Apocalypse Kits – It’s Not Just About Zombies, Maya, and Alien Attacks

Avoid being a post-disaster casualty by being a little prepared and having some common sense.

 I follow a practical blog called The 72 Hour Kit, which was created under the concept that in the case of a natural disaster and the like, that it would take about 72 hours for emergency help to arrive and that you must be self-sufficient for that time.  He went further to create not only home kits, but car kits and personal walk-around kits for urban travel, hiking and the like.  It’s all very practical and levelheaded.  Most of these kit contents are common items available everywhere and might be necessary for immediate survival up to 72 hours.  This isn’t hard-core survivalist junk, it’s just common sense.

UPDATE August 2014 -- The blog I mentioned above, The 72 Hour Kit, hasn't posted in two years, so it's a bad sign that the zombies got him after all.  But take cheer, there are many more practical preparedness sites out there. 

 Along that line and with all the babbling about imminent zombie apocalypse, Mayan apocalypse, nature rebelling, tidal waves, Planet X striking our Earth, and the like has gotten me thinking a bit.  Mind you, I survived Hurricane Camille, Hurricane Katrina along with a number of smaller hurricanes over the years.  I have also gotten to enjoy a wild fire, sand storms, earth quakes and 20 years in the military as well as a few urban riots and the like, but at least learned a bit along the way.  Needless to say, I do have stuff set aside for expected emergencies such as hurricanes, extended power outages, Cthulhu rising from the sea, and that sort of stuff.  Anybody living along the Gulf Coast with any sense has evacuation routs set up, extra food and water during hurricane season as well as tools and repair materials for a month or two of living in difficult situations.  Been there done that.

 Now on to fun-filled fantasy.  Back in the mid 1970s we did a lot of role playing games and set up some that were vaguely reality based.  For example we started a campaign with only the items that you personally own.  Let’s say a crank professor friend from the university of ours has a time travel machine and wants us to go back for a few minutes into the past.  Well you take a few goodies for maybe a day’s lark back into time and guess what … you don’t get picked up.  Uh, oh, and all you have is the junk in your back pack.  Honesty here is important for game play to make sure that the players would actually have all the stuff that they would put in their back pack, which would be their emergency kit.  Hey, all you brought was a case of Twinkies and a stuffed bear?  

 Along with that scenario was a zombie scenario based in our own town.  To narrow it down, everybody made it to the closed mall and hope they locked out all the zombies, maybe.  In any case, we used the local mall, which we were all familiar with as the source of what might be found.  The fun part was that everybody knew exactly what was in the food court, in the Sears hardware department and the like, so there was no need to dig up a supplement.  We had lots of fun potting zombies there in the mall in the 1970s.  It was a simple game to set up and the context was one that everybody got. You guessed it, we used the paradigm of Dawn of the Dead (1978) as out lead-in.  We got started in no time and had a great few evenings role playing, while using local terrain and the local mall for a background.  Next time you need a cheap, fast, and easy scenario, just pull that one out folks!  You could narrow the scope down a bit and just do a single house in Night of the Living Dead (1968) style, but if you are going to have a zombie apocalypse, have a big one! 

Anyway, seriously folks, catastrophe can happen in an instant from a 30 car pile up, to a toxic spill from a truck or train, to a power plant going up, not to mention tsunami, ice storms, hurricanes and the like.  Try to have your self together a little at least.  In all the cases where I was in a major hurricane or earthquake, etc, everybody pulled together and strangers helped strangers.  But you just can’t sit back and expect everybody else to help you, try to do a little yourself.

For those of you interested in zombies, can view my earlier blog entry called The Logical Zombie.

                                                                   CoastConFan

Additional useful links:

http://www.survivalcommonsense.com/

http://www.hurricane.com/hurricane-supply-kit.php

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/05/survival-kit-natural-disaster_n_2078505.html

http://www.wnyc.org/blogs/wnyc-news-blog/2011/aug/25/what-your-hurricane-prepardeness-kit/

http://www.cctexas.com/?fuseaction=main.view&page=779

http://ajax72.blogspot.com/

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UPDATE 14 DECEMBER 2012 -- Today NASA was so sure that the world wouldn't end that they released a new video on YouTube today (seven days before) called "Sciencecasts, Why the World Didn't End Yesterday", scheduled the day after the so called "Mayan Apocalypse".  NASA didn't explain why there was an early release, maybe they wanted to put in their two cents before it all ended.  Anyway, click on the link to see a rather limp video with mediocre computer generated narration voice (so bad it had to have subtitles) -- give me H.A.L. anytime. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3o9udHJZxk

Just put on your tinfoil hat and hope for the best.
                                                                                                  CoastConFan

The Logical Zombie

An investigation into zombies of all kinds.

Being of a logical and scientific bent, zombies have intrigued me simply because they break a lot of rules, especially in film portrayal. Zombies tap into that primal fear of the dead and especially of the recently dead returning. Ghosts fill a certain amount of the genre of returning dead, but zombies really bite into the role.

