Fuck your dearth of imagination

[wolven7]

You know what's more interesting than zombies? Exploring the motivations of Demons; trying to understand what AI would feel and how; a detailed exegesis of ghost narratives.

Gary Numan - [Pray (Extended)]--- Perhaps a vision of the apocalypse that is intensely personal, different for everyone, but with a common unifying moment, a point in time at which everything suddenly shifted, and tracing life back to that point, for everyone, to understand what it was, how it came to be and what it means for TEOTWAWKI, because we would "know it" as individuals, but also as knots of overlapping conext and confluences of beauty and insanity and the sublime.

Zombies are just fear, god damn it, and fear is the mindkiller. Don't tell me to "calm down" or "learn how to take a joke" when we're subtly, slowly insinuating acceptance of unimaginativc, panic-striking tropes into our response catalysts-- Media.

(The Dead Milkmen - [Do the Brown Nose]--- It occurs to me that I still don't believe that media changes our individual behaviour, but it does create and conscribe the contexts in which we can act. The more influences a person with a bent toward thought and deconstruction has, showing them that there's no room for that, the harder it will be for them to exercise their natural predispositions. I'm saying this for the benefit of my 15-year-old self, who once wrote a newspaper article arguing that violent media does not cause those with non-violent predispositions to Become violent.

The Builders and the Butchers - [Short Way Home]--- Also, I just found an article referencing and angrily responding to my aforementioned news piece: www.crosswalk.com/518492/ I wrote that article when I was 15, as part of the VOX Teen Communications summer program, and this article was written two years after it was published. Weird.)

Jarboe - Not Noah's Ark--- Anyway, my point is that absolutely anything at all is more interesting than the useless focus on pure mindless fear, without an expression as to what it represents or what we can learn through the overcoming of it. (The Distillers - [Idoless]). All that I see as a result of the current zombie furor is people preparing collapsarian "Who Do I Save And How Do I Survive" scenarios.

Poe - [That Day]--- All that I'm asking is that you Please Please Please tell me that you understand that this is only step one? That you know that planning for "The End" is never planning for "The End," but planning for Change?

1) How do we survive?

2) Can we fix the problem, back to "Normal?"

3) If yes, HOW?

Tom Waits - [Hold On]--- 4) If no, then how do we not just survive, but Live?

What do we become, after, during, because of the cataclysm? What kinds of things do we want to be?

Not just "how can I live in the woods indefinitely and not get eaten;" more than that.

That's my point, here.

Comments

[triskelmoon.livejournal.com]

trying to understand what AI would feel and how

Seriously, have you read yuki_onna's Silently & Very Fast yet? BECAUSE THIS IS A STRONG SUGGESTION TO GET ON THAT YO.

>_>

[halafax.livejournal.com]

In order to live through TEOTWAWKI you have to plan to survive first. Once you get there, then you have to find a place to settle, which is defensible and expandable. Living comes after surviving. If all you your group is worried about is living, you wont make it through survival. There is plenty of cannon of this kind of thinking. Civilization will have to take a back seat to survival. Once things get established, also depending on the threat, then civilization can start up again. Though as things progress do you return to where things were? or try to move past where society and civilization was?

[lillash.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I understand what you have against zombies. I mean, yes, Paradise, Lost, I, Robot, and Ghost or Casper (I'm not certain what a "ghost narrative" would look like; do you mean a narrative about a ghost or a type of narrative that shares something in common with out concept of 'ghost'?) are interesting, but it doesn't mean zombies are necessarily played out.

A while back, Ryam, raoin, and I watched Cowboys and Aliens. Afterward, Ryam commented that he now understood why westerns looked like post-apocalyptic stories. We all agreed that they represent the apocalypse that occurred when the paradigm in the US shifted from "Eurocentric" to a something more native. "Apocalypse" after all, refers not to the end of the world, but to the end of the world as we know it. It means something like "lifting the veil." In other words, "apocalypse" can refer to a social paradigm shift.

It may be that it is no coincidence that Westerns had their heyday in the 60s, at least, John Wayne's and Clint Eastwood's.

Zombie apocalypses are popular now. And, let's remember, that the early zombie movies like Dawn of the Dead are as much metaphors of consumerism as horror stories about post-human and sub-human beings. Perhaps, as Westerns arguably represented in cinematic form the paradigm shift of the 60s, so too do zombie movies of the paradigm shift occurring today.

That, anyway, is why zombies are still interesting to me.