Closet Sci-Fi Geek

Zombies on the brain

Zombie’s scare the bejesus out of me. I read in a dream book that Zombies represent a disconnection from feelings. If you are feeling numb, depressed, cold inside, or if you are completely consumed by a certain feeling, like hunger or fury, then you are the closest to being a zombie – at least according to dream symbolists. I think the loss of rational thought, that which makes us civilised human beings, is also what makes Zombies a terrifying prospect. You’re bog-standard, shambling, ‘brains’ groaning Zombie is a classic example, and made wonderfully chilling in the game, ‘Resident Evil’. The other, and I personally think scarier Zombie, is the ‘Rage Zombie’ portrayed in Danny Boyle’s ’28 Days Later’. That film, and ’28 Weeks Later’, have given me nightmares, and I still half expect when I look up at the glass sliders first thing in the morning, when it’s still twilight, to see a rage zombie, drooling blood, glaring at me with red eyes, just waiting to dive through the glass and eat my spleen.

[Shudder]

Lately I’ve watched Robert Rodriguez’s ‘Terror Planet’ and Johnathan King’s ‘Black Sheep’. Neither of these frightened me – in fact they made me laugh which was the creators’ intention I’m sure. ‘Black Sheep’ was particularly cool as I grew up on a sheep farm and my father always wanted me to write a story about mobs of rabid sheep revolting and running amok. Johnathan King got there before me, and Dad would have loved ‘Black Sheep’ had he lived to see it.

So there’s my thoughts on Zombies. What do you fullas and fullesses think about them?

Gaia Online…Yet Another Online Time Suck

Since I do work as an Internet Consultant, I can sometimes justify my time spent on online communities as time keeping in touch with the field I work in. (Ummm…yeah.) Tonight I’ve been puttering around Gaia Online, which is an online community that offers elements of role playing. Everyone on the site gets an avatar, which you can dress up and house in your own custom house (if you can find a vacancy, that is).

Like many online MMORPGs, Gaia Online has its own currency, which you can use to buy new clothes and goodies for your character. You can earn coins by playing games, by referring members (woo hoo, I’ll get 50 gold coins on each sign up, so I can buy me a new hat…yippee skippity), and by otherwise not having a real life.

The site appears to be partially built upon an expanded version of the phpBB bulletin board system, which somewhat surprises me. They’ve mixed that in somehow with a lot of Flash, so this conglomeration all works to create an avatar version of MySpace complete with custom profile pages, online journals (or blogs), and forums. It’s all a bit cutesy, but charming in its own way.

Some online games are available…nothing too exciting so far, but you can play online blackjack and earn some tickets for more virtual goodies. But as we’ve seen, people will often pay real money to get their hands on some virtual cash when they get addicted to these universes.

I am waiting for the day, sometime in the future, when virtual reality really becomes a reality, and all these virtual goodies will actually feel real. I can see an entire generation being lost to virtual worlds. Which is fine by me, there’s too much traffic anyway.

eXistenZ: Yet Another Pre-Millennium Virtual Reality Trip

In keeping with our Dark City/Matrix theme, I recently watch David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), which explores virtual reality via a game within a game. Starring Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh, eXistenZ (pronounced existaaaance) makes for a decent rental but isn’t anything mindblowing.

Leigh plays a video game developer on the run from extremists out to save the world for “reality.” Law is her unprepared body guard. Jude Law is eminently watchable (at least to me, but he does have that hot guy factor going for him), but Leigh is a bit flat and cliched. Her performance was somewhat remiscent of a heroine from a 1980s B sci-fi flick, which makes me wonder if this was her fault or Cronenberg was still stuck in Videodrome days when he made this.

With any Cronenberg film, the gross-out factor is high and includes oozing “bioports” for the games that look like anuses (and get poked and licked in a very sexual manner), plus a biotech video gaming system that uses sticky, gooey reptilian animal parts. The game console, in particular, looks like some sort of warped mammary gland.

I did enjoy some of the aspects of the game world - for example, the virtual reality characters would often get stuck in “game loops,” the type you might find in a standard video game, rather than just acting like normal people.

All told, this is a mediocre addition to the 1998/1999 flux of reality-blowing films, but it’s still entertaining and worth a rental.