Just found this (Creative Commons) goddie on Jamendo. Since I have a poor knowledge of Spanish (it’s Spanish - right?), I haven’t got the slightest idea what they’re rapping about, but I like it.
With a mix of doomish music samples and 8bit, these guys rap relentlessly away with a beat that’ll split open your ribcage.
I stumbled onto Necronomicon on Jamendo and naturally I immediately fell for the name. Judge by yourself.
Again, I must warn of spoilers, this time, they’ll appear after the image. If you like, you can start out by just reading Andrew Drilon’s What the Cigarette Said, and maybe return later to read this post.
When your cigarette starts talking to you about ancient spirits living in the city and you are all alone in a dark room, don’t you think it’s time to quit? Or would you believe and heed the cigarette?
The protagonist from Andrew Drilon’s webcomic - What the Cigarette Said - does the latter. Bereaved of his love, trying to return to normality, he suddenly relapses, hallucinates and finally loses it. Or is there truly a spirit talking to him through the cigarette? - What the Cigarette Said is inconclusive; leaving its readers in hesitation.
The main character, however, (perhaps because of the comic’s relative brevity) seems unaffected by this ambiguity, wandering off into whatever we as readers eventually decide is the fact: insanity or Elysium.
I realize this post might look as if I were lambasting the comic because of its middle-of-the-road ending, but in fact I’m not. In fact, I like it. I like being left in hesitation.
I promised myself I would write about Dead Frontier. I’ve played it for a couple of hours now and I seem to be drawn to it. It is really dark an bloody, just the way anything with zombies in it should be, and I think that is, at least part of, why I find it so fascinating.
The game was released in May 2008 by Jagged Blade Games. It features a city overrun by zombies and the survivors trying to cope with it. It is really nifty, I think, that the game is partly shooter, partly role-playing; it kinda reminds me of the good old Fallout days, back before you had to buy a new computer, or even console, to play “The Next Game”. The role-playing part of the came of course means that you get to earn both experience for stats and money for guns and other handy things like crowbars, armer etc. When you create an account, you also chose the look and the previous occupation of your “survivor”. Obvious professions such as police officer, scientist and soldier are naturally available, but so is accountant, athlete, priest and several others.
Contrarily to the old Fallout Games, however, Dead Frontier is RTS (Real Time Strategy), which of course makes it the hell of a ride.
I think the term “survival horror” is quite apt for this game since everything is about survival from the horrors the undead always seem to shamble with them. You will die at some point in the game, you will die because I did an no one is better than me. In that case, you do not want all your money in your pockets (in fact none, as far as I know), you want them in your “bank”. Additionally, when you die, you have to wait for at least one minute before being able to play again. While that is cool because it means you do not squander your precious life away, it is still a bit annoying that you cannot do anything else while waiting because the browser goes haywire – this may, of course, just be the case for me and my rotten-fish powered computer.
Where was I?.. Oh yeah! you do not have to register to try it out, there are three “nights” you can play before investing hard earned time.
Dead Frontiers is free to play but still in development. Yet presently, I cannot for the life of me recommend a better way to spend your wee hours (and what else the back-pockets of your time-jeans might contain).
An android wakes up in a scrap yard and realizes she(?) is tied to a wooden “H”. Her chest is marked 
by a round symbol of two crossed hammers. As she tries to flee the yard (with the “H” on her back; very Christ-like), a big hand places another symbol on her chest and picks up the “H”. The movie is only about two minutes long, but it is very beautiful. The framerate has either been lowered, or it simply is stop-motion. It is made in a grainy sort of black and white, accompanied by quiet music.
“Redite” is directed by Patrick Boivin, a “French Canadian autodidact movie maker” as he calls himself. The subtitle of the movie is “Freedom is hard to handle…”, a relatively ambiguous title because freedom is taken away from the android shortly after she has realized that she is free.
I must say I really like this cute little film, setting and costume is really great. I cannot stress enough how much I’d wish film makers would do this kind of stuff more often. Or at least I would wish I was better at finding it when they do.
Go see it one and all =)
Dead Patrol is a web series available for streaming directly from its page, and its free. It takes place after a plague has diminished the majority of living to mindless flesh eaters. We follow two soldiers from the C.L.E.A.N. (Clear the Living, Evacuate And Nuke) team; Cpl Keenan and the female protagonist Lt. Brigham, during their mission, as they try to get out of the city before a nuclear device is detonated.