One way that archeologists measure a culture is by their treatment of the dead and by the amount and types of grave goods. In Paleolithic times, grave goods were minimalistic and there was an edge of appeasing spirits and keeping the vengeful dead in their graves along with equipping the dearly departed into the happy hunting ground. Sometimes keeping them in their place is accomplished by big rocks or a deep burial. Apparently ancient man was pretty worried about returning dead.

Of course a lot of veneration of the dead along with appeasement meant not only a nice burial service and lots of grave goods, but then follow up services and maybe a nice monument or tomb. They could get pretty elaborate by the Neolithic era. Much later tombs got as big as to be listed as two of the seven wonders of the ancient world: The Great Pyramid of Egypt and the Tomb of Halicarnassus in Asia Minor (now Turkey).

Zombies are a specific kind of returning dead and quite corporeal. Whereas ghosts and spirits could ruin your day by moaning and issuing curses, zombies returned in the flesh, generally decaying and smelling somewhat. You don’t want them at your family picnic.

Classic Caribbean zombies are the result of a magician or sorceress, bruja/brujo & etc capturing a spirit and forcing them back into their body to the do the will of the necromancer. Basically, these island zombies were slaves and bound to their masters to do whatever zombies do best which might be a bit of manual labor as long as dexterity is not needed. Classic Caribbean zombies stop being zombified when the necromancer is done with them or if released/destroyed by another person or power.

In a sense, the standard Egyptian mummy is a kind of zombie because it is here because of a powerful will (sometimes their own), a curse or a necromancer has raised them. There are lots of typical mummy movies around, so you get the gist.

Now we get to “modern” zombies. Generally, these are the Zombie Holocaust type, where not specific zombies are animated by the will of a necromancer or a curse, but a pandemic of zombification, where whole populations are zombified. Plague of one sort or another, either from space, mad scientists or incompetent government experiments or crazy corporation experiments gone wrong.

Plagues zombies may have been killed by the same plague that zombified them or just animated by the zombifuying virus. These zombies differ completely from classical zombies in that they have the power, via zombie plague or virus, to infect others and create new zombies. Generally, nobody controls plague zombies and they wreak great havoc by infecting others and being pretty hard to stop. Just one bite can make a new convert to zombiedom in just a few hours if the virus is virulent.

These new plague zombies often to seem to crave living flesh, human generally and some types even prefer brains for a snack. They generally feel no pain, have no sentient capabilities although some might have vestige memories. Generally plague zombies are slow, clumsy, and not very strong. But they are persistent and appear in great masses. They also seem to hibernate for long periods and seem to be able to smell living persons at a good distance. They are attracted to sounds and can hunt in packs.

Although pretty much immune to bullets in the body in general and even dismemberment, a blow to the head or bullet to the head destroys the zombies. Fire seems to work pretty well, although in some movies, each and every cell is a living zombie and will move to the attack. At that point, things are pretty grim for the living.

Now to the logical part: Classic zombies seem to be a moving corpse and fall apart pretty well, although the brain shot may not work with them. They seem to be as limited as an animated rotting corpse under the will of a necromancer. So obviously classic zombies have a limited time to get their work done until they fall apart or decay.

Plague zombies seem to be actual parasite organisms inhabiting the dead and moving them around to their will, as limited as the wishes of a zombie virus might be. Clearly, there has to be a kind of half-life with these zombie plague hosts. If classic zombies are magic, plague zombies are scientific and should fall under some biological rules for organisms. They use neurons to move muscles and electro chemical energy is required from somewhere. Admittedly they have a very slow metabolism and so don’t need as much energy as a living person, but they indeed inhabit human bodies and using their mechanisms to get around, so a few rules must exist.

There must be a life cycle on these zombified humans, and even given super low metabolisms and the ability to cannibalize their own cells (live humans do that too) to keep up a modicum of energy, they have to run out of juice sometime. I just don’t see zombies staggering around malls for hundreds of years like it is an after Christmas sale. Clearly, if you want to use zombies in your game, you need some basic rules, be they classic zombies or plague zombies. All organisms have a life cycle, even zombies.

There are a few categories of non-zombie zombioids out there: Dr. Who spinoff Torchwood has the Miracle Day episodes, where people just don’t die. They are not mindless zombies, just a kind of undead. If you have not watched these episodes, they are a very mindful pondering on living forever. Secondly there are self-zombies in the sense of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cool Air, a short story where somebody has willed themselves to live on and have preserved their body from decay. I guess they are a class of undead, uh unliving, whatever.
                                                                                     CoastConFan

Here are some real zombies that occur in nature: 

http://www.livescience.com/14064-zombie-ant-fungus-parasite.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/science/23parasite.html?_r=1

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/09/how-a-brain-manipulating-virus-turns-caterpillars-into-zombies.ars

If you like my logical zombie article see also my blog article about the classic wolfman.

A new blog entry about vampire hunting kits: 

Vampire Hunting Kits Debunked, June 17, 2014

http://coastconfan.blogspot.com/2014/06/vampire-hunting-kits-debunked-props.html