Kicking Ass For The Lord

I read this afternoon (via SA) that Pope Benedict is now recruiting "exorcist squads" to "wage war on Satan." Satanism has become such a problem that this calls for squads of priests who can perform exorcisms (in the Catholic faith, as the article correctly states, very few actually know how to do it - remember The Exorcist?) In fact:

Each bishop is to be told to have in his diocese a number of priests trained to fight demonic possession.

"Extreme Godlessness" is on the rise, and who's to blame but one old scapegoat and a new one:

The Vatican is particularly concerned that young people are being exposed to the influence of Satanic sects through rock music and the Internet.

Well it's true that the Internet enables people to more closely connect with fringe groups, but rock and roll? What is this, 1967? And aren't there far worse things on the Internet than Satanists - like, I dunno, racist or political hate groups? Al Qaeda? Ron Paul supporters? Yeah, I went there.

Apparently there's good cause for this though. According to the Vatican rep quoted in the article, "We are being bombarded by requests for exorcisms." Apparently demand is outstripping supply and it's time to form some task forces.

Don't get me wrong - I like this. A lot. I don't discuss religion much, but I tend to approach faith - and Christianity in particular - with a very Liberation Theology approach - God helps those who help themselves. This is pure religious action, and I like it.

But I like the idea of some sort of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen coming forth from some secret Vatican base to fight Satanic possession even more. Can you imagine how badass that would be, to have a squad of specially trained exorcists and investigative experts traveling around the globe to fight the paranormal? I realize it's been done before but allow me to present my "dream team" exorcism squad:

Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel in From Dusk Till Dawn)

Why: He's a self-described "mean motherfucking man of God." He's a man of the cloth who lost his faith and rediscovered it, and there's no stronger faith than the one that has been tempered by the fires of doubt. Plus, he's smart enough to bless holy water and put it in Super Soakers to fight vampires, make crosses out of baseball bats and shotguns, and carve crosses onto blessed bullets. The guy really knows his shit.

Why not: Well, he's not technically a priest. But that brings us to:

Father McGruder (Stuart Devenie in Dead/Alive)

Father McGruder plays a very small role in Dead/Alive but it is probably the most memorable role. He's a priest. He kicks ass for the lord. He takes out an entire group of zombies with martial arts. So not only can he perform the exorcism, he can help the party - err, exorcism squad - if things get out of hand.

Why:Here's a video of him in action:


Agent Dana Scully, FBI

Scully should need no introduction, but I offer one anyway. She's the ultimate skeptic although a woman of faith herself, not one to easily fall for trickery. Most investigated exorcisms turn out to be false anyway and someone with a firm grasp of the scientific method and criminal investigative techniques is imperative to the success of the team. Plus she's dead-on-balls accurate with that hand cannon of hers, so any corporeal threats will think twice before fucking with her.

Why: Scientific skills, criminology background, knowledge of medicine, crack shot.

Why not: Has been known to hesitate under pressure. Her whereabouts are currently unknown.

Frederich Nietzsche

Every party - err, squad - needs a lighthearted prankster to lighten their spirits and nothing says lighthearted like old Freddy N. A fun-loving recluse who once joshed that "Christianity is the religion of pity," Nietzsche adds just the right mix of existential honesty, questioning of faith and syphilitic insanity to the group. He may not be able to help with the investigations, but he'll certainly be around to force people to consider what the events mean.

Why: A fun-loving wacky fellow. Who wouldn't want Nietzsche on their side?

Why not: Before he passed away he signed his letters "Dionysus" and exhibited other signs of syphilis. While a hoot to have around, he may be a detriment to actual investigative work.

Jake Green (Skeet Ulrich from Jericho)

Young and inexperienced although more worldly than many others his age, Jake Green offers a pragmatic if youthful angle for the squad. He is the current de facto leader of Jericho (Season 2 starts February 12 on CBS!) and has served in military organizations both government and civilian in war zones. He's good with a gun, full of practical advice and can get things done when necessary without compromising his morals. He's also more attractive than the other squad members (except for Scully) increasing the Exorcism's Squad ratings among the crucial 12-49 year old female audience bracket.

