We hope you'll find this blog an educational, entertaining, and inspiring source of information, whether you're recently undead, a long-time member of the differently animated, or a still-living friend of your fallen, yet risen again, brethren. Everyone with an interest in zombie rights is welcome!
Well, we’ve seen Anti-Zombie camps for kids and such here in the US, but what if you’re an adult who wants to learn how to brutalize the innocent, unsuspecting Undead population with military precision? Or what passes for it in a few hours of training?
And what if you live in the UK, and want your savage Anti-Zombie indoctrination to be mass transit-accessible?
On this zombie experience day, you’ll take out these maggoty scumbags with only airsoft rifles, your fists – and possibly a pitchfork – to help you.
How on earth can this be achieved without recourse to David Blaine/Ali Bongo style conjuring? Surely black magic will have to be involved?
Not a bit of it. We will train you within an inch of your life, sharing skills that can be employed wherever you find the dastardly zombie hordes.
It goes on like that. A lot.
Basically there are three training sessions and then a faux ‘raid’ on a Zombie ‘lair’. Honestly, they make it sound like Zombies live in caves or something.
Lots of fake gunplay with airsoft pistols, and yes, even indulging the cowards out there who can’t bear to see their Zombie victims up close with a bit of sniping training.
I’m sure 40 minutes will be sufficient to master that.
And not to worry, English Living Supremacists, this isn’t some coarse, American-style survivalist experience, no sir or madam. This one’s *civilized*:
Is there somewhere to get food & drink?
Zombie fighting is hard work. Tea, Coffee and light snacks available on site for you to purchase.
Oh, *well* then, that makes it all right then. Tea and light snacks means it’s not a cruel, dehumanizing spectacle after all.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — When AMC’s “The Walking Dead” returned for the second half of its season on Feb. 12, viewers were greeted with an announcement as the show started, urging them to head to www.amcstorysync.com to “start [their] two screen experience now.” It was the kick-off of the network’s interactive web experience, “storysync,” which features real-time content and discussion for fans online as they watch the show on TV.
Basically, you watch and have a laptop off to the side, and the site loads pop-up information, polls, pictures, interactive stuff, etc. Very.. distracting. It’s also not dissimilar to how I used to review Zombie movies with my laptop at my side. I can assure you that without discipline (which I find difficult at times, being an info-junkie) it really eats into the experience of something on screen.
But if you’re not interested in art so much as inflammation of your audience, well:
However, once the action got going, the storysync items slowed down to one every three to five minutes, mainly after key action or plot points. Also, the site automatically has sound enabled, which gives a quick alert noise whenever a new item pops up, so if I felt like I was getting distracted from the episode, I just minimized the window and then returned to it when I heard that to see what the new item was.
The items are primarily polls. For every zombie kill, there’s one rating its goriness with the options “barely bloody,” “serious splatter,” “guts galore,” “major carnage” and “total bloodbath.” And there are a lot of snap-judgment calls for you to vote on whether you agree or disagree with something a character just did or said.
There’s another, called a decision poll, where you pick what you think the characters should do from a list of three or four options. This, of course, doesn’t affect the action on screen, but I thought it was fun to see the results of those and the other polls and whether I was in the majority of each vote or not.
Granted, theirs actually worked, which is simultaneously cooler and more awful.
I for one cannot believe, and yet can’t bring myself to be shocked, that AMC is running live polling to get viewers to rate the violence inflicted against the innocent Undead by depraved redneck survivalists in The Walking Dead. What is the world coming to? Now we need instant feedback on our cruelty?!
On the other hand… there’s a live chat where you can register your thoughts… how long do you think they’d wait to ban me if I was civil?
This isn’t a Resident Evil first, as RE has already seen manga iterations. This latest one is set in a prestigious Asian institution, located on an isolated island. When there’s a zombie outbreak, Chris Redfield is sent into investigate.
