About
S. Swingle
I build the software, write the books, and keep the research that backs both. This page says who that is and how the research here is sourced, so you can judge the rest of the site on something.
What I do
I write under the name S. Swingle. The work splits three ways, and the three parts feed each other rather than sitting side by side.
The Forge is software. ClaudeForge Studio is a native Windows desktop application for the Claude Code ecosystem — generating skills, managing MCP servers and permissions, designing subagent pipelines, and tracking model costs without hand-editing JSON. It ships with its full Python source under an MIT licence. Smaller tools come out of the same workshop and go straight to GitHub, like DJI Frame Prep, which turns drone video into the geotagged frames a photogrammetry pipeline needs.
The Study is books. The Salvage Power Series — 6 titles so far — is short, practical engineering for people with no supply chain: stripping a junkyard alternator into a battery charger, measuring shaft speed with no instruments, pouring a bearing, sizing a charge path, surveying a site. The Mesh is fiction, 2 books in, about facial recognition and social scoring in small American cities. Different shelf, same preoccupation with systems that fail quietly.
The Vault is the open-access reading list — every document the daily science alerts turn up, each with a short summary, a free copy and a link stops. Water, shelter, medicine, power, sanitation, comms. It exists because the books needed it, and it is public because the answers are more useful than the questions.
How the research is sourced
Entries in the Vault and the daily references are written from public sources I have actually read, and every one lists them at the foot of the page. The preference order is government and standards bodies first — CDC, WHO, EPA, USDA, NIST, FEMA, state extension services — then peer-reviewed work and established technical references. Prepper blogs and content farms are not sources.
Where sources disagree, the entry says so and says which one I would follow. Where the honest answer is that something needs a doctor, a lab, or a permit, the entry says that instead of working around it. Figures carry their units and their origin; an entry short of two solid sources does not get published.
Entries carry the date they were last revised. Older ones get rewritten rather than quietly patched, and a revision moves the date.
What I am not
I am not a physician, a pharmacist, an electrician, or a licensed engineer, and nothing on this site is professional advice. The medical entries describe what the literature says about austere conditions; they are not a substitute for care, and they are written on the assumption that you would get care if you could. The electrical entries describe working with energy that kills people who are confident and wrong.
Read them as what they are: a well-sourced starting point, with the failure modes named. Verify anything that would hurt you to get wrong.
Elsewhere