Grrl Power #1186 – MSTGP
Did you know that in the original Night of the Living Dead, they never use the word Zombie. They do, however, use the word Ghoul. At least, it’s said in one of the news reports. The people in the house just call the undead “those things.” It kind of bugs me that the whole genre is mislabeled, but to Sydney’s point, “Zombie” is just a better word than “Ghoul.” It was suggested in the comments that ghasts are the kind of zombies that appear in iZombie/Santa Clarita, and if they don’t get enough brains they devolve to ghouls. I couldn’t find much to support that, and D&D certainly has different ideas about ghasts, but I support the idea that the iZombie type of undead needs an agreed upon moniker.
Demon society superficially resembles something in between medieval Europe and post-apocalyptic movies. Lots of keeps and castles adorned with spikes and skulls, city states run by the baddest dude, that sort of thing. But modern demon society is actually pretty good about inter-state commerce, modern amenities, and internet-like communications. Don’t forget they’re a star faring race. They just prefer a very dire aesthetic, and keep things like satellite dishes either out of site or decorate them so they look like they’re made of bones and peeled skin. Want to get rich? Take over the contact paper industry on Infernum.
So I did rewatch Return of the Living Dead 1, 2 and 3. 1 was by far the best. Coincidentally it also had full frontal Linnea Quigley in it. If you don’t know who she is, basically she’s an 80’s scream queen who practically spent more of her screen time nude than not. LD 2 was really a waste of time. LD 3 wasn’t great, but at least it wasn’t virtually a remake of 1 minus the nudity like 2 was. I also watched Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave. It was… fine, I guess. I also watched Creepozoids, also starring Quigley. It was pretty dull. Then I watched Vamp, starring Grace Jones painted like a Zebra. It was okay. Just a “People go to place, discover vampires are a thing, people die, vampires die, the end.” flick. I also watched The Phantom Empire. I know that sounds like a Chinese Star Wars knock off, but it was a horrible, boring Roger Corman flick and I didn’t finish it. Then there was Peelers, your basic zombies vs. strippers flick. As those sorts of movies go, not too bad. I would hardly recommend it, unless you’re exactly in the mood for some gore and toplessness of moderate frequency. At some point I watched Night of the Creeps. Your basic “alien slugs turn people into zombies whose heads explode and release more slugs” movie. Honestly, it was one of the best ones of the bunch. Probably tied with RotLD1.
Though if you want the best alien slug movie, you’ve got to go with Slither. I mean, it’s got Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks, Michael Rooker, and was directed by James Gunn. If I had to pick a #2 alien slug movie, it’d be The Faculty.
I also watched (look, I watch and listen to a lot of stuff while I draw.) Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity. Actually, not too bad. Not good, certainly, but better than most of the stuff I watched since Monday. A barely Sci-fi version of The Most Dangerous Game starring blonde chicks in feathered 80’s hair and bikinis.
The July vote incentive is finally up! There was a disagreement about digitigrade and plantigrade leg configurations. What better way to resolve it than a race?
And in the Patreon variant, what better way to resolve it than a nude race? You know, to eliminate uh… wind drag I guess?
.
.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
George A Romero was rather adamant about it being Ghouls. Which makes sense if you look at the time the movie came out other movies using the word zombie in the title were referring to people under mind control or a mindless remotely controlled humunculus. It was the general public and media talking heads saying things like cannibal zombies to describe these movies that got that ball rolling. And I guess the name just sounded better to the average movie goer.
Used correctly or not, the term “zombie” was also part of the movie going lexicon long before Romero’s film. It would have been easy enough to lump them together with the other shambling undead.
“but I support the idea that the iZombie type of undead needs an agreed upon moniker.”
Same here. iZombie zombies that aren’t devolved are basically what Twilight did to Vampires, only for a different target audience, and even more so for Santa Clarita Diet, so I don’t view them as Zombies at all. But I do respect iZombie’s efforts they put in reinterpreting Zombies because they were quite creative, while SCD feels like yet another cash grab that uses a label with a huge fanbase for attention.
I think in the original iZombie comics the technical term for the intelligent zombies is “revenants”. It has been some time since I read them though…
I’ll stick with Smurfs biting each other’s tails.
I have felt that “ghouls” should be repurposed for the “fast” zombies. The ones that are actually living people, but like, rage virus or something.
those aren’t tails. Smurfs ‘tuck’.
{insane giggling}
Including Smurfette? o_O
Does that mean the other Smurfs take turns wearing the wig and dress?
Saw it noted somewhere recently that out of an entire village of Smurfs, there’s only 1 female – of any age. This raises some really disturbing logistical and cultural questions – the less we know or hypothesize about Smurf society, the better.
Well, they did kind of go through a recent near extinction event, what with being captured and regularly eaten as holiday food. (Going off the recent movies here, never watched the cartoons.) Apparently prior to that they had a better sex ratio.
Keep in mind, Smurfette was a later addition–the Smurfs existed as an entirely male society prior to her creation/adaptation (she was originally created by Gargamel, to sow dissent in the community; when she finally decides being a femme fatale isn’t for her, Papa Smurf who turns her into a ‘real’ Smurf through alchemy).
IIRC, one of the Smurfs declared, “Smurfs aren’t made, they’re smurfed”, which really doesn’t clarify how male Smurfs came into being.
If I remember the lore right, they are immortal and have NO sexual organs. And they look the way they do by design, they were created by a kindly old wizard simply because he was lonely. After he passed away the Smurfs started their village away from the wizard’s tower to protect themselves from greedy wizards that wanted to steal the magic from their bodies. Gargumel was the only one that was able to find the forest where they hang out, but not their village.
Theres actually 3.
Smurfette – made by Gargamel
Sassette (Sassy) – made by Gargamel
Grandma Smurf – NOT made by Gargamel
Wasn’t the baby Smurf also female? Not Sassy, but introduced around the same time as two or three other young male Smurfs
Don’t remember Granny Smurf at all…
Maybe they’re like clownfish. A school of clownfish consists of a sexually mature male, a sexually mature female, and 2-4 immature males. If the breeding male dies, one of the immature males matures. If the breeding female dies, one of the immature males changes into a mature female.
Clownfish can change gender at will, if there is too many of one sex, some of them change sexes. One naturalist called them “the perverts of the sea.” This guy had footage of one “excited” male trying to breed with a hermit crab… it didn’t end well.
it means they use hermaphroditic connections. so its tricky for them to face each other and smurf.
Uh, if you haven’t been paying attention, everything is racist. A couple of years ago some professor declared objectivity as racist.
The only thing I know of right now that isn’t considered racist is actual racism, which is required so they don’t call you racist.
I really, really, really, really, really, really, really, REALLY wish I were kidding, or even exaggerating.
Yup, the world is just *extra* stupid right now, which is really saying something.
Kinda like that English (as in, based in, not native to, England) ‘comedian’ who thinks racism has a distinctive smell and hates all national anthems (dude, if you hate all national anthems, does that mean you hate all nations? it’s not racist or ‘evil’ to love your country)
So the logic is that it has to be conscious to be racism, and any conscious recognition of race is automatically racism? You would deny the existence of unconscious racism, and insist that there can be no conscious effort to do something about it? The only option is to stop thinking or talking about it, and hope everyone else does the same, and nobody’s allowed to point out that it’s still occuring?
Sigh, rather like the F-bomb it is one of those words that loses its power through over use.
-shrugs- Someone saying something doesn’t make it true, as evidenced by peoples opinions on whether ‘insert social or political figure’ is doing a good job or a bad job.
As for racism, like anything, there are levels. Something can just be a little insensitive, or it can be calling for an ethnic cleansing of ‘subhumans’. Its like the difference between pulling out the milk from your refrigerator and find its gone rancid or finding that its festooned with a type A Influenza virus. Both are bad, but one may just ruin your day, which the other may make this your last day on Earth.
So very much this.
“Racism/racist” refers to a few separate things:
1: Personal, expressed bigotry. This is the most blatant and obvious sort of racism, and oddly, the least damaging overall, at least if the society the person is in has a tradition of at least giving lip-service to tolerance. They can be identified and isolated. It exists on a spectrum, ranging from holding stereotypes (some of which might even be seen in isolation as positive, such as many of the stereotypes about East Asians) to full-on racial supremacists.
2: Unconscious bias. This is common in folks who generally accept the idea that racism is bad, but really don’t want to do any work examining their own conduct. It takes a lot of different forms, and since the biases are unexpressed, usually has to be evaluated by external study over a period of time. If a teacher consistently calls on white students more than black ones, or a doctor orders more testing for white patients, that’s a solid case for unconscious bias.
