As I managed to complete twenty-nine books last year, I have decided to increase my goal this year to thirty. I had debated raising it higher (particularly after my trip to Barnes and Noble with my gift cards ^-*), but my new student loans start to come due in March, and I'm going to lose out on some of the extra cash I have been investing in my literature.

Still, considering I wasn't even able to achieve twenty-five the past couple of years, I think this is a significant jump in my goals. I've also started to pick up new authors to explore, rather than merely staying with my "tried-and-trues." Thus far, my experimentations have proven well worth the time, and I've gained a couple of favorites. *-*

Now I just need to pry the books out of my fingers as my reading has overtaken my writing time.

Tags: goals, readings
Current Mood: optimistic

lady_karelia, happy birthday!

Current Mood: accomplished

jdparadise, happy birthday!

Current Mood: accomplished

haldir_lives13, happy birthday!

Current Mood: accomplished

You write one zombie story (or two or a half dozen), express a fondness for zombie movies like Day of the Dead and Shaun of the Dead and read zombie-themed books like Christopher Moore's The Stupidest Angel, and suddenly you have a reputation as a zombie head.

I had a zombie themed Christmas and birthday this year. From the remote control zombie (pictured to the left and available at Think Geek if you're interested) I received from Jennifer's parents to the pile of zombie books that I received from Jennifer (wrapped in zombie wrapping paper that Jennifer found, also available at Think Geek) to the two zombie board games (one from Jennifer and one from my sister Caitlyn), I'd say the holidays for me were all about the zombies.

Of course, I am into the zombies. I'm not as into them as some folks I know who dedicate a weekly podcast to reviewing zombie films (and it's a good podcast, I recommend it) but I'd say I'm more interested in zombies than the average person.

The question, though, is why? I've been trying to figure out the allure that zombies have not just for myself but for popular culture at large. One of the biggest feature films of 2009 was Zombieland, after all, and before that Shaun of the Dead and Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead both did respectably well at the box office. And, of course, there are hundreds of direct-to-DVD and made-for-TV zombie movies, with at least half a dozen more coming out each month. And there are plenty of books out there as well; the afore-mentioned Stupidest Angel as well as the more recent Breathers: A Zombie's Lament (not to mention Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) are just among a growing number of zombie enhanced novels. And, of course, zombies are a mainstay of just about every video game out there.

Zombies are the new vampires, it was recently said (though even more recently it's been said that "vampires are the new zombies", which sort of implies that vampires had ever gone out of vogue).

So what is it about zombies, anyway? Why our society's interest in them? Why our interest in a zombie apocalypse? Why is it okay to kill zombies and not other groups of people? And why my own interest in them?

Well, with regards to the zombie apocalypse, I suspect that a large part of that has to do with the fact that a zombie apocalypse, while horrifying to contemplate -- all those flesh-eating ghouls running around (or shambling around, depending on which version of zombies you're contemplating), eating the living and causing general havoc, as well as the knowledge that being bitten by one will turn you into a zombie like them -- just isn't going to happen. It's a "safe" apocalypse, as it were. I remember when I was growing up in the 80s, when everyone was terrified of a nuclear apocalypse; these days, worrying about the nuclear apocalypse is passe, while contemplating a zombie apocalypse is cool. And yet, the nuclear apocalypse had such a sense of possibility; at any moment, we all thought, some Soviet madman or some American idiot was going to start to Final War, and everyone would die. We don't feel similarly about the zombie apocalypse. In our imagination, the zombie apocalypse is an out of control situation, but really it's a situation that completely under our control, simply because we do imagine it and because it just isn't going to happen. This may simply be a reflection of the more ironic and sarcastic age that we live in these days; we've gotten bored of contemplating apocalypses that are too plausible (nuclear war, global famine, pandemic, etc.) and that are out of our control, so we've started contemplating apocalypses that are fundamentally absurd (more on this point in a bit). It's flipping the bird to the real terrors of the world.

And why is it okay to kill zombies, but not other groups of people? When I asked this question on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, someone suggested that it was okay to kill zombies because they're already dead. I think, though, it goes a bit deeper than that; zombies, by their very nature, are the ultimate in dehumanized humans. It's not just that they're dead, therefore, it's that they're inhuman. More than that: they're antihuman, the antithesis of everything that a human being is. They are unintelligent, inarticulate, and they consume living human flesh, the ultimate taboo. Because they're so offensive in that regard, they're okay to kill. We've moved past a point where it's okay to dehumanize and therefore mass slaughter our human enemies (perhaps we've grown to appreciate that even terrorists can be human beings as well?), so we focus on our inhuman enemies. That's the germ of my theory at least. I'd like to see what a sociologist or social psychologist has to say about this subject.

