Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

[AniThyng]

Welp

WWZ thread went up in TEO, didn't even make it past the OP before the dismissive statements of "stoopid writers din't have military bomb 'dem all" came out.

Cause, you know, when the world went to hell in what looks to be less than a week, several hundred nations are panicking, trying desperately to get a fix on exactly what the problem is while consolidating their own military, civilian, and pure resource assets, not to mentioned the issues with establishing dialogue with the disrupted and shattered power and communication structures of both their international allies and enemies so as to get a grip on possible invasions, changes in foreign policy, and to let them know what you're planning to do militarily to combat the sudden threat so they don't get the wrong idea about your troop movements and attack... the most reasonable thing to do is set off powerful explosives (possibly nuclear) next to the only thing keeping the bad things outside your safezone, turn your own territory into glassed wasteland and vaporize the clearly visible streams of your own citizens trying to get to safety.

Not sure if you're refering to my reply, because I certainly am not pushing the view that the military could have done much better under the circumstances.

[AniThyng]

It's a good book. And the reason I'm offended by the film is that when they acquired the rights for the source material, they had a chance to bring a different kind of zombie apocalypse story to the screen. Then they realised it couldn't be done in their format, or was too hard so fuck it. See Super Mario Brothers(1993) for another example. Instead, it became an expensive Brad Pitt vanity project. This might be why I'm begrudging it. As I've already said, I'm not usually a movie snob.

It really should have been a docudrama with interviews and "reenactment" videos right? That's what I wanted.

[Djinnkitty83]

Not sure if you're refering to my reply, because I certainly am not pushing the view that the military could have done much better under the circumstances.

No dude, your reply was the reasonable one. Grumman's followup with 'lol I can't imagine anything different so the writers must suck' pretty much captured the essence of TEO right there. Ryan's reply here, where a five paragraph summary of why the viewpoint is lacking in imagination and creativity is ignored, and I doubt even read, with a pre-packaged one-liner, it just an extension of that.

[RogueIce]

I don't like zombie movies mainly because they don't even try to explain all that. They just kind of go "and suddenly ZOMBIES ps society collapsed lol" which feels like a total asspull to me.

I mean in this one it seemed to go down like, scattered reports around the world. But then all of a sudden BOOM Philly is getting overrun and then the entire US Eastern Seaboard falls in like 24 hours or less. Because they sure seemed pretty casual when they started their drive to downtown. Except apparently Israel had enough time to build a wall around Jerusalem and shit. Apparently nobody noticed if I remember them flying in right, though I could be wrong on that one. And yeah it just felt like they didn't think through their timeline of events very well.

[Djinnkitty83]

I don't like zombie movies mainly because they don't even try to explain all that. They just kind of go "and suddenly ZOMBIES ps society collapsed lol" which feels like a total asspull to me.

I mean in this one it seemed to go down like, scattered reports around the world. But then all of a sudden BOOM Philly is getting overrun and then the entire US Eastern Seaboard falls in like 24 hours or less. Because they sure seemed pretty casual when they started their drive to downtown. Except apparently Israel had enough time to build a wall around Jerusalem and shit. Apparently nobody noticed if I remember them flying in right, though I could be wrong on that one. And yeah it just felt like they didn't think through their timeline of events very well.

Remember these are superzombies that can run, dive-tackle people and take a couple seconds to maul them before going to the next, jump ten feet in the air, pull apart metal barricades with their teeth, and drag down helicopters.

Oh, and if you're bitten, you've got ten seconds before you become one of them.

So running with the numbers... One zombie pops up in a crowded area of a city of people who didn't even know zombies actually exist and thus are likely to react to sudden violence the way people usually do: A mix of frozen indecision, or mob stampeding.

- Within thirty seconds, that zombie's mauled probably a dozen people.

- Within forty seconds, at the outside, there are now twelve zombies and an outward spreading panic leaving many trampled and injured, many more caught and bottlenecked in escape routes.

- Within a minute (the average police response time for a metropolitan area), there are probably over a hundred zombies, and a hundred more bitten and about to rise. Assuming flawless citizen execution, a couple patrol cars come up to investigate reports of one individual violently attacking passers-by, and now are dealing with a mass panick probably covering a three or four block radius.

- Shit just gets worse from there on an exponential scale.

So yeah, seeing how quickly one superzombie can turn into a thousand, I'm not surprised a city can go from 'normal day' to 'panicked warzone' in the space of half an hour or less.

As for Isreal, one thing it shared in common with the book is that the guy in charge was pretty much the one leader in the entire world that actually took the initial reports of zombies at face value and started doing something about it before isolated cases became an epidemic.

[Jung]

So I just wrote a chapter in a fic on SB where I basically used fantasy metaphysics premise as a vehicle to explore p. much punch the reader in the face with "yo, dude, the Western attitude toward animals is all kinds of fucked up."

Response thus far?

