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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!

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Army Times Publishes Ancillary Bibliography of Hate

Posted By on July 29, 2011

Ever want to know how you ‘research’ a truly odious call for violence against Undead Americans? Well, thankfully for the study of propaganda by future generations, the Army Times published a couple of additional pieces to complement their clarion call for hatred that we earlier savaged here on the ZRC blog.

First up is a reading list of books they recommend, and which coincidentally match their narrow-minded and prejudiced views of the Zombie Community, or simply supply general purpose warfare information which can be repurposed to that evil cause.

No points for guessing that Max Brooks is on there twice.

Next they give their readers an ‘Undead Dossier’ containing extremely simplified and of course somewhat inaccurate descriptions of various sorts of Zombie, and methods to fight them. Note that they do this even for ‘Thriller’ Zombies, who are nearly universally held to be non-violent, fun loving and fully-integrated members of society, even by many Anti-Zombie bigots.

Needless to say, we’re offended. Why go around picking fights when we can peacefully coexist? Don’t our soldiers have enough to deal with as it is?

I guess Army Times doesn’t think so, and wants to drum up trouble. Again, shame on them.

Army Times Runs Highly Offensive ‘Zombie Deployment Guide’ Piece

Posted By on July 29, 2011

I knew there would be negative consequences from the extremely inappropriate and highly discriminatory CDC blog post about the ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ from a couple of months back but I have to say I wasn’t expecting this from the Army Times:

The U.S. government is now acknowledging what many have feared for years: The zombies are coming. Top officials are urging all Americans to prepare for war.

Assistant Surgeon General Rear Adm. Ali Khan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s director of public health preparedness, issued an official warning May 16 on the Public Health Matters blog. It’s not a joke (although maybe it should be).

Yes, like some sort of incestuous hydra we have one semi-official media outlet of the US government feasting upon another to produce more hatred of the Differently Animated. Delightful. Can the DHS get in on this? Anyone else want to waste time and spread disinformation about Undead Americans with the imprimatur, official or otherwise, of the United States?

Moving on, the article is chock-full of delightful tips on how to treat your fellow Americans like garbage just because they’re lacking a pulse:

First and foremost, he says, you’ve got to keep your head.

To fight zombies, fight like zombies — with raw, unbridled fearlessness, brute strength, a taste for blood and a keep-it-simple approach to tactics.

“We’re going to have to redesign warfare as we know it,” says Navy Lt. J.L. Bourne, author of the “Day by Day Armageddon” series of novels examining worst-case zombie scenarios. An active-duty aviator just finishing a tour for a major intelligence agency in Washington, D.C., Bourne says, “We’re going to have to come up with ways to round up these things and eliminate them en masse. There won’t be enough bullets left to kill them all.”

The article cites a lot of Anti-Zombie authors or would-be authors, including Scott Kenemore and the Zombie Research Society’s own Matt Mogk, who charmingly suggests using a baseball bat because a blade might get stuck in your Undead victims.

Uggh I’m really starting to hate those guys.

The piece even goes so far as to recommend specific firearms and configurations for maximum murder of Undead Americans, passages so despicable and disgusting I will not quote them here.

I have to say, I’m stunned. I know Army Times is published by a private newspaper group and isn’t an official publication, but geez; think how many of our soldiers are going to read this tripe and get the idea that assaulting, even rounding up and massacring innocent Undead civilians is somehow ok.

That sort of hatred and divisiveness is simply Un-American, and as a nation we can do better. We have to do better.

Shame on Army Times.

Zombies Doing Good, Media Doing Bad, Dublin Edition

Posted By on July 28, 2011

Last Saturday it appears that a major Zombie Walk to benefit the RNLI (a lifeboat charity, believe it or not) and the Irish Cancer Society was held in Dublin, but unfortunately once again the biased media has to get their licks in even when Zombies are out there doing good:

Gallery: Zombies attack buses in Dublin…all in the name of charity

IT’S ESTIMATED THAT thousands of zombies took to the streets of Dublin today, lurching around and terrifying the general public.

