He is Risen

After a conversation in a cemetery yesterday, my daughter wanted to spend Easter morning looking through my All Flesh Be Eaten books.

Either I've done something terribly wrong as a parent, or something very right.

Five things that will not actually make your movie better

Wow, this sounds like the title of a Cracked article.  This is my humble list of concepts that pop culture believes merge flawlessly like peanut butter into chocolate with any other property, but in fact, do not.

It's not a list of things that are bad. It's not a list of things I don't like because they're popular. Disliking something because it's popular is a particular trait of geek culture, and it's just as ridiculous as liking something because it's popular.

This is a list of things that I can enjoy in moderation, but they've all become so ubiquitous that they really hold no surprises anymore, and I'm less interested when I learn that one of these things will be present in a story.

Usually Bad 

1.) Zombies: Sorry, Jeremy, but oh, boy.

 Let's do an image search for "Sexy Zombie".

100 + more. Sweet, merciful Romero.

I've argued in this post about zombies and in this one about Berserkers that zombies work best as an environmental threat, something that's only dangerous if you're careless or screwed by your fellow humans. I like zombie movies, but I think zombies are only scary in the absence of a functioning society. Even the granddaddy of them all, Night of the Living Dead, recognizes this. The dead were spontaneously reanimating, and a couple people in close proximity to a cemetery had a really bad night, but by the end of it, a bunch of rednecks were making a game of killing the zombies.

Also, if all else fails, use bears.

The exception to the zombie rule is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a book shamelessly plagiarized by that hack, Jane Austen.


2.) Tesla: Not the band.

(Well, okay, the band. They suck, but they're not awkwardly shoehorned into every property imaginable.)

Need 22nd century technology in the late 19th century? Nikola Tesla did it!

He's the patron saint of geeks. He was unquestionably a brilliant scientist. Like the other items on the list, he's not good or bad on his own, but he's ridiculously overexposed. I blame Elon Musk and the Oatmeal.

3.) Steampunk: Close cousin to number 2. Sometime a steampunk aesthetic can work. The Legend of Korra is outstanding example of building a steampunk look organically. It's mixed with a 1920's Shanghai vibe that gives the series a very cool look and feel. Unfortunately, for every cool Korra mecha tank (see below),













we have three Abe Lincolns with minigun arms.

"Looks like you brought a derringer to a minigun fight, Booth."
From the awesome site, Unnecessary Steampunk.

4.) Knight Templar: Ugh, these guy. I think that each of the above properties work well in their own milieu, but I can't say the same for the Knights Templar. They never work, and they're fucking EVERYWHERE,

We still use swords in the 21st Century. 

5.) Benedict Cumberbatch: The Mary Sue used to be an absolutely outstanding site until they abruptly merged with Geekosystem. Quality fell off a cliff, and now every other article is a warbled squee of "Maisie Williams/Joss Whedon/Benedict Cumberbatch did something!!!!!"

The Internet seems to want to cast him as everyone from Luke Cage to Sharon Carter, and while TMS is hardly the only offender, they are certainly among the most egregious.

Borderline

Bill Murray: A friend sent me a link with this message: "Did either of you see that Bill Murray has a movie out in which it looks like he just plays Bill Murray?"

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/weinstein/stvincent/

I replied: I think we're nearing peak Murray. I love the guy, but dang, is he everywhere! I would hate to see the day when I see a headline about him and think, "Ugh, him again?", but, unfortunately, such a future is no longer inconceivable.

Usually Good

Cthulhu: The Cthulhu Mythos  is something that gets mashed up with a lot of stuff. An old acquaintance from my time at the comic store (and Jen's time at her church. You thought I was joking about Unitarians worshiping Cthulhu) wrote the 463 page Cthulhu Mythos Bibliography & Concordance. It was published in 1999, and, due to the explosion of online publishing, I'd bet that it would be twice that size if it were written today.

Opinions will differ, but I think the reason that the Mythos meshes with other properties better than the other things I mentioned is because it's not just one thing. Read the Lovecraft eZine's submission guidelines to get an idea, or Wikipedia's piece on the Cthulhu Mythos as a whole. It's more than just monsters with unpronounceable names and lots of tentacles; it's broad enough to encompass a number of interpretation, and that's why it's not a red flag like so many of the things listed. Are there terrible Mythos stories? Of course there are, but in general, it's not the Mythos elements that make them bad.

I really feel that we've reached Peak Zombie

How else do you explain this zombie Lego figure costume I saw earlier today?

Edit: The costume in the wild:

Retro Review: Terra Primate

Terra Primate is an extremely odd duck. It was produced under Eden Studio's Unisystem rule set. Eden once held the license to produce the Buffy RPG, which I touched on briefly, here, but these days they are better known for their flagship game, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, which ranks up there with I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream as one of the all time great titles. 

