Zombie Apocalypse * Zombie Slave Leia * Fido * Apple Invasion * Naked Ape * 30 Days of Night * Zombie American * Zombie Emergency Defense Program

It’s Blog Like It’s the End of the World Day! Everybody Panic!

You can keep up with my ongoing entry here.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Zombies are the new Black. Marvel Zombies are great, Zombie Superman is (in good ole ObZomb’s opinion) even cooler, but now what we’ve got here is a straight up winner! Zombie Slave Leia. I’m not even worthy enough to bask in the gory glory of her shadow. What’s next, zombie Scooby Doo? I said it first, you’re my witness… so if it happens, I want cash!

Just a reminder for all y’all undead lovin’ individuals. The new ZombComâ„¢ flick FIDO is coming out on Friday. You’ll remember from the last round-up that FIDO is about a world filled with domesticated zombies. Billy Connolly plays Fido with Carrie-Anne Moss as his owner.

What some have estimated to be a crowd of nearly 150 *zombies* took to the streets and terrorized the citizenry of San Francisco, Ca. After the mob converged in a central square, the decided (how they had enough brain power left for decision-making is beyond me) to storm local businesses, including the flagship Apple store. See, my brethren have taste in tech as well as brains!

Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith’s masterwork of vampire fiction 30 Days of Night is nearly here people. Sony Pictures just posted a great little teaser trailer, and I command you to view it as soon as humanly (or otherwisely) possible. The movie opens this October 19.

What happens when Swedish electronica meets zombies? Well, when melody makers Naked Ape got together with indie film unit Zombie Duck, things got bloody hot and wet!

Check it out here: Fashion Freak (NSFW)

Let’s catch up on the latest in undead jollies, shall we? Continuing where we left off, here are the next two segments of Zombie American.

Zombie American, Chapter 2
Zombie American, Chapter 3

And for good measure, here’s a bit of the Brit I that found while trolling around on MySpace:

Zombie Roommate

A Comic Shop in Winter Park, Florida, had boldly declared their base of operations (read: a comic shop) a zombie-free zone. This past April 24th they officially announced Z.E.D. — the Zombie Emergency Defense Program. With rally cries of “When the Zombie Apocalypse Comes, We Will Be Prepared!” and “Better Z.E.D. then dead!.” They’ve taken it upon themselves to ready a makeshift militia and began practicing defense scenarios in advance of the ‘impending infestation’ (which according to the blogsphere is happening right now!)

In fact, on June 24th, they will be taking up arms and spending the day shooting down some of the unfortunate undead (hey, suddenly I don’t know if I’m okay with all this ZED business!).

Also coinciding with Z.E.D., they’re sponsoring a zombie themed short-film contest/festival. Good ole ObZomb will keep you updated as the finalists and winners are chosen.

–Obvious Zombie

Pulsating Pustules,

With all of my energies being focused on family, health, zine, and whatnot, I’m momentarily left with little time to journal anything substantial.

So for the interim, I give you Spelling with Zombies!

Dear Lame Saint,

I have Laryngitis.

Imagine that, a zombie who can’t speak. That’s a silly thought, now isn’t it. I mean, how are people going to know I’m a zombie if I can’t say stuff like ‘Braaaiiiinnss’ and shit??

Lucky me, though. I have my trusty fembot (in a wet t-shirt) at the bottom of every entry just waiting around to speak what I write. Now if I only had something interesting to say today, we’d be all set here.

O.k. got it, we could get all updated on week one of the J23Ix2, shall we? Ja!

My eating this week was quite good. No binges, no purges, no brains (well, I am a Vegan zombie). Everything I consumed was colorful, purposeful, guilt-free, and tasty good!

In the mind-food department, I made with the reading. In fact, I read a heck of a lot… of, um… O.K., O.K.!! I read about a hundred comic books. Well, it may not be exactly what I had in mind when I promised myself I’d read more, but at least I’m all caught up on D.C.’s 52 and Marvel’s Civil War. I’m having a hard time deciding which series I’m enjoying more, but I can easily say that I am enjoying reading them both.

Marvel has a distinct advantage, with there being countless tie-in’s to nibble on while piecing together the entire picture. And I’ve particularly enjoying the X-Factor, Wolverine and Luke Cage arc’s, but I’m thinking that the Elongated Man story-line in 52 might be the most engrossing for me.

As the world of fitness turns: Starting on Monday, I alternately ran and biked four miles each day, and rested on Saturday. So far I’m feeling pretty good about it. By Friday I started to feel my runner’s breathing return, so I was able to push it to six miles. I paid for it the next morning, but it was worth knowing that I could still do it. I’ll take it down a notch this week and let myself progress naturally.

Saturday, I got together with my family and we celebrated my oldest sister’s birthday. I brought my X-box and the Karaoke Revolution Party games that are to me and Eve what Crack is to Whitney Houston, and we all had a great time singing and laughing. Eve and I sang our heads off, but since I lost my voice completely, I’m gonna put forth that I may have overdid it. We won the Diamond Duet Trophy though, so I’m gonna call it a fair trade.