Why: Guns, looks, practical knowledge.

Why not: Not especially spiritual, but has a strong moral compass.

There you go - my dream Exorcism Squad. Agree? Disagree? Think I'm full of shit? Think the Pope looks like Emperor Palpatine? Comment below.

Buy My Stuff: A Zombie Story

So I finally sat down and forced myself to use Lulu.com's e-distribution tools to try them out. The result is that a short story I wrote a couple of years ago, Some Side Effects May Occur, is now available to purchase as an e-book for the low, low price of $1.30. It's a 6400 word story, so it's a steal at $0.0002 a word! I dare you to find a better deal for zombie fiction / social commentary anywhere. If you do, I'll promote it here!

Warning (for my mother and any other family members reading this) - this story is pretty gory and is intended to be disturbing.

Oh yeah, and I'm not crazy about the cover image but I didn't have any pictures to use so I went with one of Lulu's stock images.

Here's a nice button where you can buy my story too:

The Zombie Apocalypse: From The Space Needle

Fair warning: I'm still getting a wireless signal up here (thank you, Clearwire!) but the laptop is just about out of batteries, so if it looks like it's about to die, I'm just going to hit "publish post" and hope the Intarwebs does its thing.

The funny thing is, I've had this plan for years. I remember back when we lived in the apartment and I realized that the perfect place to survive a zombie apocalypse in Seattle was the Space Needle. Why? Think about it:

There's one way in and out: an elevator and service stairs. Now that the power's out, the elevator is not a problem. A little welding and some creative furniture rearranging and the staircase is impregnable. Those flesh-eating bastards have been banging on the door for hours and it hasn't so much as cracked.

I can live up here for quite some time. There's a restaurant on the top floor with plenty of food (and a shitton of good wine - at the very least I can drink myself to death). Depending on how long it takes them to die, I can start to plan long-term: there's enough open space to grow food. And since I'm the only one up here - now, anyway - it's not like I have to feed an army. There's a subtle zombie joke there.

I'm missing a few things I really want. A gun, for example. A way down would be nice, but I think I can make either a wire or a glider out of some of the plastic furniture. You know, like in Escape From New York? It's not like a grisly death splattered on the ground is any worse than eternity as a brain-eating ghoul. Seeds would be awesome too.

I did manage to find a small, battery-powered TV set. I think the thing is from the 80s, and all I'm getting is the Emergency Broadcast System message. There's only one radio station still on the air, some AM piece of shit, and it's broadcasting prayers. I guess those are as good as anything these days.

Wait, something is coming on the TV. Be right back.

[UPDATE 1]OK, well, I feel a little better. That was Homeland Security. Apparently the naval base on Whidbey is being used as a camp for survivors, and they've blown the bridge at Deception Pass. I wonder if Brook and Wendi made it out there? They had a chance if the roads weren't too bad. If it was anything like downtown though, I'm guessing not. I still haven't heard from Liz. The cellphone won't connect to anything - my office's mail server, the phone system, nothing. I'm trying not to think about it. Of course I'm failing.

Anyway, they said the military had a contingency plan for the area. I have to wonder though if it happened as quickly as it did at my office, what the hell the rest of the city - country - WORLD - looks like? I haven't seen an airplane in hours and it looks like the boats in Sound are kind of drifting around. I think one of them is leaking oil, because the water looks black down by Pike Place. Gross. The only movement below is the slow, shambling dead. I've heard a few screams, and I think they tore a dog apart a little bit ago (at least, I hope that's what that sound was.) Otherwise, things are really quiet. You never notice how much noise a city makes until it's all gone. Walk through Seattle at 4am and you'll see how much noise there still is.

Oops. Well, maybe someday you can walk through Seattle at 4am again.

Hey, that's interesting. Speaking of noise: I hear a jet. I cut up some cloth from the furniture - going to go hang it outside. Maybe this is the contingency plan and rescue?