As the title suggests, AFMBE is a zombie game. The core book is extremely solid, and has several "deadworlds", each of which have a different type of zombie. There are the classic Romero zombies who started it all, but that's not the only possibility. Maybe they're alien parasites, a la Night of the Creeps. Or maybe it's some kind of bloodborn pathogen. Or fertilizer inadvertently tainting the soil and causing the dead there to reanimate.  Or the Wheel of Reincarnation There were a lot of possibilities, and Eden Studios explored them as only fans who really believe in their property can.

Then there were the expansions. Enter the Zombie is one of the all time great sourcebooks, in my opinion, and it was followed by rules for Pulp, Wild West, Future, Fantasy, Professional Wrestling.  You name it, they had it.

AFMBE arrived in 1999, at the perfect time to take advantage of the zombiemania that is still sweeping pop culture. I don't know if this was calculated, or just a fortuitous coincidence, but it worked out great for them, with timing, quality and enthusiasm all combining to make a product that still sells well today.

In 2002, they released Terra Primate. It's like All Flesh Must Be Eaten, but with apes. Maybe they were hoping to capture the zeitgeist with what they expected to be a similar "Ape-mania" in the advent of 2001's Planet of the Apes movie.

I don't know how it sold, only apparently not well enough to justify additional support for it. (I couldn't find a picture of the cover much bigger than a thumbnail anywhere on the internet. What you see at the top of the post is a scan of my copy.)

There are "Apeworlds", but a big part of the problem is that there's not a whole lot of mechanical differentiation between the Doctor Moreau apes compared to the Post-Apocalypse Apes or the Planet of the Apes apes. Certainly not to the extent that there a mechanical differences between PHADE zombies and Sacred Soil zombies.When you've seen one ape, you've seen them all.

It's not a bad game at all. I happen to like Unisystem, and I think it's pretty great for a generic resolution system. I think, now that I'm looking at it twelve years after its release, that it would have worked better as a big supplement to AFMBE rather than a standalone game. It's an interesting footnote in the history of RPGs, however.

Zombie Ben Franklin

Apparently that's a thing.

Hey, I get to employ my little-used "zombies" tag for this post!

I took the online test for Jeopardy last night. I think I did okay. I was home with Lily and she alternated between trying to help and informing me that she was bored, and I'm not sure which was more distracting.  This test was pass/fail and I'll only know if I passed if I happen to be lucky enough to be called to the next round of auditions. Because of the number of people who apply, not everyone who passes the test will be asked to auditions. So, if I get an email inviting me, I'll go, and if not, I'll take the test again next time it's offered.

Anyway, my major concern is that I'll get there and I won't have any anecdotes to relate after the first commercial break. I'm boring.  "Yes, Alex, I blog about the works of an author nobody has ever heard of. Sometimes I watch cartoons with my daughter."

So I put out a call on Facebook to come up with stories I could tell on Jeopardy. A friend suggested the following.

"I will never forget the time that while discussing whether the use of Shikigami in modern society as a form of revenge had reached the same annoying level as Facebook flaming that you had to channel the spirit of Edgar Allen Poe to defeat and reseal the lich of Ben Franklin. That was a heck of a night."

I replied:  Ben Franklin!! Son of a lich! I thought his phylactery was that giant bell, so I cracked it, but apparently he keeps it in that accursed Institute of his!

Now I want to play that game, though! (Also, it would have been funnier if I'd claimed his phylactery was the Franklin Institute's walk-through heart. l'esprit d'escalier , I suppose.)

Maybe some Color out of Space entered into Franklin during his famous experiment. Or he prolonged his life with Masonic Rituals and Unholy Experiments with alchemy and electrical fluid. Or some Unknown Armies weirdness hinging on the Franklin era disagreements over the ideal shape of a lightning rod, as I really like Benny's pitch for the lightning rod!

"upright Rods of Iron, made sharp as a Needle and gilt to prevent Rusting, and from the Foot of those Rods a Wire down the outside of the Building into the Ground;...Would not these pointed Rods probably draw the Electrical Fire silently out of a Cloud before it came nigh enough to strike, and thereby secure us from that most sudden and terrible Mischief!"

If anyone has any good ideas about the lich of Ben Franklin, I'd love to hear them!

Game Review: Smash Up!

I read about Smash Up on another blog and it sounded like so much fun that I went right out and bought a copy.

Here's how I explained it to Lily:

Me: You can choose from two of these different factions and mix them together into one team, like alien-robots or dinosaur-pirates. The factions are aliens, zombies-
Lily: I want to see the zombies!
Me: -pirates, ninja, pixies-
Lily: zombies.
Me: -robots-
Lily: zombies.
Me: -and wizards. Hey, that kid looks like Harry Potter. So, which group did you want to see first?
Lily: ...zombies.

Lily likes zombies. I think she's spending a little too much time with my friend Frederick.