There's something about this chapter that just makes me so very angry at the Elves [edt nt: ppl pointing out how fucked up modern Western "intelligence value morality" is in-story].

Why am I somehow not surprised at all?

[Dooey Jo]

i can't wait for the internet and zombies to just fuck already like the infatuated awkward teens they are so they'll be so ashamed they never talk about each other again for some twenty years when they've got some perspective

i gots a question for you bilingual folks

i can more or less read spanish (at least simpler stuff like newspapers), but when i do, my eyes see spanish words, but the voice in my head is still english.

is that the same for those of you who are actually /good/ with a second language? or do you just read it and understand it directly, bypassing your other language?

we bypass it

it is the only way to be fluent

[Jung]

Generally actually writing on SB is increasingly drawing me toward the depressing conclusion that much of the userbase is ironically bad at engaging with speculative fiction.

[Zablorg]

it's all very tvtropes

[Big Orangutan]

And what's with the "thanks" system (with kooky nitwits such as Cloak & Dagger getting showered with thousands of "thanks")?

[Oxymoron]

It's a good book. And the reason I'm offended by the film is that when they acquired the rights for the source material, they had a chance to bring a different kind of zombie apocalypse story to the screen. Then they realised it couldn't be done in their format, or was too hard so fuck it. See Super Mario Brothers(1993) for another example. Instead, it became an expensive Brad Pitt vanity project. This might be why I'm begrudging it. As I've already said, I'm not usually a movie snob.

It really should have been a docudrama with interviews and "reenactment" videos right? That's what I wanted.

District Z ?

[Flagg]

Alright, sure. Where have they actually done that, like ever?

The book.

Oh, then it's contrived and poorly written as anything else, so never mind.

Do you need some oxygen? Your smug dismissal was so lofty I'm worried the atmosphere's a little thin up there.

Guy reads bible and loves it, calls WWZ poorly written and contrived.

[Oxymoron]

Speaking of social commentary sci-fi movies... there's this one I hadn't heard about that's apparently coming soon this summer, "Elysium".


http://youtube.com/watch?v=oIBtePb-dGY

It seems like it's a great summer for science fiction.

[RyanThunder]

Not sure if you're refering to my reply, because I certainly am not pushing the view that the military could have done much better under the circumstances.

No dude, your reply was the reasonable one. Grumman's followup with 'lol I can't imagine anything different so the writers must suck' pretty much captured the essence of TEO right there. Ryan's reply here, where a five paragraph summary of why the viewpoint is lacking in imagination and creativity is ignored, and I doubt even read, with a pre-packaged one-liner, it just an extension of that.

Oh don't worry, I read it. Pre-packaged? No, no, you don't understand. Anything like Yonkers is simply unforgiveably bad writing by somebody who, like many zombie writers before and to come, do not understand the firepower available to the modern military even without getting into nukes or anything of the sort.

[evilsoup]

it's really not though
the explanation given is 'incompetent upper management', which is probably the most realistic explanation of anything in fiction

[Infinity Biscuit]

So I just wrote a chapter in a fic on SB where I basically used fantasy metaphysics premise as a vehicle to explore p. much punch the reader in the face with "yo, dude, the Western attitude toward animals is all kinds of fucked up."

Response thus far?

There's something about this chapter that just makes me so very angry at the Elves [edt nt: ppl pointing out how fucked up modern Western "intelligence value morality" is in-story].

Why am I somehow not surprised at all?

I've been avoiding that thread since it's huge, but I'm interested so definitely continue to post little updates like this here :L

[RyanThunder]

it's really not though
the explanation given is 'incompetent upper management', which is probably the most realistic explanation of anything in fiction

Alright man, if you can't or are unwilling to recognize that a even an unsupported rifle platoon could kill a shitload of unarmed runners without breaking a sweat, you're not worth convincing.

[timmy]

it's really not though
the explanation given is 'incompetent upper management', which is probably the most realistic explanation of anything in fiction

Combined with, at Yonkers, someone screaming 'headshots don't work!' when he'd probably just missed, and within minutes unit cohesion went out the window.

[Flagg]

it's really not though
the explanation given is 'incompetent upper management', which is probably the most realistic explanation of anything in fiction

Alright man, if you can't or are unwilling to recognize that a even an unsupported rifle platoon could kill a shitload of unarmed runners without breaking a sweat, you're not worth convincing.

You either didn't read the book and are just repeating second hand bullshit, you're trolling, or you're too dumb to live. Given your love of pederasts I can believe any of those.

The military didn't bring enough HE rounds and were using AP shit after the first few salvos which was ineffective. Also, and this is a huge fucking plot point only the dimmest of dimwits would miss, the zombie brains don't seem to be negatively effected by pressure waves. They can walk on the bottom of the fucking ocean for christsakes. So go jerk off to Leviticus while flogging yourself or something.

[Darksi4190]

Generally actually writing on SB is increasingly drawing me toward the depressing conclusion that much of the userbase is ironically bad at engaging with speculative fiction.