The terror was not in vain though, the Dublin Zombie Walk 2011 raised money for both the RNLI and the Irish Cancer Society.

‘terror’? It looks like a good time was had by all, for two worthy causes no less, to me. Oh, I see, it’s just terrifying if the Differently Animated do anything in public, where ‘normal’ Living people have to see them, is that it?

Shameful.

Meanwhile, there are many wonderful pictures sans hateful commentary over at DublinCulture.ie that you can enjoy.

(Below find just a couple pictures, which I hope they won’t mind in the spirit of journalistic commentary, attributed Fair Use and besides, they watermarked them.)

A happy crowd scene.
(click to enlarge)

Good show, Irish Zombies, good show.

Particularly wonderful about this event? The local community responded with open arms!

I loved the response from the people who run The Cliff, a hotel/restaurant on St Stephen’s Green. They called out “come in!” and beckoned the horde of zombies into their establishment.

What a great scene.

Truly this news made my day.

Zombie Rights at Comic-Con

Posted By on July 28, 2011

No, we couldn’t be there in person this year, but apparently someone sympathetic to The Movement was!

A march for zombie civil rights: In the aftermath of 2011’s fifth-annual Zombie Walk on Saturday, one “walker” was spotted carrying a sign reading, in appropriately mangled English: “Legalize same zombie sex marriage Support ilegal zombie immigration Keep the FDA out off our brains.” Dead rights now! –Angela Watercutter

Wired’s snarky editorializing aside we think it’s awesome that Zombies are still getting out there, promoting their points of view peacefully. Good show, whoever you were! Good show.

As longtime ZRC readers know, we’ve supported similarly political marches by the Differently Animated before, and the ZRC plans to continue doing so in the future. Zombies are people too, and they have opinions!

IMG_1513

The ZRC is here for them.

Hot Topic Again Goes After the Differently Animated

Posted By on July 28, 2011

Ok, seriously, for a mall store catering to teenagers who don’t know what a well-printed t-shirt looks like, Hot Topic is managing to push a lot of ZRC buttons.

We’ve talked previously about their Anti-Zombiism on the blog, but this shirt really makes it official:

ugh.

Killing zombies may sound like fun, but after a while it gets old. When the zombie apocalypse is here, you’re going to wish for a world with “No zombies.

Really, Hot Topic? You want to go there. You want to sell this? Fine. Guess what? We’re rating it Living Supremacist.

Totally unacceptable.

The shirt is available (online only) from Hot Topic, no doubt because they’re too ashamed to hang it in their brick and mortar stores, or perhaps too afraid of protests.

Xbox Again Pushes Anti-Zombie Content Hard

Posted By on July 27, 2011

The Xbox 360 has clearly become one of the central fronts in the battle against Anti-Zombie media, with its continued exclusives and early releases of Anti-Zombie games. As previously discussed, however, the Marketplace for Xbox downloadable games is a hotbed of Anti-Zombie media, and Microsoft seemingly has no problem letting legions of Living Supremacist developers hawk their wares on the system. If anything, they encourage it.

Case in point, the Xbox is soon to get two big downloadable Anti-Zom titles:

Undead Labs has a deal with Microsoft Studios for two XBLA exclusive zombie titles. In ode to Max Brooke’s top-seller Zombie Survival Guide, these two titles are being code named Class3 and Class4. Class3, the first title scheduled for release, will be an open world, story driven game that can be played in single player or co-op. Class4, though part of the same world as Class3, is more of the massive-multiplayer online (MMO) nature.

Gamasutra recently interviewed Jeff Strain, Undead’s founder and Executive Producer, about the direction and goals of thes games. He says that Class3 is definitely the “most ambitious XBLA title to date” and will utilize a “cutting edge, high caliber 3D engine”, but that they will have to do a lot of tweaking to achieve the open-world environment they’re looking for. They want these worlds to be very much like MMO worlds that you’re used to, with every part feeling unique and different, as well as each decision having a dynamic effect instead of being all pre-scripted.

