Cumberland MD was caught off guard yesterday when Lewis Giblin came back to life in the county morgue during the autopsy and took a  bite out of  the pathologist. This caused a medium sized outbreak with only a couple hundred infected; nothing like the outbreak of ’68 which caused thousands of deaths that spanned five states. The local authorities found out the cause of the outbreak was a carton of milk that was left out for a couple of days. Officials from the CDC and FDA want to confirm that there’s no need to panic as this was an isolated incident due to Giblin’s poor hygiene and food safety practices.

The bigger story might be that the first call about zombies were to security companies that install zombie proofing items inside the home, such as steel window shutters and easy swing armored doors. The calls going to such companies first hindered the response time of police and other officials. If we are to keep the tragic events of yesterday from repeating, we must remember that the first call after acknowledging a zombie infestation should go out to the police or CDC for immediate containment.

And remember, aim for the head.

Related Posts:

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• July 24, 2008 -- One Of The Best Free Dating Sites For Zombies
• October 21, 2008 -- The Dismember-Me Plush Zombie!

Take a gander at how a vinyl record is made from start to finish.  Just plain awesome.

via [JamCult.com]

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Remember the good old days when you could be a reporter that covered wars and receive instant respect from others. No? Well neither did Frank West during the first installment of Dead Rising. Even the ability to change your appearance into a transgender Mega-man couldn’t stop the disrespect. Simple security guards would push him around too through a radio like a very bad puppet show. And even after killing hundreds of zombies, insane cultists, and your average everyday zombie clown with chainsaws Frank still received very little respect. In fact new slander is surfacing due to the official announcement of Dead Rising 2 as you can see by Ctrl+Alt+Del’s creator Tim Buckley and Brian’s conversation on the subject.

This new game will have many new features, first being that Frank West is not the main character. This was to be expected, because of the multiple endings that could come from the different choices you made in the game.  Some allowed for safe return to the outside world. Others allowed for Frank to exit the mall atop of a tank surrounded by swarms of zombies. Also, for some reason not enough people liked his ability to become a transgender axe wielding psychopath.

Another new feature is that the mall is no more, instead you’ll be surrounded by tourists, showgirls, and alot of slot machines. That’s right, welcome to the world of zombie Vegas, where the zombies never sleep and you wish they would. With new weapons like rulet wheels, the idea of killing mass amounts of zombies is revived through a new desire to kill things with as many new options as possible.

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Here’s a funny comic about the dilemmas of being a zombie.

Hit the link for a more in-depth “analysis”.

via Tor.com‘s Sean Bieri

Since the first days of George A. Romero’s vision of “the zombie”, there have been millions of unsuspecting people placed in the path of stumbling guys in tattered suits tysoning their way to our juicy brain melons. But have we ever stopped to consider their feelings? I certainly haven’t. And if you do, you’ll be a dirty zombie sympathizer! If there’s ever a zombie outbreak, I plan to grab the first weapon I see and blast my way to the nearest mall.  I need my cricket bat…

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• October 21, 2008 -- The Dismember-Me Plush Zombie!

Here’s a great article written by Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Run Fat Boy Run, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, and soon Star Trek) on “why zombies should never be allowed to run on film”.  Simon discusses today’s fast zombies and how their sprinting actions might make for exciting pace, but they make for awful scene setup and suspense.  Don’t forget to hit the link to continue reading.

“As an avid horror fan, I found the prospect of last week’s five-night TV zombie spectacular rather exciting. Admittedly, the trailer for E4′s Dead Set made me somewhat uneasy. The sight of newsreader Krishnan Guru-Murthy warning the populace of an impending zombie apocalypse induced a sickening sense of indignation. Only five years previously, Edgar Wright and I had hired Krishnan to do the very same thing in our own zombie opus, Shaun of the Dead. It was a bit like seeing an ex-lover walking down the street pushing a pram. Of course, this was a knee-jerk reaction. It’s not as if Edgar and I hadn’t already pushed someone else’s baby up the cultural high street – but that, to some extent, was the point. In Shaun of the Dead, we lifted the mythology established by George A Romero in his 1968 film Night of the Living Dead and offset it against the conventions of a romantic comedy.”

[Guardian.co.uk]

“Still, I had to acknowledge Dead Set’s impressive credentials. The concept was clever in its simplicity: a full-scale zombie outbreak coincides with a Big Brother eviction night, leaving the Big Brother house as the last refuge for the survivors. Scripted by Charlie Brooker, a writer whose scalpel-sharp incisiveness I have long been a fan of, and featuring talented actors such as Jaime Winstone and the outstanding Kevin Eldon, the show heralded the arrival of genuine homegrown horror, scratching at the fringes of network television. My expectations were high, and I sat down to watch a show that proved smart, inventive and enjoyable, but for one key detail: ZOMBIES DON’T RUN!