Link pls? I can't actually find your fanfic since I don't know what name you post under over there.

[RyanThunder]

I'm not going anywhere you sack of shit. World War Z is a dumb, preachy book full of childishly ignorant nonsense, and there's fuck all you can do about that. I'm happy they blew away whatever chance it had at getting made into a movie by hijacking the title.

[Flagg]

I'm not going anywhere you sack of shit. The Bible is a dumb, preachy book full of childishly ignorant nonsense, and there's fuck all you can do about that. I'm happy they blew away whatever chance it had at getting made into a movie by hijacking the title.

Fixed that for you.

[timmy]

So Ryan you've read World War Z, cover to cover?

[Djinnkitty83]

it's really not though
the explanation given is 'incompetent upper management', which is probably the most realistic explanation of anything in fiction

Alright man, if you can't or are unwilling to recognize that a even an unsupported rifle platoon could kill a shitload of unarmed runners without breaking a sweat, you're not worth convincing.

World War Z, the bottom of page 93 to the top of page 94:

Why didn't they put us on the roofs? They had a shopping center, a couple of garages, big buildings with nice flat tops. They could have put a whole company right above the A&P. We could have seen the whole valley and we would have been completely safe from attack. There was this apartment building, about twenty stories, I think... each floor had a commanding view of the freeway. Why wasn't there a rifle team in each window?

You know where they put us? Right down on the ground, right behind sandbags or in fighting holes. We wasted so much time, so much energy preparing these elaborate firing positions. Good "cover and concealment," they told us. Cover and concealment? "Cover" means physical protection, conventional protection, from small arms and artillery or air-dropped ordinance. That sound like the enemy we were about to go up against? Was Zack now calling in air strikes and fire missions? And why the hell were we worried about concealment when the whole point of the battle was to get Zack to come directly at us! So backasswards! All of it!

Call me crazy, but I'm getting the impression you haven't actually read the book. Or if you did, none of it stuck.

Oh don't worry, I read it. Pre-packaged? No, no, you don't understand. Anything like Yonkers is simply unforgiveably bad writing by somebody who, like many zombie writers before and to come, do not understand the firepower available to the modern military even without getting into nukes or anything of the sort.

I'm not going anywhere you sack of shit. World War Z is a dumb, preachy book full of childishly ignorant nonsense, and there's fuck all you can do about that. I'm happy they blew away whatever chance it had at getting made into a movie by hijacking the title.

This is exactly what people like Shroom are pointing at when they talk about the sort of poison which drives creative people away from TEO. It's not just the obsession with numbers, numbers can be fun to many people. It's the fact that you guys take the numbers, completely divorce them from anything in reality and limit your worldview to whatever the almighty numbers say. Humans are numbers, explosions are numbers, zombies are numbers. Whoever has the bigger numbers wins, you cannot possibly conceive that those numbers are not in a vacuum. That squishy things like empathy, incomplete information and simple random chance can completely and utterly change the equation you're working with.

And you are so obsessed with that, you've made it into such a fetish, that you become nearly religious with your devotion. Over there Anithyng points out several entirely valid reasons reasons why bombing zombies and survivors en masse right outside your walls is a bad idea, and Grumman literally goes, "lol no, the writers must suck because I can't imagine otherwise". Here it's been pointed out, rather clearly I thought, that the social, political, religious and economic situations that surround a theoretical zombie apocalypse makes things a hell of a lot more complicated than "lol killemall", and your only reply is, "I can't imagine anything outside my bubble so I'll wave all that aside and say the writing sucks, lol!"

I can't even be mad. I just feel sort of disheartened at that rather pitiable state of mind. Even with something as overdone as a zombie apocalypse, the world of factors and complexity involved, the potential for an imaginative exploration into a million possible avenues, social, scientific, religious, political, even military, how they all mesh, how shit can fuck up on a thousand different levels, how people react to each other, to the outside force. Win, lose, curbstomp, apocalypse. Personal drama in a sealed safety room. Political intrigue on an international level as old grudges surface and past wars are re-fought using zombie-combating resources as both bribe and weapon. Military epic as leaders and grunts alike have to choose between following orders and carpet-bombing the outside of the capitol, wiping out zombies and civilians alike to protect the leadership infrastructure of the nation, or defect to help out loved ones in a more measured approach, but risk losing everything by weakening the whole. Media/Religious conspiracy net as someone unravels the threads of demagogues inspiring the populace to revolt against martial law and corpse-disposal policies for religious reasons, playing on fears and misinformation that zombie family members can be saved... and maybe they can, what if they are still in there, feeling every bit of pain as they're torn apart by daisy-cutters? The possibilities are endless.

And you miss it all out of your blind devotion to the almighty numbers and your desire to score internet coolpoints.

[evilsoup]

Well put, Djinnkitty. Unfortunately we don't seem to have a 'wholehearted agreement' smilie, so I'll link the Citizen Kane gif instead.