(Thanks again, Max Brooks)

Yes, Microsoft is actively complicit in this latest wave of Zombie-bashing game development, and that is extremely troubling for the ZRC. The prospect of a multi-billion dollar megacorporation pushing the distrust and fear of, not to mention active hatred for our clients is daunting. ‘World War Z’ the Movie (not to be confused with World War Z: The Placemat) only has a hundred million and change to play around with after all – Microsoft has billions. How devoted are they to the evil cause of spreading fear? Is this just an attempt to cash in on the hate in a mercenary fashion? We can’t say, as yet.

The games themselves sound pretty awful, and we’ve talked about how the multiplayer bonding over virtual Zombie slaughter disturbs the ZRC in the context of games like ‘Left 4 Dead’; these two new titles appear to be angling for a similar experience.

The ZRC will of course continue to monitor this situation and keep you apprised as more details emerge.

The ‘Zombie Research Society’ Again Plugs Pseudo-Science to Justify Zombie Bashing

Posted By on July 27, 2011

We’ve heard this song and dance before from the ZRS and professional Zombie haters like Dr. Scholzman: “I watched some highly inconsistent Anti-Zombie movies and now have deduced *the* best, entirely fictional, all-encompassing, heavily biased ‘explanation’ of what makes Zombies tick!”

Sort of like phrenology for the 21st Century:

In case you missed it, Wired.com recently ran a feature of the work of ZRS Board Members Bradley Voytek, PhD and Timothy Verstynen, PhD.

Verstynen is a neuroscientist at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition in Pittsburgh, specializing in human brain imaging and neural network modeling, and Voytek is a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley studying the role of neural oscillations in communicating brain networks. Together they authored a groundbreaking paper on zombie brain function titled “The Living Dead Brain”, in connection with their development of a complete three dimensional model of a zombie brain.

Naturally, the extent of this ‘research’ consists of watching a few Anti-Zombie movies, ignoring their internal inconsistencies and deviations from the imagined ‘norm’, then retrospectively designing a brain that would mimic the author’s unjustified assumptions about both the Zombie movies they claim to love and real world Zombiism:

Believe it or not, the guide to surviving the zombie apocalypse is actually derived from real neuroscience. The charts are largely based on a presentation (see video below) by UC Berkeley neuroscientist Bradley Voytek, who re-created what the zombie brain would look like based on cognitive problems observed in films like 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead and The Return of the Living Dead.

Based on that map of the zombie brain, Voytek and a fellow neuroscientist Timothy Verstynen established that the walking dead suffered from a condition they called Consciousness Deficit Hypoactivity Disorder. CDHD is characterized by “the loss of rational, voluntary and conscious behavior replaced by delusional/impulsive aggression, stimulus-driven attention, the inability to coordinate motor-linguistic behaviors and an insatiable appetite for human flesh.”

In their research, the scientists were able to determine that humans can exploit many zombie deficiencies. For example, abuse the undead’s poor motor skills by running fast, take advantage of their amnesia by hiding until they forget about you, or activate their Capgras delusions by mimicking their actions so they don’t attack you.

“This entire endeavor is partly an academic ‘what if’ exercise for us and partly a tongue-in-cheek critique of the methods of our profession of cognitive neuroscience,” Verstynen said.

Honestly, I don’t know what these two are thinking. The ‘Zombies’ contained in those three films have, Anti-Zombie stereotyping aside, completely and radically different sets of portrayed behavior. In ’28 Days Later’ the Infected are depicted as semi-rational individuals capable of learning, observation, hunting and tracking, but overwhelmed with aggression. They are not, however, conventionally Undead – and in fact, their complete inability to eat is a MAJOR PLOT POINT which one might assume that a viewer would notice since the other characters extensively discuss it on screen as their one and only hope to save the world (or at least England). What do the Infected *want* to eat? The viewers are never told, but one thing is certain – they never so much as snack on human flesh.