But there's an element of zombies which is fundamentally absurd. Zombies are menacing, to be sure, but plenty of comedy has been built up around zombies as well. The original Return of the Living Dead is as much a comedy as it is a horror film; Shaun of the Dead is, at heart, a romantic comedy; and Zombieland, of course, is equal parts comedy and adventure. Even the venerable George Romero incorporated some comedic elements in the original Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder's remake did not have much comedy in this regard). Many of the zombie representations that we see these days, including remote control zombies and zombie wrapping paper, are just goofy. What's up with that? I suspect that by making the zombie an object of ridicule, by laughing at the shambling creature that wants to eat our flesh (or our brains, again depending on which subset of the zombie genre you're looking at), we're sort of whistling past the graveyard. It goes back to the notion of the zombie apocalypse as the controllable, imaginary apocalypse; here, it becomes a symbol of every apocalypse that can happen, and so we laugh it off in order to show that we're not afraid.

Either that, or zombies, with their shambling and their moaning, are just plain funny.

Actually, it occurs to me, reading this over, that I really have no idea what I'm talking about. I find zombies interesting and I enjoy zombie movies and stories about the zombie apocalypse, but I know that if I ever saw a zombie in real life, I'd scream like a little girl and run as fast as I could in the other direction.

I invite your comments.

Tags: just a day in my life, zombies

jpsorrow, happy birthday!

Current Mood: accomplished

Among the gifts that my wife gave me for my birthday was this box-set of "50 Sci-Fi Classics". Now, I'm not positive that all fifty movies in this set would be considered "classics" -- although I suppose Santa Claus Conquers the Martians would, for certain definitions of "classic" -- but the ones we've watched so far have been at least fun. Of course, we've only watched three of them so far:

The first we watched was The Incredible Petrified World. In this film, four deep sea explorers end up at the bottom of the ocean when the cable suspending their diving bell snaps. Judging by the light outside the bell they decide they're not so deep that the pressure would kill them, so they all slip into their wet suits and make their way upwards... only to end up in what appears to be a large and complex series of underground caves, lit by phosphorescent rocks. Dangers of this "incredible petrified world" include a mysterious shipwreck survivor who takes a hankerin' to one of the women in the crew, and stock footage of large lizards. There wasn't much in the way of petrification in this "petrified world", except that some of the rocks kind of looked like rocks in a petrified forest, sort of. Anyway, in the end, a volcano somewhere erupts, killing the weird old man, and the four are rescued. Not much more than that happens in this hour-long saga, but that's all that matters, I think.

The second film we watched was Queen of the Amazons. In this film, intrepid adventuress Jean Preston travels to the Middle East and then to an unnamed country in Africa to track down her fiancee, who has been captured by Zena, the fearsome Queen of the Amazons. Unfortunately, at some point her fiancee has fallen in love with Zena; but that's okay, actually, because Jean has fallen in love with the safari guide. This film also lasted an hour or so, and at least half of that was stock footage of African landscapes and wildlife that someone found in the studio archives and decided to make a movie around. Oh, and there's a subplot involving ivory poachers, and at the end it turns out it was the cook all along who was killing the Africans and plotting with Zena to steal the ivory from the U.S. merchants or something. Jennifer and I both lost track of what passed for plot in this film shortly before the big fight scene. But there was a big double wedding at the end, so I suppose it was a happy ending.

The third film we watched was Moon of the Wolf, a pretty predictable werewolf murder mystery set in the Louisiana swamps. I thought this film was better than the first two, but it was still mighty predictable. I was impressed by some of the details brought into this film, such as the French origin of the world loup-garoux (which I am very likely misspelling here), and some attempt at a medical definition of lycanthropy.

The part of me that enjoys films like this for their camp value has been having a blast with this set of discs; another part of me, though, the part of me that appreciates good storytelling and decent narrative, realizes that these three films are just plain bad. Yes, there's a certain narrative naivet that characterizes them -- after all, fifty years past The Incredible Petrified World, audiences have come to demand more from movie storylines, and screenwriters write more complex ones in response (for the most part -- there are certainly exceptions). But even granting that, these films just don't compare with some of the true classics of the genre: Forbidden Planet, say, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or The Day the Earth Stood Still (I won't say "the original" here, because my brain refuses to admit that a "remake" was made recently with Keanu Reeves).

Still, these films are fun in their own way, so watching them is no waste of time. And there are some films in this set that I can't wait to see. Included here are some classic giant monster movies, like Gamera the Invincible, and I've always had a soft spot for Kaiju movies. Plus, there are films with titles like She Gods of Shark Reef; and who can possibly forego a movie with a title like that?

Tags: just a day in my life

I made Sauerbraten for dinner tonight. The recipe and pictures are over on my craft journal.

Tags: recipes
Current Mood: full

So, I wrote for two story exchanges this year -- Yuletide and Jingle Bells, Batman Smells.

All Creatures Great and Small (Primeval, Abby Maitland, Connor Temple) --

An anomaly opens in the Lake District, and the team isn't quite sure what they've got.

Meant To Find You All These Years (The Flash, DC comics, Bart Allen & Owen Mercer) at either the JBBS site or the Archive of Our Own --

Bart deals with a message from his Mom; it's a little more complicated than 'I love you. Take care of yourself'. Make that a lot more complicated.

kittieonmyfoot, happy birthday!

Current Mood: accomplished