Event Horizon

I spent the last two hours trying to get the Internet working on this computer, so damn right I'm going to use it. Typing is slower than usual having only one hand to use (hurts too much to use my left arm, even if Mr. C managed to get it popped back into place), but I am stubbornly making sure I type this right.

No word yet whether any of our families are all right. And my friends list seems incredibly calm about this. Dare I hope that this is a localized phenomenon?

Managed to get a glimpse of the highways out one of the windows -- bumper to bumper red lights, all on the way OUT of the city. I can see dark shapes moving between the cars...I don't think the highway was the way to go.

Got nothing to complain about, not here and not now.

In a little while, I'll get up to do my look-around on this floor (make sure none of the zombies around here figure out how to climb stairs), maybe get another cold bottled water from the break-room fridge. The movie-buff in me kind of wishes we'd gone by the Boyfriend's grandmother's house and gotten them, or at least the guns. Not sure if holing up so high in the building was a great idea, but it works for right now. The Boyfriend and Mr. C are looking through some of the other floors right now.

Oops, there's the radio. Gotta go.

Had to stop, collect my thoughts. Would rather talk to you all via voice post, so that I could pretend you were on the other side, something...but the Boyfriend yelled at me for talking on the phone after we escaped the library, so...yeah. It's why I've been silent until now.

My friends-list knows I'm wild about zombie movies. Zombie anything, really. But all the zombie movies in the world don't prepare you for the sound and the sight at the FEEL of a hammer sinking into the half-rotted temple of a ghoul as you fight your way through a fucking oven of a parking garage. The fact that we had to wear multiple layers of clothing -- since we have no heavy jackets or anything -- made it harder to move. But it also made it harder for them to get teeth into our flesh, so that was a bonus.

Their hands dragged at me, but I was fighting hard, panicked, and I was strong enough to break free. I heard the Boyfriend up ahead -- asshole had taken the opportunity when they swarmed me to get away, not that I would have reacted any different. He was pounding on a door, yelling for whoever was in there to "Come out! Come out! It's your last chance!"

They had me by the messenger bag I'd slung over one shoulder. I flailed away at them with my hammer, barely aiming anymore -- anything to break their grip, you know? -- and then there was pain. Up from my left shoulder, so strong I nearly blacked out. I was screaming -- I don't know if I was crying or not, my face was soaked wet with sweat that stung just the same -- "I've been bit, I've been bit!"

The Boyfriend charged them, grabbed me up -- there was someone else there, not sure who at the time -- and the next thing I know, I'm sitting on the corrugated metal floor of a freight elevator, sobbing for breath and hacking so hard I can hardly get one. The Boyfriend is on his knees in front of me, and he's pulling at my clothing -- it hurts, but I don't have the strength or the air to protest. Another man is at the front of the elevator, and he's not looking at either of us.

My sweatshirt had -- has -- a big rip along the arm seam, but the layers underneath weren't torn. I hadn't been bitten, but the zombies who'd been grabbing onto my bag had dislocated my shoulder. The Boyfriend told me all this later. At the time, all I knew was that he stopped trying to pull my clothes off and relaxed a little. I closed my eyes. I was sure that he was going to take my hammer and bash my head in.

But he didn't. He and the other man -- Mr. C, I'll call him -- talked to each other in low voices. They talked for a lot longer than the elevator would have taken to get to the top -- the building only has 50 floors -- even I could tell that. I opened my eyes, curious, and saw that Mr. C would lean down every so often near the buttons that controlled the elevator and switch the floor it was going to, keeping us moving. I don't clearly recall what they were talking about -- too tired. But eventually we stopped on one of the floors where the freight elevator opened up into a break room.

The Boyfriend and Mr. C barricaded the doors. I probably sounded like I was whining when I asked if I could sleep, but they let me.

Several hours of cowering before the dressers that we moved in front of the doors, in this heat, had me almost wanting to be bitten and dead. At least I wouldn't be sweating so badly. Or at least, I wouldn't be caring.

The dogs went crazy about an hour into our wait, barking up a storm. There was lots of yelling, too. But then it was very, very quiet. I tried not to think what this might mean. The Boyfriend got it into his head that maybe we should head for his work; they have restaurants there, and probably run on back-up generators of their own. We packed up what we couldn't see leaving behind -- some canned food, the flashlights, and the laptop for me -- and got our "weapons" (just tools from the toolbox, and the Boyfriend's beloved "big umbrella".