3: Systemic racism. This is the ‘academic’ form of racism, and can ONLY be shown by statistical analysis. Example: There was a study of traffic stops along a particular stretch of highway; not only were black drivers stopped more often than white drivers by a good margin during the day (which could be argued away by saying that there were more black drivers on the road, or even that there was some other reason that black drivers were more likely to conduct themselves in a fashion to get pulled over), but at night, that discrepancy almost entirely disappeared. So the only real difference is that the highway patrol couldn’t see the driver, and suddenly, their stop-rates were free of bias. Other forms of systemic bias are even more insidious, such as banks that change their loan policies based on zip code (that is to say, a credit score of X gets you a loan if you live in zip code 1, but won’t be high enough in zip code 2). Since housing is so heavily segregated in many cities, this can have a dramatic impact on who has enough access to credit, or the affordability of same.
“Objectivity is racist” is a superficial understanding (or more specifically, a superficial restating, with the intent of deliberately masking his argument) of that professor’s position, BTW. Rather, his position is that many seemingly ‘fair’ concepts like objectivity and benefit of the doubt play into category 2 and 3 forms of racism, because they fail to take into account that inherent biases WILL be there to begin with.
“Systemic racism” is ill-defined bullshit. If cops stop black drivers more when they can see the’re black, that’s just regular racism of variety 1 or 2 (or something else entirely, deriving causal relations from statistics is difficult.)
Actual “systemic racism” like the zip code example, meanwhile, isn’t racism at all*. Because race doesn’t even come up in it.
*Caveat: It’s possible (but unlikely) that there’s racism of 1 or 2 motivating the policy.
> seemingly ‘fair’ concepts like objectivity and benefit of the doubt play into category 2 and 3 forms of racism, because they fail to take into account that inherent biases WILL be there to begin with.
Objectivity is by definition fair. If you see bias influencing decisions, you should strive to reach objectivity by removing the bias. Not ditch objectivity. The worst you could say would be that false objectivity is abused, but then the solution is true objectivity. Because ditching objectivity is even easier to abuse.
I don’t think anyone’s claiming that actual objectivity is racist, but that racist people claim to be objective either as a cover for their racism, or that they’re unaware of their own biases.
Systemic racism has a clear and comprehensive definition.
When racist convictions of the past (or present) become enshrined in law, or become part of the implicit (assumed without thought or consideration) practices of government or corporations, they are called ‘systemic’ (or part of the system).
A more formal definition would be: “Systemic and structural racism are forms of racism that are pervasively and deeply embedded in systems, laws, written or unwritten policies, and entrenched practices and beliefs that produce, condone, and perpetuate widespread unfair treatment and oppression of people of color”
Both examples of definitions have a clearly deliniated cause and effect, and could by no stretch of imagination be called ill-defined.
And while objectivity is in theory fair by definition, pretty much nobody is without personal biases. Which means that pretty much nobody is as objective in their opinions and reasoning as they think they are (and yes, that includes me. I am aware of that irony). It is generally very difficult to recognise your own biases because they are so central to how you think, and how you think about certain things. By extension this makes it very hard to live up to the ideal of complete objectivity.
The bank loan example is bad because it is based on statistics, not race. Race just happens to match the statistics, because being poor is being poor. Poor white districts ALSO get redlined for loans, if their repayment ratios are bad.
Poor areas are expensive to loan to. The loan amounts are usually smaller, so higher fixed costs, and the defaulting ratio is higher, which means eating more losses. The rates are there to match the costs from those areas.
When you ignore the default ratios for neighborhoods and just give everyone the same rates, you get the huge mortgage market collapse of the 00’s, when suddenly these people who were given money stop paying on it at a higher percentage rate than people who actually have good jobs. There’s a whole book about a guy who made millions betting on loan insurance and watching mortgage bonds based by zip code. When they started to default en masse, he cleaned up on the insurance payments.
You can try to narrow this down by catering to the individual and their income, but statistics, while easy to manipulate in some ways, are brutally honest and unforgiving in others. Rather than stop redlining, some banks will just completely stop loaning rather than eat the losses that will come with ‘fair treatment’. It’s a money-losing game.
It sucks, but that’s how money works for the poor, of ANY race!
“Just happens”, huh? There were no choices made that resulted in that situation, no deliberate action to produce it, it’s just the natural result. The natural result of what? Race?
I would say that the distinguishing element of structural racism is that it creates situations in which a non-racist furthers racist ends merely by participating uncritically, not out of unconscious bias, but because the system has been engineered such that neutral participation leads to racially disparate outcomes.
Racially disparate outcomes =/= racism.
Is the NBA being majority black systemic racism?
Or do you actually mean deliberately designed to keep blacks down, as your word choice of “racist ends” and “engineered” seems to imply? Because anyone who believes that should take off their tinfoil hat.
Those two definitions aren’t equivalent (not even roughly), and that’s exactly the problem. Well-defined doesn’t mean you can write down a definition that sounds reasonable in a vacuum. It means you can write down a definition that matches the usage of the term. Which you can’t, because the usage lacks consistency.
Your formal definition exemplifies the problem: It defines systemic racism as a union of two things, one of which falls under racism (defined as “forms of racism that …”), and roughly matches the informal definition (at least if we restrict “racism” to mean “racist convictions”. But that’s another problem, because “racism” is also ill-defined, and so a definition that depends on it will be as well.)
The other doesn’t.* This means when you’re talking about “systemic racism”, it isn’t clear whether you’re talking about racism. But “systemic racism” is presented as part of racism. So the definition is not only useless, but actively confusing and misleading.
*See the zip code example, which would formally fit: It’s an entrenched practice, and it’s can certainly be argued to be unfair treatment to reliable people who live in a bad neighborhood, many of whom are “people of color”. But there’s no racial component to it: the reasons for the policy have nothing to do with race, it can be implemented completely color-blind. It only has different impact to people of different races, but that’s only due to socioeconomic status being correlated with race, not anything about the policy itself. RED has nicely expanded on this.
Another huge issue is that you’re restricting it to “people of color”, which is in itself racist.
> And while objectivity is in theory fair by definition, pretty much nobody is without personal biases.
That’s exactly why objectivity is so important. Because it means taking biases out of the picture. Yes, that’s not easy. But that just means we have to try harder to strive for it.
So it seems that you have a problem with the fact that racism itself does not have a strict formal definition (more of one in the direction of ‘I know it when I see it’), but not with the concept that overt racism can become enmeshed in social and legal systems and in that way become less visible and continue to cause harm to minorities long after the general attitude of the population regarding racism has shifted from approval to overwhelming rejection.
The zip code check that banks applied, and apply to this day I might add, most definitely had a racist root.
The unspoken assumption was that people of colour were incapable of handling their own finances(*)
Banks imagined they had a financial motivation to keep people of colour from taking out loans with them as they assumed, based on nothing but racist ideas, that they were a high risk group.
The banks then used the zip code as a convenient means to separate the people of colour (who they would reject when applying for a loan) from white people (whom they would allow far greater risk indicators before rejecting them for loans).
This way the institutionalised the original racist practices and made them systemic. Conveniently also hiding the racism they casually subjected people of colour to behind a system they pretended to be ‘race neutral’ when they whole thing started out, and in the early years of the civil rights movement still was, the zip code for /black/ neighborhoods that got flagged, not the zip codes for /poor/ neighborhoods.
(* and the fact that they were poor was taken as proof for this assumption. This is to this day a very common assumption that is made about poor people that they are stupid and need somebody ‘better’ than them to make sure they do not mess up their finances. This is no longer overtly racist but it very much was so in the past).
> So it seems that you have a problem with the fact that racism itself does not have a strict formal definition (more of one in the direction of ‘I know it when I see it’)
My problem is with the fact that racism does not have a consistent definition. It doesn’t necessarily need to be formal, although as soon as there disagreement when it applies (which is true for racism), rigor becomes necessary and “I know it when I see it” insufficient.
> The zip code check that banks applied, and apply to this day I might add, most definitely had a racist root.
Possible (although it’s also possible they actually simply looked at which zip codes defaulted the most.) But as soon as the measurement stop being justified by racism, it stops being racist. Loan defaulting is very measurable, and banks will soon find out if their measures are bad, so they will change it to stop losing money.
Either it’s (still) directly motivated by racism (but it isn’t, or anti-racists could be making bank by exploiting the racist market inefficiency), or it isn’t racist (anymore). Wealth/economic reliability and racial makeup of zip codes change as well, so banks can’t just keep the original qualifiers, they have to adjust them according to their data and as soon as they do that, it’s no longer racist.
