We’ve all seen the movies. We’ve all read the books. We’ve all immersed ourselves in fictional apocalypses with one eye on the story, and the other on the wheel, meaning … we wonder what we would do if stuck in the same situation.

In the next couple of weeks, I’ll be posing apocalyptic scenarios of the zombie kind with the key question … what would you do? My goal is to start at day one and move throughout the blossoming apocalypse. I’ll try and pose a question a day. Your job is simply to answer it.

Here’s the kicker … you must answer it honestly. You must close your eyes and put yourself in the imagined situation and tell me what YOU would do. Not what you would want to do or what Max Brooks advises you to do.

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For the record, I loathe snow. When the skies turn into a mixture of grey and white then vomit out that icy celestial dandruff, I lower my head in both pain and dread because it means that I will have to shovel the mother of all driveways. My driveway eats other driveways. If there wasn’t a street at the end of it, it would make for the best sledding hill. As it stands, it is a great free standing laboratory for studying repetitive injuries.

Thankfully, we were spared the horrors or horrors that hit DC this past weekend, but even if we were hit, I wouldn’t have minded because I kept seeing this word everywhere: Snowpocalypse.

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Some time back, I mentioned an upcoming art exhibit over in Pasadena-land that combined our love of zombies with our love for each other. It was mixed media event that was a celebration of both zombie culture and Valentine’s Day.

Saturday marked the start of the exhibit which kicked it off with zombies shambling down the street with the ultimate convergence of the art gallery. The following article shows some pictures of the event. The funniest one on the page shows a bunch of zombies, staring at a zombie painting. There’s nothing quite like seeing zombies appreciate zombie art.

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In writing any story, the name of the work is a crucial piece. The best names illuminate the contours of the theme while giving light to both plot and character. Often times, when I am hacking out stories, I will have no idea of the piece’s name. When the name doesn’t come after several rewrites, I know I am still looking for the soul of the work

I wrote around a hundred pages of A World on Fire before I found the title of this series. I’m not sure how it came to me, but one day, all my documents were stored in the “untitled book” folder, and the next day, it became “A World on Fire”.

It’s important to note that it isn’t “The World on Fire”, but rather “A World on Fire”. The “world on fire” is not referring to a whole, but rather, a part. In one perspective, you can view this as a different Earth undergoing a biological revolution. This Earth is different from our own in so much as the dead walk the earth and destroy the living like a fire destroying a forest. A World on Fire.

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Good news and bad news coming the Valve folks, creators of our favorite zombie killing romp. Well, the good news first is that AI controlled bots will be joining the mix, so if you have a team less than four people, prepare for some digital assistance. They’ve ramped up the AI from walking lobotomy patients to three stooges on banana peels so good news there. There’s also a ton of other little fixes that don’t plague the game but make for a better gameplay experience overall.

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This could be old news, breaking news, or musty cheese news. I have no idea. What I do know is that this is very frigging cool news indeed. Some enterprising programmers, hackers, and assorted zombie lovers have decided to take their love of walking hungry corpses and spawn them en masse in the virtual Miami inspired metropolis of Vice City, turning mere playful anarchy into a full on zombie apocalypse.

As cool as this mod sounds, it’s not all guns and roses (hah). From the article:

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What happens when your baby gets bitten by a zombie? It becomes a baby zombie. And what happens when you have a baby zombie? You have a lot more other baby zombies.

On an aside, while writing my book, I got to think about what would happen to newly delivered babies in a hospital once a zombie apocalypse occurred. I reasoned the outlook wouldn’t be so good, and promptly thought of something else. Babies and zombies go together like kittens and crocodiles. They’re just not good for each other.

Baby Zombie (25.media.tumblr.com <- new window)

This is an oldie but goodie that made the rounds through the intertubes last year. As you know, what is old is new again (unless we’re talking about my car). I posted this cake sometime back but seeing as how I’m in a lazy mood today, I’m pillaging the archives.

The cake itself pretty awesome. Who needs a dancing bride and groom when there are chainsaws to be passed out. The spatters of blood along the sides of the cake really make this puppy sparkle. Check it out and despair.

Zombie Wedding Cake (flickr.com <- new window)

Here’s a fun little retrospective on Fulci’s Zombie by a blog over at the entertainment website, Hitfix. The author is undertaking a project to write an essay on a great film per each letter of the alphabet. He’s written about High Plains Drifter, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, and even the highly underrated Joe Vs. the Volcano (which admittedly pukes all over itself at the end).

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Believe it or not, although George Romero has become synonymous with zombie films, he actually has directed several other movies that have nothing to do with zombies. FearNet has compiled a list of the seven Romero films that are worth watching.

I will say my favorite Romero non-zombie film but is actually a zombie film is The Crazies (which is on the list). Sure, it’s getting a remake (what isn’t these days) which has garnered zero interest from me because the original film really tapped a vein about how people felt about the government. It’s a great film , indicative of its time. The seventies was the hangover after the peace movement when people became disillusioned with their government. Vietnam and Watergate were sucker punches to the gut of idealism and these types of movies reflect it.

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Many thanks to the Unofficial Romero for sending me over this youtube link. It’s kind of funny, depicting behind the scenes footage of Romero directing actors on how to act like zombies. The problem being, people didn’t really know about zombies at the time.

The would be zombies are pretty funny with one of them grabbing his forehead in frustration while bemoaning that “he didn’t want to get into porn again”. There’s another guy who wants to be badass zombie while a growingly frustrated Romero he tries to express his vision.

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Here comes the latest game for the iPhone. Titled Pro Zombie Soccer, your goal is to defend against a ravenous horde of the undead with nothing but a soccer ball. While some of you might roll your eyes, a previous link to a soccer flash game resulted in hundreds upon hundreds of pageviews for reasons I have no idea. People just love zombie soccer. Here’s a snippet from this review:

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From A World on Fire’s zombie loving community, I’d like to extend wonderful happy birthday greetings to George Romero who turns seventy years young today. I’ve linked up his twitter feed in case you’d like to personally send him birthday wishes as did I link a show of Wait Wait Don’t Me where George plays “Not My Job”. It’s a pretty funny listen.

Here are some interesting tidbits about his life I gleaned from Wikipedia:

Romero was born in New York City to a Cuban-American father and a Lithuanian-American mother. His father worked as a commercial artist. Romero attended Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University. After graduating in 1960, he began his career shooting short films and commercials. One of his early commercial films, a segment for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in which Mr. Rogers underwent a tonsillectomy, inspired Romero to go into the horror film business. He and friends formed Image Ten Productions in the late 1960s, and they chipped in roughly $10,000 apiece to produce what became one of the most celebrated horror films of all time: Night of the Living Dead (1968). The movie, directed by Romero and co-written with John A. Russo, became a cult classic and a defining moment for modern horror cinema.

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I think the most interesting thing about the last matchup wasn’t whether the Uzi could be accurate or whether it could jam in a tense zombie situation, but the fact that Jason owns three, er excuse me, four 357 magnums. That’s like one hand cannon for each pillow of the bed. Wow. That is quite impressive. Personally, I think Jason should give out his address so that when the zombies do come, we can all hide under his bed.

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I found this link through The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse’s new feed. Horror website Blood Disgusting is showing some stills for the upcoming film Zombie Women of Satan.

I gotta say, I find it a tad bit ironic that Mr. Disgusting declares the images to be the big NSFW (not safe for work, to the uninitiated). This is not a slight against Mr. D. It’s just funny to see the blood spattered image of a man with a gaping eyeless socket warn me that the following images should be viewed outside a professional work environment.

Moving on …

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