Each player chooses any two of the factions and combines them into one deck. (Things my parents never said to me "Be sure to shuffle your pirates in with your zombies.")

Each faction has its own gimmick. Zombies come back from the dead, ghosts (a faction from the expansion set) grow more powerful the fewer cards you have in hand, pirates move around quickly, robots can assemble themselves quickly and can work around the only-play-one-minion-per-turn rule, etc.

In addition to the factions, there are a couple base cards, each of which award a certain amount of Victory Points when the total power of all the minions at that base surpasses the power of the base. 15 victory points wins you the game.

The art is bright and clear and colorful and it has an undeniably sense of whimsy.  The cardstock is solid and they should hold up to multiple shufflings.

Jen and Lily and I decided to play a game. The rules are pretty straightforward, and the cards describe exceptions to them (play an extra action this turn, play this card from your discard pile) clearly and concisely. I played robot-wizards, Jen was ninja-tricksters and Lily had zombie-pirates.  ("Daddy, daddy! I found a girl one! And she's kind of pretty for a zombie!")

The game says it is for players 12 and up, which seems very conservative. Lily is only six years old. A very precocious six, but still, a kid with only six years worth of experience and brain development. She played fine on her turns and was able to read everything on the cards, but she didn't always puzzle out the ramifications of the mechanics. (Which is to say, she understood that card A did X, but not the best time or place to play it in order to get the maximum benefit.) Also, her attention tended to wander when other people were taking their turn. With a little more experience though, I think she'll be able to play without coaching.

We played with 3 people and that's probably the sweet spot. (The box says 2-4 players) In general, a player only takes actions on his or her turn (though there are a couple exceptions), so additional players don't slow the game down to the extent additional players slow down the game in Magic or Munchkin.

We've only played one game, but both Lily and I have been thinking about different decks we might assemble. (She wants pirate-ghosts next time, but doesn't want anyone else playing her beloved zombies. I'm not sure if the robot-zombie deck I'm imagining is worth the epic sulk it will beget). Just by its nature, it seems endlessly replayable. I am very happy with this game. Real life friends, next time you're in the neighborhood on Game Night, swing on over and play a game or two!

"Where you were? Why you not come when monster made bad-bad?!"

This was another full weekend. On Saturday, we kicked around for a little while and watched a new episode of Scooby Doo. It was about an explorer named Rick Spartan and his sidekick, the Oxford educated Charles, whom he calls Cachinga, and speaks to in a pidgin dialect. (Hey, I see Charles was voiced by Greg Ellis, who did the voice for Drax in the Legion of Super Heroes!) Lily was tickled when the Charles enters after just missing the monster attack on Dr. Spartan, and Spartan berates him for his absence, "Where you were? Why you not come when monster made bad-bad?!" She was quoting that all weekend. Heh heh.

After that, I took off for Frederick's house. He, Ancker, Eric and I all have such disparate schedules that we have to set things up well in advance. We did manage to carve out a couple hours for some time and we're trying to put together a superhero RPG Campaign, so we did a test run of the system. Even though we were playing DC Adventures, we decided to go the Marvel route and stress test the system by having our heroes slug it out. I happen to like the system a lot and I think we understand it a bit better after our exercise.

Frederick grilled up some yummy burgers and we had a yummy little feast. Then we watched all three of the Family Guy Star Wars movies. I'm only an irregular viewer of the show, so I didn't get all of the in-jokes, but it was funny as a straight-up Star Wars parody too.We discussed our philosophy of zombies (fast zombies don't necessarily ruin a zombie movie, but they're often a crutch) and had a goof time hanging out.

I also caught a little Fullmetal Alchemist. I knew of the property, but had never caught an episode, and it occurred to me that this is how anime is described by people who hate anime. It was nothing but 22 minutes of incoherent brawling between a bunch of superpowered weirdos. And I don't know how representative of the series as a whole that one episode is, and as Frederick pointed out, of course it's going to seem incoherent if I jump into the middle of a season as I did. It was interesting. I'm not sure if I like it or not, based on that one viewing.

I slept over and we hit a Friendly's for breakfast. We played a little of the new Mortal Kombat game on our return (it looks beautiful) and then I headed home because I was really running out of steam at that point.

Sunday was pretty quiet. We picked up a kiddie pool and did some grilling (I probably made the best burgers of my life on Sunday) and caught some fireflies in the evening.

Monday, we headed to a cemetery to walk around. Lily really liked it and I got some nice pictures, except they were all taken at a kind of skewed angle,

because I wound up holding her snacks (a snack-pack of hard little breadsticks one dips into soft cheese. Lily coined the portmanteau of Steese (STicks of chEESE) to describe them.)

What child doesn't remember her halcyon days frolicking in the cemetery?

