Episode 560: What’s Next?

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Dave

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Zombie Cliche Lookout: You Gotta Have a Plan

If there’s one thing zombie fans like (other than zombies) it’s coming up with plans for dealing with zombies. To the zombie fan, it’s like fantasy football. We plan zombie defense strategies, procuring supplies, transportation, and a thousand other hypotheticals. And some of us take things further. We plan out how a reformed society might work, our role in a team of survivors, rules our group must follow to keep everyone safe, and so on and so forth. It’s a lot of fun, and I would argue one of the major things contributing to the huge popularity of zombies at the moment.

Because this is such a huge part of zombie fandom, we are starting to see it be represented in zombie fiction itself. Increasingly, characters in zombie stories are not only aware of zombie mythology, but active fans of it. Some of these characters even plan, like the fans, for various situations. Sometimes this is played straight, with the character benefiting from these plans. Other times the trope is reversed, and the plans are shown to be ludicrously unrealistic, or far too rigid to work in “real world” conditions.

About this Episode:

This truck is huge. Ludicrously huge. For some reason I decided to modify an official set rather than just building my own (yes, that reason is laziness, now shut up). Because of this, our characters seem a bit out of scale, but I choose to believe that Michael and/or Joy just happen to like huge trucks.

Discussion Question: The Worth of Planning

As I said above, zombie fans love making survival plans. Most of us look at these as little more than fun thought exercises, but not everyone. Some people use zombies as a metaphor for overall preparedness, and still others take things completely seriously and have a true plan that they hope to stick to. The question is, is any of this valuable in any way?

14 thoughts on “Episode 560: What’s Next?”

  1. Apologies for the late publish on this episode.

  2. Typo alert, Zombie Cliche Lookout, second paragraph, first sentence, after the comma: “see if be” if–it 😀

    Same section, same paragraph, fourth sentence: “benefiting form these” form–>from 😉

    Same section, same paragraph, last sentence: “far to rigid to” to–>too 😀

    I think your typos form plans: this time around they planned to attack one paragraph! 😀

    • Hah, at least they’re easy to find that way.

      Fixed all.

  3. I don’t think that truck is unrealistic at all! I think, for a zombie apocalypse, it’s exactly what they need because it looks as if it’s got plenty of off-road capability! 😀

    One really good truck to get in a zombie apocalypse is an off-road model, because you never know when you’ll need to head cross-country to avoid some zombie! 😉

    • Can’t argue with the reasoning here.

  4. Two quick questions:

    1. Is it a 6-wide model?

    2. Did you see my comment a couple episodes ago about wanting better shots of the trees? 😀

    • It is six-wide, but I didn’t see that comment. I’ll add an image to the next episode.

  5. Actually, just answered 1 myself: I checked last episode in between browser crashes (it seems to be the theme of the day at the moment) and the front of the truck is indeed 6 studs wide! 😀

    • Is your browser crashing on everything, or just this site?

  6. While I was stuck in the navy, they geared up for a “zombie situation strike” for the MP units, but if you read deeper into set up you found it was suppose to be a losing war of attrition in which the now famous “bath salts” drug had 1 of 2 outcomes.
    1) madness diseases ie: panicking people which lead straight to…
    2) contraction of a “drug induced violent rabid state only slated by flesh”

    The participants of the drill had to evacuate about 2 times, before passing on the drill a 3rd time with lots of heavy arms.

    • Oh man, I have to hear more about this. By any chance would you be up for doing a blog post on it?

  7. It’s randomly crashing. It is a test build where they release fixes for it often, so I expect that it’s not actually related to this page, as I’ve had it crash on any page anywhere.

  8. Still waitin’ for the moment in which Michael and Joy are revealed to be antagonists…

  9. Boy, I sure hope so or my entire coursework is a waste… 🙂