How many isolated laboratories in remote locales ARE there in the RE universe, anyway? It seems like every remote island, village, mountain retreat or hermitage in the Resident Evil/Biohazard world is actually the hideout for nefarious super-scientists making Undead slaves.
Who, by the way, are totally not to blame for any of this. (Poor Zombies)
It’s all very disturbing. Clearly scientific ethics are not at a premium in that world.
That, or the authors are totally running out of ideas. You decide, of course.
So my main ZRC laptop has again decided it wants to die, and I need to take a few days to try and coax it off the ledge. In the meantime I have posts scheduled for the blog through Wednesday, and can be reached via email if there’s a Zombie Emergency. I may even be tweeting from time to tima via the smartphone.
Redundancy is useful.
Hopefully I’ll be back with a shiny, and finally *fixed*, laptop by the middle of the week to continue fighting the good fight against the forces of Living Supremacism.
Look at you, all plump and fleshy, with a quickening pulse and body jam-packed with sweet meats. That brain of yours, with the scrumptious gray matter and thinking cap makes certain re-animated corpses crave a dining bib.
So what are you to do when the formerly living awaken with a hunger for a little human takeout? Are you ready for the zombie apocalypse?
Probably not. If you have to ask yourself that question, or took a moment before answering, then definitely not. In the time it took you to hesitate, even the slowest zombie could pull a dine and dash – or shamble – on you.
Oooh, scary. And a slow living person could hit you in the face with a pool noodle; should we be fearing the NERFpocalypse next?
Counterfactuals and hypotheticals aside, the obvious truth is that the ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ ranks below even flying cars in the annals of futurist predictions: it never, ever happens, for fairly obvious reasons, and yet you never have to go very far to find some wide-eyed, over-credulous pundit mouthing off about the possibility that ANY TIME NOW the Undead Community will eat your face, just as any day now you’ll be able to take your flying car to the (presumably also flying) Taco Bell drive-thru.
Because pattern recognition is not a big thing with these people.
Our learning-curve-that-is-more-or-less-flat subject of the day is one Aaron Sagers, and he has lots to say about how the CDC in particular is debasing itself by allying with The Walking Dead for more of its ‘safety’ campaigns that just happen to demagogue the American Zombie Community.
He doesn’t mention that just this month the CDC, through its spokesman, stated that it was never ok to kill Zombies. I’m not claiming that Sagers is wrong about the CDC’s current actions, but noting their hypocrisy on this issue would provide valuable context to his readers.
Oops. Another oversight.
Still, it was disturbing to hear that the CDC is renewing its on-again, off-again relationship with cheap Anti-Zombie rhetoric:
The CDC has also recently partnered with AMC’s zombie drama “The Walking Dead” – based on Robert Kirkman’s comic book series – to utilize clips from the TV show and add helpful tips such as, “Clean water is zombie-free water.”
Right. Is it also Irish and Italian free water? Bigots.
Sagers does provide something of a useful service by listing several real-life Anti-Zombie events, including some we had already heard of and planned to investigate further. I suppose we should thank him for that; sometimes, in the midst of working day after day to advance the rights of this critically misunderstood and underserved community, we forget to poke our heads up and see what the real loonies out there are doing with their time.
So thank you for that, Mr. Sagers.
Sigh. Guess we have even more work to do than I thought.
Madison, Wisconsin Zombies peacefully discuss issues of the day with then-Mayoral candidate, now-Madison Mayor Paul Soglin. Not the sort of picture you’re ever going to see on CNN, sadly, because it just doesn’t fit the fearful narrative very well.
Feel free to discuss this issue in detail with Mr. Sagers (@aaronsagers) on Twitter; we plan to.
We’ve attended a lot of Halloween events for the ZRC, and seen some political protesting done at them (as well as participated ourselves, like when we took picket signs and a megaphone to Elgin last October).
Generally speaking, Halloween is a chance to make a statement, and sometimes those statements (and naturally the costumes that frequently accompany them) rub others the wrong way.