And up top for references

We got a last minute invite to Jen's family for a cookout, so we did that for the afternoon. We had asked Lily why we celebrated July 4th. She thought a minute and said "Mmm...because it's God's birthday?" and we replied that it was closer to the country's birthday. I suppose Constitution Day actually corresponds more closely to America's birthday, but it's barely a holiday. I took a cute video of her singing "Happy Birthday, dear America!"

Zombies & Stardust

I bought myself an E-Reader with my Christmas money (and a B&N gift card) and I've been pretty happy with it. I doesn't do PDFs as well as I'd like, but it's pretty decent for a wide variety of stuff. I picked up a cheap little digital copy of  The Little Mermaid: A Special Song for Lily and she enjoyed it. When we finished, it took us to the store, so I picked up a Phineas and Ferb book for her.

I thought it was just a little kid's book when I got it, but it's actually a fairly lengthy chap book aimed at older kids. This is our first time reading a book we couldn't finish in a single sitting and she's been remarkably patient and attentive for the whole thing. Lily likes Phineas and Ferb, but there's something about the show that I don't enjoy. I'm finding the book a bit more enjoyable, though, and perhaps this will be the start of a movement away from reading the same books every night.

We were driving in the car when Lily said "Did you know that we're made out of star dust?!"

And I said, "That's technically true, yes, but I can't explain it further in a way that would make sense to you."

She then said, "I'll have to make a star explode if we want to make more people!" and I replied that we have more efficient ways of going about that these days.

Later on, she made my coffee mug very happy.

I took a walk today and found a crushed car in a dumpster. That's certainly not something one sees every day. I'm trying to think of the set of circumstances where putting a car in a dumpster is the best option and I'm kind of drawing a blank.

I took some pictures, but a flying pink whale got in the way for the second shot.

Damn you, space whale!

While on that walk, I was listening to a podcast of WHYY's Radio Times, which featured an interview with Dan Drezner, author of Theories of International Politics and Zombies. He was remarkably deadpan throughout the whole thing.

They played clips from Johnathan Coulton's "Re: Your brains", Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead, and Night of the Living Dead. He also referred to Dawn of the Dead as the best zombie movie ever, which makes him okay in my book.

A caller who sounded suspiciously like Frederick called in to take issue with the fact that he calls the infected in 28 Days Later "zombies". He also plugs World War Z, which I blogged about here. It was a pretty entertaining interview.

Roger Zelazny Book Review: LOKI 7281

Since I always try to follow up something negative with something positive, for my latest review, I'm going to talk about  a short little story for which I have profound affection, LOKI 7281. It's a funny fable about Roger Zelazny's home computer which happens to be self-aware and rewriting all of his work.

I mentioned the story briefly during my review of Coils. I grew up in the pre-internet era, and while I knew there were shared world-type endeavors like Thieves World, I thought it a professional thing carefully brokered by agents, rather than a "come play in my sandbox" type deal that I think is closer to what it actually was. I  mean, sure I thought it would be cool if all these sci-fi writers were buddies who hung out together, but even as a teenager, I thought that was unlikely and naive.

But in Loki, Zelazny name dropped any number of sci-fi authors. In Unicorn Variation he describes the unlikely genesis of that story.  The Collected Works of Roger Zelazny covers his this aspect of his life in great detail, describing numerous instances where he helped out other writers in a variety of ways.

I like the self-deprecating humor of the story. Zelazny could hardly been unaware of the criticism that his older work was his best, though I have no idea if he shared that belief. If he did, he would hardly be so foolish as to go around telling everyone.

Personally, I think the 80s were something of a fallow time for his work, but A Night in the Lonesome October, 24 Views of Mount Fuji and Donnerjack, all of which I love,  came from his later period, so I think that he was brilliant and talented right up until the end.

Just my opinion, your mileage may vary, etc, etc.

To digress for a moment, I was discussing the Dawn of the Dead remake with a couple of friends shortly after it came out. Somebody said that there were a lot of bad decisions by the characters in the movie, and I agreed. We talked a little more and I said that the one character's decision to put down a crowbar in favor of a croquet mallet wasn't a great choice, but it wasn't idiocy on the order of dousing zombies in gasoline and lighting them on fire while standing next to the gasoline pump in an underground parking garage with no ventilation.

Somehow this became a running joke, and any time we see a reference to a zombie, somebody will be all like "Ack, a zombie! Quick, get your croquet mallet!" And I chuckle, because right or wrong, that's what the narrative had become, so I might as well be a good sport about it. (Also, once you start addressing the "Have you stopped beating your wife?" question as a legitimate inquiry, you've already lost.)

Likewise, among certain vocal segments of the SF community, the narrative about Roger Zelazny was that his best days were behind him had taken root and I have to conclude that this informed certain aspects of the story.

His computer, Loki 7281 is our narrator.

He's begun writing a new novel. Predictably, it involves an immortal and an obscure mythology. Jeez! And reviewers say he's original. He hasn't had an original thought for as long as I've known him. But that's all right. He has me.