In ‘Return of the Living Dead’, the Undead are shown to retain their full pre-Undeath intelligence; they are mentally equivalent to their Living selves, albeit unfortunately suffering from a very painful medical condition. Again, a person might expect an alleged academic to notice this, since there is an extended scene where a restrained Russo ‘Zombie’ is tied down in the mortuary and interrogated. As for outrunning these alleged Zombies due to poor motor control, you’re kidding me, right? ‘Return of the Living Dead’ is the movie most important historically for popularizing the ‘Fast Zombie’ subgenre! Inability to coordinate ‘motor-linguistic’ behavior? The film’s ‘Zombies’ form an army and defeat the police in a street battle! Remember ‘Send more cops’? Seems pretty coordinated to me, not to mention obviously linguistic.

‘Shaun of the Dead’ is the only movie to demonstrate a majority of the behaviors these two researchers asign to their ‘Disorder’ in its fictionalized Zombie population, however, ‘Shaun’ too belies their pigeonholing and hasty prejudicial treatment by showing that the Undead are in fact capable of learning to peacefully coexist with the Living and by the end of the film this process is already well underway.

Oops.

All these missteps, while fascinating evidence of the inability of your average Anti-Zombie movie fan to sit through a film and actually observe the events on screen with any degree of accuracy and recall, are tangential to the essential point that here we once again have a group of academics leveraging their credentials to promote intolerance of the Differently Animated.

Perhaps the ZRC should propose a syndrome of its own: ‘Anti-Zombie Attention Deficit Disorder’. Symptoms include the inability to note and later recall basic facts about a film’s plot if it involves the Undead, a lack of sympathy for those whose Vitality Status is different from one’s own and a desperate craving for the attention and acknowledgement of other fans of Anti-Zombie media.

Prognosis is grim to say the least, and untreated leads to a lifetime habit spending large amounts of money on entertainment that the viewer apparently cannot comprehend, let alone remember later. However, there is hope, in the form of education and outreach. The first step is to acknowledge you have a problem!

The ZRC will be happy to provide the sufferers of AZADD with counseling and sensitivity training, along with a notepad and pencil so that they can attempt to learn basic note-taking skills before they write extensively about movies, given their own poor observational and recall skills. Perhaps a bit of tutoring on proper study behavior would help.

If it prevented just one of these Quasi-science pop science pieces from percolating through the media, believe me, it’d be worth the effort.

New Suda51 Title Appears to be Anti-Zombie Gorefest

Posted By on July 27, 2011

Videogame auteur Goichi Suda, widely known as Suda51, has become famous for making edgy, bizarre, sardonic titles aimed at adult gamers and is best known for the ‘No More Heroes franchise. It appears however that he has decided to cash in while the money’s so very good and make an Anti-Zombie videogame of his own:

It wasn’t but a couple of weeks ago that I reviewed Shadows of the Damned, yet we’re already hearing rumblings of Suda 51′s next project. Re-teaming with Akira Yamaoka (Shadows and the Silent Hill franchise), Suda is upping the crazy — again.

Lollipop Chainsaw is the next title from Grasshopper Manufacture, and it features a zombie-killing, chainsaw-wielding cheerleader named Juliet.

what the heck, Japan? San Romero Knights, very clever btw

Yes, because we’ve never seen a chainsaw wielding crazy schoolgirl in Zombie media out of Japan before.

Oh wait.
shot7

But while ‘Kore wa Zombie desu ka?’ was a subversive rethinking of the Undead and their role in anime, ‘Lollipop Chainsaw’ appears to be yet another splashy, gory, pointlessly violent assault on the virtual Differently Animated.