I know it is absurd to debate the rules of a reality that does not exist, but this genuinely irks me. You cannot kill a vampire with an MDF stake; werewolves can’t fly; zombies do not run. It’s a misconception, a bastardisation that diminishes a classic movie monster. The best phantasmagoria uses reality to render the inconceivable conceivable. The speedy zombie seems implausible to me, even within the fantastic realm it inhabits. A biological agent, I’ll buy. Some sort of super-virus? Sure, why not. But death? Death is a disability, not a superpower. It’s hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all.

More significantly, the fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety. As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.

However (and herein lies the sublime artfulness of the slow zombie), their ineptitude actually makes them avoidable, at least for a while. If you’re careful, if you keep your wits about you, you can stave them off, even outstrip them – much as we strive to outstrip death. Drink less, cut out red meat, exercise, practice safe sex; these are our shotguns, our cricket bats, our farmhouses, our shopping malls. However, none of these things fully insulates us from the creeping dread that something so witless, so elemental may yet catch us unawares – the drunk driver, the cancer sleeping in the double helix, the legless ghoul dragging itself through the darkness towards our ankles.

Another thing: speed simplifies the zombie, clarifying the threat and reducing any response to an emotional reflex. It’s the difference between someone shouting “Boo!” and hearing the sound of the floorboards creaking in an upstairs room: a quick thrill at the expense of a more profound sense of dread. The absence of rage or aggression in slow zombies makes them oddly sympathetic, a detail that enabled Romero to project depth on to their blankness, to create tragic anti-heroes; his were figures to be pitied, empathised with, even rooted for. The moment they appear angry or petulant, the second they emit furious velociraptor screeches (as opposed to the correct mournful moans of longing), they cease to possess any ambiguity. They are simply mean.

So how did this break with convention come about? The process has unfolded with all the infuriating dramatic irony of an episode of Fawlty Towers. To begin at the beginning, Haitian folklore tells of voodoo shamans, or bokors, who would use digitalis, derived from the foxglove plant, to induce somnambulant trances in individuals who would subsequently appear dead. Weeks later, relatives of the supposedly deceased would witness their lost loved ones in a soporific malaise, working in the fields of wealthy landowners, and assume them to be nzambi (a west African word for “spirit of the dead”). From the combination of nzambi and somnambulist (“sleepwalker”) we get the word zombie.

The legend was appropriated by the film industry, and for 20 or 30 years a steady flow of voodoo-based cinema emerged from the Hollywood horror factory. Then a young filmmaker from Pittsburgh by the name of George A Romero changed everything. Romero’s fascination with Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend, the story of a lone survivor struggling in a world overrun by vampires, led him to fixate on an aspect of the story leapfrogged by the author: namely, the process by which humanity is subjugated by the aggressive new species. Romero adopted the Haitian zombie and combined it with notions of cannibalism, as well as the viral communicability characterised by the vampire and werewolf myths, and so created the modern zombie.

After three films spanning three decades, and much imitation from film-makers such as Lucio Fulci and Dan O’Bannon, the credibility of the zombie was dealt a cruel blow by the king of pop. Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, directed by John Landis, was entertaining but made it rather difficult for us to take zombies seriously, having witnessed them body-popping. The blushing dead went quiet for a while, until the Japanese video game company Capcom developed the game Resident Evil, which brilliantly captured the spirit of Romero’s shambling antagonists (Romero even directed a trailer for the second installment). Slow and steady, the zombie commenced its stumble back into our collective subconscious.

Inspired by the game and a shared love of Romero, Edgar Wright and I decided to create our own black comedy. Meanwhile, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland were developing their own end-of-the-world fable, 28 Days Later, an excellent film misconstrued by the media as a zombie flick. Boyle and Garland never set out to make a zombie film per se. They drew instead on John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids, as well as Matheson and Romero’s work, to fashion a new strain of survival horror, featuring a London beset by rabid propagators of a virus known as “rage”.

The success of the movie, particularly in the US, was undoubtedly a factor in the loose remake of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead in 2004. Zack Snyder’s effective but pointless reboot parlayed Boyle’s “infected” into the upgraded zombie 2.0, likely at the behest of some cigar-chomping, focus-group-happy movie exec desperate to satisfy the MTV generation’s demand for quicker everything – quicker food, quicker downloads, quicker dead people. The zombie was ushered on to the mainstream stage, on the proviso that it sprinted up to the mic. The genre was diminished, and I think it’s a shame.

Despite my purist griping, I liked Dead Set a lot. It had solid performances, imaginative direction, good gore and the kind of inventive writing and verbal playfulness we’ve come to expect from the always brilliant Brooker. As a satire, it took pleasing chunks out of media bumptiousness and, more significantly, the aggressive collectivism demonstrated by the lost souls who waste their Friday nights standing outside the Big Brother house, baying for the blood of those inside. Like Romero, Brooker simply nudges the metaphor to its literal conclusion, and spatters his point across our screens in blood and brains and bits of skull. If he had only eschewed the zeitgeist and embraced the docile, creeping weirdness that has served to embed the zombie so deeply in our grey matter, Dead Set might have been my favourite piece of television ever. As it was, I had to settle for it merely being bloody good.”