> This is no longer overtly racist but it very much was so in the past
That’s an important observation: Things can be formerly racist but no longer so. This explains why “institutionalizing racist practices” doesn’ result in racism down the line.
Whats most stupid racists claim you have heard?, for me its still “if you like watermelon and aint black you are racist”
> Whats most stupid racists claim you have heard?, for me its still “if you like watermelon and aint black you are racist”
Where did you hear that?
Maybe it’s the parts of the internet that I hang out in, but from what I’ve seen the conservative cry of “everything is racist” and “I’m being canceled because I said [thing]” and “political correctness!” are usually either wildly exaggerated or outright made up. Even when there is something to it, “being canceled” seems to usually mean one or both of:
* “being criticized by a lot of people because you said something insensitive”
* “being kicked off a social media platform because you violated their TOS, the violation often being of the ‘inciting violence’ or ‘passing disinformation that might get people killed, such as vaccine denial’.”
I hear a lot about “you can lose your job if you say [thing]” but I have yet to see such a claim that carries actual verifiable details.
Again, maybe this is simply the parts of the internet where I hang out. Can you point me to some examples?
like a lot of people I have a YouTube feed. for a group as silenced as they claim to be I hear from them a lot. I believe a reference to Princess Bride is in order.
No, see, when they threaten other people, that’s just free speech, but when someone criticizes them, that’s oppression and censorship.
That’s certainly how it works for leftists, yeah.
Oh boy, you said it! Marxism is at the root of so many of our modern problems. Race-baiting, indoctrination & dumbing down in our schools, politically correct changes to our language, government over-regulation of a supposedly free economy, the ‘climate change is all our fault’ scare, and a thousand other insidious plots are designed to make us voluntarily enslave ourselves in a Marxist “workers’ paradise”.
I think that if “divide and conquer” race-baiting had not been used to inflame wounds for over a century now, that Black culture would have merged into American culture along with Native, European, Asian, African, Mediterranean, etc. cultures without undue strife. Listen to some Jazz music, for crying out loud.
You will find comments in today’s posts touching upon all of these problems as though they are not related. Their common thread is that they are exacerbated and promoted by good, home-grown, American Marxists. It is high time that we recognized that Marxism is inimical to and incompatible with the American republic and its’ Constitution. Marxists are domestic enemies of these Unites States, and pursuit of their agenda in public office should be recognized as high crime.
(Too close to politics my posterior!)
Oh look, someone deliberately misunderstanding Marx online.
Is it a day ending in ‘y’ already?
And people are just so happy being wage slaves under capitalism!
Maybe if you want to reduce the threat of “Marxism” and its “workers’ paradise”, do something to make capitalism less repugnant.
Working hard has been a fact of life for people through all of history. People in modern capitalist societies, however, get much more wealth for their work than in any other. (Their work is also much nicer, but that’s mostly incidental to capitalism.
The issue with the worker’s paradise it’s not real. It’s a utopian dream that’s of course much better than reality. But actual attempts to implement a worker’s paradise have always ended in the workers being less wealthy and less free.
I don’t understand why people pretend that any political or economic system we’ve come up with actually holds water when put into practice. I genuinely don’t believe we’re capable of creating a system that we wouldn’t eventually figure out how to abuse and exploit. That’s just human nature – we inevitably find a way to make ourselves unhappy.
We’re too smart to be content with just living, but not smart enough to create a world we would be content with. A sad, mediocre medium.
It’s not the “working hard” that’s the problem, and it’s disingenuous to suggest that’s why people might prefer an alternative to capitalism. Or rather, the issue with capitalism is that wealth is distributed in inverse proportion to how hard people work, because capitalism rewards ownership, not labor.
What people want is to not feel abused, not feel like their lives are at the whims of an employer. They want control over their own lives.
@ChaosAndBunnies: Even if it’s impossible to create a system that can’t be abused and exploited doesn’t mean there isn’t any variation in how easy it is to exploit, and thus it is not a hopeless endeavor to pursue a system more resistant to exploitation.
@Torabi: Yes, working is the “problem”. What limits people control over their lives is that they are forced to work for a living. But every system does that, and capitalism has created unprecedented wealth that made the rewards much better and generated the surplus to support to some degree people who don’t work (unemployed, disabled, retired).
“At the whims of an employer”? Have you heard of labor laws? Of job markets? And even ideal communism demands “according to his abilities” from everyone, and in reality of course you’ll be at the whim of a party apparatchik.
> Or rather, the issue with capitalism is that wealth is distributed in inverse proportion to how hard people work, because capitalism rewards ownership, not labor.
Capitalism rewards hard work, it just rewards productive work even more, as it should be. Rewarding ownership is merely a side effect of very useful policies, and it doesn’t harm you.
Maybe it was different in Marx’ time, but Marx is long dead.
The people who make the most money in our society are the people who do the least meaningful work. They manipulate the financial system, and create no value whatsoever.
Cite your source.
Dozens of books and decades of self-study, but too many to hunt & peck here. Enough years under my belt to see Marxism in action.
I don’t single out Karl Marx however. But the manifesto defined by he and Engels was a fundamental milestone in the development of “leftist” ideologies. There are many terms for variations, so I use the single term “Marxism” here to refer to all of them. For some of the variations see “Liberal Fascism”, shiny red cover and a yellow smiley face with a Hitler mustache.
I reached my conclusion as described in the first post during Obama’s first term as President. Sean Hannity seemed to be the only media vetting Obama’s background, and so I figured him for a communist before he was elected.
So now I am curious. How will you react to my revealing that I am a “talk radio” listener?
Btw, “Talk Radio” was perhaps my favorite sitcom. It was sad when the actor who played Bill McNeil was shot to death. The series died with him.
we welcome our new opinion writer.
Citing Sean Hannity as a source for anything seems about as smart as citing Baron Munchausen.
Well, for almost any group that leans to extremes. Be it political (there are more then two possibilities), religious extremes, sport or music fans or anything else that goes to extremes. Not the moderate portion of any of those.
Every extreme opinion is convinced to be the truth and needs to be told. Any criticism is an attempt to shut them down.
Really? It’s those on the right that are constantly threatening to rely on “second amendment solutions” if they don’t get their way.
It is both. And many more.
Those on the left simply want to be able to participate in society as equals, without being killed, punished, threatened, or denied basic services simply because of who and what they are. Those on the right believe the most important right is the ability to coerce other people into compliance through violence or social pressure. They want everyone to be carbon-copy clones, neatly sorted into two highly structured social categories.
Now, see, this is utter crap, because that is not what the Right considers most important at all. I can turn that statement right on its head immediately, and be just as truthful:
Those on the left want everyone to see the world their way, and only their way, and if you are out of step you are a hateful bigot and racist and should be punished. Everyone should be absolutely equal, and it doesn’t matter how hard they work or don’t.
Those on the right simply want everyone to get along, live and let live, and if you don’t mess with me, I won’t mess with you. They want everyone to be rewarded for the work they do fairly, with upwards mobility to those who work more or get lucky.
See how that’s done?
You can say that, but it doesn’t correspond with reality. How do you explain the wave of laws targeting people who do not conform on matters of sex and gender? That’s not “live and let live”.
Because that’s the left doing it as much as the right? Seriously, what kind of argument is that? They both have different opinions on the matter and go after it from their own angles.
What “wave of laws” exactly? Do you perhaps mean laws recently passed to protect women in sports from males misrepresenting their physiology to steal the first place awards in women’s sports? And maybe trying to get into the ladies’ locker rooms too?
Much of this problem goes back to the Kinsey Report. Kinsey was a pervert, and his so-called report was basically propaganda designed to convince Americans that their neighbors were already committing adultery, fornication, and perversions, so they were missing out because ‘everybody is doing it’. Since then the communists have kept pushing the program, so here we are. Why? I think it has been to distract us from their infiltration of our schools, et.al., and indoctrinate our children into communism.
I read somewhere that humans have the least genetic diversity of any species on the planet, something about mitochondria DNA indicating a recent bottleneck.
Least? Unlikely. There are several species who got even closer to extinction even more recently. Google claims the record holder is some Island Fox, but I suspect several animals on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck trump it … say, golden hamster, vast majority of domesticated hamsters descended from a single litter found in the Syrian desert around 1930, or black robin – All of the surviving black robins are descended from single female named “Old Blue”, giving little genetic variation among the population and creating the most extreme population bottleneck possible.
Way below average, yes.
