Friday, January 2nd, 2009

Time	Event
12:55p	Zombie Survival (and Disasters) Well, I would point out that there are ignorant people out there. I mean sure, most people are at least familiar with concepts like Zombies and Horror movies, but then there are families who bring their children up in a very sheltered way (with or without religion) where things like horror might have been forbidden. - *That* said, keep in mind also that the biggest thing that kills people in emergencies is the modern desire to treat everything with disbelief. If there is a fire, before people react they want to actually see the fire for example. Part of it is a desire not to be taken advantage of or "punk'd" so to speak. On top of that highly individualistic societies like the one in the US, tend to raise people to believe that they are 'special' even from their earliest cognitive thoughts. This means that in an emergency people always think that their needs are paramount. In a casino for example during the rare sectional evacuations (serious fire, or a terrorist threat that has to be taken seriously even if it's not real) people do not want to leave slot machines, abandon their chips, or leave without locating other members of their party. Indeed the evacuation plan for the casino has dealers and table games people cashing everyone out before evacuation which basically means that in a REAL emergency of huge level people would die left and right, since they wrote the policies assuming any alarm is a false one and figuring if it's not the insurance would cover the massive damages/loss of life. Being a false alarm it's better to avoid the inevitable lawsuits and people claiming "OMG half my chips are missing" when they come back or whatever. On top of that there is the sheer idiocy of evacuating the old and handicapped, oftentimes first. Politically incorrect? Well given the situation it's occurred to me that in the time and personal attention it takes to evacuate one of these people you could have saved dozens. Given the "fun" in false alarms, all I can think to an extent is that thank god they eventually decided to go with some federal laws that allow you to dump them in stairwells (arguably the most structurally sound part of the building) but my god you've never seen people get so upset. What's worse is the people like that who refuse to cooperate with security until they find a caregiver/family member as that is oftentimes 10x worse than just trying to get a regular party together. So basically going with my experiences, crisis = tons of dead people. If I was writing federal/business guidelines I'd remove the ability of people to perform lawsuits from situations incurred during an evacuation (false alarm or not), and allow rescuers in most cases to perform the equivalent of a triage and abandon people that would take the most work until last. Some places might allow this, but my experiences have led me to believe most don't. Indeed it seems the whole "handicapped first" thing is almost a universal practice and it's been claimed it's in the law. - The above rant aside (the inabillity to save people in a practical sense), I will also point out that too much knowlege of fantasy and horror and such can also lead to the seemingly glaring "what are they" comment. See, in horror there are plenty of differant kinds of zombie-like creatures that follow the same genere. You've got several differant takes on possesed people that use the same idea (Demons, Evil Dead), your basic cannibal mutant guys (like CHUDs to some extent), and other similar things. Not to mention whacked out concepts like John Carpenter's "Ghosts Of Mars" or the "Critters" series (this last one being very un-zombie like) Head Shots, Dismemberment, true bordeline invulnerability, do they possess people if they go down? Yes it takes a true oddball to think of all these possibilities based on fiction but just think about it. If I ran into someone with more experience in a situation like this I'd probably ask the same "what are they" question albiet with some eventual clarification. This is also incidently while when watching zombie movies I realize your supposed to get freaked out by the evil of humanity when you occasionally see people performing Mengele-like experiments on Zombies, but honestly when I'm fighting something like this in a war of extinction, any information gathered is useful. If I'm killing Zombies, or hordes of the hopelessly possesed, I'm not going to be worrying about moral and humane rules of engagement. Though honestly I imagine if it really came about someone would probably eventually think of such a thing. "Yes, we must destroy the legions of the walking dead/damned, but do so with dignity for they were once people". Followed by people burning the equivilent of the Reapers Survival guide and drafting a new equivilent of the Geneva convention. Especially in this country we definitely seem that stupid at times. Current Mood: enthralled (Comment on this)
