Posted By John Sears on February 22, 2011

This statement put up on BuyZombie by the author of a number of Anti-Zombie books on their marketability and the influence of the Anti-Zombie craze on authorial choices was illuminating, if depressing:

When I started writing fiction seriously I never thought I’d end up a zombie writer. That’s not to say I am strictly a zombie writer now, I’m a multi-genre writer, but zombies have always been a passion of mine and my first novel, DEAD MECH, just happened to be my take on the zombie genre.

Then the zombie boom hit and I found myself with fans and followers clambering for more. Who am I to turn them down?

…

I guess this is what has drawn me to zombies most of all: The End Of The World!

Ah, the post-apocalyptic landscape is so refreshing to write in. It’s a way to strip things down, get back to basic survival without having to write historical fiction. You don’t need to research a futuristic wasteland, it can be whatever you want it to be!

…

However you like your zombies (fast or Slow) or like your setting (current apocalypse or futuristic wasteland) I will agree with you. I’m easy that way and really, when all is said and done, it’s the reader that decides what works. I just hope the story I put out there works for you. And if one doesn’t, just stay tuned, I’ll probably have the right mix for you soon.

Who am I to turn you down?

This really gets to the heart of what we’ve been talking about with our critiques of the ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ meme and the enormous surge in Anti-Zombie books of late, here at the ZRC blog. It’s become a vicious and self-reinforcing cycle; Anti-Zombie and Living Supremacist media feeds the hunger for more Anti-Zombie and Living Supremacist media. The market for these books, movies, videogames and such draws out ever more creative personalities who smell the blood in the water and jump right in with great enthusiasm; after all, a gig is a gig, right?

Well, no. Not when your ‘gig’ means defaming and dehumanizing an entire group of people for the amusement of the mob. That is not ok, and The Zombie Rights Campaign is here to tell you, the Zombie fiction authors of the world, that you are hurting the Undead Community when you succumb to this ugly and very lucrative peer pressure and turn out more stereotyped, prejudiced and unfair fiction targeting the Differently Animated.

Though at least some authors, like Jake Bible here, will admit to the monetary incentives to writing this material. It gives us a goal here at the ZRC; if we can help reduce the demand for such books, the Jake Bibles of the world would be happy to go on writing something different.

Let’s help them do that, shall we?

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Anti-Zombie Products, Books

Posted By John Sears on February 22, 2011

Can I just say this up front? Jon Stewart is a massively overrated pundit who isn’t nearly as smart as he thinks himself to be.

I mean, not even close.

Just check out the headline he ran with to talk about Madison:

Crisis in Dairyland – Revenge of the Curds
The Wisconsin protests against Scott Walker’s plan to cut benefits and collective bargaining rights turns into the Bizarro Tea Party. (09:14)

Basically, as Stewart outlines in his piece, the Pro-Union protesters are right on all the facts; Walker’s plan is a radical power grab and crushes long-held civil liberties.

But can’t we be *nice* about it? Not so ‘chanty’?

In the 9 minute segment Stewart repeatedly mocks the brave people who have occupied the Capitol Rotunda as being, well, dirty, noisy hippies.

He then proceeds to attack some commentators for comparing us to the Mideast protests that have rocked the world.

Hey, Jon? You know who else compared us to them?

Kamal Abbas, general coordinator of the independent Egyptian Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services (CTUWS), has sent an amazing message of solidarity to U.S. workers under assault by CEO-backed governors and state legislators. From Michael Moore’s website:

I am speaking to you from a place very close to Tahrir Square in Cairo, “Liberation Square,” which was the heart of the Revolution in Egypt. This is the place were many of our youth paid with their lives and blood in the struggle for our just rights.

From this place, I want you to know that we stand with you as you stood with us.

I want you to know that no power can challenge the will of the people when they believe in their rights. When they raise their voices loud and clear and struggle against exploitation.

No one believed that our revolution could succeed against the strongest dictatorship in the region. But in 18 days the revolution achieved the victory of the people….

We want you to know that we stand on your side. Stand firm and don’t waiver. Don’t give up on your rights. Victory always belongs to the people who stand firm and demand their just rights.

We and all the people of the world stand on your side and give you our full support.

As our just struggle for freedom, democracy and justice succeeded, your struggle will succeed. Victory belongs to you when you stand firm and remain steadfast in demanding your just rights.

