Posted By John Sears on May 30, 2011

The ZRC was linked to this video on Twitter and it provoked mixed reactions. It’s basically catchy pop-culture infused nerd rap-rock and quite easy to listen to, and Zombie Ninjas are at least somewhat novel. However, in spite of these fictional Zombies from the song apparently being stealthy superpowered action heroes, they’re also very stereotypical in terms of their ‘Zombie’ nature: the Ninjas are now Undead and utterly fixated on eating brains.

Brother.

Check this out and get back to me:

What’s with the ‘brains’ thing? Why did they have to go there? We’ve talked about the hateful and prejudiced stereotype that all Zombies devour or want to devour piping hot human brain before on the ZRC blog many, many times. Not only is it prejudice but it’s unsupported by even the rabidly Anti-Zombie media; the overwhelming majority of Anti-Zombie books, games, comics and films do not show the Undead as having a particular preference for or focus on a brain-based diet.

George Romero hates the stereotype, because it’s not from his work. Resident Evil’s ‘Zombies’ don’t particularly care for brain. ‘Dead Rising’s Zombies don’t eat brain. ‘Marvel Zombies’ eat all flesh, human or otherwise, and even, in some series, foliage and wild plants. ‘Walking Dead’ Zombies eat flesh in general, not just grey matter. And of course, supernatural and/or ‘Voodoo’ Zombies don’t eat human flesh of any sort, even in stereotyped and flagrantly offensive early American Anti-Zombie film. ‘White Zombie’, ‘King of the Zombies’, ‘Revolt of the Zombies’, etc, all flesh-eating free. (In fact in ‘King of the Zombies’ the Zombies sit down to a home cooked meal of perfectly ordinary food,)

Instead, as we’ve tried, fruitlessly, to explain to the general public on innumerable occasions, the brain-eating stereotype originates with 1985′s ‘Return of the Living Dead’, a cult-classic film popular with horror aficionados but virtually unknown in the general population. That’s about the only thing that our Anti-Zombie culture absorbed from ‘Return’, however, which featured intelligent Undead who craved neural tissue for medical rather than gustatory reasons.

Thus when we see yet another video defaming Zombies, a diverse population of Undead citizenry, for allegedly acting according to a half-remembered stereotype from a movie made as recently as 1985, it drives the ZRC barmy.

Zombies deserve better. Zombie Ninjas deserve better.

For shame. We rate this video ‘Anti-Zombie’:

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Music, Youtube Mischief, ZRC Reviews

Posted By John Sears on May 30, 2011

I don’t know how I missed this appalling little picture book but io9, frequent purveyors of Anti-Zombiism, had a small feature on it a while back:

Check out some exclusive pages from Z is for Zombie by Adam-Troy Castro, with illustrations by Johnny Atomic, coming next week from Harper Voyager. As John Scalzi says, “It’s not the first alphabet book you’ve ever read… but it may be the last.” Entries include A is for Apocalypse, B is for Buried Alive, C is for Cannibalistic… plus the gems we’re sharing with you here. [Z is for Zombie]

Yes that’s right, it’s a faux-whimsical alphabet learning guide about the Zombie Apocalypse, replete with fear-mongering about the Differently Animated and the usual twaddle about Undeath being a fate worse than regular death, etc.

Only this time with deluxe illustrations and a low word-to-picture ratio to help push the hatred. Disgusting.

Given that io9 helpfully provided us with 3 of the 26 pages I think we can go ahead and safely rate this book as Living Supremacist.

Go check out the large images they’re hosting if you don’t believe me, however. I encourage our readers to see for themselves how deep the cesspit of hatred really goes.

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

Posted By John Sears on May 30, 2011

There are those trailers for a film or game that cleverly explain the premise and entice the viewer with promises of entertainment, thrills, chills, what have you, building a narrative that hopefully leads to the eventual sale of a ticket or copy, all in a very limited timeframe.

Then there are puzzling clip-shows that leave you with far more questions than answers.

Case in point:

Eight of Resident Evil’s most notable characters come together to take on legions of bio-organic weapons (B.O.W.) in the newest trailer for Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D. Launching June 28, 2011 exclusively for Nintendo 3DS, Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D delivers the intense Mercenaries gameplay experience on a handheld console.

Featuring re-mastered stages from Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5, it’s a race against time as players try to defeat as many enemies as possible before the countdown reaches zero. The fast-paced, combat intensive action of Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D is available both as a solo experience or gamers across the world can team up and enjoy two-player co-op via network play. Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D ships to retailers on June 28, 2011 and is rated M for Mature by the ESRB.

Ok, so it’s Resident Evil characters killing ‘enemies’ or ‘Bio-Organic Weapons’, aka Zombies and other Differently Animated victims of the evil and fortunately fictional Umbrella Corporation. Twisted, unfortunate, gratuitous violence, more of the same.