1:00p	From the Palladium boards, just like the previous entry. That's a good point: I was on a different message board, arugueing with some 'dead-head' about the "kill the brain" rule. I kept bringing up varient zombies from fiction that were resistant to this, but he didn't accept it. My arguement was that like vampires, werewolves and many other creatures, the attributes, powers and weaknesses of zombies has been reworked that if, IF you ran into one, you wouldn't know the truth from the myth. (He didn't accept this argument either.) So, I took a different approach: I told him to imagine that a robot was walking down his street, smashing things and killing people, and it was up to him to kill it. I asked him how would he stop it? Smash it with a hammer? Throw water on it? Use a magnet or Electricity to scramble it's circuts? Catch it in a logic loop and make it's brain explode? Hack it's CPU with a Powerbook? Hit the red button on the back of it's head? Tell the robot that it's going to Robot Hell if it doesn't stop it's rampage? The point was that there are many forms of robot in fiction, but no one REALLY knows how to stop a "Killer Robot". This is the same of the zombie. He insulted me and then logged off. Oh, and the only way to beat that robot was to teach it to love. Current Mood: geeky (Comment on this)
1:25p	On Writing (Buddy Ebsen) Here's a great quote about writing. "You take a blank piece of paper and, whatever you're thinking, you write it down. I'm very satisfied if, in my mind, it increased the value of the paper. That's what writing should do. It should increase the value of the paper." – Buddy Ebsen Current Mood: creative (Comment on this)
4:57p	Rights - As Presented by George Carlin "Boy everyone in this country is running around yammering about their fucking rights. "I have a right, you have no right, we have a right." Folks I hate to spoil your fun, but... there's no such thing as rights. They're imaginary. We made 'em up. Like the boogie man. Like Three Little Pigs, Pinocchio, Mother Goose, shit like that. Rights are an idea. They're just imaginary. They're a cute idea. Cute. But that's all. Cute...and fictional. But if you think you do have rights, let me ask you this, "Where do they come from?" People say, "They come from God. They're God given rights." Awww fuck, here we go again...here we go again. The God excuse, the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument, "It came from God." Anything we can't describe must have come from God. Personally folks, I believe that if your rights came from God, he would've given you the right for some food every day, and he would've given you the right to a roof over your head. GOD would've been looking out for ya. You know that. He wouldn't have been worried making sure you have a gun so you can get drunk on Sunday night and kill your girlfriend's parents. But let's say it's true. Let's say that God gave us these rights. Why would he give us a certain number of rights? The Bill of Rights of this country has 10 stipulations. OK...10 rights. And apparently God was doing sloppy work that week, because we've had to amend the bill of rights an additional 17 times. So God forgot a couple of things, like...SLAVERY. Just fuckin' slipped his mind. But let's say...let's say God gave us the original 10. He gave the British 13. The British Bill of Rights has 13 stipulations. The Germans have 29, the Belgians have 25, the Swedish have only 6, and some people in the world have no rights at all. What kind of a fuckin' god damn god given deal is that!?...NO RIGHTS AT ALL!? Why would God give different people in different countries a different numbers of different rights? Boredom? Amusement? Bad arithmetic? Do we find out at long last after all this time that God is weak in math skills? Doesn't sound like divine planning to me. Sounds more like human planning. Sounds more like one group trying to control another group. In other words...business as usual in America. Now, if you think you do have rights, I have one last assignment for ya. Next time you're at the computer get on the Internet, go to Wikipedia. When you get to Wikipedia, in the search field for Wikipedia, I want you to type in, "Japanese-Americans 1942" and you'll find out all about your precious fucking rights. Alright. You know about it. In 1942 there were 110,000 Japanese-American citizens, in good standing, law abiding people, who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That's all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers, no right to due process of any kind. The only right they had was...right this way! Into the internment camps. Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most...their government took them away. And rights aren't rights if someone can take ‘em away. They're privileges. That's all we've ever had in this country is a bill of TEMPORARY privileges; and if you read the news, even badly, you know that every year the list get's shorter, and shorter, and shorter. Yeup, sooner or later the people in this country are going to realize the government doesn't give a fuck about them. The government doesn't care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety. It simply doesn't give a fuck about you. It's interested in its own power. That's the only thing...keeping it, and expanding wherever possible. Personally when it comes to rights, I think one of two things is true: either we have unlimited rights or we have no rights at all." Current Mood: mischievous (Comment on this)

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