The cavendish banana got so bad that it’s no longer able to reproduce normally and is instead propagated exclusively via transplanted clones. The entire species is only still alive because we’re keeping it on functional life support. So yeah, I’d say they’d definitely beat us if we’re competing for low genetic diversity.
While cavendish banana has extremely low genetic diversity, I think it’s still technically part of the same SPECIES as the original wild banana, which still exists and is not THAT bad in genetic diversity.
Among the big cats I think it is leopards that fall on this list. It has been a long time since my genetics course but I think they were down to a dozen or so individuals.
Cheetahs have famously low levels of genetic variation, or you may be thinking about Tsushima leopard cat …
Yeah, wasn’t zombie used as a term for some sort of undead voodoo creature that obeyed orders in the early days? Seems like I remember that’s how the term was used before. Kolchak: the night stalker, S1 Episode 2: Zombie, is a good example.
Before American pop culture ran away with the concept zombies weren’t even (un)dead.
If you tee’ed off the wrong practisioner (or you were excessively greedy or generally disruptive) you could be punished by having your will being taken away from you. After which you would be forced to work for free in the fields of the people you had wronged.
Basically a cautionary tale meant to keep the community reasonably in line.
Stories usually ended with the wrongdoer returning home, years older and with no memories of what he had done all that time (but with the physical evidence on his body of years of hard labour).
This got sensationalised by writers and visitors (what passed for tourists back then) where the victom was not simply drugged into obedience but killed and reanimated instead. Clearly these embellishments did not have the lesson at the end where the troublemaker returned home wiser and properly repentant of his earlier actions.
But these stories did resonate a lot better with the western (American) audience and over not so many years zombies became the shambling corpses with a predilection for brains that we hate and love to mow down by the thousands.
Ghouls of course are from an entirely different (Arabic) demonology and historically vampires were monstrous bloated corpses that had more in common with ghouls than with the sparkly seductive pretty boys that Stoker set them on the path to become.
How can they return ‘wiser and properly repentant’ if they have no memory of the years they were ‘missing’?
Also, do not blame Stoker (or even Rice) for the sparkly fuckers, that’s entirely on that hackshit bitch who simply wanted to write a porn fetish story for the masses
I will not pretend that morality tales need to make logical sense. They just need to scare the plebs into behaving as they are told to. (mind, encouraging people to be social in their community is a pretty good thing, and it is sad to realise that we need tales like these to make sure people actuall behave like that).
Good thing then that I did not say that Stoker was responsible for the infestation of sparkly vampires. All I said was that by prettying up Dracula he started vampires on the path that would ultimately lead to said sparkles.
(also, Stoker’s tale was 50% thriller and 50% tittilation of the very sensitive victorian era senses. Stoker’s Dracula had brides for much the same reason Greek mythology had nymphs ;) That does not make it a bad story by any stretch of imagination, but we should understand that the story was as naughty as the era in which it was written allowed.)
I blame Joss Whedon for Twilight. Sparkly daywalkers with magic rings, hot demonic lesbians, necrophilic cheerleaders, the whole lot of it. He is to blame.
“Warm Bodies”, “Shaun of the Dead”…
I prefer to think of the type of undead in iZombe/Santa Clarita as ‘crappy actors’.
The original stories around zombies say they were undead servants that followed the orders of the one who raised them, just like parfait says here. nothing about their bite being infectious or them eating brains.
there’s even some speculation that those stories were based on a real ritual where practitioners used pufferfish poison to “kill” a target, (actually leaving them comatose and letting them become brain damaged just enough that they would act compliant) before waking them up and giving the impression they were returned from the dead. Nothing supernatural at all.
When I first heard that idea I dismissed it thinking no one would be cruel enough to do that, not to mention it would likely have a very low survival rate leaving multiple dead for just one success. But then I started reading history…. Yeah I was naive back then.
The idea of lobotomizing people into mindlessly compliant slaves… its disgusting, immoral, terrifying and exactly the sort of thing people would have tried, the only reason I doubt it ever happened is because people would still be doing it if it worked.
unrelated to the above but this needs one more person to get the full MST3k effect.
Have you looked at the state of the world lately? People are being brainwashed into mindless, compliant, rage-machines. The drug is social media and propaganda, which spreads quite easily. Harvesting sufficient pufferfish poison would be a lot harder.
People have been conditioned to believe whatever they’re told. The vast majority of “The People” these days are little more than zombies, getting their orders from the mainstream media.
I mean think about it…tell them that a trace gas composing 0.05% of the atmosphere that is nonetheless VITAL to life on Earth is dangerous, and they’ll rabidly fight anyone who disagrees.
Getting a little too close to politics.
Every substance has a concentration where it becomes lethal, or at least inimical to life, even water and oxygen. The substances we call poisonous have a very low concetration where they already become deadly while those we call harmless have that threshold at a much higher concentration. Saying ‘it is only 0.05% is meaningless and actually an example of the ‘Tiny Percentage Fallacy’.
The reason why (climate) scientists have been raising the alarm over the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has nothing to with toxicity. The effect of CO2 in the atmosphere has been theoretically predicted and experimentally confirmed. It is quite clear, to scientists in the field, what is happening, and why even a tiny increase in the concentration has an outsized effect (it is a fulcrum effect not a one on one linear increase).
The simplified reason for the danger of CO2 (among several other gasses) is that they more easily absorb photons with the infrared (heat) energy level. This puts an electron in a higher orbit and after a short time that electron falls back to its normal orbit and releases a photon again. The photon is relased in a random direction, including back down. The end result of this is that the infrared radiation takes longer to escape from earth the higher the concentration of CO2 (or water!) in the atmosphere.
The Earth receives a fairly constant amount of energy each day in the form of sunlight (the effect of the 11 year cycle is a few percent of the daily energy, not enough difference to build up during the 11 year cycle). This energy arrives in the form of visible light which is turned into infrared light when it hits the surface of the planet (and lots of UV but that is blocked high up in the atmosphere, well above the layer where CO2, CH4 and H2O are commonly found, and had no meaningful effect on the energy equilibrium). To maintain a constant temperature (on average over the days and years), all that infrared light must be emitted into space in the same time that the solar energry hits the planet. If not the planet will heat up (higher energy levels in the infrared radiations allows to get rid of the energy more quickly), or it will cool down if the radiation exceeds the incoming energy (which is why you experience shade as cooler than sunlit, even though the air temperature is the same in both places).
Now if the infrared photons need more time to escape into space, because of that additional CO2 absorbing them and redirecting them away from space, then the amount of sunlight hitting the surface increases relative to the amount of energy escaping during the same time. In other words, the planet warms up.
The amount by which it warms up is not linearly related to the concentration of CO2. Twice the CO2 increases the temperature by far more than a factor 2.
On top of that, many of the Earth’s ecosystems can absorb only tiny differences in temperature (e.g. coral reefs will start to quickly die off if the water temperature rises a small amount). Higher temperature also mean higher evaporation, which is bad for trees and significanly increases both the risk and severity of nature fires. These and other effects can be observed and quantified with the average temperature rising by as little as 0.5C We already are will above 1C now and rapidly homing in on 1.5C global average temperature rise. And it is not as if both the highest and lowest temperatures increase by that amount, but rather the extremes get much further apart while the average increases by that 1 to 1.5 degrees. That is why we had months long extreme heat in parts of the USA in the summer and why southern Europe experienced temperatures until now considered impossible, while at the same time we get more severe snowstorms in winter.
Finally, while it is impossible to attribute any single weather event to climate change, the increase of number and severity of such events closely match what the climate models predict for current average temperatures and the number of extreme weather events has now grown so much that it is ludicrous, statistically speaking, to assume they may still be covered by normal weather variability.
And it does not need a lot more CO2 than what was the pre-industrial baseline, to set off this process because it is all about the average time a infrared light photon takes to escape the earth’s atmosphere and even a little higher concentration will redirect them to take a longer path through the atmosphere. The longer the path the higher the chance it gets redirected a second, third and so on time. If we would double that time it means twice as much sunlight hits the planet before the photon can escape, and the new equilibrium temperature would be double (not double what it is now as there are other mechanisms in place and CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, but double from the baseline what it would be without CO2 in the atmosphere).
I strongly recommend you to listen to people who actually studied climate. There are many clips you can find on youtube that explain this process much better than I can, and who can explain to you why the increase from 300 to 400 ppm is an existential threat to us if we don’t curb our excesses.