If you watch the trailer in question however, much of the time the characters seem to be smashing glowing rocks. Huh?

What do they have against rocks?

I can only assume that this is footage of some capture the flag/king of the mountain game mode and smashing said glowing rocks accomplishes some objective beyond just murdering innocent Undead. Still, I find it hilarious that in the midst of all this allegedly life and death struggle the Resident Evil characters do flying kung-fu kicks into big Eye of Sauron looking rock sculptures while the dramatic music plays.

Take THAT rocks! We’ll show you! Hiiiiiiiiya!

At least it’s a momentary pause in the maiming of innocent Zombies.

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

Posted By John Sears on May 29, 2011

I’ve mentioned before that the Greater Chicago Area is one of the true heartlands of Zombie Liberation here in America, and that they have a ridiculously wonderful number of Zombie events.

Well, here’s another one, although I question the use of the word ‘Terror’:

Retro Zombie Tiki Terror the 3rd!

…

5:00pm- Doors Open

5:00 – 10:00 all ages welcome (please be aware that this event does have adult humor)

5:00 – 7:30 – Eat, Drink, Be Scary

7:30 – 8:30 – The Tiki Terrace Live Polynesian Floor Show

8:30- 10:00 – Booze and Schmooze

10:00- Kids go home- 18+ after 10:00

10:00 – Zombie Costume Contest
Guys & Dolls, come dressed in your zombie finest and compete to win fabulous prizes! This year we will have a mens, womens, and couples competition.

11:00 – VIP section turns into Retro Zombie Tiki DANCE FLOOR! Yup, this time we Party until 2am with dance, rock, and everything in between! Why stop with the contests when there is so much more time!

It sounds like a fun time and a great event, probably quite Zombie Friendly. A party, some humor, a costume contest focused on Zombie ‘finest’, which is encouraging, the works.

So I’m choosing to believe that they mean ‘Terror’ ironically, or whimsically, especially given the event’s location in the unbeating heart of the Zombie Friendly Greater Chicago Area.

If you’re in the area and enjoy a good Tiki time, check them out. Sounds like a Zombie Friendly time.

Category: ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags: Zombie Public Event

Posted By John Sears on May 29, 2011

I’ve heard of niche marketing but I have to say this is slicing your demographics a tiny bit thin:

In Whittier, CA July 9th 2011? Cirque de Zombie

So this sounds as if it could be fun. Not only is it a zombie pub crawl but its a THEMED zombie pub crawl. Yes they want a specific type of zombie for this one – clown zombies. So if you are in the area get some undead loving friends together and get set for a night of drinking and eating! (…not the living.)

Yes, they want Undead clowns, or at least appropriately costumed Living people, to show up to the bars. Apparently there may be music and other fun stuff, and it all seems to be well-intentioned, but I have a few questions on behalf of the ZRC.

1) Why Zombie Clowns? I don’t think that there’s a large subculture from the clown profession in the Differently Animated community.

2) Is being associated with clowns really good for Zombies? I mean, let’s face it; clowns? They’re utterly terrifying.

Now, I know that there are undoubtedly many very nice clowns, and I understand that, intellectually, but still; they’re terrifying.

Zombies might have enough problems without getting ‘terror by association’ from clowns, as it were.

Still, on the whole, I guess they mean well. We hope the event goes off without a hitch and maybe it can work to improve the public image of clowns a bit by associating them with Zombies at the same time as it helps familiarize the drinking population with the Differently Animated.

Category: ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags: Zombie Public Event

Posted By John Sears on May 29, 2011

We’ve condemned the open-air game of simulated Living Supremacist conflict known and played on many campuses as ‘Humans vs. Zombies’ before here at the ZRC.

It’s repulsive, divisive and perpetuates harmful stereotypes of the Differently Animated. A ‘game’ like that should have no place at an institution of higher learning.

Thus this news story has us feeling a bit conflicted:

Humans vs. Zombies is a week-long game similar to tag. It started Monday, May 23, at 12:01 a.m. and will continue until Sunday, May 29. Players start off as humans and defend themselves against zombies with Nerf blasters or rolled-up sock balls, but if they are tagged by a zombie, they will become one within an hour. The actual game started in 2005 at Goucher College and has since been played all over the world. Until this week, Eugene had not been one of those places to experience the game.

…

Although they are following the standard weeklong game, they added the element of playing for charity. Players get sponsors, who agree to pay a certain amount of money for their time in the game as a human. The money will be donated to the Red Cross to help the Japanese tsunami relief effort.

Argh! It’s so Living Supremacist, but it’s also for a good cause; a cause we’ve supported here at the ZRC!

