Episode 365: Give It To Me Straight

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Dave

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Zombie Cliche Lookout: Secondhand Info

Intelligence is important in a huge variety of situations. Just ask the NSA, who are – for reasons beyond my understanding and patience – watching you read this sentence right now. That goes double in a combat or survival situation. If you know what the bad guys are doing, you can avoid them, or use an oversight or weakness to your advantage. And if those bad guys are zombies, it’s a pretty good idea to make sure you’re keeping tabs on them. You really need to know where the zombies are and aren’t; what areas are safe and what areas are infested with ambulatory corpses.

The trouble is, it’s a big world, and you can only do so much yourself. That means you have to depend a lot of information from secondhand sources (often, there are many more layers between you and what’s really going on out there). Figuring out how factual and up-to-date that information actually is presents a challenge. This doesn’t just apply to spy versus spy kind of stuff either. People really just aren’t very good witnesses. If ten people witness a crime, the police will likely get ten very different accounts of what happened.

About this Episode:

I’m a really big fan of people walking away when they respond to someone. I think it makes a sort of cool capstone to and episode, especially when I get get them in nice focus, while the person they’re speaking to is blurry in the background.

There’s probably a name for this technique, and I’m probably doing it wrong.

Discussion Question: The Zombie Social Metaphor Challenge

Hacky writers love using zombies as ham-handed metaphors for all manner of social ills. Now it’s your turn. Embrace your inner hack and tell me what the zombies, like, really mean, man.

55 thoughts on “Episode 365: Give It To Me Straight”

  1. i like the zombies in black ops zombies 2, mostly alcatraz island, but thats cause thats how i see zombies, a rampaging endless horde with glowing eyes, and zombie dogs with fire burning from their nostrils, and the alien Nova 6, or crawlers, the ones who started the disease all the way from the moon, i love black ops

    • But what do those zombies represent? Pollution? Let’s go with that.

      • Dave, when is the next comic going to come out?

        • Tomorrow. New comics on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Except for major holidays.

  2. Hoo-boy, that kind of open-ended question is dangerous, and there are a lot of really offensive metaphors I could go with, so here we go.
    Zombies are obviously a metaphor of religious zealots; they’ll either convert you to their way of life or kill you trying. Just like most religious folk promise their religion grants freedom from death, pain and suffering, becoming a zombie means liberating you from feeling pain, the burden of conscious thought and of course there’s the whole not-subtle rising from the dead thing going, which also fulfills the promise most religious zealots make of resurrection or reincarnation of some sort.
    Finally, like most zealots, zombies are absolutely relentless in their quest to convert you into their ranks.

    • Awesome!

      Also, re: it being a dangerous question. Good point. Let’s keep this fun, everyone.

      • so zombies are a religeon trying to convert you into one of them, sounds good to me, in my religon, we send people out to convert people (or try to anyway.) Of course were not animals, if people say no, then we’ll never hint at at that house ever again, so maybe if you mark your territory by fighting back enough, less zombies will come back every time, right?

        • I think it’s dangerous to get too specific here. Saying that zombies = Catholicism/Mormonism/Sun Worship just doesn’t work in my book because it’s almost attacking a specific group.

  3. Zombies represent mortality. They are usually slow and creeping, but occasionally jump out and catch you by surprise. They take everyone, young, old, whatever, and devour your flesh. They look like death, and bring death with them. They are the inheritors of the Grim Reaper and the Danse Macabre of the Middle Ages.

    • Man, well said Steven. Well said indeed.

  4. Zombies are the great unknown, the collapse of society brought on by overspending governments, the push back against the nanny state, and the inevitability of trying to control every aspect of society: chemicals in the air, chemicals in the food. Eventually that will all fall apart. The zombies will take over. When that happens the survivors will be the reset button, and have the opportunity to return to simpler times, without the corrupting influence of collectivism.

    • Nice on, Bo. Zombie mythology for the rugged individualist.

  5. Zombie and what they really mean –

    There is something that happens in a community when the numbers get too large and you’re unable to know everyone on your own block for example. There’s a disconnect and a tendency to no longer relate or emphasize with your fellow human beings. Especially if you don’t know them. For some, it makes it okay to lie, cheat and steal, even murder.

    Zombies seem to symbolize that the whole human race has gotten too numerous, this is how we can justify killing them. Because they’re no longer human, no longer seen as a live person.

