 What's up guys? Okay, so I'm Willow Blue for somewhat obvious reasons, and I care about both movement of people and objects through space and time as well as movements of people through society and ideologies. Coincidentally, this ignite also includes references to movement if you know what I mean, so mind your sensitivities. This is an infograph of one month of my life. If you average the number of miles between these different cities that I visit and average them over the course, the number of hours in a year, I am currently moving at 10.5 miles per hour. This means that I am really good at packing bags. I can go for three weeks without doing laundry and without checking bags, and that's what I'm going to tell you about today. If it... there we go. Okay, so big picture in time. You first need to figure out how you're getting to where you're going, huh? I really like Hitmonk because it does a visualization of that. I also use a cell phone app called TouchCal so that I don't book coffee with a friend who's going to be halfway across the globe. It's also important to know where you're going to stay. I hate hotels. They give me the creeps, so I stay with friends or sweeties and barring that in a new city. I would do Airbnb or couch surfing and make new friends. Then you have to figure out how you're going to get to these places. The open government has done beautiful things for transit maps in the US. Ufi is great for Europe and Germany, and Uber is totally posh if you want to call a black car generally anywhere from the same app. You'll see that all of those assume an internet connection. Sometimes you land in a new place and you don't speak their crazy moon language, and there's no Wi-Fi, and you have to figure out where you're going. But thank goodness that when you get into the taxi that you also don't speak their language because you're a stupid American. You just say rocket ship, and the driver says, ah, hackers, and takes you to where you need to be. Don't count on that, and instead cash your maps or draw yourself one, and get a SIM card as soon as humanly possible. Any civilized airport will have a SIM card vending machine. You can stash these in your GSM-enabled phone. And I like to store these in a sorted folder along with the transit card of the city that's associated with. I also have a friend who does this with ziplock bags. You can also store it with the cash associated with that country. As soon as you get that SIM card, which you should usually use a spoofed ID with, because sometimes they'll tie your ID to the data you're getting, tether your tech don't connect to sketchy open Wi-Fi, except for MIT, or totally fine, and use data and encrypt that data as much as you possibly can. So OTR, PGP, etc. Also encrypt your hard drive just straight up. You can even mail yourself your hard drive. Your dwindling rights are even less present when you cross over borders. The cords that you're using bring extra, and I like to keep mine with binder clips and then clip them onto my bag. That way I can tell when something is missing, which is super important when you're three cities into a seven-city trip, and suddenly you're out of all of your Android cables. Bad news, bears. To keep sane, keeping your teens is super important. You can pack jump ropes or TRX bands or resistance or whatever else. Also, pack frivolous things like comic books so that you're not just working and traveling. You have to keep something going. I like to pair socks with underwear and an undershirt. Roll that up and put it set of those in a dress shirt along with a pair of pants. That way I don't get laundry all over everything, and I don't have to think about my outfit when I'm super hungover. Those things should go into your rolling bag. You should only be opening one bag when you go through TSA, so put your liquids and your laptop easily accessible, be able to balance on one foot for the amount of time that it takes you to remove that shoe, and know that your pants might come down when you take off your belt. Embarrassing but true. Speaking of, I always opt out. TSA, this is a whole hour-long talk, is not only effective, they're also non-consensual and invasive. I have the luxury of having my physicality match my mentality. Not all of my friends are this lucky to be what we call cis, and when you are getting patted down, that's a huge invasion. So that means that I do what is called soft packing when I go through TSA, which is where you have a flaccid phallus. You place appropriately in your pants. That way I, who am emotionally unattached to these things, can have a conversation with the TSA agent about their policy and process before one of my dear friends has to go through this whole thing. That is how I pack. Have fun on your travels.