askchapo

Pokemon cards so that after the revolution i have people to play pokemon cards with

I learned to make bread. It's cliche but if shit hits the fan, flour water and oil last forever.

Edit: also cardio. I only started running to be valuable to socialism. Good cardio can go a long way

Go out for nature walks and identify all the plants in your local area.

Gardening.

Also, strength and conditioning, and a little bit of parkour. Nothing fancy like flips and spins, but being able to get up or over or down from a fence or wall or pole or tree is very useful. Being able to do a few pull-ups is a good baseline for practical fitness, along with being able to run a 7-minute mile. Body-weight exercises are all you really need; no fancy equipment is necessary if you understand how to work out a muscle group.

I've been interested in "locksport", competitive lockpicking, ever since reading about it in a Wired article about DEF CON years ago. During covid quarantine I got a transparent practice lock and a set of picks and started learning picking. It's pretty fun and I find it relaxing, kind of like a fidget spinner. Masterlock padlocks are super easy but I haven't practiced much on doorknobs or harder locks.

Cooking for large groups is an important skill. You can scale this up from large batch/mealprep to small gatherings to large gatherings. I've seen several large gathering situations where it was extremely noticeable when there was just 1 person skilled with this, and also when there wasn't.

Scrapping/dumpster diving. Works best if you have a decent amount of storage space and a cargo-suited vehicle. Tapping the waste stream yields bounties. All sorts of things can be fixed up or sold or even used as-is.

No one's mentioned this yet, and I don't relish it personally, but being good@car is extremely useful. Everybody has car trouble once in a while, and being able to fix it yourself can save you or your comrades up to thousands of dollars a year.

Computers. Learning basic computer hardware, security, networking and all that sort of nerd stuff is important. Knowing how the inner workings of how machine works it’s very useful for subverting it, modifying it, and extending it for real leftist purposes. I remember setting up my Boy & Girls Club computer center in my teens I seeing use was really satisfying

Socializing, leadership, organizing… you know, things that require you to touch grass and might be out of reach for some of us who are nd and/or have other constraints

I can recommend woodworking. Yeah, you can get really fancy with it, with lots of expensive tools. But you can also keep things simple, mostly working with traditional hand tools. You can even build a lot of your own tools. If you want free material, you can recycle old obsolete furniture you get for free into new and useful pieces. (Think old entertainment centers built for old giant CRT TVs, desks with huge drawers for storing massive amounts of paper, etc.)

Yes, you can go full bougie artisan if you want, but from a more leftist perspective, you could follow the tradition of the country carpenter. An old-timey country carpenter was someone that had the skills and tools to help people with their needs in a cheap and effective manner. Their customers were poor and working people. Need a dresser or a table? They would build you something functional. It might have been made of whatever wood was on hand and from mismatched fasteners, they would produce something usable for a cost people could afford. They would be just as likely to accept payment in barter as in currency. The modern version of this might be developing the ability to offer simple repairs to even IKEA-type furniture.

With global trade breaking down, people are going to need to fix the things they already have. If the price of everything at IKEA triples, well suddenly repairing things is a lot more viable than just throwing it out and buying another one. I focused this discussion on woodworking, but the same applies to many fields. Start thinking about how you can help people not just by making new things, but by repairing those that already exist. We need to learn to get by, to make due with what we have, now more than ever. Develop the skills for furniture repair, basic appliance servicing, simple electrical and plumbing work, etc. In an era of both stifled trade and immigration, the need for people with basic everyday repair skills has never been greater. You can make it a career if you want, or you can do it just as a mutual aid activity. Hang a shingle and offer your services on a sliding scale if you want. But this is one of the most practical and rewarding ways you can help people in your community. You get to directly help people in a tangible way, using an activity that lets you use your own hands and build/repair something. It's the kind of work that's good for the soul.

Gardening and food preservation are easy ones. Do try and avoid botulism though