    • I think there is a connection between the violence a society perpetrates, and tolerates, and that of the individual. I mean we’ve made the word “drone” into a verb to define the faceless killing from a distance that exemplifies warfare in the digital age. When it’s all we see on the cable “news” outlets it’s no wonder we can kill without hesitation. The police kill with near impunity. Violence becomes de rigueur.

      • That’s a good addition to what I’m trying to say with what zombies symbolize or mean.

        • Yeah, dehumanization is a big problem in our society. Maybe it always has been; but that doesn’t mean that it’s not something we should work on.

        • If you look historically, many cultures throughout history thought of themselves as “true people.” Where the name for their tribe meant “the people” and somehow they’re real people, everyone is false and it makes it okay to kill them if they’re not human.

          The movie District 9 is good because the alien race are given derogatory names, their sentience isn’t even acknowledged and thus easy for the government in that movie to exploit and kill them.

          I think we should try to over come this tendency to dehumanize.

        • We need a like button for conversations like this.

          Carry on.

  6. People who blindly follow religion, conservatives, people who go with the status quo. Basically, people who doesn’t think for themselves are zombies.

    • Works for me, although I’d be wary of assigning this to any particular group. I think you can be conservative/religious and think for yourself, and conversely liberal/atheist and follow things unquestioningly. It’s less about groups and more about individual people. Are you buying into the idea, or the dogma?

      • Well said Dave.

        • Thanks!

  7. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/zombie
    Do I win?

    • Hah. Nicely done, sir.

  8. i see zombies as relentless,coldblooded,canibals,that never sleep,never rest,and they dont feel any pain

    • Sounds about right to me, but what does that represent from our culture?

  9. zombies have to all be together so they can unite for thier favorite snack
    and they have a way of summoning eachother, for example in dead frontier the siren can summon swarms of zombies just by its incredible scream.

    it might take 2 to 10 years but zombies will start to learn basic stuff like how to open door knobs, open cupboards,use flashlights,etc (i guess if that happens were screwed)

    • So in your estimation, zombies will evolve in some way? They won’t rot away or anything like that?

      • in a more moist climate (like where i live) zombies will decompose faster than if your in a colder climate

        • Here in Michigan we get it both ways. Warm, humid summers and cold winters.

  10. heres a good question/ argument. Which is more dangerous, Jurrassic Park? Or the zombie apocalypse?

    • Zombie apocalypse. I can always just not go to Jurassic Park. Honestly, I couldn’t afford to even if I wanted to.

      • well while some zombies may number in the millions, there are flying dinosaurs, so im on team D

        • It’s been many years since I read the book, but I seem to recall there being a few failsafes preventing the dinosaurs from escaping the bounds of the park, at least for too long. If memory serves, they required some medication that would kill them if they didn’t get it.

          Of course, some of the other failsafes didn’t work, so who knows.

        • Yes, there were supposed to be fail safes, such as they intended all of the dinosaurs to be female, but due to the use of frog DNA to fill the gaps in the deteriorated Dino DNA, it resulted in a mutation where the Dinosaurs could spontaneously become male to reproduce.

          There was also a specific nutrient/vitamin that the park was providing the dinosaurs that they couldn’t make themselves and some of the breeds were discovering an alternate plant source that could provide that vitamin.

          The Dinos also weren’t going to live long either as the carnivores had their meat supply contaminated by mad cow disease, prions. It was all in the second book that they expanded on that one.

          And they’re planning a 4th movie for anyone interested.

        • Wow, my memory really is bad. I completely forgot about the dinosaurs getting the nutrient elsewhere. I also have no recollection of the prions, although I only read The Lost World once and didn’t really care for it.

          Thanks for schooling me, Fox!

        • you’re welcome Dave.

          My opinion of the second book was Crichton writing a sequel due to Publisher and Fan demand. It’s okay and did some expanding on information from the first book.

          Movie-wise, especially with number three, there were scenes in the first book that CGI limitations and budget imposed, so this was Spielberg going back to put those scenes into movie form so people could see them.

        • I thought it was interesting how he used elements from Doyle’s Lost World, but yeah, it was absolutely a “You have to write a sequel” thing.

  11. Zombies represent the worst qualities of humanities, whereas robots represent some of the best qualities of humanity. Which is why I’m surprised there isn’t a Robots vs. Zombies movie out there yet. (Maybe that’ll be Pacific Rim 2?) Sorry if that’s slightly off-topic.

