Zombie Cliche Lookout: Reversal
One of the most exciting moments in a football game is an interception on a scoring drive. Team A are driving down the field, within a play or two of scoring a touchdown. Suddenly, Team B (generally speaking, we’re not talking about the Lions here) picks off a would-be scoring pass and runs it across the field. Within a couple of seconds, the momentum of the drive – and perhaps the game itself – is completely changed.
Of course, we’re not all football fans here (I have, at best, a fleeting interest), so let’s change this example into a zombie movie instead. Here’s a classic example: our heroes, after struggling through countless hardships, happen upon the perfect place to hole up against the zombies. It’s remote, defensible, and is even stocked with food and water. Not wanting to lose an opportunity, they move right in and lock down, gorging on their new-found supplies and letting their guard down for the first time in months. They never quite get around to completely checking out the place, and thus never notice the weak point in the back fence.
After all but a single watchman go to sleep, and that watchman is bloated and tired. It’s not long before he dozes off as well. All the while, the zombies are surrounding the location, probing for weak spots in the fence.
About this Episode:
Seems like Ol’ Lou is getting a lot more comfortable in his role here. It’s relaxed and having fun, even going to far as to stop pointing his shotgun at our two heroes.
Discussion Question: Secret Skills
Last episode we talked about useless careers in the post-apocalyptic world. Now, let’s reverse that a bit (see what I’m doing here) and try to find a silver lining on these “useless” people. No one is useless, so lets justify keeping a few people with negligible skills around. How might that same life coach find his place in the new society?
Regarding the zombies “probing” around the fence for weak spots in it. I thought zombies didn’t think, they just aimlessly walked around until they stumble in through the weak spot in the fence.
Either zombies have intelligence driving their dead brains that suggests they would look for weak areas or they don’t – make up your mind! 😀
If we assume they don’t have intelligence driving their dead brains, then pure chance would randomly have one of them stumble through the weak spot and open it up for more zombies to randomly stumble through it, thus breaching the compound, but I definitely wouldn’t call it probing I’d call it happenstance.
I don’t think that was meant to be literal; obviously the herd isn’t actively looking for a weakness in the defenses, but many times zombies are shown to grab onto fencing and push or shake it in their attempts to get at food. If there’s a weaker section of the fence that doesn’t stand up to that stress, then the zombie pressing against it will get through and the others will follow, but it could take them hours of stumbling past that same section of fence before one of them happens to press against it.
Yeah, this is a figure of speech. They don’t actively probe for weaknesses, they bumble into them. It’s not methodical by design, but by happy accident.
Since Brent seems to be the genius negotiator here, why doesn’t he see how far he can get on sharing the knowledge he’s learned about the zombies? Knowing something about them might be useful to ol’ Lou, or maybe he’d just prefer more corpses pile up out back. 😀
Not a bad idea at all.
In the last episode you didn’t talk about useless people; you talked about useless careers. I went for model and I can’t think of a silver lining for that career. However; the person in itself could be very useful; maybe he has been hunting since he was 3 years old in his spare time… maybe he is a very good karate-trainer in the evening on the side. Maybe he is a model now, but wants to change careers and is studying to become… well… you get the point.
On the other hand; maybe the cop you met was just suspended because he’s a lousy cop and accidentally shot everybody around him in the face. LOL 😛
Ah well… still think everybody MAY be useful, don’t judge a book by his cover / job.
Every extra pair of hands can be useful in a crisis, it just depends on the intelligence, motivation and character of the person attached to them to fulfill that usefulness.