My nephew’s X-box was broken, so like any good Uncle would do, I ran out to Best Buy and bought an X-box 360…. for myself, and I let him keep my hella old, creepy, X-box regular. But when I got home the next day and hooked that bad boy up, I found out that none of my old games work on it. And I ask you,

What The Fuck???

None of them???

What the hell kind of backward compatibility do you call that???

On Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance (GBA), every single freaking regular old GameBoy game works on it. Now that is what I call backward compatible. The 360, on the other hand, makes you go through this whole shit-ass routine of telling you that the game is not compatible with the new system, but if you get online with it, you may be able to download an update that will make it work. So I got through the painfully slow process of signing up for an X-box live account, it begins to download all these ‘necessary’ updates, which, even though I’m sporting a 30mbps broadband connection, took fucking forever to finish its business.

And when all is said, done, and updated, nothing worked. And I became very sad. I don’t know what I am gonna do about it, but as Evie so eloquently said yesterday,

“That thing really is a 360, cause it’s gonna be circling right back to the store.”

As it turns out, there is a backward compatibility team at Microsoft that is sloooowwwwly creating a separate emulator for each and every X-box game (what a shitty solution, b.t.w.), starting with their ‘most popular’ and working their way down the line. I don’t know where Karaoke Revolution Party stands on that list, but I’m guessing pretty fucking far down. So, I emailed the Microsoft X-box Backward Compatibility team and asked them if they could give me a time-frame for when my particular games would be updated. If they don’t answer me by the end of the week, back to the store it goes.

And Finally, we finished off the weekend by seeing Lady in the Water and Clerks 2. I’m not going to go in-depth here, but if you want my quick opinion, Lady in the Water was a slow, moody film, that I grew to enjoy, with Paul Giamatti once again proving to me that he is one hell of an actor. But unfortunately, I can never, never, ever recommend this film to anyone, ever! It was just far to inconsistent and idiosyncratic for me to lay my reputation on the line and give it the nod. Sorry, M. Night, but you’ve been on Notice ever since that crapfest with the fake monsters in the fake amish village, buddy! That’s it your gone from my life for cereal. You can go hang out with that other dude whose movies I will never watch again– Oliver Stone!

P.S. Oliver Stone, go fuck yourself!

On the other hand, Clerks 2 was Pure! Freaking! Genius! There is so much to love about this movie. It was funny, intellectual, gross, intriguing, boundary-pushing, and as Joel Siegel will never know, heart-warming. As a sequel, it completely did the right thing. The script stayed true to the realism of the two working-class New Jersey dudes we saw in the original movie. Kevin Smith added a necessary complexity to the main character’s relationship— a complexity that was only hinted at in the first movie. And this ultimately made the film very endearing and believable.

Sorry, Joel Siegal, but you are an unprofessional douche. And Kevin Smith is my new B.F.F.L.!

Shit, I guess I did go a little in-depth there.

Anyway, so far as I can tell, the only thing I failed to fit into my self-imposed J23Ix2 schedule was a bit of guitar practice.

Sorry, Guitar! You know I love you. We’ll get together a bit this week, I promise.

-Draconian Devil

Future victims,

On Saturday, Eve and I went over Jenn & James’s house for an evening of dinner, followed by fun and games. We usually get together for a few rounds of Trivial Pursuit or Cranium, wherein Jenny and I are usually crushed under the steel-toed boots of Eve and James’s superior trivia knowledge.

Well, thanks in part to the modern miracle of video gaming technology, this particular instance of ‘fun and games’ happened to mean belting out Brick House, Play That Funky Music, and Dust in the Wind into a Playstation2 microphone, for points, laughs, and props.

Finally, a level playing field!

Since they’ve had the game for a while, Jenn can sing up a karaoke hurricane, and James can definitely Take Care of Business. Eve and I totally had a blast. We sang until we could hardly talk anymore, whether it was from the singing or the laughing is debatable, but nonetheless, fuckin’ awesome fun was had!

Now, here goes something I thought I’d never be caught dead writing:

Eve and I are karaoke singing fools!

Well after the evening was over and we were home, as I was lying in bed waiting to succumb to the nightmares, I couldn’t get those games out of my head. I woke up with one, single-minded purpose.

Get! That! Game!

Thankfully, they make the same games and stuff for the Xbox, except that instead of Microphones, they have the Xbox live Communicator headsets. So instead of looking like Sonny Bono & Cher singing into vocoder mics from a ’60s Playtone set, we look more like Madonna from the Like a Prayer tour.

So, in one-hundred degree weather, we got on our bikes and peddled to the local Best Buy. The rest of the weekend went like this.

Location: Den, Couch Proper… headsets on.
Song: Endless Love
Fools: Singing

Thanks Jenny, Thanks James- Addiction Achieved.

–Obvious