    • This is an interesting one. Why do robots represent the best qualities of humanity? In what way?

      I could make an argument that they represent coldness, lack emotion and empathy, etc. That makes them very inhuman, much like zombies.

      • Robots, specifically androids (like Star Trek’s Data) are often introduced as naive and innocent. The goal then, is to “educate” them in how to become human. The only evil robot is the one programmed to be so.The whole toy to boy Pinocchio thing. Yes, you too can become a person.

        Whereas the zombies are the dead end of humanity: hopeless ambulatory decaying death.

        • Nice response, Luis. Especially the Pinoccho example.

  12. It’s not my idea, but I saw a book once where everyone got a weird variant of Mad Cow Disease because they ate meat. Only the vegans were safe from the ZA and it was up to the vegans to save the world. It seemed a little heavy-handed for my tastes, but was definitely pointed and fits today’s topic well.

    • Heavy-handed is the name of the game here, Kim. This sort of thing fits perfectly.

  13. “In a world . . .” Baby Boomers lived in a time of unparalleled excess, especially in the U.S. the returning parent generation, victors of WWII wholeheartedly committed themselves to production consumption and the dream of a life of ease. Having been the moral victors against clearly defined unquestionable evil, the WWII generation, essentially became morally lax. After all they were right, history was in their side!

    The children if the WWII generation, the Baby Boomers, became increasingly aware of the moral laxity, consumptive gluttony, the limitations of natural resources and the over estimation of the dictum “might makes right.”

    It fell on the Boomers to say, “mom, dad, enough!” Enough to the arms race, Cold War, striping and squandering natural resources. Having developed an awareness of a limited, self-contained Fish-Bowl Earth, the Boomers became aware that maligning and dehumanizing whole populations (communist, women, ethnic groupings, women, the poor, etc.) was suffocating the human dance. Meanwhile, this generation grew up under the horrific anxious awareness of impending nuclear devastation. “5 minutes to midnigjt( the extermination of the human race).

    Then, it was the Booners turn to have children and grand children. The obvious question is, how does a generation that began that was raised in excess (compared to other periods in history), who then spent their early adulthood rebelling and battling their progenitors, systematically challenging every value, institution, moral system raises it’s own offspring?

    The answer: not well at all. The Gen-Xers and Millenial Generation, not having the advantage of historical context and perspective, only saw this confusing, nebulous intergenarational struggle (“how come you don’t get along with gramps and gramma?”). Without the Moral-Certainty of their grandparents and the driven Moral-Indignation of their parents’ youth 21st century children were essentially abandoned (”Fight Club” does a great job explaining this generational loss of moral compass).

    Because nature abhors a vacuum, and and the human race is a species of predators and scavengers thinly covered whith a veneer of I transient intellect, this vacuum in “parental” leadership was quickly filled by corporate greed and corporate growth. Consumerism no longer was for the sake of a safer, comfortable life with an eye to the future. Now, consumerism is only for the sake of consumerism, aggressively and cynically promoted by increasingly dehumanized corporate mindset.

    Remember as a child how your parents would grumble, “you will eat everything in your plate AND you WILL like it!”? Well this too is today’s mandate by our current social parent-figures: corporation spouses married to advertising industry spouses stuffing their children (consumers): You will eagerly consume everything we give you and you will ‘more!'”)

    So today, weary, frustrated, and with a sense on chronic helplessness, no longer willing to be nanipulated by cynical forces,the current generation is saying “enough is enough!”

    Grieving the growing awareness that Gene Rodenberry’s Polliana future is unattainable, that eventually every well-meaning movement becomes an institution condemned to replicate it’s predessor’s sins and mistakes, and recognizing that FaceBook simplistic “feel good” postings by 15 year old kids do not “amount to a hill of beens,” a whole population is ready for a new start.

    The operative word in Zombie Apocalypse is Apocalypse. From the above one can gleen where the images of mindless hordes of zombies emerge from , and previous readers on this thread gave awesome ideas.

    But the collective fantasy of an Extintion Event (Apocalypse) is what really intrigues me. First of all apocalyptic perspectives are scattered throughout all of history. You see, an Apocalyptic Mindset is inherently . . . positive.