(p.s. CO2 is not essential for life. It is a waste product that can be utilised and has a greenhouse effect that makes the planet several degrees warmer than it would otherwise be. It also is so sensitive that it can be used by natural feedback mechanisms to keep the temperature within narrow bounds. Without it the planet would be cooler and likely to swing more between extremes but it would hardly be devoid of life)
I beg to differ. No plants can grow without CO2. It Is absolutely vital to life on Earth. And it’s dangerously low to begin with. (It used to be nearly 20% of the atmosphere, back when plants first evolved and the Earth was plenty cool for life to evolve, and it’s now 0.05% of the atmosphere, even WITH human contributions. Plants will start to die at 0.03% due to a lack of CO2.
Actual Climatologists HAVE been interviewed, and expressed their actual data to Channel 4 in Britain, where the documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle” was the result. And the only error anyone was ever able to find in that film was that the artist used a superscript to illustrate CO2 instead of a subscript. (Yeah, the Artist wasn’t a chemist, and that was their big “Refutation” of the illustration of how the Carbon Cycle works.
You know, the Carbon Cycle? an actual scientific fact that the “Warmies” would have you ignorant of? CO2 is a natural part of the life cycle of the planet, not “Pollution” – If you want less CO2, you could always outlaw the Catalytic Converter, which was invented to reduce CO in automobile exhaust by turning it into CO2. THEN you can talk about pollution.
And you’re absolutely right. the whole Global Warming scare is POLITICAL, not Scientific. the United Nations is a political entity, not a scientific one. The lead author on their own report, the IPCC report that keeps getting waved around, had to SUE to get his name OFF the author list, because his scientific result (That humans have little or no impact on the climate) was taken out of the report when it was published.
And that makes it a perfect example of just how many zombies are out there chanting the mantra “Follow the Science” when what they’re actually following is the POLITICS.
Dabbler and Deus can tell you, that if you mix some truth with your lies you can fool more people. And stage magicians always try to distract your eyes from what they are really doing. Hence the cloud of experimental and modelled details to obscure the fundamental ice age vs. global warming vs. climate change fraud. But “climate experts” wouldn’t lie, would they?
Fortunately there is no concensus in climate research. In a used book store, I found a long-titled book that began with “Global Warming, Every 2500 years…”, but the Sun only has one 11 year cycle, right? This book cites research evidence that corresponds to available historic records for a long, variable, solar cycle of 2500 +/- 1000 years, of several degrees Celcius in amplitude. Remember the numerous instances of human mass migration out of the middle of Eurasia over millenia of recorded history. If conditions there were good enough for large populations to grow, then why would they keep leaving home again and again? Did the weather change? Were they beginning to starve?
Then there is all that heat, from visible light. What about the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum? It is no coincidence that the Northern and Southern Lights appear where the ozone holes are, i.e. at the weak points in the Van Allen Belts. And the Sun is far from the only star in the sky. Real scientists have to take all of these things into account.
How are the temperatures on the other planets? Not changing any more than they should be compared to the Earth’s temperature, from what I hear. And they all radiate heat in excess of energy added to them by the sun, enough to inspire crackpot books about suspicious rock formations on Mars and special angles that reveal weird, suppressed science. Alien ruins on Mars? Why not?
Consider the tides here on Earth, both Lunar ans Solar tides. They are caused by the Earth’s rotation in the gravitational fields of the Sun and Moon. But doesn’t that only affect the oceans? Don’t be silly, gravity is mysteriously linked to the presence of matter, regardless of its’ state. Think about atmospheric tides the next time you look at the weather forecast. Why do the Earth’s tectonic plates keep grinding against each other, producing earthquakes and volcanoes? Surely the Sun’s gravity is not strong enough to bend the very Earth under our feet? Not regularly, not daily?! Why do you think the Earth’s mantle is still molten lava after billions of years? Now take some modelling clay…
Take modelling clay, cool and stiff, and mush it around. Keep at it and roll it into a ball between your hands. Eventually it warms up and becomes easier to work. How did it get warm? Whoever said “friction” deserves a cookie! :) Now picture that ball of clay as the Earth, and your hands represent the mighty gravitational force of the Sun. The Earth’s momentum keeps it rotating in that gravity field, producing heat from friction as the molecules of clay mush against each other. Every “body” in the universe that rotates relative to the rest is subject to the net gravity of all the rest together (Mars, Jupiter, everything). (Why is Mars’ core solid? Farther from the sun, thinner atmosphere…) Everywhere in the universe planets are generating internal heat, like they were inside a microwave oven. Planets are large enough to note that they are not warped uniformly, and Earth’s orbit is not perfectly circular, so the quantity of additional heat generated in different parts of the planet over time is also variable. I have not heard of any climate scientist trying to take the effects of gravity into account. Perhaps an astronomer, physicist, or cosmologist?
But “climate experts” only want us to look at whatever small pieces of actual science they can string together to make it look as if their computer models fit with cherry-picked historic data, while still launching into frightening predictions of a terrible future. We are all supposed to suffer and die, and it will all be our own fault, if we do not submit to their politcal agenda. Oh, wait, that was going to happen anyway. Death and taxes.
While I’m at it, I read another book refuting “peak oil”. They observed that hydrocarbons are found in the spectra of bodies all over the sky. Then they wondered just how many dinosaurs died out in space to produce all of those fossil fuels… Inspirational, isn’t it? So I developed my own pet theory of why we must stop drilling for oil, to avert a disaster even more imminent than climate change! Do you realize that once we have sucked enough oil out of the planet that the bearings will seize up? The Earth’s rotation will grind to a halt, and we will all be thrown off into space! Take that, climate-changers!
Lest I unduly alarm you, that no peak oil book also said that Stalin dictated that he didn’t care if the geologists said there was no oil there, just keep drilling until you find it. Stalin revolutionized oil drilling (ba-dump-bump!). If oil is just about everywhere underground, did it all come from dinosaurs? Nah. Turns out some planckton leave tiny fossil skeletons in the oil, so that’s how it got to be called “fossil fuel”. But planckton lived in the oceans, including where they used to be. Remember those tectonic plates? What do the oceans conceal? Subduction zones, right the first time! :) Everything that dies or gets excreted in the ocean will eventually settle to the bottom, and over time that biomass will be subducted under the continental plates. Eventually it transforms into hydrocarbon fuels, and if we learn just how that happens, we should be able to calculate the daily rate at which the Earth produces hydrocarbon fuels. As long as we don’t use more per day than that, we will NEVER run out of coal, oil, and natural gas!
So: do you really want to trust people who are trying to scare you into doing what they want you to do?
Your arguments boil down to a conspiracy theory of ‘They’ do not want you to know this.
The book you refer to, as well as the conjecture behind it (it never rose to the level of hypothesis never mind to the level of theory) has been reviewed and found severely lacking. Nobody is denying the Bond cycles and they were documented well before dr Bond wrote his paper about them. Most notably the potential effect of them on the total radiation was too small for any meaningful long term effect on their own. At best they could slightly increase or decrease a trend caused by other heating/cooling mechanisms.
The sun emits most of its light in certain wave lengths (and most of its energy as neutrino particles that do not interact with the earth). While it emits in almost all of the electromagnitic spectrum, the majority of it is in the infrared and ultra violet part of the spectrum. The earth’s atmosphere however prevents most of that light from reaching the surface and as such it does not contribute to the surface temperature, weather or climate. Visible light can travel through the atmosphere mostly unhindered (except for a few wave lengths that cause the sky to appear blue to us) and is the primary energy source of the planet.
Other stars are very VERY far away, and the energy the earth receives from them drops with the square of the distance. If you have a sufficiently sensitive thermometer you can measure that amount of heat, that is what the JWST is after all a giant infrared, ie. heat, detector. But the size of these distant suns in steradians and the extreme weakening of their light before it reaches Earth means that even the 300 million stars in the milky way do not add up to any meaningful fraction of the energy the Earth receives from the Sun. Not to mention that it would be a constant amount anyway so it has no bearing on the rising global average temperature.
The Moon experiences a day/night temperature difference of 250C, and this is pretty much entirely due to the infrared radiation it receives from the Sun. When planets have an atmosphere that dampens the differences between the extreme. It also tends to cause a higher average temperature than the black body temperature would be for a rocky body at that position in the solar system. Not sure what you are trying to argue here but if it is the claim that other planets in the solar system have experienced similar rising average temperatures as Earth over the past 100 years, that story has been debunked very thoroughly (and it never was more than somebody making an unasserted claim in a social media post that a lot of people desperately wanted to be true).