[UPDATE 2] I'm not airplane expert, but those looked like B-52s, coming from Bremerton. They're just circling the city. I hung the cloth off the observation deck; hopefully that will attract their attention. It looks like they're heading south, maybe towards Boeing. It's kidn of hard to

HOLY SHIT white light oh christ i can't see, hopefully you can still read this and i'm hitting the right keys oh god i can feel the air rumbling going to try to click publish and maybe someone osmewhere can hear what happened air gone and here comes the heat hittomh [pdt mpw///////

Two Days Late and a Meme Short

I always miss the cool stuff. I wondered what the hell Jeff was blogging about with his zombies and all, and then today he updates and links to Blog Like It's The End of the World, which I so would have been in on if I'd realized it was occurring. So I'll do that here in a minute.

I also promise to finish my Spain travelogues too.

Lego Zombies Kinda

I don't have time to roll up my sleeves and get into this just yet, but Boxhead More Rooms looks like it could satisfy my craving to kill Lego-like zombies for a while.

Via Kotaku.

Achievement Unlocked

Going through my animated gifs and came across this gem:

Zombie Grinder

In addition to picking up our dog today, I've also been grinding out one of the last achievements in Dead Rising. Dead Rising is an Xbox 360 zombie game, and quite possibly the best reason to purchase the system at the moment. It's a game that's wickedly flawed, but whose awesomeness actually makes up for the flaws and still puts it far ahead of a lot of other games out there at the moment.

Achievements are Xbox 360's way of permanently recording your accomplishments. They don't actually do anything (except earn you Gamerpoints, which are equally meaningless and are just a nearly-arbitrary number), but each Achievement has a title and a corresponding picture. Think of it as a combination of a Boy Scout Merit Badge sash with a bunch of badges on it, a permanent journal of your gaming accomplishments with time and date, and a scrapbook of the various things you've done in a single game or across lots of games.

They're also an excellent way to keep you playing a game beyond when you might have stopped, especially if you're an OCD freakshow like yours truly.

I've got 46 out of 50 of Dead Rising's achievements, and I'm grinding out two of the last four today. Unfortunately the last of those two means leaving the game running for 14 hours straight, without saving or pausing. If you pause, you're going to leave the game on longer. And you have to pay attention to it every 20 minutes or so, so you can feed your character.

Sound like a pain in the ass? Yeah, but no more so than grinding out levels for a WoW character, I suppose.

I started the console at 6:45 this morning, and now (11:30 at night) I'm about an hour or so away from finishing and going to bed. Yeah.

Zombie Evolution

Via Jon, a fascinating article about zombie evolutionary epidemiology. It discussed dispersion of fast and slow zombies. Money quote:

Zombies actually evolve towards a very diverse population, with some zombies very fast and some very slow even if the majority is optimal. This might be relevant as the situation changes. If there are many people around the optimal efficiency is lower than 0.5, since each zombie still has plenty of chances of attacking someone. After most people have turned to zombies fast zombies have more fitness (pun not intended) since they are better at getting the few survivors.

This (and This, and This) Is The Way The World Will End

Via Digg, a Discovery online article about 20 Ways the World Could End.

They left off the most obvious method: zombie attack. For shame, Discovery online. For shame.

Puppeteers: what is your preferred method for the world to end? Flooding? Alien invasion? Maybe something not on the list, like Cloned Dinosaur Attack? Do tell! The comment button is there for a reason.

Grand Theft Mario

This is making the rounds, but worth watching: a Robot Chicken bit where Mario and Luigi end up in Vice City.

Here Comes Halloween! Also Zombie Awards

It's one of the two holidays I celebrate every year - Halloween! This year we carved pumpkins (pictures coming, I promise) and I dressed up twice! Woohoo! Today I'm half-a-zombie (again, pictures coming) and I get to wear my Fangoria "Zombie Exterminating Service" t-shirt.

Let's kick the day off with the Golden Brain Awards, recognizing accomplishment in the field of zombiism. More fun shenanigans to come, no doubt.