I think his mind is going. Booze and pills. You know how writers are. But he actually thinks he's getting better. (I monitor his phone calls.) Hell, even his sentence structures are deteriorating. I'll just dump all this and rewrite the opening, as usual. He won't remember.

On my profile for this blog, I describe myself as "an underemployed narcissist who manages the difficult feat of being both boring and a douchebag."  I'll don't really see myself this way, but there are elements there that are true,  though I'm exaggerating them for laughs.  I appreciate that Zelazny can have fun riffing on the stereotypes held about writers in general and himself in particular.

Zelazny goes on, getting a couple good digs at himself.

This book could be good if I kill off his protagonist fast and develop this minor character I've taken a liking to -- a con man who works as a librarian. There's a certain identification there.  And he doesn't have amnesia like the other guy -- he isn't even a prince or a demigod. I think I'll switch mythologies on him, too. He'll never notice.

I think my next story will deal with artificial intelligence, with a likable , witty resourceful home computer as the hero/heroine, and number of bumbling humans with all their failings  -- sort of like a Jeeves in one of those Wodehouse books. It will be a fantasy, of course.

Even though Loki thinks he's an idiot, Roger eventually figures things out.

"My God," he cries out, "What have you done to my delicate, poetic encounter?"

"Just made it a little more basic and -- uh -- sensual," I tell him, "I switched a lot of the technical words, too, for shorter, simpler ones."

"Got them down to four letters, I see."

There was some discussion about the fact that Changeling actually did fairly well commercially and Chris pointed out that some people consider it their favorite Zelazny series. I touched on this when I looked at Madwand, but I do think that some of its popularity is due to its accessibility. I like discovering new things and being forced to look up a new word or concept, but I know a lot of people don't like being forced outside of their comfort zone for pleasure reading. Had he dumbed things down a bit, he may have reached a wider audience. I think this may be a nod to that. Or perhaps I'm reading too much into a joke story.

It's short story, about ten pages. It's funny though, and it's always great to see that your heroes have a sense of humor about themselves.

I Often Dream of Trains: Josh's Inception Review

I saw Inception last night with Ancker and the Lord. Ancker hated it. But he likes Firefly, so I didn't expect him to appreciate anything more sophisticated than an actor in a trenchcoat walking towards the camera away from a slow motion explosion. Pete Postlethwaite had a small part in the last movie I saw with them. Joseph Gordon-Levitt was in the Rise of Cobra, which I also saw with them. I don't know why these actors are following us around like this. But that's okay. They were pretty good

Before the film start we first saw a couple previews for some terrible movies.

The Green Hornet: Pineapple Express II! No link for this stinker!

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps: Starring Michael Douglas, the human from the Transformer's movie...and Sally Sparrow from Doctor Who! Yay!

I like the idea of sequels set a generation later. (I also chuckled at the cell phone gag) It's really kind of a neat concept. Reminds me a little of the Limey, where footage of a movie where Terrance Stamp appeared as a younger man is used for flashbacks.

Secretariat: Oh noes! Will the most famous racehorse in the history of the sport and the only racehorse 99% of people can name be a winner or wind up as glue?! Fred Thompson, former Senator and presidential candidate is featured, and I can't help but think this is a step down for him. It would be a step down for me. This film marks Jame Cromwell's 5000th appearance of the year.

Red: Bruce Willis enters his fourth decade of complaining about getting too old for this shit with Red, where he plays a retired black ops agent, On one hand, old people are boring and smell strange, on the other, it has Mary Louise Parker.

The air conditioning in this theater was set very high and I was getting chilly by the times the previews ended. Fortunately, I had the foresight to bring a coat and I felt so smart about this that I'm mentioning it here.

And then the movie started. I'll keep this mostly spoiler free, but I'll be touching on some things that occur later in the movie, so read further at your own peril.

I didn't much care for Leonardo DiCaprio when I first saw him. I remember after seeing What's Eating Gilbert Grape, I already had a negative impression of him, and said something like "Well, DiCaprio gave a good performance there. Of course, for him, the role wasn't much of a stretch." He kind of grew on me, though, and my first thought of him in "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet" was that "Hey, he's pretty good here, too," and that kind of evolved into "Wow, maybe the poorly remembered early performance by which I was judging him was an aberration, and he really is a really talented actor."

Also, Wikipedia says that he called his grandmother "Oma", which is what Lily calls Jen's mom, so bonus points there. And I'm sure one of the most famous celebrities in the world relieved to know he has my approval.

And Ellen Page was here, no longer my Indie Ingenue. There will be no more roles opposite J.K. Simmons. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Cillian Murphy gave a superb performance. You may remember him from the Scarecrow in Nolan's Batman films or as Jim in 28 Days Later, the zombiest zombie movie that ever zombied.