The way was clear to the ground floor, but gawd what a stink! The heat wasn't helping (since when has it ever, today?) and there were flies everywhere. The neighbors had set up deck chairs near one of the side "exits" from the back lot, which we knew from our earlier library excursion, so we didn't go that way.

I don't want to know what we would have seen if we did.

We stuck to the side streets, which were miraculously clear. I saw a couple of those things (I hesitate to call them "zombies", even though that's what every movie-honed instinct is screaming at me to say) by Skillman, gathered around a dead cat. Or at least what I hope was a dead cat. Otherwise, the streets were weirdly empty.

There was the occasional abandoned vehicle, but it was pretty easy to skirt those. Got more difficult as we neared Baylor, but the Boyfriend knew a way around that. We were more worried about how to get into his building -- after a certain time of night, you have to have a security guard open the door to the garage for you, going in or out. If there wasn't a guard...if the place had been compromised, we would have no "safe" way in. We would have to go in through the lobby -- which, believe you me, was the route favored by the zombies. Several of the skyscrapers we zoomed past had all their ground-floor windows and doors busted, with plenty of undead milling about. A few attempted to chase our car, but one snapped its ankles and took another down with it when it fell. The Boyfriend went faster, and the two left standing seemed to lose interest as I watched them shrinking in the rearview mirror's reflection.

The garage door was standing open as we approached. Had it been open for a while, we wondered, or had the Boyfriend's coworker seen us coming on the exterior security cameras? I tightened my grip on my hammer's handle and hoped it was the second one...

Pipermage managed to deactivate herself on the K!boards -- we're not sure how. Since our power was still out when she put in the "distress call", we headed to the library...after I hassled the Boyfriend awake and off the couch.

There must be some kind of "zombie walk" going on today, but I've never heard of one happening in a residential area. Really realistic costumes, too. They're all coming from the Baylor Hospital direction. No idea what could be down this way or why they're walking so far.

Library is mostly normal -- and by normal I mean full of people who just won't give up their computer time. Some jerk was using the computer we were assigned to, and apparently it's our fault for not kicking them off when their time was up. Funny, I thought that was what library workers were for.

And damn, I just got a fucking popup saying that I had ten minutes left, so how could Miss Fatass not notice that her time was almost fucking up, eh?

Well, whatever. At least my laptop battery is getting charged in their powerstrip right now. Maybe I can at least use the word processor or something when we get home.

I miss the electricity.

Huh. That's weird. One of the zombie walkers just staggered in the front door. I guess even political activists appreciate central air...

It's unlikely, but some of you might remember my offhand comments from last November about adapting the Night of the Living Dead audiobook into a movie using footage from the movie. It's the reason I've been wanting old black-and-white, public domain footage to play around with...I need new scenes for the opening narration. (It's only twenty seconds long, but I have a very specific vision of what I want for it.)

I tried and tried to find a 1950s/60s educational film about death (I would have even settled for a film from the 1940s, though that's the incorrect era) for some pictures of mourners and cemeteries -- but the search function at Internet Archive crapped out on me. I may have to settle for short clips from music videos. If I can find a shot of the cemetery from the Cranberries' 'Zombie' music video that stays still at all, haha. Or if I can get a clip from Pantera's 'Cemetery Gates' that doesn't have the band projected onto tombstones.

[Random thought: Why do people complain about how difficult the Vulcan salute is? Seriously, I can do it with both hands, no problem. No fucking glue or tape for this girl... *pointed glance at Zachary Quinto*]

Anyway, it's 20-seconds of narration followed by 17 seconds of the opening theme, then I probably have to do something to extend the driving scene somehow since audio!Johnny and audio!Barbara talk for much longer. The narration following the cemetery scene describes (rather gruesomely) Johnny's death in a way that doesn't really jive with the movie scenes, so I'm cutting all in-story narration (probably) and using the original music cues where possible.

I also found an interesting B&W anti-drug film from the sixties called 'A Day in the Death of Donnie B.' that might do well for some clips of audio!Ben's story. There are also some short clips of people stumbling in the streets, backs to camera, which could be used to stand in for shambling zombies, yes?

If any of you are inclined/able to help, any B&W mob scenes or urban fighting (or something that wouldn't look too jarring from the 1968 source material if converted to B&W) would be great; I'd love to fade Ben talking over scenes of chaos if I can, kind of like the Prelinger/educational films sometimes do.