The Earth core is big, it is really mindbogglingly huge. It is also made out of metals and was heated up to a melting point when huge chunks of accreting matter kept slamming into it at orbital speeds. The lighter elements linke silicon and oxygen collected in thick layers over the molten core, insulating it so it could not easily shed all that heat. Add in a huge amount of radioactive isotopes that where heavier than all that nickel-iron still and thus tended to collect in the middle. All that kept decaying and releasing immense amounts of heat (after all, just a handful of fuel rods in a nuclear reactor can easily get hot enough to melt rock. Imagine how much time it takes for a million tons of fissile material, and how some of the longest lived isotopes have not gone through all that many half-life cycles. That’s a lot of heat trapped under a couple of hundred kilometers of matter that is not exactly a great heat conductor.
The sun and the moon (and jupiter) do create a small amount of tidal friction on the earth but it is not enough to create a lot of heat the core of the planet (and the moon is by now also far enough away even if it may have contributed some shortly after it was formed).
Climate scientists do not model for the tidal heating of the earth’s core because it is both small and has no effect on weather or cliimate. For much the same reason that they do not take the centrifugal force of earth’s rotation into account.
Not sure what the points of the tangent into fossil fuels being more ubiquitous than thought in the 1980s so I will ignore that (for now).
Aye, not an expert.
That whole ‘organic bits fall to the ocean floor and eventually get turned into oil’ is also completely wrong.
Oil formed because at one point in earth’s history, there was no bacteria that broke down WOOD. Not animals. WOOD.
So forests grew up, died, fell on top of one another, and kept doing that, never decaying, because there was nothing out there that ate cellulose.
Over time this mass compressed, liquified, was reduced to basics, millions of tons of trees growing and dying atop one another in a mass grave.
Oil is the cemeteries of a billion years of dead forests.
Nowadays, we DO have bacteria that eats away wood. There is no build-up of oil. Living creatures are completely broken down by bacteria until all the organic material is basically gone, and what you have left are bones, which are basically calcium deposits that don’t become oil in the slightest.
So, no, there IS no new oil being produced by nature. It has evolved far past that point. Indeed, one very, very common disaster scenario is a strain of E.Coli developing that can finally digest oil, it getting loose, and eating away our entire hydrocarbon dependent technology!
Water is vital to life on earth; too much of it will kill you. Too much oxygen will kill you. Too much direct, unfiltered sunlight will kill you. The danger isn’t in the substance, it’s in the imbalance, because evolution fills the space it’s given to work with; change that space at faster than geologic time-scales, and the adaptation made to accommodate one set of circumstances will prove detrimental in the new one.
Oxygen actually already caused one of biggest mass extinction effects on Earth, back when it first appeared. And there are signs that aging is basically slow oxygen poisoning.
You can’t win for losin’, and you can’t live for dyin’!
Death & taxes, all over again!
Gasp! I can’t breathe! Where are my cigarettes?
that’ll be $30 sir
The vast majority of people consuming mainstream media are able to disagree with each other. It’s the “Do your own research” people following alternative media who become incensed, mindless zombies, ready to kill or sacrifice themselves at their leader’s command.
You really hate people who think for themselves, don’t you?
I hate people who can’t have an intelligent, reasonable discussion, whether they agree or disagree with me. People who just repeat talking points that someone else has given them aren’t thinking for themselves.
No, they hate people who think differently
Honestly, “we do not do that but the others do” defenses have a very low likelihood of being true. Some human behaviours are widespread, including propensity to violence against ideological or cultural outgroups; logical fallacies; confirmation bias. It would be exceptionally strange that the percentage of people consuming mainstream media and people doing their own research (compared to totality of the respective group) exhibiting these behaviours were different.
To say nothing of the fact that there might be a significant overlap between the two “groups”: people can do both. In fact, that seems sensible.
It always seemed kind of funny, kind of sad to me when people denounce ideological opponents for reprehensible behaviour, and behave exactly the same as them, just with a different target, and are completely unable to notice that.
Thank you, Dellis.
Part of learning to think for yourself is learning to recognize when you are playing for a different team, but using the same methods. Your arguments won’t convince anyone else who notices that.
You also have to learn how to deprogram yourself and decide what is worth keeping, all part of growing up.
There’s people doing their own research, and then there’s the “Do your own research” crowd. They are not the same thing.
But yes, humans are pretty uniformly terrible, regardless of which side they stand on, because most of them did not reason their way into picking a side, and don’t really understand or believe in anything.
Y’know, I’m with you on the “people can be terrible” thing.
But what anybody ELSE does, doesn’t absolve anyone of personal responsibility for not being terrible. When I see someone saying “it’s okay for us to be terrible because (whoever we oppose) is also terrible” I’m usually listening to someone making excuses for the actions of those on the American Political Right.
I contend that allowing that belief to become an excuse for terrible actions, violates the conditions that otherwise make it valid. Because taking that excuse actively makes people WORSE than the people who continue to accept that their responsibility for refusing to be terrible is personal.
A prime example of the kind of shit this excuse gets trotted out for is this: according to arrests for the last fifteen years, over 95% of mass shooters who have political motivations are on the right. There was only one exception, when some leftie went and shot at Republican congress members at a baseball game. During the same period, over 30 mass shooters were motivated by right-wing politics.
This is because lefties by and large DON’T believe that political violence on the right excuses them from personal responsibility for their actions or the requirements of personal honor, and still treat not being terrible people as a personal choice because they believe that they CAN choose to be otherwise.
Which is exactly the sort of value that used to be “Conservative” back when “conservative” meant something.
“People are being brainwashed into mindless, compliant, rage-machines.”
That’s exactly the message of the 2022 song “Zombified” by the group Falling In Reverse. The lyrics are a pretty good take on the topic, and it’s a really banging song.
People still doing that, Voudou (or however it’s properly spelt, not ‘voodoo’) is a religious practice that dates back at least a couple hundred years
The word existed before anybody was arguing about how to spell it. I don’t think it’s ever yet had just a single standard spelling.
My takeaway from this is that demons have better city planning. No minimum parking laws, probably much less reliance on automotive transport to begin with and better zoning laws across the board.
I think most demons just fly or teleport. Making the parking problem non-existent.
… probably lower population density.
Oh my GOSH! Sidney! How can you be so insentive to the Glabrezu population? Zabzorbu is my neighbor and she LOVES gardening her petunias!
Zabzorbu: Um, we actually prefer “Infernal-American”! My interests also include needlework, impaling small creatures on my claws, and and being Brood-mother for our local chapter of Y Demon Guides!
And born from the Sins of Americans would definitely qualify as a native of America, too!
I don’t think the zombies from Izombie or any other reimaging of zombies needs a new name. They’re just that, a new twist in the genre or race.
Or are we gonna search new names for any kind of vampire?
There are vampires resistant to solar light, other sparkle under it. Others can’t cross mass of water or need to ask permision to enter an habited home. Others are repeled by objects of faith. Weakness to garlic or silver… and a long long etc.
Do any of those variants need an specific name?
This makes me remember how shocked my cousin was with the IZombie variant of zombie. He is so used to the shoot first and don’t ask questions of the genre that a sentient and good nature zombie broke his world.
Already happened, vampires that can withstand solar radiation are Daywalkers and the ones that emit sparkles are sparklepires. I think the other limitations listed are common to all of them.
I’ve heard that the Eskimoes have like 17 words for different types of snow. Even a fictional concept like undeath can reach a critcal mass of variations so that people with time on their hands will coin new words to describe it.
Its actually 40-50! A mere 17, posh! Us barbarians have no proper appreciation for snow!
AD&D had Animated Skeletons and Zombies as being effectively magical automata. It was Ghouls that attacked the living as a food source
Apparently Suburbia is another fault that Demons don’t possess.
Now, I have to wonder if they even have the evil known as Euclidean Zoning.
Or single-exit neighborhoods with no exception for pedestrians and bicyclists.
Or HOA’s with nitpicky, power-tripping, sometimes embezzling, board members.
If they don’t have any of those things either, I’m going to have to demand that they forfeit their Evil card.
There is evil, and then there is HOAzi’s
Having worked with local government and interfaced with the public during planning, I’m now envisioning a horde of HOAzi members in black socks and sandals protesting new infrastructure in the next subdivision and shouting NIMBY slogans at the local zoning meetings. If anything, I’m having to draw from real-life experiences to imagine sufficiently evil and angry demons.
And here, I thought that was a portmanteau of HOA and, …the WWII bad guys, not HOA and some name from the DND Monster Manual.
It should be brown socks, over the calf and with patterning running up the sides and around the tops, and patent leather sandals.