The theme for the series is made by Skinny Puppy and the acting is reasonable, although I can’t help feel that the full scale of the emotional apparatus has not yet been utilized.
Even though this might all seem like a great deal, my conviction is that the computer graphic side of the series could have been better. There are a couple of glitches and I think the graphics could have been more gritty to make it more realistic. That’s really a shame because the rest is actually quite good.
So far, there are three episodes up.
First of all, I’m sorry if I’ve kept you waiting in what might have seemed endless anticipation. I’ve been a bit lazy lately, well, lazy and I just couldn’t find anything interesting enough to post a blog about. Now I finally have.
Monster Distributes has put the steampunk animated movie (26 min) The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello on their YouTube profile. If you haven’t already seen it, I recommend that you to so (at a time and leisure of your own choosing, of course).
From Monster Distributes’ webpage:
The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello is a very beautiful film. Its beauty primarily stems from the intricate systems of clocks and compasses as well as monstrous clunky steam powered blimps, resembling Gothic churches and Swiss clocks as much as airships. Also, I really dig the fact that the characters are all portrayed as silhouettes, maneuvering in a nightmarishly dark environment of infernal devices reaching towards the skies.
It is really well written and mono- as well as dialogues are written in those eloquent pompous gothic Victorian phrases that all us Frankenstein geeks adore so much. Additionally, the voice acting is really great and perfects the whole feel of the movie.
According to Monster Distributes, this is the first of a trilogy. If this is still the case, I wonder where its possible to obtain the last two (it might be here).
(Image from Gravestmor)
Late summer of 2008 saw the genesis of James Melzer’s The Zombie Chronicles, since then, Melzer has more or less regularly published podcasts from his novel on his website.
The Zombie Chronicles takes place in the near future where a near miss comet has released a poisonous gas that zombifies people. In the beginning, everything is chaos, but then Government realizes that the zombies may be used as a work force, if only fed people. But hey, you can’t just feed your population to a zombie work force, can you? Maybe there’s a middle ground, maybe if you paid people for their clones and just fed the zombies the clones, you’d be able to avoid the moral problems, because after all, clones aren’t people, right?
Melzer not only writes well, he’s also good at reading his texts aloud and best of all: he’s not afraid of being explicit and cursing a lot.
Additionally, the content is released under a Creative Commons licence, you can share it as long as you give attribution and don’t make either money or derivative works from it. Melzer encourages donating for the show, if you do, 10% of the donation will go to The Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of Canada.
The only problem is the quality of the sound. Some times, you can hear that it’s not a quality microphone Melzer uses.
So far there’s 13 episodes up.
From Nicolas Wilson, Stephen-Reichert and Giovanni Timpano comes Survival, a well-written and -illustrated zombie webcomic. The story’s about an outbreak of some army biological virus (you know the jazz) that turns people into zombies.
Although the premise for the comic isn’t original, I couldn’t shake it. Even though it’s action and the main characters (so far) are soldiers, the dialog is so well written and the characters developed in such a way that you never get bored listening to them. Furthermore, it seems to me that the comic is well researched with regard to military tactics, lingo and equipment which makes it seem realistic.
So far, the comic is about something as simple as a Delta Force team trying to extract an officer from the an the airbase where something’s gone completely bonkers.
Here, the team meets a British special agent (Roy Hull). So far, he’s the only one alive (I mean, really alive, not living dead). The place crawls with zombies and sights of horror as the team (and Roy) try to figure out just what the hell happened.
Survival is a humerous, action packed, well written, beautiful comic with lots of zombie fiends who’d like noting better than to get a bite of our courages heroes. Will they finally succeed? We’ll have to wait to find out. Next page should be up at Feburary 18th.
I’ve just finished editing my newest short story; Bringing Home the Bacon. It’s my first non-ironic, non-sarcastic horror story. It’s not that I used to dislike the genre, it’s just that I never really felt that the horror I wrote was good enough to be completely serious.
But then I started this short story and I had a good feeling about it. I guess the only judge will be time. But trust me, as far as horror goes, this is the best I’ve written.
The story is about a guy named Robert DeSapio who’s working at a firm that analyzes sales data to determine the strength of a brand. He’s looking forward to his coming promotion, but when he finally gets it, it turns out he was better off before.
Bringing Home the Bacon can be downloaded as PDF here.
