Stay Cool
Wow. I was sick yesterday, and Starr’s sick today. Awesome. It might very well have been dehydration on both our parts, though I drink more water these days than I have in years.
I need to watch the latest Doctor Who very soon, it is apparently most excellent, and the net is bursting with spoilers that I am carefully avoiding. Stephen Moffat may be the best Who writer on the new show, responsible for The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, The Girl In the Fireplace, and Blink; I’m not displeased at all that he’s in charge of 2010’s Series Five. The “Everybody lives!!” line still gets me right ‘there’.
And now, this year’s zombie meme:
You are in a mall when the zombies attack. You have:
1. one weapon.
2. one song blasting on the speakers.
3. one famous person to fight alongside you.
* Weapon can be real or fictional; you may assume endless ammo if applicable. Person can be real or fictional.
1) Phaser II, set to “vaporise”. With endless ammo, I can just hold down the trigger and sweep.
2) Queen, “Flight of the Hawkmen” (starts at about 1:08 in the video)
3) Tim the Enchanter (I think his skills would be well matched to the situation.)
Starr’s list:
1) Sonic Screwdriver (“I’m sure it has a ‘defeat zombies’ setting.”)
2) Meredith Brooks, “Bitch”
3) Kal-El
Words On the Run
Dang, I just had a pretty good idea for a vampire story. Weird, because I don’t generally like vampire stories. It must be an interesting job right now, being a graphic artist for the fantasy section of the bookstore: once, you were collecting Vallejo paintings of mostly-naked barbarians; now, you’re taking mood-lit photos of women in leather, vinyl, and pointy dental appliances.
Anyway, this is the third or fourth fairly decent story idea I’ve had in a month. Maybe I could pull a McCartney and mash them all into one finished project. I certainly hope it’s a sign that my creativity is fighting free from the coma it’s keeps slipping into.
Speaking of comas, I felt like the walking undead this morning. Suddenly, I’m kinda feeling better. Creativity: my anti-drug.
Zombie HORROR!!
Yesterday, of course, was ‘blog like it’s the end of the world’ day. Several people I know were caught a bit off guard, especially when reading the better-written entries. I’m interested that most of the zombiepocalypse bloggers posted as if they expected to survive all this, and with convincing feeling rather than easy melodrama. Frankly, this was more fun than NaNoWriMo as far as I’m concerned.
But I wrote in mine about ‘going mad’ with the shock of what’s happening. I tried to imagine the other day a horrific event that would ‘drive me mad’. There’s not a lot I can imagine – I mean, I can imagine being terrified, sickened, appalled, but not driven insane by an event. The very sight of Cthulhu was supposed to do this, or the reading of his forbidden books; but I suspect that had more to do with the awful realization that such things could exist in a universe of which we’d pridefully assumed we were the supreme center.
Last week I read about a story involving a 100-foot-long house with a 110-foot-long hallway inside!!! For a while, i thought that might be my road – how would my scientific, skeptical mind embrace this physical impossibility? It might DRIVE ME MAD!
But maybe not. I have a built-in error-protection routine for these situations, which is to simply say “There’s something going on here that I don’t understand.” If I “know” that you can’t fit 110 feet of corridor in 100 feet of domicile, but I am forced by the evidence of my own measuring tape to concede that that’s what seems to be happening, I don’t need to shriek “That’s IMPOSSIBLE!” and run from the building, I need only admit that I can’t explain this, and start looking for answers.
A zombie can scare me, might consume me, but can’t make me admit there isn’t an explanation somewhere 🙂
The End of the World
I’ve got to write something about the Uprising. I’ve got to keep my head or it’s all lost. Everything may be lost anyway, but if I freak out, then everything’s definitely over for me.
I’ve never been able to get into a zombie movie… I know too much biology. Well, I’m in one now, and I’ve got to keep my mind occupied. How are their muscles moving without a blood supply? How can they have a blood supply with an unbeating heart? Their tissues are rotting, their bones are crumbling – how can they move at all?
Okay… their bones are holding them up, and their muscles are producing force. Something has repaired them at least that well. Niven suggested a strange symbiotic plague in “Night on Mispec Moor”, but why would they rise from the grave all at once if there were various plague infections?
Evil spirits? The Devil’s work? Angry ancient voodoo houngans? As near as I can find out – the cable channels aren’t much use right now – the risen are impartial in their attacks. If this is an act of revenge, it’s on all humanity.
This is what I know. This is coordinated by someone or something with the power to make rotten human tissue functional again.
—–
I may go mad, but I’m physically okay right now. They moved us all from the NASA side to the Air Force side as soon as possible, and well-armed soldiers are proving effective for the moment. I can’t contact anyone else… land lines are clogged, cell lines are clogged, and e-mails / IMs to my friends and family seem to be going to /dev/null. I will check my Friends page again shortly to see if anyone’s blogged about this.
Feeling a little like Dr. Clayton Forrester right now – trapped in the research lab while the destroyers of humanity knock on the door, and the refugee hordes demand what few resources we have. Perhaps the common cold will save us as well. I’m not sure what else will.
What the hell could be behind this?