“Karens” and HOA’s go hand in hand, anytime you give a “Karen” the tiniest smidge of power, they think they control the world. Just go to the DMV or the building commission if you don’t believe me. The HOA is them in their natural habitat.
You were correct in your original thought
Excellent suggestion, SeanR. We should get the Karenzi’s into uniform, so that they will be more easily identifiable from a distance!
Actual zombie movie: Wes Craven’s “The Serpent and the Rainbow”, starring, I think, Buill Pullman, about the Haitian Voudon practice some have alluded to.
Big fan of “Night of the Creeps”. It’s set at Corman University, and characters are all named after horror directors: Chris Romero, J.C. Hooper, Ray Cameron, Cynthia Cronenberg, etc. Makes for a great double feature with “Night of the Comet”, another zombie-adjacent movie.
Pre-NotLD, zombies in movies were usually mindless slaves created by some kind of drug. “White Zombie” (1932) is probably the earliest example.
Honestly expected (hoped?) that Parf would have said the biggest difference was… demons were more honest (or is that devils who never lie?)
Yeah, it’s the devils who never lie, but lawyer you literally to death.
I was really hoping for an Antler Guy cameo toward the end there. Look up Antler Guy and Neighbor Steve if you want more stories about when demons do have suburbs.
The only reason why ‘zombie’ sounds ‘cooler’ than ‘ghoul’ is the same reason why most people have heard of VHS and think Betamax is… (can’t think of anything stupid people might think it is)- VHS and zombies had the betterer PR team (by the way, Betamax was the superior system and was still being used in news studios long after VHS died out as home entertainment)
What hurt Betamax in the format wars was Sony’s insistence on keeping it a closed, proprietary system. JVC allowed VHS to be adopted and manufactured by multiple manufacturers. Market saturation of VHS over Betamax won that war.
If summoning normally requires blood and demon society uses magic as a substitute for technology I don’t find it surprising everything is bonelike.
They probably have to make all magic objects out of the skulls of their enemies.
To be fair, most of Earth doesn’t have ‘murica’s suburbs either. From an outside perspective it feels very weird to have huge areas where there’s nothing else to do than “be at home”. Not even restaurants or convenience stores around…
To be fair, most of America doesn’t have ‘murica’s suburbs either, and places that do, call them ‘housing estates’ or ‘tenement blocks’
There are probably dissertations on the subject but I would bet that it is partly due to the fact that North America has room to be suburb friendly and it had a huge auto industry that needed to sell lots of cars in the post WWII years. Prior to WWII most people lived within walking distance of most of services that provided their daily needs or you only went into town once a week. You can still see the ghost of this in the older inner cities that still have corner markets and in small towns that haven’t been swallowed up by suburbs. Suburbs would have begun with municipal train services but it’s the automobile that really made them possible.
I think a lot of people who happen to like urban life tend to discount the extent to which a good fraction of the population LIKE suburbs. Having enough land that you can have a bit of privacy in your backyard, do a bit of gardening, the traffic isn’t scary, but the population is dense enough for amenities like sewers and city water… It really does meet the desires of a lot of people.
Kind of hits the sweet spot for density for many folks.
Suburbs totally began with trains in many areas, however nearly all light passenger rail projects were horrible money sinks even without the automobile. The economics of building routes with sufficient ridership meant that the only profitable lines were those connecting directly to the downtown work areas (a self-perpetuating issue tied to raising the land values once built), so travel directly between outlying areas was impossible. Which contributed heavily to the need for a car to do anything but go to the office, and once most people have a car they won’t take the rail anymore even for trips where it would work due to the extra time* and inconvenience of working around the train schedule.
And once a (relatively small) critical mass of residents have a car, adequately funded and distributed rail (and bus) systems are doomed, even with heavy subsidies propping them up.
* Anecdotally, I lived in a city where I had to commute with rail lines and a bus system that connected me from 1 block away my house to 1 block from work on the opposite end of the metro area. Almost a straight line from A to B, on paper it was noticeably shorter than the route I had to drive. I tried it only twice to see if I could work on the journey (nope) – with a single transfer, a very short wait for the bus, and dozens of stops, it took me 75 minutes one way on hard seats vs 35 by car. Impossible to pick the train over the car – essentially equal cost of pass vs fuel/maintenance/ownership, far more comfort and total control of what I listened to, and saved me over an hour a day.
What this ignores is the fact that the suburbs are only able to grow past the ‘bedroom community’ stage by virtue of an absurdly heavily subsidized road system. FREX: Illinois currently collects roughly $212 million in gas tax revenue. It also collects about $1.4 billion through tolls and “recovery” (meaning fines on unpaid tolls). So call it $1.6 billion total extracted from drivers directly.
But total expenditures on roads and bridges for the state is around $4.6 billion in the most recent budget (and that’s just state roads, and bridges in general). So for every dollar contributed directly by drivers, 2 more are extracted from some other tax. If folks were paying three times the current gas tax and toll rates, I bet you’d find a MASSIVE shift to support for light rail, and outlying ‘burbs, especially, would have their property values hacked down.
this goes back to the sad truth, single family homes are not financially viable for the communities they are in. never mind environmental the infrastructure to support single family homes generally costs more than the homes can generate in tax revenue. this is why there are so many HOAs the builders use them as a vehicle to pay for the infrastructure they had to build to create the subdivision since the towns cannot afford to provide it for them anymore.
we need better building codes to make multifamily housing more private and to encourage denser forms of development.
You had better first ask what is presently being encouraged by myriad government regulations, before adding more regulations. Maybe it would be easier to remove some regulations. That is the only way to find out what current technology actually encourages.
be more specific on the regulations you want to see gone. the people libertarians elect always seem to change the regulations to empower monopoly or oligarchy. besides… I did comment about some regulations that are creating this mess.
This is adjacent to one of my personal peeves, regulation for the sake of being seen to do something. The worst offenders in my opinion are government officials who attempt to regulate increasingly trivial things rather than admitting that the real solution is big, expensive and inconvenient. I think this exists in most levels of government/management. Even as a low level manager in a state mental health system (I had about 90 minions) there pressure was don’t spend any money but look busy and pad your accomplishments. I cant claim to have been more than just an average manager but a big chunk of my first year in the job was just cleaning up 20 years worth of busy work.
In response to Palmvos, I suspect the reason that Libertarians end up electing oligarchy friendly candidates is that those are the people who are getting the most campaign funding. Personally I am a big fan of strictly limiting campaign spending.
I would say the ‘time waster’ regulations are a small section of the regulations. a much larger section are the ones written in blood such as the regulations concerning building structure and ropes for lifting. another large section are regulations built to protect businesses or business models an example here are the various states where by law, cars have to be sold through dealerships. most of the regulations you describe are kneejerk overreactions which isn’t even primarily the province of bureaucrats, that’s politicians and the body politic.
Oh yeah, my favorite example of that is turning the FAA loose on model airplanes in response to the drone fad. The media exploited an largely imaginary risk for ratings and somebody saw an opportunity to say ‘Look how we are making you safe”. I don’t have a problem with regulating the commercial use of drones but the FCC already had applicable regulations in place.
I’m torn on the drone regulation. Yes the FCC’s domain over the signal frequency bands covers a lot of the need, but physical objects moving through the air is a different class of issue than all their other concerns. Airborne hazards definitely need coordination anywhere near the >5200 public airports where human pilots and passengers are at risk if some random drone pilot decides to shoot a closeup of an incoming plane’s intake, so the FAA needs to be involved there. And better to have just one agency overseeing the red tape than two.
No Plan 9 from Outer Space with zombified Tor?
I’d hate to get stuck in the theater seat behind that pair.
I think Sydney, Parfait, and Peggy could make a killing doing an intergalactic version of MST3000.
On the topic of alien zombie slugs, I’ll also recommend The Hidden, with Kyle McLachlan, Michael Nouri, and Claudia Christian.
“The Hidden” is definitely worth a watch. And speaking of body-controlling alien slugs, 1994’s “The Puppet Masters” is pretty decent, based on a Robert Heinlein story, and starring Donald Sutherland, Eric Thal, Keith David, Julie Warner and Andrew Robinson. (So yeah, Donald Sutherland has been in two different body-snatching films.)
I’ll check it out.
Political Correctness ranks up there as one of the great oxymorons (with emphasis on the “moron” part) ever.
Friendly Fire…Isn’t.
Military Intelligence…Isn’t.
Political Correctness…Isn’t.