The actual audiobook is only about 52 and a half minutes long, while the film is 1 hour and 35 minutes -- that's total, though, counting in-story narration/scenes with music/credits. I wouldn't be surprised if my adaption is much shorter than either.

[This is kind of the reason behind the JEM amv that I did, too...a little bit of practice for this project.]

Why, why, why, why, why do recent remakes of scary movies always have to include violence toward dogs??

( Disturbing Spoilers Under the Cut )

Ugh. I mean, come on! I love horror movies. I love to be scared, to get my pulse racing -- but I do not like to fucking cry over animal suffering. True, aside from the first movie I mentioned under the cut, the scenes were brief and none of them were terribly graphic, but I still...just...do not want.

However, I was satisfied by watching the lead character in Quarantine have a complete meltdown, as I predicted, because it was fun to imagine that she was Deb Morgan from "Dexter"... (I'm cruel.) But aside from my own weird jollies, she was pretty awesome -- a really good, convincing actress.

Just got done watching *REC. I had to install VLC player to watch it; Windows Media Player absolutely would not detect that .srt file for the subtitles. The subtitles had a few spelling errors, and a couple instances where the character code for end-quotation marks showed up instead of the mark itself.

Yes, I fixed it. Editor to the bone.

I feel a little sick -- there were several times that Pablo (the cameraman) was running or swinging the camera around, so one hour and fifteen minutes of occasional wild camera movements have made my stomach a little upset. Not surprisingly, I suppose, the gore itself did not bother me.

And the first infected person that got shot and (supposedly) went down? I kept my eyes on them the entire time they were in the background...only to have nothing happen then. ^_^ Perhaps I've been watching too many zombie movies. I still startle when there are sudden loud noises or movements but that's an ingrained response.

I liked this movie a lot. It was more realistic than most zombie movies (particularly in comparison to the insanity that is Wild Zero), and I was quite intrigued to see another foreign, non-American view on zombies. (Wild Zero is Japanese, and camp as hell.)

I also have Quarantine -- which I'll have to wait to watch; can't risk eyestrain or a more upset stomach (we're out of Pepto). I'm quite intrigued with it, though. The same actress who plays "Deb" on the TV show Dexter is the reporter in Quarantine; Deb is my least favorite character on that show, so I'll quite enjoy watching her have a meltdown. ::wicked smile::

[Error: unknown template qotd]

It depends on what version of zombie lore you ascribe to.

Romero/Brooks type Zombies
The reanimated dead or virally-infected near-dead can't be considered the type to suffer. The Romero (reanimated dead) kind can't for the fact that they are dead and largely mindless (the 'mindless' part was called into question during the events of Day of the Dead and later Romero films). The Brooks (Solanum-virus infected) kind do not suffer because the virus that made them that way cuts off the pain receptors as it takes over the brain, if I recall correctly from The Zombie Survival Guide.

Traditional 'Voodoo' Zombies
These creatures, who are really living (possibly brain-damaged) humans drugged, kidnapped, and brainwashed by a 'zombie lord' DO suffer. They are still alive; they still feel pain.

Russo type Zombies
The reanimated dead of the Return of the Living Dead films have plainly stated that they consume brains to stave off "the pain of being dead" because they can feel their bodies rotting. While outside pain influences -- such as being chopped into pieces or shot in the head -- don't stop them from pursuing you for your grey matter, the whimpering half-dog and screaming of the 'yellow zombie' from the original film seem to indicate that they do register such pain...but clearly, the pain of rotting is the major one that these zombies deal with.

The Infected/ Rage "Zombies"
Since the people infected with the 'Rage virus' from 28 Days Later and its sequel are still alive, they are not technically considered zombies. And since they are alive, they still feel pain...but their rage is all-consuming (pun not intended), so they seem to be able to shrug off most non-fatal injuries.

I've been feeling kind of down, what with the realization that people who meet me in real life go out of their way to avoid socializing with me, and that the friends I do manage to make drift away from me. I've been jealous of Adam in particular, because of his long-time friendship with Shawn...I've never had a friendship like that, and I doubt that I ever will, unless we're counting Adam (but Adam is like, friend/husband/smart guy/protector/hot guy all rolled into one package to me).

Also, schoolwork has been dragging me facedown through the mud, in a sense. I feel like I'm smothering.

So I found a zombie quiz on my friendslist!

55%Mingle² - Free Online Dating