That said, some careers that seem like they would be a good fit for a zombie apocalypse would turn out to be crap; a bodybuilder seems like someone who would be a good fighter or could carry heavy supplies because we think big muscles = strong, but unless they’re focusing on strength training, most bodybuilders have poor muscle density and their size has to be maintained constantly through exercise and protein supplements, or else their muscles will literally deflate back to their normal density. Considering how hard it’ll be to find the basics of survival – nutritious food, clean water, weapons and ammo – no one is going to go out of their way to grab a tub of whey protein for one guy, and there won’t be time for that guy to keep his exercise regiment anyway. Besides all that, due to the inflated size of their muscles, bodybuilders generally have terrible range of motion and poor flexibility, two things that will kill you in a fight.
Another career that seems useful but wouldn’t be is construction. You’d think that a person who is experienced in building things would be invaluable, but many modern construction workers are reliant on technology for their projects; they use computers to design structures and noisy, gas-fueled machinery to construct them. The tools and skills they would have to use in a zombie apocalypse are those that almost anyone can learn, making construction workers somewhat redundant if that’s all they know. Sure, a good construction worker would still know some tricks to make your fortifications stronger, but again, those are things that most people can learn with enough practice.
On the flipside, a career that seems useless but isn’t would be an accountant; what need would anyone have of someone who just manages money when money is meaningless? The answer is, they would be greatly needed; accountants rarely deal with physical bills of money, but rather the numbers that represent that money, which makes a good accountant invaluable to your party where resource management comes in. Having an accountant means they can keep track of and ration out your supplies to ensure they last as long as possible.
Similarly, an extreme sports athlete would seem to be equally useless, but their ability to plan ahead and adapt to adverse conditions would prove to be quite useful when planning scavenging trips or raids on other survivors.
I heart this, Darg.
Indeed, Foolish Lego, I should have been more specific here. But you absolutely hit the nail on the head: it’s easy to put people into categories, but people are far too complex for that to ever work.
“I went for model and I can’t think of a silver lining for that career”
How about entertainment/motivation in the post apoc world? When we are rebuilding society we don’t want to be working 24/7, we need down time and something to take our mind off things… so perhaps that modelling career could be useful after all.
Typo! “It’s not long before his dozes off as well.” paragraph two, Zombie Cliche Lookout, should be It’s not long before he dozes off as well 🙂
Good spot! I’ll fix that.
Discussion question: ‘this “useless” people’ could be better worded as ‘these “useless” people’. 😀
Or perhaps even ‘those “useless” people’. I’d suggest using an online dictionary of your choosing and picking between “these” and “those”. 😉
Googled “usage these those” and it seems that “those” would replace objects further away, whereas “these” would replace nearer objects. Good luck picking the correct form for your needs! 😀
Yeah, I’m going with “these”.
Damn typos.
Personally I think a lot of us would be ok in a post apocalypse world (providing we survive the event itself) as even though we have different careers, it doesn’t mean that is our only skill, and we are also human, which means we can learn and adapt pretty quickly, just look at the differences in environment we have adapted to live in…. desert through to ice… we live in it 🙂
We might not have power, running water, enough food and yes there will be a population drop while we survive the event and reach a new equilibrium with what the “new” world can support, but look at some of the other parts of the world that live like this already (tribes in Amazon rain forest etc)
Depends a lot on the person, and most that would struggle in post apocalypse world probably won’t make it through the event itself anyway, survival of the fittest and all that jazz.
Or, it is our extinction event and everything above makes no difference because it’s Game over man…. Game over.
Hmmmm…. Inez sneaking around back or a zombie walking through the open front door. What is going to break up this negotiation?
I might be wrong, but the question Dave asked us was what are our useful skills in a zombie apocalypse? Anyway, lots of careers are useful in a ZA crisis. Even though I’m around 95 lbs in muscle, and 143 in regular growth, I’m not a good fighter. I’m not a good shot with a sniper, but epic with my 12 inch knife. I’m also very intelligent. Just not a prodigy. So over all if you need: melee tactics and fighting(not fists), strategies, and heavy lifting, you’ll need me.
When I mean not a good fighter, I mean I’m not good with agility and martial arts. I can’t even do one of those spin kicks in judo or whatever it is.