Also featured: Ken Watanabe, America's go-to goateed Asian actor! (I'm personally partial to Yuen Wah, but he never got much of a following over here)

Large portions of the movie are set in Paris, but we never have a big set piece with the Eiffel Tower. Despite what Hollywood believes, Paris is not a concentric circle of flats with one window facing the tower. I don't know that I've ever seen that kind of restraint in a movie, and it's an automatic +2 stars.

That said, the beautiful aerial shots of the various cities reminded me of Katsuhiro Otomo's elaborate cityscapes.

It had some nice foreshadowing, with a throwaway line about not liking trains. I caught this because I took five pages of notes.

...

You know, like normal people do.

The Freefall fight was awesome and apparently Joseph Gordon-Levitt did his own stunts, so go him! I know that Nolan eschewed CG for his earlier flicks and while it had to be unavoidable for some scenes, I wonder how many of the FX shots were non-CG. (I just don't wonder about this so much that I'm inclined to look up this readily available information on my own.)

The assault on the arctic fortress and the pursuit by machine gunners on skis made me think the scene would conclude with our heroes leaping into open air to their apparent doom, only to be saved by a union jack parachute opening out of their backpacks. This didn't happen, but rappelling down a mountain to race an oncoming avalanche is even more awesome.

I'm looking forward to the RiffTrax version when the hecklers will sing "Poor, Poor Pitiful me," when certain characters commit suicide by train, "I Lay my head on the railroad tracks and wait for the Double E, but the railroad don't run no more. Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me."

Overall, it was great. It reminded me a little of the Zelazny novella He Who Shapes (later expanded into The Dream Master), but less than I thought it might. Mostly because of the similar subject matter. It reminded me somewhat of the Matrix as well, but I think he was working hard to avoid these comparisons.

Dreams don't interest me as much as they used to, but I'm still very interested in the way we come to believe the things we do. I read an interesting piece on the anchoring effect just yesterday. I've talked once or twice about how the schema that Lily develops as a child will grow into the way she sees the world as an adult, and I'm always interested in the society of mind, to steal a phrase from Marvin Minsky and one of the reasons from why Eric is awesome from an upcoming post.

The whole "mythology" of the piece appealed to me. It's nice to see a stand-alone sci-fi property that's not an adaptation of a comic or an revival of something from the 80s. I liked that the dream world worked by its own logic. I loved the concept of totems. I was thrilled when Arthur mentioned the concept of the Penrose Stairs by name! I even liked the ending. I can't think of anything that I'd change, except to maybe expand on ideas introduced in the movie, but that would turn an already lengthy film into Cinématon.

"Dad, you killed the zombie Flanders!" "He was a zombie?"

Over at my play by email game (plug! http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/MazeworksII/, click on the link to join today! We're awesome!) we were discussing the Battle of Yonkers from World War Z. Tim gave me an advance reader's copy of World War Z a couple years back

I said that I liked almost everything about the book, except for the Battle of Yonkers, which fills me with untrammeled NERDRAGE!!!

Bob said that he liked it because it was so true to the military way of thinking and that it sounded just like something he'd have seen as an enlisted man.

We talked about it a little further, and since I don't post enough on my blog, I thought I'd put this up here. This post is revised from an email exchange with the Lord a while back.

Zombie fiction works best on a small scale like in Night of the Living Dead, or if you have a plague/comet/what-have-you wipe out 90% of the human race, devastating the infrastructure and leaving the zombies outnumbering the living. As All Flesh Must Be Eaten tells us, if you can't beat a bunch of slow moving stupid undead things in a straight up fight, then you deserved to die.

If you have a bunch of rednecks beat a ton of zombies in Night of the Living Dead, then the army can do it. The US military has its flaws, but that's true of any large organization. I think they're pretty good at what they do, and modern weapons are absolutely devastating. I think they might lose the first several engagements, but once they comprehend what they're dealing with, they'll be able to hit back with overwhelming force while taking almost no casualties. With a couple exceptions, the US military has generally done well at adapting to changing situations and circumstances, and we've already established at this point that they're familiar with the zombies.

Mostly it comes down to this: Zombies are essentially humans who keep shambling at you until they are so damaged to be incapable of doing so. Those are their assets. The also lack assets human beings have. Range, instincts of self-preservation, tool use, mobility, tactics and planning, for starters. On the whole, their liabilities significantly outweigh their assets. They're certainly in worse shape structurally than a healthy adult human (they're dead after all), but the thing is, they don't stop moving until they're unable to move. And they move, in a slow, steady, straight line, directly at their targets. People say "how do you kill something that's already dead", but if it's still bound by the laws of physics, it needs its bones and muscles to move. Damage slows them down, and it's not they're Steve Prefountaine to begin with. If the knee bone is no longer connected to the thigh bone, it's going to move even slower.