Huh. But I guess he should shut up, because Jon Stewart has decided the two events are completely unrelated. I mean, what would Kamal Abbas know about living under, and then overthrowing, dictatorship?

About Kamal Abbas and the Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services:

Kamal Abbas is General Coordinator of the CTUWS, an umbrella advocacy organization for independent unions in Egypt. The CTUWS, which was awarded the 1999 French Republic’s Human Rights Prize, suffered repeated harassment and attack by the Mubarak regime, and played a leading role in its overthrow. Abbas, who witnessed friends killed by the regime during the 1989 Helwan steel strike and was himself arrested and threatened numerous times, has received extensive international recognition for his union and civil society leadership.

Oh… right. But still, I mean, Stewart runs a comedy news program, so clearly Abbas is mistaken.

Stewart then slips in a bizarre attack on Al Jazeera as ‘promoting’ the World Trade Center attacks and Al Qaeda, finally rounding off his segment by explicitly calling the Madison protesters the ‘Bizarro Tea Party’ and saying that MSNBC is identical to Fox for standing up for us. (Even though, as previously noted, Stewart establishes that the Pro-Union side is right on all the facts. Reporting facts, it seems, is now an uncivil, unfair approach to journalism, unless accompanied by a touch of scorn and wacky graphics.)

Jon Stewart is, and let’s be clear, an idiot when it comes to politics. He’s a man who thinks that the facts are far less important than everyone being nice, and sitting down, and having a pleasant conversation. His false equivalencies and fetish for painting himself as the reasonable and rational center of the country are notorious. He is not a great thinker, and his ability to care about your plight and your situation extends precisely as far as your tactics don’t offend his delicate, pearl-clutching, run-for-the-fainting couch sensibilities while you stand up for your rights.

Jon Stewart is, in fact, a tool.

Category: ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags: Journamalism, Madison Protests

Posted By John Sears on February 21, 2011

The video above, taking video from ‘Shaun of the Dead’ and running it in reverse alongside the ‘Dead Island’ trailer theme, helps to illustrate a point the ZRC has been trying to make in the discussion over ‘Dead Island’ on the net the last few days: the fact that the trailer is visually pretty and has very nice music does not, in any substantive way, alter the fact that it is a work of vicious Anti-Zombie prejudice and bigotry.

I doubt that was the intent of the mashup makers, but kudos nevertheless for helping us make our point. The video is quite graphic, since it’s from ‘Shaun of the Dead’, so be advised, you might not want to watch it over lunch.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Movies, Videogames, Youtube Mischief

Posted By John Sears on February 21, 2011

The rally continues and democracy continues on another day here in Madison. Far more drizzly, frigid and generally unpleasant weather has moved most activities indoors but thousands still turned out for today’s festivities.

(Inside the Rotunda this afternoon)

(Great sign from today)

(The great folks from Ian’s on State are very busy dishing out those pizzas people from around the world are donating; last I heard it was up to all 50 states and 17 countries now)

(As usual the balconies are lined with signs and people)

(Here’s that mud that the AP thinks is more important than exercising your civil rights)

(John Oliver from The Daily Show was in town today interviewing protesters)

(The protests continue on, all night, as usual)

(MC Superman leading the chants tonight in the Rotunda)

(From this afternoon, drumming and various noisemaking activities in the Capitol)

(I was going to do a post of just sign pictures but there are so many now; here’s one I’m including just for the ZRC’s friend Deneen Melody, a huge Lord of the Rings fan)

That’s it for now, ZRC fans. I’ve got more video to upload to Youtube. You can see all the day’s photos here.

Category: ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags: Madison Protests, Public Appearance, Social Justice

Posted By John Sears on February 21, 2011

Getting a late start protesting today. Entirely my fault; dishes had stacked up, laundry needed doing and I have a sick norfolk pine that I was tending in the green room downstairs.

Plus I had to take the time, and inhale the fumes, to craft this:

That’s right, it’s my first sandwichboard protest sign for the ZRC. I’ve heard that they’re not allowing picket signs with sticks into the Capitol, so this baby is just paper, ink and reflective duct tape. I tried to make it sturdy enough to endure the lousy weather today, but if it dies in the line of duty at least it will be remembered on Flickr.

Category: ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags: Madison Protests, Public Appearance, Social Justice

Posted By John Sears on February 20, 2011

As you can see from the blog feed, your loyal ZRC staff stayed back at the home base today and tried to catch up on some of the Zombie Business that had piled up.