Book: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

World War Z: The Oral History of the Zombie War is Max Brooks' successor to his pseudo-comedy book The Zombie Survivial Guide, although Z is very much a serious piece of literature that not only curb-stomps the brains out of anything else in the genre I've read, it blows it into a pulp with a shotgun blast. Yeah, it's good.

Z is a series of vignettes, each an "interview" with someone associated with a worldwide outbreak known as the "zombie war," or "World War Z." It has taken the world twelve years to push the zombie threat back to managable levels, and not without great loss; it's an apocalyptic scenario, but not a total one, as there are still millions of people as well as some infrastructure left.

What's fascinating about Brooks' Z is the same spirit that encapsulates all post-apocalyptic literature - the posed question "how would people react in this, the most extreme of circumstances?" Brooks' answer is certainly more hopeful than most, and reminds me in no small part of David Brin's take on civilization - that despite its shortcomings, it's something worth fighting for. Brooks also manages to work in some good social commentary as well without resorting to cliches or jaded and tired criticism; his details of Israel's response and the reactions in the Middle East are especially telling.

I cannot recommend World War Z enough, as the top of the zombie novel genre, a great piece of post-apoc. fiction, and just a great read.

Book: Autumn by David Moody

Autumn came in a batch of Amazon.com recommendations while I was checking out World War Z from The Zombie Survival Guide scribe Max Brooks. Autumn is another example of zombie fiction, which seems to have taken off in the last five years seemingly on its own, and like Monster Island, Autumn was published online first and then self-published into the physical world. Its rawness shows; I counted a few editing mistakes and Moody's writing just flowed like something you'd read online, when the author is more concerned about getting thoughts down than in the structure of what he writes, and hasn't gone back to look it over.

Autumn is really a setup to the rest of Moody's novels, which are not avialable for free online; it's character introduction and development leading to a climax that is anti-climactic in the greater scheme of the world. It's Night of the Living Dead when you know there several more movies coming - which isn't to say it isn't a satisfying read. Moody could have stood to edit out his characters' bickering a little bit, not because it was unrealistic but simply because it got repetitive. But Autumn certainly accomplishes its goal of making you want to know what's happening next in the series. Next order I make from Amazon, I'll have to drop another of Moody's books in there.

Re: The Brains

Via Seth comes a music video for a zombie song. Warning: gory scenes may not be work safe.

Interactive Mall Map

This has been sailing around the Internet, but I have to give credit to one of my pals at work for linking me: the Dead Rising Interactive Mall Map. Like the computerized map in Crossroads mall, except it shows Psychos too.

Dead Rising Revisited

Looks like Clive Thompson at Wired News agrees with my conclusions about Dead Rising and its save system. Money quote:

"Save mechanisms are key to the emotional stakes in a game. Personally, I tend to prefer titles like Half-Life, where you can save anywhere you want, instantly -- and save as many different copies of your life as you want. (A sentence of utterly Philip K. Dickian weirdness, if you think about it.)

For me, constant saving makes me feel more free: I can take more chances, go down risky alleyways, and explore the game more boldly -- because death holds no sting. I get whacked? No problem; I just restore to a moment a few seconds before my death...

In contrast, a rare-saving game like Dead Rising forces me to be ultra cautious. I don't dillydally, explore needlessly, or take any big chances. When I creep across the mall's open lawn at midnight, when the zombies are more aggressive, my heart is in my throat -- not just because the scenario is inherently scary, but because if I die I'm gonna lose another half hour of the most nonrenewable resource in existence: my time...

Yet here's the thing: One could just as easily argue that infrequent saving is a much more intense and authentic experience. It forces you to put some skin in the game. That's why people seek out life-threatening sports like sheer-face mountain climbing and skydiving. In situations of genuine danger, your senses snap open and you experience things more fully -- or, as any extreme athlete would boast, you live more fully.

It's certainly true that in Dead Rising I was focused with cheetah's intensity on my enemies. I pretty quickly learned to give a wide berth to even a seemingly slow-moving, harmless zombie -- because if one grabs you, it'll hold you still long enough for the others to stagger over and pile on. I can't say I ever studied the enemies so closely in an easy-saving game like Doom III."

