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!
The ZRC has to take issue with the above graphic from Very Small Array on a number of levels. First, regardless of where you live, Zombies are not ‘coming to get you’. Quite frankly, the whole world doesn’t revolve around Living people, and Zombies don’t just exist to ‘get’ them. Zombies are a diverse lot with their own legitimate hopes and dreams and ambitions.
Second, however, we have to take issue with lumping Zombies (along with Vampires, Ghosts and other innocent Undead) in with such legitimate menaces to public safety as Radiation and Stephen King. How dare you, Very Small Array?! This is outright Zom-bashing and the ZRC is not going to tolerate it. For shame.
I hope you think about what you’ve done, and the unfair aspersions on Undead character you’ve cast, and update this chart accordingly. Wisconsin may face many perils, including potential maple-syrup fueled Canadian invasion, but our local (and valued!) Zombie population is not such a threat.
(A Wisconsin Zombie shows that not only are they not a threat, Zombies can peacefully participate in the civil process, and even put out fires for the community.)
I appreciate an attempt to delve into ‘Zombie Culture’ but I think this video misses the mark and instead hits the Zombie Cosplay segment of the horror community (a practice also known at least under some circumstances as ‘Greenface’):
In reality, Zombie Culture is about so much more than just scaring people. It’s a diverse community with widely varying political, social and economic interests, not simply an excuse to dress up in public, as fun as that might be.
Food for thought, Seattle. If you genuinely want to be the World Capital of Zombies it’s going to take more than a convention and some latex prosthetics. It’s going to take tolerance and understanding as well.
(On a final note, I think Chicago also has a very credible claim to being the World Capital of Zombies, given their extremely wide variety of Zombie-related public events, but it’s probably good to see competition for this sort of title between cities in general)
The film version of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies really just cannot catch a break. From having countless director and lead actress woes since it was first announced that it was going to be getting the film treatment it finally seemed to have an upswing. Lionsgate picked up the recent director of the Fright Night remake, Craig Gillespie, to take the lead on this project. While everything seemed to be going well, Deadline has reported that Craig has just dropped out of the picture.
The split was apparently amicable and just a disagreement over casting decisions.
In all seriousness, the ZRC *tries* not to take pleasure in news like this, as it doesn’t really represent social progress toward Zombie Equality, but rather just the travails of Hollywood.
Still, it’s worth noting that it seems upon casual observation that making Anti-Zombie media leads to a lot of professional and personal strife. Just sayin’ :D
ZRC pal and author Michelle Hartz (we reviewed her novel ‘Helpless’ here) is a big proponent of NanoWriMo and after some thinking about it (and technically wasting the first day of November) I’ve decided to sign on and write a work of Zombie Friendly fiction.. which will probably be so awful that I end up deleting it on December 1st.
This has one major implication for the blog: the ZombieWriMo experiment logically has to come first if I have any chance of success.
On top of that, I have a major travel announcement to make soon concerning a trip at the end of November, which should make the last legs of this writing experiment extra-exciting. Good thing I have a laptop, eh?
I will update the blog with important news and outrages, of course, and perhaps a daily word count and even, if I can stand the scrutiny, some excerpts, who can say?
Good news: Zombie Friendly anime series ‘Kore wa Zombie Desu ka?’/'Is This a Zombie’ has another season coming:
The Japanese publishing conglomerate Kadokawa announced on Monday that the 10th volume of Shinichi Kimura’s original Kore wa Zombie desu ka? (Is This a Zombie?) light novel series will bundle its second original anime DVD in a limited edition next April. The included “Episode 0″ for the upcoming second anime season will be about 24 minutes long. The limited edition will also come with an exclusive illustrated book cover and a tall case to contain the DVD.
Alas that episode probably won’t be coming stateside anytime soon, but we can hope for the second season, right Crunchyroll?
Yes, for those sad individuals who start to go through withdrawal from ‘Left 4 Dead’ the moment they set foot out the door and need desperately to satisfy their sick urges on the go? There will soon be an app for that:
Nexon is bringing an adaptation of its free to play shooter Combat Arms to iOS. The Unreal Engine powered Combat Arms: Zombies is an adaptation of its PC big brother’s Fireteam mode, tasking players with holding out against wave after wave of the undead using a variety of death-inflicting modern weaponry. Nexon hopes to keep the game fresh with regular content updates, and anticipates that eventually the iOS title will rival the PC version in terms of volume of content.
As a kid I played a lot of Unreal Tournament. I mean, a *lot*. I get it, I do. But to make a game using the Unreal Engine based around discriminatory slaughter? That’s just not cool.
Shouldn’t Nexon stick with making MapleStory, instead of pandering to prejudice this way?
The ZRC definitely thinks so.
The trailer for ‘Combat Arms: Zombies’ is embedded below.
I’m not certain that the video is any more sympathetic to the Differently Animated than ‘The Walking Dead’ itself, but at least it’s viciously satirical about the televised bloodbath against the Zombie Community that has, inexplicably, become one of the most watched things on TV:
From the sketch comedy group POKYPAC comes The Walken Dead, a television series about an entire planet overrun by undead cannibals who know how to run a joke into the ground.
Me? I wish the video was a bit nicer to the Walken-Zombies though. Is it really so wrong to quote Christopher Walken? He’s had a long and distinguished career after all. And I’d like to hear their side of the story about the violence shown in the brief trailer; I mean, those survivors are pretty heavily armed, not to mention judgmental. Maybe they started it?
Zombonie ($0.99) by EMI Records Limited may be another bloody zombie slaying game, but it brings in the heavy machinery: a Zamboni. And what’s cooler than killing zombies? Killing them with your very own Zombonie, of course!
The ZRC disagrees completely! You know what’s cooler than killing Zombies? *Not* killing Zombies! Befriending Zombies! Inviting Zombies over for tea!
Those are all cooler.
If you can’t enjoy tea with the Differently Animated then I think you died inside and *didn’t* reanimate, and that’s just sad.
Just wanted to make one last post about our awesome trip out to ‘Nightmare on Chicago Street’ both to thank the city of Elgin and the various groups that put on the show for having us, and to show off some fun pictures that didn’t get showcased anywhere else.
At one end of the street there was a great live graffiti/mural wall set up for people to play around with. The results were impressive:
The night also saw more than a few fantastic costumes:
(bit blurry but I think we can all see the Plants vs. Zombies motif here)
Undead Lincoln returns to Illinois to party.
Not entirely sure what these costumes represent, other than greatness.
Beetlejuice is one of our clients, right? I’m pretty sure he is Undead.
Thanks one last time for having us, Elgin. We’d very gladly do it again.