Tomorrow I’m going to be back downtown for as much of the day as possible. Get some more pictures, video, hang out, protest, you know, go with the flow.

The Zombie Rights Campaign appreciates your indulgence as this unforseen but absolutely necessary Solidarity action interferes with our usual slate of content, news and analysis. Ultimately, however, if Zombies want to be accepted by the Living Community, they, and their representatives, need to stand together with other social justice movements. That same principle underlies our ZRC charity work and much of our outreach.

So please stay tuned, and thanks for your patience.

Category: ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags: Public Appearance, Social Justice

Posted By John Sears on February 20, 2011

I was somewhat bemused to see this particular editorial arguing that there is no reason to find the ‘Dead Island’ trailer controversial:

So Dead Island has been announced, and everyone’s going gaga over the trailer. Forgive me for being so blunt, but I fail to see why. Various industry outlets such as MCV and The Guardian are suggesting that it’s one of the most controversial teasers in gaming history.

Really? I’ve watched the thing about fifteen times already, just to see if there was something my diminishing brain power could discover. But every time I came to the same conclusion. There is no controversy over the Dead Island trailer.

…

The issue can’t be the fact that a kid’s been turned into a fictional flesh-eating member of the undead. What parent gets nightmares about that? Of course, it can’t be the powerful idea of failing to rescue your child from danger, either. Even in games, that’s been covered by Quantic Dreams’ Heavy Rain, and there was barely any controversy over that.

Beyond games, this concept has been raised in countless films in the past, most prominently Ransom – so what makes Dead Island, as brilliant a trailer as it is, worthy of discussion in a world where this sort of idea is played out all the time?

I checked out The Guardian piece that was referenced here, to see what their take on the potential controversy was:

A family is slaughtered during a summer getaway on a tropical island. That’s essentially the narrative driving this astonishing trailer for forthcoming first-person shooter Dead Island. Told in a reverse, in a style similar to Coldplay’s video for The Scientist, it’s an unusually affecting and emotional experience.

But, centering as it does on the gruesome death of a young girl, it is also causing controversy. Some – including MCV’s Ben Parfitt – are questioning whether scenes of a family being hacked to death and a girl plummeting from the window of a tall building should be considered marketing material for a zombie slash-’em-up. Parfitt later linked to this blog post, written by a father whose own young daughter died in 2007.

I would suggest that horror movies have always traded on the emotionally wrenching duality of the zombie figure – part monster, part recognisable human.

The problem with both of these pieces, particularly the Guardian one, is that neither recognizes that the real ‘controversy’ here shouldn’t be the precise nature of cinematic violence directed against one set of fictional protagonists in a short trailer, but rather the fact that neither of these ‘journalists’ even *considers* the impact of the vicious Anti-Zombie prejudice on display in ‘Dead Island’ as a whole.

Oooh, an adorable, presumably American, little white girl dies, and it’s stop-the-presses controversial, but when Zombies are mowed down, routinely and repeatedly in this genre, nobody bats an eye. In fact, they usually cheer.

Remember this scene from ‘Dawn of the Dead’?

George Romero ‘went there’ with the issue of Living Supremacist entertainment and violence against children, decades ago. But because they were *Zombie* kids, somehow, it was ok. It isn’t even played out in the movie as a particularly momentous occasion, or weighty act; the Zom-tykes are mown down and the ‘survivors’ continue their looting.

I guess the message here is that for The Guardian and many others, cinematic violence against kids is ok so long as they have a green, blue or ashy grey skin coloration, and for gaming sites like Spong, Anti-Zombie violence is just ok in general.

That’s the real issue this trailer has exposed, and it’s not even a controversy; it’s just plain bigotry.

Category: Zombie Media | 2 Comments »
Tags: Journamalism, Mainstream Media, Videogames

Posted By John Sears on February 20, 2011

I was alerted to today’s ‘Get Fuzzy’ comic strip by ZRC Cultural Historian Andrew Leal, who keeps up with the newspaper comics industry for us. I’ve taken the liberty of posting the comic below, so you can read it before the ZRC take:

Two things about this strip interest me from a ZRC perspective. First, the idea of casual violence against the Differently Animated, gruesome mayhem even, is now thoroughly acceptable even in the rather restrictive, family-oriented newspaper comics industry. Naturally, such excessive violence against any other oppressed minority group, even mentioned in passing, would be unacceptable to editors across the country.