It rarely descends into violence. About the worst the ZRC has ever encountered protesting for Zombie Rights was when a drunk at one of our first trips to Halloween on State Street here in Madison tried to wrestle a pro-Zombie sign out of my hands. I chalked it up to the liquor.
The Atheists of Central Pennsylvania decided to walk in the Mechanicsburg Halloween parade. There was a zombie Pope and a zombie Muhammed. On YouTube, you can catch a scary moment. It’s dark and distorted, but a Muslim man comes off the curb extremely offended at Muhammed being depicted in this way.
“He grabbed me, choked me from the back, and spun me around to try to get my sign off that was wrapped around my neck,” said Ernie Perce, who donned the costume.
…
The Muslim man and Perce both called police to report a crime. Both kept walking, and a few blocks down found Sgt. Brian Curtis. He talked to both and came to this conclusion.
“Mr. Perce has the right to do what he did that evening, and the defendant in this case was wrong in confronting him,” he said.
Seems like an open and shut case, right? A guy was harassed, at least by conventional definitions, and possibly assaulted on a public street for wearing a costume another guy didn’t like. The police sided with the costume-wearer, as they should. A crime was committed in public, it even ended up on Youtube, justice will be done, right?
Talaag Elbayomy was charged with harassment, but District Judge Mark Martin threw it out after criticizing Perce, the victim, and even calling him a “doofus.” The audio is also on YouTube.
Martin, who has done several tours of duty in the Middle East, said Perce would be put to death in those societies for his crime, but Perce wonders why that’s relevant in this country.
“He let a man who is Muslim, because of his preference of his culture and his way of life, walk free from an attack,” Perce said.
So, to summarize: it is now acceptable, court-sanctioned actually, to accost people dressed in a way that you don’t like in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. At least, if they’re an atheist, or dressed as a Zombie. And to have a judge then implicitly threaten you with DEATH by talking about how, in other countries, you’d be executed for speaking out? Wow.
That’s fascinating. Or Fascist, I’m not sure, it starts with ‘fasc’ anyway.
Someone should mail Judge Martin a copy of the First Amendment, he’d probably be surprised at what’s in there.
Also noteworthy for contempt is the defendant’s lawyer, R. Mark Thomas, who claims that being dressed in a Zombie manner on a public street makes you an ‘antagonist’ and deserving of, presumably, assault or harassment in public.
Bonus: the defendant seems to have either perjured himself, or lied to a police officer, as he confessed to grabbing at the defendant on the day of the incident, but said he did not do so in court. Oopsie. Not that it matters, seemingly, in Mechanicsburg.
The ZRC is not about to say that dressing up as a Zombie to make political points is without risk, especially to the larger Undead Community, who may well be uninterested in your particular issue. But, as with the earlier UK Zombie-related political protests, if as a society you start accosting people who DRESS as Zombies when their doing so offends someone, or is part of a protest that offends someone, it’s only a matter of time before you also start accosting actual Zombies going about their business. All that aside from the fact that, in this country, we’re supposed to have a relatively ironclad guarantee for free speech and expression. I had hoped that the sort of abusive, scornful treatment of public Zombiism our 2011 Zombie of the Year fought so nobly against in the UK would not be seen here in America.
I was very wrong. And that, frankly, is more than a little scary.
Truly an unbelievable, and outrageous, miscarriage of justice.
The Zombie Rights Campaign has been trying to spread the word that there’s no need to fear the ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ for some time now (we prefer the term ‘Global Reanimation Block Party’ at any rate). But there are those out there that really like, for some reason, the idea of your largely peaceful and law-abiding Undead neighbors destroying Western Civilization.
Which, really, says a lot more about them than it does about Zombies.