I can’t bring myself to condemn this as strongly as I might want; grr. But just look at the way they frame it, with the reward going for time spent ‘as a human’, as if Zombies are not, in fact, human beings! As if a player who becomes a ‘Zombie’ in the game should be punished for ‘losing’!

But it is for charity…

Basically, I guess, to the students playing this game at the University of Oregon: you’re being a bunch of Anti-Zombie jerks, but for charity. Next time, hold a bake sale or something, and make it inclusive of the Differently Animated population. We’ll let you off a bit lightly this time.

It’s what the Zombies would want.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Anti-Zombie Public Event, Charity Auction, Social Justice

Posted By John Sears on May 28, 2011

Not much seems to be available about this movie yet, but it definitely seems to be a unique take on the ‘Zombie Apocalypse’:

Here’s the trailer for an indie film being shot in Athens, GA. They are making a zombie film where the zombies have no real interest in the living unless they are provoked. While they will still tear into you apparently if you are bothering them, if you aren’t they could care less about what the living are doing. There isn’t a lot of information quite yet on how the plague spreads if the undead are indifferent to humanity or if it’s just something that now happens to anyone who dies but time will tell as we find out more information about the film.

And here’s the trailer:

Essentially, the dead rise from the grave (the trailer seems to indicate all dead people) as Zombie-like creatures, who are utterly disinterested in the activities of the Living. If you fight them, they fight back, and in the early days of the ‘Apocalypse’ people do just that, nearly leading to the end of the world… until someone notices that the Zombies will only retaliate, they never initiate hostilities. They’re Pacifist Zombies.

Huh. That implies both intelligence and reasonableness at least. On the other hand, the trailer shows.. Undead people standing around, expressionless, almost motionless, staring off into space. ‘Indifferent’ as BuyZombie puts it, a very apt description.

Can you even have a pacifist automaton? Are these Zombies oblivious to the world around them, or perhaps TOO immersed in it?

The latter idea comes to me from a number of sources. “Death & Suffrage” by Dale Bailey, the story that was extremely loosely adapted into the ‘Homecoming’ episode of Masters of Horror, deals with Zombies who, upon coming back, have very little interest in the affairs of day to day Living people because they find the world so beautiful that they slip into almost autistic trances at simple objects. (We discussed this previously on the ZRC blog here)

Likewise, a science fiction series I read years ago called ‘The Risen Empire’ featured post-mortem individuals who had been given a form of ‘immortality’ and found the concerns of people who had not yet died trivial or hard to understand, in part because their senses had been altered somewhat profoundly by the process. They were intelligent but solemn and had their own artistic and aesthetic senses that were incomprehensible to those who had yet to die and be converted. In particular, they could appreciate *extremely* subtle differences in the hue of black and greyish colors, which led them to create large works of art that to the uninitiated looked like a black canvas.

So there’s some precedent to the idea of Zombies/the Undead coming back as peaceful observers of the contemporary world, or with still human but significantly altered senses of the world around them. A ‘rich inner life’ one might call it. It’s not necessarily Anti-Zombie at all.

We’ll be keeping an ear out for more information on ‘A Plague So Pleasant’ as it becomes available. Intriguing, so far, even if the ‘plague’ part of the title is a tiny bit worrisome (though ‘pleasant’ helps offset it; Zombies are pleasant, aren’t they?)

Category: Zombie Media | 2 Comments »
Tags: Books, Movies, Television, Youtube Mischief

Posted By John Sears on May 27, 2011

I have talked on Twitter and elsewhere about my frustrations with Paypal. We’ve had some customer service issues; a payment reversed here, some other difficulties there. It’s a bit clunky, and hard to use some features for our store.

So I started looking into Google Checkout. At first it looked great; full of useful features, flashy, slick. Had some nifty stuff about shipping and taxes and such that would be super handy for the ZRC.

Then the art and technical director found some problems when going over the process to set up a store.

First, Google Checkout explicitly disallows tip jars. Why is this a problem, when we don’t have one? Well.. I thought we might in the future. I’m planning to release some stuff completely for free with the standard Creative Commons license we do for the ZRC, bigger things than our usual pamphlets and guides, and I thought, hey, if people wanted to chip in after reading and appreciating them, that’d be swell. Ditto for the desktops and poster images I have the art director working on now.

That’s not allowed, I guess. Not a huge deal but weird.

Then the Art and Technical Director found something that I couldn’t live with. Google places a lot, and I mean a LOT of restrictions on what you can sell in your store if you use their service, content based restrictions I can’t tolerate for the ZRC.

We’ve talked about censorship before here on the blog. Protests and calls for censorship for ‘A Serbian Film’, or for gay zombie pornographic film‘L.A. Zombie’ for example. The ZRC believes in free speech. So how could we agree to terms like this (which you may not be able to read w/o a google account):

Google has developed the following policies to ensure overall program quality and a positive user experience for everyone. Any individual or business processing transactions through Google Checkout must adhere to these policies.