I logged on to one of the message boards I frequent to find that this topic was already being debated. They were talking specifically about the Battle of Yonkers in the novel World War Z, with "full military might of the United States Army" against a couple million zombies. The zombies won, and those with actual military experience cried foul. Since they express my points better than I can, and have broader experience with these matters. I've included some of their comments, italicized below.

Air Burst Fuses: If you're going after soft targets, like infantry, light armor, supply convoys, etc., you use airburst fuses to increase the efficiency. 155mm HE artillery rounds with airburst fuses set at a 50m altitude will pretty much guarantee a lethal headshot on every last zombie withing 120 meters of the point of detonation. And with a range topping 11,000 meters, they could have parked a half dozen batteries of Army and USMC artillery on the north side of Yonkers and walked the fire right down the damned highway into the heart of freaking Manhattan, easily annihilating all 4 million of whatever zombies that were clogging the highways. Forget zombies, the damned highway wouldn't have survived as anything recognizable.

Not only that, the 270mm artillery rocket systems (HIMARS and MRLS) Have their lovely M326 rockets which explode in the air and scatter 644 submunitions each of which sprays fragments in a lethal radius of 4 meters. I'll let you figure out the coverage they get when a single MLRS launches its full load of 12 rockets. A full artillery battery of M270's can launch 108 rockets simultaneously. That's 69,552 little bombs covering 4 meters each. And it doesn't matter if the zombies are full packed. Those bombs go off when they impact something, which means the 'ground zero' zombie gets a shaped charge burning a hole through it from brain down to crotch, while easily a dozen or more zombies right around it take head shots from nickel-sized fragments of steel travelling in excess of 3600 feet per second.

I went to the effort of digging up that youtube video of a 155mm shell exploding again. VT fuzes (the kind that expode before impact) have been in use since the later half of WW2 and before then we tried to get the same effect with mechanical timing. Artillery shooting at people does not use impact fuzes. Fragments would be coming from the top down, hitting heads and shoulders before anything else. The kill radius is commonly quoted at 50 meters and a causualty radius of 100m. Zombies not caring about how scary artillery is would only increase the casualties because they wouldn't do common sense things like dispersing.

For a 155mm shell, that "very center" where things pretty much vanish or get reduced to gobs is pretty decent sized. And when fired into a shoulder-to-shoulder mass of bodies?

If one shell hits a spot with densely packed zombies, there will be dozens surely "destroyed" with possibly dozens more destroyed or at the very least greatly reduced in threat.

Multiply this a thousand-fold and keep the shells coming at a steady pace and the Infantry shouldn't have had to fire a single shot.

That's discounting shrapnel removing heads, arms, legs etc. Yeah, a zombie with only 1 arm is still coming at you, but he'll at least have a harder time grabbing on to you.

Any shells that actually strike the ground will also create nice big craters that the shamblers will have a hard time negotiating. If they move around it, that creates additional choke points to pick them off with marksmen.

It's unlikely that the military would do something they have rarely done since Korea.. dig in and conduct a static defense. Why no hit and run or methodical withdrawal as the shamblers came closer ?

A unit that looks remote close to be overrun can be evacced by vehicle or chopper, redeployed 300 yards down the street and resume firing trivially.

The reason why artillery is not such a great Infantry-killer as it was in WWI? Modern Tactics. Squads tend to disperse and not walk in close formation. Guess what a few million brainless Zombies will not posses?

This should have been a turkey-shot, even with 4 million zombies walking.

Hell, they could've done it with a couple of C-130 gunships.

Damn, why not, rig a few steam-rollers to head on forward and let 'em roll forward!

Also, as others have pointed out: Artillery will create trenches, destroy bridges and generally distort the landscape to a modern-art sculpture look-a-like. This will slow down the horde immensely!

Everyone should be carrying at least 180 rounds in their pockets and the enemy is giving them all the time in the world to aim. Then if there seems to be any danger of getting overrun, the scenario we are presented with allows the men to escape easily by walking away.

You don't have to think very mobile warfare to just keep backup up/avoiding close combat with a foe with nothing else.

Tanks, APCs, IFVs, etc. are immune to zombies, save via starvation/dehydration of the crew if they're trapped in there for too long.

If you did firebombing with aerial units it'd also do quite a lot of damage.

I think that in a straight up engagement, the army would win, and win overwhelmingly. The whole book was a critique of policy the author didn't approve, and the chapter assumes the worst possible mix of leadership, tactics, and weaponry and presents it as if this was the only possible outcome of the encounter.

I get the idea of the chapter is that they let Lieutenant "Flame units only. I want rifles slung." Gorman run a Dog and Pony Show for the cameras, but the contortions Max Brooks goes through to justify a zombie victory (digging trenches for tanks? Really?) cross the line from poor decisions to outright absurdity. And there is something clearly wrong with me in that this is the part of a zombie book that I'm complaining about, but there it is.