Permuted Press has 3 new books that were just released that should delight any post apocalyptic zombie fan out there. Each one of these sound like it’ll be a fun read and knowing Permuted Press’s strive for perfection in the undead and post-apocalyptic genre these are all ones you are going to want to be checking out if you need to expand your library!
Yes, if you have a thing for reading about supposedly noble survivors in a Zombie-ravaged (as opposed to Zombie-assisted) United States, you have even more options.
Lucky you.
BuyZombie gets the story on this one first, as they often do.
The ZRC is on Facebook, so we’ve, ahem, noticed the constant, frequent, and to many users maddening aesthetic tinkering that goes on with that particular social networking site.
It doesn’t really bother me, because I went into Facebook assuming it was evil, but many users hate it.
Facebook Timeline has finally arrived. And whether or not you’re a fan of the social network’s latest feature, you can at least take advantage of a new opportunity to broadcast your devotion to The Walking Dead via one of three The Walking Dead-themed images for your profile.
I think we’ll refrain, AMC, but thanks for asking if you can turn our Facebook page into an ad for your Living Supremacist show. /sarcasm
Simply Twisted Productions invites you to attend their first Book Date at the Northwest Film Forum (located at 1515 12th Avenue, Seattle, Washington 98122) on February 25th, 2012.
Doors open at 2:00 pm, and the show starts at 2:15p m. This is a new event series featuring Morgue Anne of The Twisted Geeks and Sex and Death with Morgue Anne. This is Anne doing what she does best – talking to authors about their books and creative process.
The first Book Date will be zombie-themed and feature three authors of the genre to talk about their experiences with the undead.
Authors Thom Carnell, Eloise Knapp and Timothy W. Long will be in attendance. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read any of their work! It mostly sounds Anti-Zombie from the descriptions, but you never know, and the ZRC applauds their willingness to face public criticism and discussion at any rate.
But sadly, that’s a bit far away for us to attend, err, the day after tomorrow.
But any ZRC readers in Seattle should totally consider it!
I’ve pined for a good (and available) Zombie beer on the ZRC Twitter off and on for some time, but the joys of Facebook brought me news of hot sauce, long my first love when it comes to bottled food concoctions – *Zombie themed* hot sauce.
Observe:
Yes, HauntedHotSauce.com does indeed sell a variety of Zombie-themed hot sauces, and even provides cedar ‘coffins’ for the bottles to reside in (although the sauces can also be ordered without coffins).
Now, I have to warn you, the marketing does not appear very Zombie Friendly. Observe the information on their original hot sauce flavor:
Fleshfeast is our original recipe hot sauce, the one that started it all!
Fleshfeast is rich, robust, thick, extremely flavorful. A bit hotter than Tabasco, Fleshfeast is designed for everyday use.
Fleshfeast is topped with a tattered scrap of aged burial cloth and a toe tag.
Yes, the sauces have names like ‘Mortician’s Mold’ “Ghoul Drool’ and ‘Fleshfeast’. Combined with the coffins, burial shrouds and what not, it’s hard to argue that HauntedHotSauce.com is promoting a particularly novel or enlightened view of the Differently Animated.
But then again, every market’s got to start somewhere. Perhaps if quality Zombie themed hot sauces take off we can get some less inflammatory marketing, a bit Zombie Friendlier, a bit less death-and-graveyard obsessed. Zombie Culture is, obviously, about more than loitering around where corpses are traditionally stored.
And from a hot sauce lover’s perspective it’s refreshing to see that the Haunted Hot Sauce flavors don’t seem to be confined in the endless, and largely pointless, race to the top of the heat scale that so many sauces compete in. Given that it’s possible to buy more or less pure capsaicin, which of course isn’t so much a food flavoring as a severe irritant, I for one would rather see hot sauces compete on flavor. This basil and red pepper focus they’ve got going is intriguing.
I think I’ll have to pick up a bottle or two for the ZRC and do a formal review.
Thanks to Marlena Midnite of Midnite Mausoleum for bringing this one to our attention.