Google reserves the right to expand or edit these policies at any time. Google will also exercise its sole discretion in the interpretation and enforcement of these policies in conjunction with the program’s Terms of Service. Products, goods, services and other items not listed below may still be restricted.

Unacceptable product categories
Examples

….

Adult goods and services
Pornography and other sexually suggestive materials (including literature, imagery and other media); escort or
dating services; novelties and toys

…

Offensive goods Goods, literature, products, or other materials that:

Defame or slander any person or groups of people based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, or other factors
Defame or slander any person or groups of people protected from defamation or slander by applicable law (such as the protection afforded to the royal family in some jurisdictions)
Encourage or incite violent acts
Promote intolerance or hatred
Promote or support membership in terrorist groups or other organizations prohibited by law
Promote revisionist theories proscribed by applicable law
Contravene public morality

So basically, Google goes way, way beyond simply telling you that you can’t sell something illegal in your area/nation with their service, which should be obvious. You can’t sell anything that offends THEM, that could be construed as pornographic or even ‘sexually suggestive’. You can’t sell any materials that ‘contravene public morality’ whatever that is supposed to mean.

Whose morality? Which public? Who knows.

Note how it seems that the lowest and narrowest applicable standards may apply to everyone who uses the service. It’s not illegal to defame ANY royal figure in America; we have the 1st Amendment, after all. (And it’s almost impossible to slander a public figure in the US)

But if I was to say ‘Down with the bloody tyrant Queen of England’, would our store face losing its storefront? What about the Saudi monarchy? The very thought of having to watch everything I say for fear anyone on Earth would be upset is appalling.

It goes on and on like that. Undefined terms, vague generalities, restrictions on what speech and content you can sell even if it’s perfectly legal, all interpreted at their discretion. And that would definitely affect us at the ZRC.

After rebooting the store I was/am planning to add some merchandise; signed copies of ‘Helpless’ by Michelle Hartz, which has scenes that could be construed as ‘suggestive’. Google wouldn’t let me sell those, I guess. Copies of ‘Atomic Age Cinema 2′, which has profane language and suggestive jokes. Couldn’t sell that either. Heck, our ‘Zombies Forever’ posters might be construed as inciting violence – violence against Sparkly Vampires.

Who DESERVE IT.

For that matter, Google’s terms could ban selling lots of Shakespeare if you want to get right down to it.

The Trope Namer: Hamlet, act 3, scene 2, by Shakespeare
Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?

Now, I’ve never looked into Paypal’s TOS too closely, but from the stuff on sale on Ebay and around the web via paypal, it’s obvious they don’t care much about the content of what you sell. Google claims to care deeply, and in ways that fly in the face of what we do and stand for here.

So we’ll keep looking for a better upgrade option, and I apologize to those of our buyers who are inconvenienced or turned off by the prospect of using Paypal in the present.

Category: ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags: Social Justice

Posted By John Sears on May 27, 2011

If for no other reason than to curry favor with the adorable animal obsessed crowd on Twitter, here’s an update on the wildlife of the ZRC Compound:

Today I discovered that the mourning doves, my accursed foes (whose ‘plaintive’/incredibly loud and annoying calls are driving me slowly insane) have constructed a nest over the light by our front door.

I found an old nest there when we moved in last year, so this isn’t unprecedented, and now we know what birds are to blame: mourning doves.

Grr.

To make things worse they’re skittish about their nest and very loudly take off if you approach.. which one has to do to use said door. We mostly enter through the garage, so I guess I can take solace in knowing that there’s a bird bomb armed and ready to go off on the next idiot solicitor whose company wants to spray chemicals all over our yard to maintain a perfect carpet of artificial green.

I think we’ll stick with our weeds, native plants and animals thanks (along with probably lower cancer risk).

Even if that means putting up with mourning doves.

Category: ZRC News | No Comments »
Tags: ZRC Wildlife

Posted By John Sears on May 27, 2011

I don’t mean to be too hard on this shirt, I think it tries hard and the core message is pretty Zombie Friendly:

Still I have to ask, why can’t you be a Zombie in *this* life? Is it really that big a distinction that a person dies (briefly and temporarily) then comes back as a Zombie that we must consider them a new legal/philosophical entity?

Also, what’s with the bloody hand? That’s not very Zombie Positive, and seems to imply a hostility not in agreement with the message of the shirt itself.

I think in spite of these minor flaws we can at least give the shirt a Zombie Tolerant rating. Think of it as an A- for Effort.

You can get this garment from CrazyDog Shirts.

Category: Zombie Media | No Comments »
Tags: Clothing, Zombie Products, ZRC Reviews