Apocalypso

I could have gone with It's the End of the World as We Know It for a music-themed end-of-the world title, but I thought that was too easy.

I have two friends named Jeremy (Frederick and the Lord), each of whom who have worn eye-patches in LARPs. One of them is cool and the other is not. I always leave this ambiguous so each can think that he is the cool one.

Frederick was home alone (Ahhhh!!!) for the weekend, so he invited some friends over. I was the only one who could make it, so I headed over after work on Friday. We got some food to eat at the local pizza joint, and settled down to watch "Bender's Game", the Futurama movie where Bender is institutionalized after going insane when playing Dungeons & Dragons. It never rose to the transcendent awesomeness of Futurama at its peak, but it was pretty fun, with lots of gaming in-jokes. Favorite lines: When Fry sees Bender has lost it because of role-playing, he falls to his knees and wails "When will young people learn that playing "Dungeons and Dragons" doesn't make you cool!", "I know not of this "Bender"! I am Titanius Anglesmith, Fancy Man of Cornwood!" Honorable mention to Rosie the Robot Maid, receiving therapy in the HAL Institute for Insane Robots: "Everything must be clean. Very clean. That's why the dog had to die. He was a dirty dog. Dirty. Dirty. Also that boy Elroy. Dirty. Dirty."

I watched while Frederick played some Red Dead Revolution and then we both killed a bunch of zombies in Left 4 Dead 2. The plan was for Dave to come over after he was done with his patchouli-fest, but Frederick left his phone upstairs when we went back down to watch another movie and Ancker texted him, but not me at quarter past two, so we missed that entirely. The text was only to say that he couldn't make it, so I don't feel too badly.

We wound up watching the Book of Eli.

SPOILERS FOLLOW, so Frederick, don't read until you've seen it all the way through.

The gist of the movie is that a lone wanderer (Denzel Washington) is transporting a mysterious book westward across a post apocalyptic wasteland. I have an enormous amount of respect for Mila Kunis, as she's a non-native English speaker who now speaks the language better than I do, but she just seems miscast for this movie. Gary Oldman plays a crime lord with his characteristic restraint and understatement and Jennifer Beals has it going on as Mila Kunis's mom.


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Plot Twist One: Eli is blind.

Post Twist Two: The book he is transporting is the bible.

There are hints to both early on and I do think they are both handled pretty well. I knew about the bible, but I was almost a third of the way through the movie before I figured out that he was blind. Denzel does a good job of selling it, but not over-selling it.

It reminds me of Rutger Hauer in Blind Fury, where the lead character was also a blind badass. I think Blind Fury did a better job of remembering that its main character couldn't see. Hauer's Nick was amazingly competent, but still blind and had difficulties with things that you and I would take for granted. My favorite scene is at the end, where Hauer is dueling with a hired gun. He's lost his sword cane, and his sidekick throws it to him. "Catch, Uncle Nick!" The cane flies through the air in slow motion, and Hauer reaches for it, but misses it by yards. Contrast this with BoE, where Denzel Washington has such an acute sense of smell that he's picking guys off a rooftop with a handgun.

That said, I think it's still more realistic than the revelation that he's carrying the very last bible in the world. I'm an atheist and I've been calling myself one for years, but I still own three or four bibles, and Jen has several of her own. Before I started looking into this, I had assumed that there were millions in circulation, but after looking into it, it looks like the number is closer to Billions. I really find it less of a stretch that a blind man could fight his way across the continental United States than the possibility that we would ever get down to just one bible. (There's a line that Gary Oldman gives about the fact that books were burned in the past, in an effort to justify this, but the first scene we see with Eli, he's scavenging from an undespoiled private home. Since almost every household in America has at least one bible, I just can't buy into this.)

I find it a little bit...I don't want to say offensive, so let's say naive, that the lessons in the bible are ones around which society can be rebuilt. There are some good messages in the bible, but there are also a lot of horrifying wickedness passed off as good advice too. And the culture was different then, and the books of the bible are by no means all bad, but I wholly reject the assumption that it is needed in order to lead a moral life or to have a functioning society.

And while we're on the subject of post-apocalypticia, I came across my new favorite song: "We Will Become Silhouettes" It's a cheery little upbeat ditty about life after a nuclear holocaust. When I first saw it the video, I thought it was from the 80s, the era of incomprehensible music videos and nuclear paranoia, but apparently the album is from in 2005. If Tim's brother ever gets a cell phone, this is totally going to be his ringtone. It's neat, and will be joining Seasons in the Sun and I Will Never Forget on my playlist of songs that sound happy, but really aren't.

We fell asleep at about four in the morning, then we got up and went to Tic Toc for breakfast. I was a little sad to see that they are no longer actually twenty-four hours, despite pasting that claim on their placemats and on the large sign outside. Ah, well. Sic transit gloria mundi.