The “intelligence” part of the phrase military intelligence refers to information of a tactical or strategic value, not the kind of intelligence measurable in an IQ test. PC is really just another name for being polite to people you don’t know. Friendly Fire is fire from troops that are supposed to be on the same side, aka “Friendlies”.
You don’t get the joke, do you?
Common Sense…isn’t.
Political Correctness ranks up there with some of the greatest oxymorons (with emphasis on the “moron” part) ever.
Friendly fire…Isn’t.
Military intelligence…Isn’t.
Neutral countries…Aren’t.
Recoilless rifles…Aren’t.
Political Correctness…Isn’t.
Could you show me some examples of political correctness that caused actual harm beyond someone simply being criticized? It sounds like you’re more familiar with it than I am.
The hidden purpose of political correctness is to force changes in our language using social pressure. Puns for example, are usually lost in translation because the ideas cannot be expressed without the original language.
I have recently re-watched old black & white World War II movies that I originally viewed decades ago. These films were made during and after the war, and, as an example, commonly used the syllables “jap” and “nip” for “japanese” and “nipponese” in a derogatory sense, because Americans were quite unhappy with the Japanese at the time. But this was part of history. Was, not is, because those syllables have been deleted from the sound tracks of those movies, leaving silent gaps in the dialogue. Small loss, you might say. But are these deletions in recordings, and word bans in present speech, not identical in principle to the control of speech and records in Orwell’s “1984”? Obtaining unbiased history is difficult enough already. Do we not owe future generations the truth?
I disagree. Recoilless rifles…do – recoil less. Don’t stand behind one when it is fired. This leads to the condition known as ‘a bad day’. :)
Don’t stand in front of it either.
Thanks for mentioning “Slither”, it’s a little-known gem of a sci-fi/horror B-movie.
I’m a big fan of Bruce Campbell’s The Evil Dead.
Of course, they’re called “Deadites”, not zombies, but they’re undead, anyway.
The Deadites were not dead at first, they became possessed by the evil spirits and they died after a while when the spirits deformed their bodies to complete their tasks. Campbell was possessed himself at the end of the 1st movie and was released when the sun came up in the start of the 2nd one.
So the spirit didn’t have time to kill him. So it took over his hand instead to torture him. They took over his girlfriend for the same reason, he couldn’t get it out of her in time, so he wound up killing her. She came back, so he had to chop her up and bury the pieces because they also woke up again. I’m a big fan of them too I have copies of all of them. It’s dark humor and I loved the corniness of the movies.
So suburbs are too evil for demons? Good to know.
No, no, you’re reading it wrongly. Most suburbs are too HELLISH for demons. Especially the ones with HOA’s.
Before the HOA’s they were just too boring and mundane for them, demons like chaos, not gardening. Add in the HOA and it’s just maddening, a demon would just eat them and have to deal with the indigestion. (me calling “demons-R-us” on the HOA members as we speak)
A new subdivision started down the road from our farm and they HATE farmers, we have security cams setup just in case. I already had to run off some kids that were trying to set fire our hay bales, just this past 4th of July. All because we won’t join…
They really hate it when you explain to them that HOA’s are really communist enclaves.
So…is there anyone here who would admit to actually liking their HOA?
HOA’s are virtually never created by home owners, though in theory that’s possible to do. They’re created by developers before anybody moves in, and then getting rid of them is extremely difficult, because it requires a majority vote of all the home owners, not just a majority of those who bother voting.
Ah yes. Return of the Living Dead with Linnea Quigley. She can definitely claim the lion’s share of the credit for why a young teen me watched that movie repeatedly on VHS in the mid 80’s.
This is off topic, but I found it interesting.
The GP comic is set in an alternate Earth. I think we found out what happens to Varia in this one. I just read a news article reporting that one of the candidates for the presidency of Mexico is named Xóchitl.
Too bad our Earth does not have powers. Considering that the primary job of candidates is shaking hands, this could have lead to a huge array of new powers being displayed as she worked her way through the crowd.
I disagree on powers. I have personally destroyed 3 motor vehicles that their owners had the bad judgement to run into me. The first two were about a year apart at the same intersection and crosswalk, and both drivers tried to make a left turn while I was crossing with the light. The last one was a DUI who couldn’t handle the fact that there was a bicycle on the same street he was driving the opposite direction on and he had to wait for a cut-through in the median to get on my side and going in the same direction and then flooring it to be going 60 MPH (between 45 and 65 with a best confidence of 60 MPH based on my trajectory and how far my bike ended up away from my body).
Interesting thing was the amount of damage I did to the vehicles was way out of proportion to the speed of impact and my mass. The first vehicle had a broken frame which was put to rust damage at the time, the second had way too much sheet metal and support structure damage, and the cop that saw the aftermath of the wreck and the extent of my injuries tried to say I was making it up. The last one had the passenger side of the cab smashed almost flat to the bottom of the window and the door on the driver’s side warped almost beyond being able to open it.
Fun fact. Suburbs are an economic nightmare that isolate individuals far away from all of their needs in a self contained area necessitating commutes that vastly increased our reliance on automobiles and the fossil fuel industry.
A just-so story told by people who can’t bear to admit not everyone wants to live in a city and rely on mass transit.
If you tell yourself people were trapped into living the way you don’t want to live, you can rationalize taking their choices away ‘for their own good’.
The truth is people LIKE having cars because it gives them more freedom to travel, and people who live in suburbs LIKE the life there.
Civil engineer and land developer here, can confirm that suburbs are horribly inefficient from a purely economical and logistical standpoint when compared to denser options like apartment buildings or even townhouses, let alone high rises. They require far more infrastructure per capita to create, and a compounding of infrastructure and energy demand to live in due to having to transport or travel for everything.
However from an emotional and sociological standpoint, people who have the option financially rarely choose where to live based on raw efficiency. Whether an area is pleasant or isolating is largely a matter of personal preference and communal effort. Large quantities of ink have been spilled in arguments between the country mouse and the city mouse, and I haven’t seen any example or argument that fully sways me to one side or the other. Personally, I have lived in downtown metro areas, very rural villages, and classic suburbia, and seen both isolation and close-knit communities in all of them.
If you’re in a reading mood, try “My Life as a White Trash Zombie” by Diana Rowland. It’s a story about a woman who gets turned into a zombie, gets a job at the local morgue and has a hankering for human brains. If she can’t eat brains, she gets progressively more feral…
…Stop me if you’ve heard this before.
Seriously, it’s a pretty good series, worth checking out.
Both these people would be awful to sit behind in a theater.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 for the win?
Thank you. I’ve been telling people for decades that very point about ghouls and zombies. Voodoo witch doctors turn people into zombies by controlling their minds – you can find that in old movies up until the 70s when someone confused the fictional creatures. I think the last movie made with voodoo zombies was “Live and Let Die” and ghouls re-labelled as zombies was George Romero’s 1978 “Dawn of the Dead” the sequel to 1968 “Night of the Living Dead”. The ’68 film was about ghouls, but in the sequel it was a zombie apocalypse. The Bond movie game out in between them, so it was 70s Hollywood that caused the confusion we have now.
So thanks for pointing this out Dave, it was nice to see one person that knew this – I can finally let that pet peeve die now. :)
You don’t have to have a personal car to live comfortably in a suburb… as long as you have access to someone elses car if you need to travel too far for feet
We use to have a good bus system, had ten routes that covered the entire city with no more than two or three blocks away from a route (8 of the routes were circular, meaning they were covered by a bus going both ways: if you missed it going one way, you could catch the one going the other), but then some arsehole decided to change it and there are now just four routes with huge gaps (ie long walkies between routes in some parts, specially the poorer or elderly areas, areas that needed a reliable bus service)
Fortunately, we also have a good taxi service (technically there are two or three, but we have been using just one for over 40 years, much more frequently since the Great Bus Disaster…
Careful, the saga of “Rusty and Co.” is still reasonably fresh in Hasbro/WOTC’s mind.
That’s a bit specific to someone’s intellectual property…
I bet notjustbikes could answer why there are no suburbs in hell. My guess is no car culture, all subsidies go to the death castle instead, and teleportation existing play a part.
Dave weasled out of showing us Sydney’s room.
Next time maybe?
I’m guessing many anime figurines.
ALSO….
Her authorized action figure of herself.
Definitely an Ultra Short Throw Laser Video Projector with Ambient Light Rejecting Screen.
An ordinary set would reflect her Orbs Of Power.
Not really horror, but I’d recommend Space Hunter 3D, both good, bad-ish, serious and camp, in sort of the same genre and Era as Ice Pirates, but less like Airplane!.
Warm Bodies for rounding out your zombie movie experience.