The second point of interest came in the question of whether Bucky, or ‘Get Fuzzy’ itself, is Anti-Zombie. I tend to think not, actually. Much like ‘MadWorld’, which was rated as Zombie Neutral because it applied grotesque atrocities to the Zombies and Living communities in equal measure, Bucky hates everyone and everything more or less equally, to the point where his sheer misanthropy extends even to harmless thank you notes, and he is more than willing to make his alleged ‘owner’ the target of his scorn.

In other words, he’s a cat, albeit one that can talk, and as such is an amoral monster, judged by human standards.

About the worst I think we can say here is that this particular comic shows us that horrible individuals, like Bucky, will easily pick up on the currents of Anti-Zombie prejudice in our society and use them as outlet and inspiration for their innate cruelty. This is yet another reason we need to remain vigilant about the Anti-Zombie media.

Naturally, the ZRC will keep up the vigil on behalf of all the Differently Animated.

(You can read more ‘Get Fuzzy’ here)

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Comics

Posted By John Sears on February 20, 2011

Minecraft, for those who aren’t aware of the phenomenon, is a sort of sandbox/world building game, centered largely around construction in a cube-filled, primitively polygonal world:

Minecraft is a sandbox building[1][2] indie video game written in Java originally by creator Markus “Notch” Persson and now by his company, Mojang, formed from the proceeds of the game. The game is focused on creativity and building, allowing players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D world.

Only..there are ‘monsters‘ in this virtual world too, including ‘Zombies, as well as ‘Skeletons’.

Perversely, these Undead entities are depicted as being completely and uniformly hostile to the players; bizarrely, they also burst into flames at dawn, conflating all Undead with certain types of Vampires (who still wouldn’t deserve this treatment).

But perhaps the game tells a different story than the one most people take away? Clearly the player is meant to think of the Zombies as the evil party here, but think about it: you are going into their world and radically reshaping it, terraforming it to suit your own purposes. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the players of Minecraft are the invaders here. If anyone is in the wrong, it is surely them, and not the native denizens of the game world fending off a hostile takeover and the destruction of their entire way of virtual life.

Which brings us to today. Where Anti-Zombie games roam, they are inevitably followed by those who seek to glorify their culture of violence and discord. In this case, as in so many others, with a snazzy Youtube video:

Oh, wow. I haven’t even played the game Minecraft yet, and this still somehow manages to be awesome. The vid starts off slow, but don’t worry, the music jacks into high gear, and the duo of survivors bust out their newly crafted weapons for some zombie killing.

Delightful how eager this individual is for ‘zombie killing’, isn’t it? Uggh.

We’ve embedded the video below, so that the ZRC readers can see how even an intentionally ‘retro’ depiction of Anti-Zombie stereotypes can lead to cutting-edge malice against the Differently Animated.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Videogames, Youtube Mischief

Posted By John Sears on February 20, 2011

This announcement was inevitable but it’s still a sad one that we have to bring you, the loyal Zombie Friendly readers of the ZRC Blog: Yes, there will be a ‘Walking Dead’ videogame:

Can’t get enough heart-wrenching, emotion inducing zombie based games? Of course you can’t. No one can. So, you’ll be pleased to hear that we’ll all be getting a new one.

Telltale Games has announced that it’s got the license to make the game of the TV series of the novels of the comics of the zombesque Walking Dead.

“The rumours are true”, says the company, “we’re working on a game based on Robert Kirkman’s Eisner award-winning comics series The Walking Dead!”, see.

…

We do, however, discover that the game will be episodic.

Telltale Games is best known for working on the ‘Sam and Max’ and ‘Wallace and Gromit’ games, though they also had success with a recent game adaptation of ‘Back to the Future’. They specialize in episodic content, so that last part is no real surprise.

Still, who better to adapt a seemingly endless comic book, which often takes years to see any significant advancement in the story, than Telltale Games? Perhaps they can capture the true ‘Walking Dead’ experience, where in between releases you forget who almost all the interchangeable supporting characters are, and then spend as much time reviewing as reading in a vain attempt to discern why, precisely, all the Living people are so bloody stupid and self-destructive.

Don’t worry if you can’t figure that one out; neither could I.

Between this and ‘Dead Island’ the ZRC’s going to have to think about getting another next-gen console. Maybe setting up a secondary gaming area in the Zombie Shelter downstairs too.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Comics, Videogames