He articulated that point far better than I did in my short(er) review of the game. In fact, the "no save" system that I grew up with on the NES forced the same kind of emotional response, even on games like The Legend of Zelda, where you could only save when you died. I remember trying to tell my parents why I couldn't come to dinner right now, on the count of three because I had to actually get to a point where my pixelly little in-game avatar met his demise. In retrospect, it seems pretty absurd, but it certainly heightened the overall emotional investment in the game and Zelda still stands as one of my favorite console experiences because of it.

Of course, you could save any time you wanted on (most) PC games - Bard's Tale being a notable exception - and aside from doing dunder-headed things on games where part of the design was a Skinnerbox-like trial-and-error system - Sierra's graphic adventures, for example - it was never an issue. You expected to die, and die a lot. You could always restore to the last screen. But Mario wasn't like that. You had exactly three chances (plus any green mushrooms you might find) to take a lava bath before you started over at the very beginning.

I'm unconvinced it was more satisfying overall in that context, but I will argue that it is in Dead Rising. But it certainly heighened the emotional involvement in the game. It was more of an investment, in emotion and time.

Wired article via Joystiq.

Game: Dead Rising

So you like zombie games, kid?

Actually, I don't typically like zombie games. The genre isn't exactly bursting at the seams, though - we've got Resident Evil, the big old franchise that coined the term "survival horror" and features zombies as an afterthought. There was a zombie marketing tie-in first-person shooter that released with Land of the Dead. And the old SNES game Zombies Ate My Neighbors. But as far as a game that accurately mimics the feel of a zombie movie like Dawn of the Dead. Negative. That was, until Dead Rising.

Dead Rising is as much a love letter to Romero's zombie movies as it is an incredible stand-alone game. You play Frank West, a photojournalist on a hot scoop: something's going down in the Colorado town of Willamette. Frank gets dropped on the roof of the mall, and has 72 hours to uncover what's going on - and survive the hordes of zombies that have taken over!

Gameplay is open-ended. There are two types of missions: Cases (which advance the plot) and Scoops (which don't, but will level you up quickly and basically act as "extra credit.") You can do as much or a little of either as you want - but if you stop doing the Cases, you lose your chance to solve the mystery for that playthrough. But fear not - when you restart the game, you keep your experience and skills from the last game (basically, your XP and character level.) You can pick up pretty much any item, whether it's the rack of toys at the toy store, the wine bottle in the restaurant, all kinds of guns and knives, or trash cans and cardboard boxes. You can play dress-up with all kinds of outfits, hair dyes, and so forth. And you can kick a lot of zombie ass, or not kill a single one (although I imagine that might be a very difficult proposition.)

As with any good zombie story, the really dangerous parts aren't the zombies themselves but the other humans. The "bosses" are various types of psychopaths - escaped convicts, Vietnam vets who snapped, killer clowns with chainsaws, and "normal" people whose reaction to the apocalyse has become so extreme that they're a danger to others and themselves.

The save system takes a little getting used to; you can only save in certain locations (on couches and in bathrooms.) Because of the time limit and the vast numbers of zombies, this means you have to very carefully plan your saves, just as you carefully plan how long to ration out your ammo and food so you can replenish your supplies of those as well. At first, I found it annoying, but now I can't imagine the game without it - it adds greatly to the "survival" flavor. Just wandering around and screwing off is very likely to get you killed, not unlike a real apocalyptic scenario. Careful planning and strategic use of resources is the #1 key to survival.

Zombie fans, start your chainsaws. Dead Rising is our game.

In a Minute I'll Be Just Another Zombie!

Dead Rising came out on Wednesday and it's everything I hoped it would be. The game is tense, and you never feel safe, even in the so-called "safe" areas. I must look pretty goofy playing it, since I tend to violently shake the controller around when I'm trying to get out of a zombie's grasp. It might not help, but it sure makes me feel better. Now that's immersive!

I took time from killing zombies to do some long-needed cleanup this morning, and took time off this week for a little personal R&R (which was really me working on the Fallout d20 stuff and playing Dead Rising.)

And that's my exciting life update.