-Simon Pegg [Guardian.co.uk]

Related Posts:

• February 23, 2009 -- Those With Living Hearts Need Not Apply
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• August 26, 2011 -- Zombie Outbreak In Cumberland
• July 24, 2008 -- One Of The Best Free Dating Sites For Zombies
• October 21, 2008 -- The Dismember-Me Plush Zombie!

Here’s a video with the grand scheme of things in mind.  I can’t imagine how much time this took but I’m glad there was so much effort poured into it.

The full quality (long) version is available after the break.

[BluBlu.org] via [JosWeb.co.uk]

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

The new short film by Blu

an ambiguous animation painted on public walls.
Made in Buenos Aires and in Baden (fantoche)

http://www.blublu.org/

http://www.blublu.org/sito/video/muto.htm

music by Andrea Martignoni, produced by Mercurio Film, assistant: Sibe

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Here’s a cool use of the fresh avatars from The New Xbox Experience (NXE).  I originally thought these avatars were going to be a cheesy rip-off from the Nintendo Miis but I was wrong!  Now I feel like the avatars and I should stop fighting and make up because there are beautiful songs to dance to.  Like Justice’s Genesis above or Daft Punk after the break.

[YouTube] via [MajorNelson]

[Daft Punk - Something About Us]

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This guy, featured on Today’s BIG Thing, has combined some great drumming chops with a crazy home made Drum-Guitar controller hybrid to make Dragonforce on Guitar Hero 2 even harder.  The video is long but the insanity is captured in the first minute (in case you’ve got the ADD).  Thanks to SpankyStokes for the great tip.

[YouTube] via [Today's BIG Thing] via [SpankyStokes]

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Now, those that play games constantly know that there is always the problem of not enough exp, items, or money to complete the game safely and easily. With that in mind, the ability to find ways to make it easier on the player is always in high demand. Some might say that these “get good quick” schemes are too easy and are “cheats”, even though most of the schemes are built into the games but just to simple for people to think of until the game’s already out. Now in some games you might be able to find a way to only receive an abundance of money. Like the “money cheat” in the original Fable where you could buy and sell as much as you wanted and make enough money to buy the entire continent. Others would give you two of the three, like Final Fantasy 12′s easy way to make money and exp by killing the same types of monsters for increased loot and the added exp. Sometimes it might take someone a couple of playthroughs to figure out these “cheats”; and other times it might take only 3 hours of play. However for those that look for the way to do things as easy as possible, none was easier to figure out than Fable 2′s “cheat”.

The creators have learned from Fable 1 not to make the prices dependent on the amount of items the vender has. Instead, you may only buy one item every couple of days, this will come into play later on. Now after you first get to Bowerstone, get to the blacksmith job and work until you have about 5000 gold. Now buy a house, if you wish to be evil you can raise the price to be around 200% normal price. Now be a good little player and save your progress, because you just made the best investment of your life. Every five minutes you will be paid, now to be fair the amount at first is not that much, you will only receive 100 gold or so for a while. However, if you listen to what I said before, you make money every five minutes. That includes anytime you spend offline. So I repeat, save your game, now go to Xbox dashboard, change the internal clock to one month ahead and look at your fortune. Log on to your account and but any shop you can get your money grubbing hands on.

With every building you buy, the amount of money you receive next will be higher and higher. After a good 20 minutes you should not only have a small fortune but also all the buildings in Bowerstone. Now, weapons, food, and enough money to buy the rest of the world is nice but it won’t help as much as getting an easy access to lots of exp. So for my next trick I will give you a sure fire way of getting you all those level 5 abilities you want so dearly. One of the shops in Bowerstone’s marketplace is a potions shop.  Go inside and buy everything they have in stock. A couple of the potions should give you different amounts of exp per use. Now if you go and sleep for a week the shop should have another shipment of the potions for you. Now for an easier time leveling, push through the next couple of main quests until you are about to get on the boat to go to the spire. Remember DON’T GO TO THE SPIRE RIGHT AWAY! go to the Bowerstone potion shop again and look at the new inventory that can increase your exp by a couple thousand. Remember there are always more than one way to make loads of money in games, so don’t think of this way as the one way to do it.

But remember, just because the game creator didn’t think of that as a way to make money, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, or that it’s a cheat. If anything, it means that your playing by the rules set down by the system and you have come out on top. So go forth and use the rules to your advantage; don’t think of them as restrictions. Think of them as fences you can hop over when you learn how to.

Related Posts:

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