Zombie survival RPG? Um, yes please.

Project Zomboid is in playable alpha now. Count me in.

EDIT: I tried it out and it is VERY raw, so don’t go in expecting a finished game. I had some trouble figuring out some of the things you need to do, like to eat food you drag it over your heart. Little things like that. I definitely see promise though, and I would like to try it again. There’s an open-endedness to it which seems very cool. I read on the forums of all the different things people have tried out to see what would happen inside the game and there are some interesting results – you have a wife that’s ill, neighbors breaking in your house, and you have to worry about the power going out – so there’s a lot of room for improvising things. Seems like a creative little germ of a game they have going.
via boingboing.net

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How cool is this little guy?

I hope my wife wants this for her birthday – because I think she is getting one. They have a lot of other cool stuff at this store too. Apparently part of this “Orneryboy” online comic – which I will now be reading. EDIT: I don’t usually read online comics, but after checking it out, this looks pretty exceptional.

RE: Your Brains

“All we wanna do is eat your brains. We’re not unreasonable. I mean, no ones gonna eat your eyes…”

Was thinking about this awesome song because of this interesting podcast I listened to about how Jonathan Coulton made over $500,000 last year selling his songs only via the internet, word of mouth, and hustling. No label or anything. Then one of the commentators in the story said he was just music’s version of a Snuggie. The way she said it was just not cool. His rebuttal is here. I first read about this on Waxy’s links page.

How the Zombie Apocalypse Starts

Just so you don’t get the wrong idea, 99% of this post in tongue in cheek, but here’s how it could happen: Someone’s going to be monkeying with science – and probably for the good of the world. Like, for instance, this scientist right now is trying to cure malaria. Malaria is a huge scourge on some continents to this day. It’s not one of these diseases we eradicated like smallpox. People still die from it every day. So anyway, an entomologist named Raymond St. Leger is on it. He thought about the problem in a unique way. Since malaria is nothing but a parasite that a mosquito caught, instead of attacking and killing the mosquitoes to solve the problem of malaria – let’s kill the parasite in the mosquito. Let’s cure the mosquito, instead of killing it. Sounds great. So Raymond St. Leger found that this parasite in the mosquito can be killed by a transgenic fungus that he’s identified. It attacks the malaria and kills it. So he’s injecting his mosquitoes with this fungus, and then the mosquitoes are cured of malaria. We don’t get malaria when they bite us, and the world is a better place.
I can just see the scary news stories after some of these mosquitoes accidentally bite some scientists, and it turns out the fungus also had the side benefit of carrying it’s own parasite on it, that humans never came in contact with before since it’s found in remote regions on the Amazon on a fungus no human as ever eaten. This parasite, in a human, takes over the nervous system functioning of the human, much like toxoplasmosis does to rats, or rabies does to racoons. These fungus parasites makes humans aggressive to other humans and causes them to crave eating human flesh and specifically braaaainnnnnnssssss…
Okay, I’m done my crazy rant now, and frankly, I feel a little better. On a serious note, it’s awesome that someone is making inroads to eradicate malaria, that could save millions of lives. Don’t let me being an idiot, and not even partially understanding the science behind all this, stop any research. Thank God for dudes like Raymond St. Leger who are way smarter than me.