Tag Archives: entertainment

Video – Top 10 Post-Apocalyptic TV Shows

Posted on by

I’ve watched about half of these. One thing I always find terribly amusing is that in the British series the individual with a simple double-barrel shotgun is the high muckymuck because everyone else had nothing more deadly than a crossbow or a cricket bat. Contrast that with, say, Walking Dead where our heroes went from 870’s and Remington 700’s to MP5, M4, and AUG’s in less than three seasons. (Heck, they even had an RPG at one point.)


What I don’t like is that, at least in the series I’ve seen, it all boils down to a) having to fight other survivors for resources and b) scrounging. And while those probably would be rather important, I am always amazed how hygiene, or the utter lack thereof, leads to almost no bad consequences. Take Walking Dead….its summer in Georgia and these people are covered in dirt, sweat, blood, and a zillion other nasties and no one gets an infection when they cut or scrape themselves.

Anyway…entertaining post-apocalyptic TV shows are fairly rare. Movies come and go all the time, but TV shows…not so much. Probably because its difficult on a TV budget to empty out several square blocks of a city (which is why so many of these take place in rural settings, I suppose.)

Anyway, for your amusement…………

Walking Dead observations

Posted on by

Ok, so the Walking Dead is now about…mmmm….seven years into the zombie apocalypse and it’s starting to look more and more like an SM Stirling novel. Ammo is virtually non-existent and edged weapons and arrows are the order of the day. Okay, fine. Here’s my question…they have a somewhat-genius in the form of Eugene, who has shown the ability to engineer and science his way out of some pretty tough situations. So, while expecting him to make nitrocellulose-based powders and percussion primers might be a little out of his league, surely he can make black powder and cobble together a flintlock rifle. Right? And even something as simple as a matchlock proves to be beyond his capabilities you’d think black powder for simple explosive devices would be within his capabilities. So…what gives, Eugene?

And, yeah, I binge watched to try and get caught up. Although if I do have to carry around some sort of headchopper in the zombie apocalypse, I’ll probably go with something like this from the local boys down the street at ZombieTools.

Wisdom from the T-800

Posted on by

Really, these ‘reboots’ and unwanted sequels in The Terminator franchise are getting rather lame. BUT…once in while, there’s a nugget. Such as this:

To be honest, I was a little underwhelmed with the gun room. My own is a bit more…densely populated…than that one. But…I guess they needed to save money for all the CGI.

But the summation of why he has all these guns ‘around’? Spot on.

 

The ultimate survivor, it seems

Posted on by

I suppose it is sort of fitting that “The Survivalist” series of books has managed to …uhm..survive…after the death of it’s author. I may be a little late to the party on this, but it appears that despite Jerry Ahern dying a few years back his famous pulp series is continuing on…

I am a bit perturbed by this. Ahern’s original series, which is a guilty pleasure, required a certain suspension of disbelief if you wanted to make it through his books. But, despite the outrageous over-the-top invincibility and deus-ex-machina luck of the main character, there was still a bit of a foundation in reality…at least, up until a dozen books in where it became more sci-fi than just -fi. But even that still had a bit of a tenuous basis in reality. This book tells us “Corrupt politicians, Neo-Nazis, Aliens, the returned Atlanteans or those thought to be dead for centuries; who is about to finally bring down the human race?” Aliens? Atlantis? Ah, poor Jerry….they should have thrown the copyrights in the casket with you and let the series die a somewhat dignified death.

This somewhat parallels the old “Guardians” pulp series which met a similar fate – the original author moved on and strings of ghost writers came in and all consistency went out the window as, again, somewhat-based-in-reality gave in to shark-jumping nonsense.

Hands down winner, though, for most dissatisfying way to end a series goes to “J. Johnstone” of the infamous “ashes” series. A series of pulp novels so formulaic I literally believe they used the exact same text from the previous books and simply changed supporting character names and locations. The final chapter to this series was so dissatisfying and limp that it effectively alienated the few fans the series had left.

Post-apocalyptic fiction is a genre that used to be pretty fringe. It’s become far, far more mainstream as the whole ‘zombie’ thing has become a cultural touchstone for such fiction. Early fiction did exist, of course, but they were standalone books…not series. As best i can tell, Ahern’s series was the first modern post-apocalyptic serial. It’s heartening that there is still an audience for it, but it’s a little sad to see it become what it appears to have become. It’s like an old Hollywood starlet, far past her prime, slathering on makeup and old costumes to try and recapture the magic from her heydaynd instead being a pathetic and pitiful caricature of her past.

As much as I liked Ahern’s series, I think I’m going to give the post-mortem installments a pass.

 

Entertainment – The Walking Dead

Posted on by

I’ve gotten out of watching TWD regularly. I let the DVR record it and then watch the whole season at once. (And, lemme tell ya, several hours of non-stop post-apocalypse viewing will cure any motivational issues you may have.) Anyway… I decided to go back to watching because TWD did a ‘time jump’ which they do every few seasons. In this case, they leapt ahead six years to give us this:

An utterly adorable 8-year-old with a Colt Python (which she holds better than Rick ever did) and a sword. (And, apparently, it’s still impossible to find a holster that fits a six-inch Python properly.)

There is something a little odd about seeing a tiny kid with a Python, but rationally it makes perfect sense. There’s a scene later in the episode where Michonne has an encounter that had the potential to turn violent. When its resolved peacefully, she turns around to see the kid providing overwatch with her Python. And the kids says: “..Dad would have wanted me to have it. To protect myself and the people I love.” Lovely sentiment and pretty much the reason many of us own guns.

What I’m going to find fascinating to watch is that this character will have absolutely zero normalcy bias. This kid will have been living in zombieland her entire life.. so itwill be interesting to see if they show that in her behavior, relational skills, pragmatism,emotional maturity, etc.

Certainly, what I’ve seen so far is a lot less annoying than Coral* ever was.

From a temporal standpoint, it is my understanding we are now six-years past Ricks last appearance, and Judith was about two when when that happened, so I’m saying it’s about eight years on at this point. And, from the looks of things, ammo is getting scarcer since virtually no one, except the eight-year-old, seems to be throwing bullets around.

*=For the humor-challenged who don’t get the joke, Rick always seems to pronounce Carl as ‘Coral’.

Where were his drops?

Posted on by

MegaMagMania runs for two more days… would you like to know more?
===========
Saw this, and a couple other similarly themed t-shirts and couldn’t help myself.

Starship Troopers is one of those rare books that gets the ol’ wheels turning. “Atlas Shrugged” was probably the one book that changed my way of thinking about a lot of things, but Troopers specifically gave me some thoughts about the nature of duty and obligation that I’d never really explored. (And for the love of Crom, read the book rather than see the movies.)  It’s a book that clearly is more geared towards military folks, but it’s explorations about the nature of individual duties to the state, the states duties to the individual, and that sort of thing were quite interesting. It’s been labelled as fascist or racist, but that’s usually by people who think everyone without a certain melanin count is automatically a racist.

This being a college town, I look forward to seeing if anyone gets the reference.

Walking Dead – metaphors

Posted on by

Remember the last season episode where right before our crew of intrepid survivors walks into the setup at Terminus Rick is showing Carl how to make a snare to trap game? He explains how the animal is funneled into the trap and is caught before it knows its even in jeopardy. Remember that?

36c7c8927b0192364bc95d45845d8bcb

So look at the metaphor in tonights show. The horse has been running around during this crisis and has been surviving just fine. And then…someone tries to reintroduce it to civilization, and once its in the pen behind the fence it gets swarmed and killed by zombies. It was safer outside the confines of the pen, taking its chances with everyone else.

Foreshadow much?