    People realize that things are not as they could/should be, that the human race and social fabrics are out of control, and that it is time to re-boot humanity. Enough is enough, it is time to start all over. The zombies represent the previous “mindless” generation who got us in this mess to begin with, but more importantly, it is the story of The Remnany which we identify with. We engage with them, we identify with their against all hope plight, by proxy we are judge jury and executioners of the microcosm of humanity AND we are the moral victors, because we know that if it were us in those situations, we would “know” what to do.

    And therein lies the inherent hope of an apocalypse: no tater how devastating or dire the situation is, thre will always be a handful of individuals who will rise to the occassion (ok, maybe not in the aging Boomer George Romero’s mindset), the hope is always in the few, not the masses, and in that the worst conditions will bring out the best in a handful of us. And maybe just maybe that is enough to keep the human race going.

    Sorry about the typos; I’m not about to go back in my minuscule screen over all that! 🙂

    • Now this is a well developed theory, and an interesting one to boot.

      What I like about this is that it can very easily apply to all apocalyptic fiction. The post-disaster “start over” is often as or more compelling than the disaster itself.

  14. Zombies are a clear metaphor for survivalists/ rugged individualists–they do whatever they can to get ahead, with no regard fo other people. If other people are stupid, they become survivalists. They also tend to have poor hygiene.

    • Hah! I love the trope reversal here.

  15. I remember watching a special (I think it was the History Channel) a few years back on dragons. They made an interesting point about how dragon myths had developed in a wide range of geographically separate cultures and parts of the world, and that the dragons from many of these mythologies looked very similar and were endowed with similar abilities. A lot of experts had different opinions about why this had happened. Some felt that the most likely explication was that the people of the time had uncovered a variety of dinosaur fossils and had somehow constructed them into the idea of dragons. It seems sound, but several archeologists cast doubts on these theories based on the types of fossils found in these areas and questioned why man would assume that they were from reptiles like life as opposed to large mammals or something. The really interesting theory came from an evolutionary biologist. He theorized that dragons were an amalgam of predators we had learned to fear early in our evolutionary development. As small primates, we would have be preyed upon by snakes, raptors, and large mammalian carnivores. If you took say, a cheetah, an eagle, and a boa constrictor and kind of melded them together, you would get a dragon. He postulated that we had somehow retained a genetic memory of these fears and that they had manifested themselves as dragons in later cultures.

    Im not sure I buy into this, evolutionary biology seems to be like a religion into itself in that it seems to be able to explain anything if you just make a few assumptions, but the idea of a single mythical creature representing a perfect amalgam of human fears interests me.

    Giant monsters don’t really scare us anymore. If some giant mutated T-rex actually showed up in downtown Tokyo the modern military would make short work of it.

    Zombies are the perfect amalgam of what we fear. We fear death, we fear contagion, we fear the mindless horde, we fear an enemy that feels no pain and has no concern for its own self preservation, we fear losing control of ourselves and if you take a minute and think about it, we have a deep fear of being bitten and or eaten alive.

    We as humans at large don’t really fear any predator on the planet anymore. (Heck, many of them are hunted for sport and many are protected from extinction by humans) We dont believe in monsters or vampires or werewolves because we know they aren’t real and aren’t likely to pop up anytime soon outside of teenybopper films. No living predator scares us much anymore, so we made one for ourselves.

    • Very interesting. Like you, this isn’t a theory I necessarily buy into, but it’s fascinating in its own right.

      Now I want to watch this dragon show. I wonder if it’s on Netflix.

  16. I think this is it
    http://www.history.com/videos/monsterquest-monsters-of-legend-dragons#monsterquest-monsters-of-legend-dragons

    Dont confuse it with the Discover Channel mocumentray where a bunch of hikers find a frozen dragon carcass,

    • Man, I watched part of that Discovery show. Terrible!

      • I tried to warn you. It is truly beyond me how so much crap makes it into media. I love that I can turn on the TV or the computer and get more information on a wider variety of topics then I could ever find the time to read out of a book. But its getting that so much of it is unsubstantiated crap that I may just have to go back to reading again.

        • Oh no, I watched it several months ago. My son is really into dragons. We saw it was on and recorded it. I watched some of it to see if it was appropriate for him to watch. It was appropriate for no one. Ever.

  17. there is going to be a fewthings i bring with me in the zombie apocalypse (lil’ of subject here but it’s something good to have) a trash bag, can be used for shelter bag, and pillow. Now the only thing you need is a 38 mpg Hummer and a buttload of food.