Sigh. Why must you do this, Japan? Why must you be so mean to the Zombie population? Can’t you find another hobby?

Another Uninformed Take on Zombie Media History? Why Not!

Posted By on July 27, 2011

Reading pop journalism stuff like this sometimes has me reaching for the Cuervo before noon, but I must resist.. I must!

London – Hollywood’s current love affair with zombies is a weak echo of the decades-long romance between videogames and the living dead.

In any fantasy game, zombies haul themselves up out of the soil with an almost calming predictability, and ever since Doom introduced the gargle of the undead to its eerie soundtrack in 1993, they ve been a staple of shoot- em-ups, too.

DOOM was about demons, not Zombies. You might have been able to tell by all the pentagrams and horns, but if all else fails the point at which the game explicitly involves WALKING INTO HELL might have been a tipoff. Some early enemies involve reanimated corpses, but the game was about Zombies in the same way that Dungeons and Dragons is about Zombies – minor seasoning in the stew.

No game has ever treated the undead with such outright love as the cult hit Resident Evil, one of the first to deliver heart-stopping frights as its characters stumble down horror film passages awaiting the clawing arms of their foes, usually with just one or two bullets to protect them.

The game not only spawned dozens of sequels and remakes, but five Hollywood films and an entire gaming genre: survival horror .

Hilariously wrong. ‘Resident Evil’ was hardly the first, or even one of the earliest, horror videogames. Nor was it the first Survival Horror game; that honor is often given to ‘Sweet Home’, a predecessor to the Resident Evil (Biohazard in Japan) series from the same publisher, Capcom, which had much of its setting and gameplay designed recycled to form Resident Evil in the first place. Other game writers and historians have their own theories of course, but the history of horror videogames dates back to the early 80s at a minimum.

All of the misinformation I was mocking was background for a review of the new 3DS Resident Evil Mercenaries game, which the reviewer thinks is poor value for money because it’s so derivative of past incarnations of Resident Evil. On that point we could probably agree; ‘Resident Evil’ is sorely lacking in innovation. How about a game where you work with the Zombies toward peaceful coexistence to the benefit of society as a whole?

The ball’s in your court, Capcom.

‘Plants vs Zombies’ Evil Continues to Spread, Now Infecting Music

Posted By on July 26, 2011

We’ve had a few tangles with ‘Plants vs Zombies’ here on the ZRC blog. We feel that their game is a harmful product marketed at children to introduce Anti-Zombie hate to the next generation; they, or at least ‘Plants vs Zombies’ writer Stephen Notely, have harsh words about our clients

I lay my prejudice bare. I see zombies as a curse and a class of monstrosity, pitiful beings with no desire other than for brains and, perhaps in their best moments, for utter destruction. If these unliving creatures have other purposes, I await evidence of such with great interest.

‘Plants vs Zombies’ exploded onto the media scene before our formal review system was in place, but I think it’s safe to say the game earns an ‘Anti-Zombie’ rating mitigated only by a small sliver of hope for peaceful coexistence in the form of the game’s ending. Very small.

Thiiiiis close to Living Supremacist

So why are we revisiting this today? Well, BuyZombie brought a new wrinkle in the PvZ saga to our attention recently:

Dungeon Elite Cover Zombies On Your Lawn

While it says a cover it’s a mix of sampling from the original song, techno, metal, and it’s just kind of strange – in a good way! (Assuming you liked Zombies On Your Lawn)

We of course did not ‘like’ that Anti-Zombie anthem in favor of segregation and gated communities. Nor do we appreciate this remix much:

In fact, by aggressively stepping up the tempo and attempting to instill a sense of menace by having the Zombies scream gutterally alternating with vocals extolling the lack of ethical consequences for their destruction, this remix makes matters worse. The ZRC accordingly gives it our *worst* rating, the Living Supremacist brand of shame.

Catchy but full of hate.

For shame, ‘Dungeon Elite’. For shame.