almostwitty

Zombies only want you for your brains

A debate that HyperHam seems to be having with her mother (and defacto, me) …

What can you do with an untamed zombie?

So we’re leaving out the zombies at the end of Shaun of the Dead, Fido and Land of the Dead, ie the ones that have either been trained, or shown signs of doing things other than wanting to eat your brains out.

This does include zombies who can talk and reason – as in the ones in Tasty Flesh and Marvel Zombies – just as long as they still have an all-consuming desire to eat your brains and flesh.

Suggestions that we’ve had so far include:

• Prostitutes/escorts – which wouldn’t work because prostitutes/escorts work for money. And what’s the good of money if it doesn’t get you brains? Plus, of course, would a zombified escort want their client’s money or their brain? Their brain, of course.
• Loan shark heavies – ie a loan shark, or someone you owe money to, threatens to send zombies to your door. This wouldn’t work because a zombie let loose would end up chomping through the brains of the person you owed money to – or worse yet, turning them into zombies. And a zombie isn’t going to work hard to pay up your debt.

Surely, the whole reason that zombies are such a popular topic in culture is because they stand for the relentless, the indefinable. The thing that cannot be stopped, reasoned with or outnumbered.

Of course, I say all this without having seen a single zombie film (aside from the rather terrible Resident Evil: Apocalypse) because I’m rather scared of them in the movie world. Of course, this didn’t stop HyperHam buying me the surprisingly good The Zen of Zombie: Better Living Through the Undead which is a great read. With a couple of good life lessons thrown in for good measure.

Note to future self: I’m scared of zombies. So stop looking for Flickr pics of zombies at midnight. Because it’s just going to scare you.

Mirrored from almost witty.

One of the aspects of being a geek celebrating your love of a particular TV show seems to be all about the dressing up – posing as a character from your favourite TV show.

If it works for you then great, but it’s personally struck me as a very uncomfortable thing to do. Mostly because I’m a great believer in being comfortable – and surely it’s a lot easier and more comfortable, if you’re at a convention, to wear simple T-shirts and shorts/trousers rather than wake up dead early, strap on your costume, dye your hair, and wear some incredibly uncomfortable shoes before striking a pose for a couple of hours before succumbing to the utter pain and retreating back to your hotel room?

Then again, I’m the kind of chap who isn’t that comfortable wearing a smart suit to a wedding.

Another main reason is that, well, most of these characters are white and a Chinese person dressed up might just look a bit stupid. I once had to dress up as Al Capone for a stag do, and for the entire evening, everyone thought I was Odd Job from the Goldfinger films. Plus, when was the last time you saw a black woman dressed up as, say Slave Princess Leia, who seems to be a bizarrely popular costume choice?

Then again, judging from the pic on the right, some people are perhaps more sensibly saying “To Hell with it”, and dressing as whoever they want to be.

You won’t see me voluntarily doing it for the joy, though. Well, probably.

Mirrored from almost witty.

Burlesque

Originally uploaded by Oh Lenna

So … I’ve been semi-invited to a Burlesque and Blues night this week - and a Burlesque birthday party in July.

Now, of course, I like seeing scantily-clad ladies disrobing as much as the next heterosexual male - the weekend’s soaring temperatures in London proved that as much as anything. But I still can’t decide if it’s the sort of thing I can go to myself and come out feeling, well, good about myself.

It is a world away from seedy stripclubs with strippers who only see you as walking wallets, but I can’t help wondering if I’d come out still feeling slightly seedy and unsure of myself, if only because I hate paying for things.

The Guardian suggests that it has itself become somewhat of an industry that is itself rife for exploitation. But all the railing by feminists against the porn industry hasn’t stopped today’s yoof exposing themselves to anyone and everyone for a bit of fun.

Expression or exploitation?

Originally published at almost witty. You can comment here or there.

With the Pet Shop Boys being given a Outstanding Contribution to Music award at The Brits, I thought I’d look at ITV’s Brits website just to see what behind the scenes content they had. To be fair, they had a reasonable range of content, but it was all let down by the following:

• It took four clicks from The Brits homepage to get to the page I wanted - even though it was prominently advertised on the front page.
• See that cunning play icon overlaid on the main picture of the Pet Shop Boys on this page? Click it, and wait forever for the pic to change to a video … before realising that the video is being played in ANOTHER window on the right hand side of the page.
• Then keep waiting as an entire minute of adverts is played out before your eyes before you even get to the main feature. At least other commercial TV websites like Hulu only play one advert lasting 30 seconds.

  It wouldn’t be so bad if you were watching a thirty minute programme … but all this for a clip lasting three minutes?

The trouble with ITV’s approach to online video is that it seems to show a breath-taking arrogance for ignoring the way online video has been built up till now on other platforms, with a determination to do it their way. From YouTube to Hulu to iPlayer, people now expect when you’re clicking on a play icon, that the video will play where the play icon was, not on another window on the other side of the screen. Trying to establish a different user interface for the sake of it just seems incredibly daft, if not arrogant. We’re living in a world where 37% of 15-24 year-olds say they mostly hear music via YouTube. The corporate world is littered with the corpses of once mighty companies who didn’t notice when little minnows slowly took away their audience.

Oh, and why is Kylie hosting with James Corden? It’s almost as inanely dull and self-consciously zany as the Samantha Fox/Mick Fleetwood pairing…

Originally published at almost witty. You can comment here or there.