Tag Archives: zombies

“Zombies, Run” iPhone app – UPDATE

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It’s official: this game still rocks. When I first dl’ed it a few weeks ago, I half expected “Zombies, Run” to be a clever idea that didn’t quite deliver more than a one hit spin on exercise motivation. And that was going to be fine with me. I already knew I needed to get more exercise and if “Zombies, Run” just gave me the initial kick to get started, it would have done enough.

It’s done more. The little app has maintained my interest and actually spurred me to exercise longer and more frequently than I’d originally planned. I planned to be doing a “mission” that is 30:00 or so three times a week. Last week for instance, I exerecised six times. I’m also exercising for longer than my original plan. Today, I’m recovering from 46:00 minutes.

In particular the app helps in two key areas. The first problem area for me is that first 5 minutes. The drudgery is in full effect while none of the endorphins have kicked in. Pre-Zombies, this was a time when I frequently would stop. Now there is a thread of narrative interest that keeps me htting the pedals. (OK, so I “cheat” — I’m using an indoor stationary bike instead of actual running.) The other problem area occurs at the end of the workout. There’s an option in the app to select workouts of about 30 minutes or about an hour. 30 minutes are getting a bit too easy for me and though there’s a clear sense of closure when the “mission” in complete, the app switches seamlessly into “radio mode” where I can continue running while listening to DJs from my beloved zombie-ridden town. And most important, I can continue to gather supplies for this beleaguered encampment. That supply-gathering aspect is the game part of the app. Every tin of food or discarded mobile phone that I retrieve helps contribute to my town’s vitality.

And there continues to be some nice serendipitous corelations between the songs in my playlist and the zombie menace. A few that come to mind are:

• “Those are People who Died” by Jim Carroll
• “Be My Frankenstein” by Otis Taylor (the refrain is “Just wanna live another day”)
• “Can’t Get You Out of my Head” by Kylie Minogue (a guilty pleasure — don’t judge me! — but given the zombie context I imagine the undead trying to crack into ones skull to feast on the goo inside.)
• “Crawling from the Wreckage” by Dave Edmunds (especially for the beginning where “Runner 5″ emerges from a crashed helicopter)
• “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” by Johnny Cash (the zombie tie-in is that it was used in the remake of “Dawn of the Dead” as the opening credit sequence, as I recall.)
• “It’s the End of the World as We Know it” by R.E.M.
• “Nemesis” by Shreikback
• “Run to the Hills” by Iron Maiden
• “Survivalism” by Nine Inch Nails

etc.

If I keep this up, I’ll be ready for 5K season in no time. And I’ll have honed a survival skill for the zombie apocalypse.

Nightmare #316 – Zombie Demolition

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(Male, 20′s) I came home one night, around twilight. The actual house resembled the house that belonged to my grandmother, by the way. But there was something wrong, really wrong. The entire first floor of the building had been ripped apart, pretty much torn down to studs. There were people I didn’t know living there. They were frantic and quite suspicious of me at least at first. It was difficult to explain to them that I actually lived there, that this was my house.

Evidentally they lived there too, somewhere upstairs. I asked what happened. Zombies attacked and started tearing off the siding and drywall. It was like the zombies were cracking the shell of a peanut in order to eat what was inside. But then, evidently the zombies wandered off when dawn came.

The inhabitants of the building were insane with fear because they thought the zombies would return because it was nearing dark. They were useless. I tried to get them to work, to re-arrange some of the rubble into a small defendable structure but they were shell shock, totally gone.

I picked up a piece of metal and stapled it to a joist. There, I thought, at least I’ve started.

“Zombies, Run” = an iPhone App You’ll Need to SURVIVE

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Though I have no enduring love for the undead, I basically adore the iOS App “Zombies, Run” a fitness game that fuel-injects a bit of narrative into the brain-eating monotony that aerobic exercise so easily becomes. The premise is simple: you are the sole survivor of a helicopter crash after the zombipocalypse and your objective is to run — literally, run — around picking up supplies that are needed at your home base. Game play is a series of audio tracks that are interspersed among the tracks of your standard workout mix but once back at the base, you can assign the assets you’ve picked up.

TIP: Make a workout mix rich in creepy, high energy tracks. The first time I was warned of an imminent zombie attack and counseled to sprint, serendipitously the track “Be My Frankenstein” by Otis Taylor came on. It’s refrain is “Just wann live another day” and the icy guitar work was a perfect motivator to avoid the imaginary menace. My existing workout mix is fine but a good playlist would really augment this game. I’m going to have to listen to those good ol’ Rue Morgue Radio broadcasts to come up with more tunes for future “missions.”

The app struck me as a bit pricey, $7.99 but then again, I’m a cheapskate. However, I bought it without a second thought because I have the body of a middle-aged geek and I needed something to ressurect my fitness regimine after a long winter nap. “Zombies, Run” is very likely going to do that. I wasn’t ready to strap on running shoes today — my excuse was the spring rain plus my fear that I’d injure myself early in process and have to sit out while I healed — so I played the game while on my stationary bike. Some features weren’t accessible like the ones that are based on the accelerometer — presumably when the radio operator exhorts a boost of speed to escape an unexpected pocket of undead, the iPhone actually senses that effort. Cool beans, eh? Even without the machine keeping watch, I still cranked it during those close scrapes. I was just going to kick the tires with an easy spin but I found myself completing the whole first mission, a good half hour of workout. I’m dripping in sweat… and ready to play another round.

My suspicion is that if you are reading The Daily Nightmare, you need this app.

This Just In – Man in Morgue Not Quite Dead

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You’ve heard this advice before but it bears repeating: double check before sending someone to the morgue. This goes for family members, “private undertakers” and heck, probably especially for the folks who work at the morgue.

Sometimes folks are just unconscious, not fully deceased.

http://www.capetimes.co.za/man-wakes-up-in-morgue-1.1104810

Nightmare #298 – House, Plans and Zombie

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(Male, 50′s) Extremely strange and disturbing dream that only incidentally had a zombie in it. I guess that’s enough to make it a nightmare, right?

I was in this house which at times was the house where I live now and at times was the house where I grew up, even though it really didn’t resemble either of those actual houses very much. There was a big apple tree in the back yard.

And there was Richard Pryor. He was just hanging out. He might have been a relative or he might have been just a friend but he was just there and we were all acting like it was no big thing. I haven’t thought of Richard Pryor for years by the way though I used to think he was pretty funny. He looked good, like he did back in the 70′s before all the freebasing coke stories came out. So there was me, Richard Pryor, the girl who later became my wife and a couple other people.

We were working on plans to remodel the house. We all were inside standing around the dining room table and then one of us would make a change to the set of plans, then we’d all walk out side to see what that would look like on the house. It was like as soon as we made a decision, it actually changed the house.

But we got mixed up a little. Some of us were changing the plans while others were checking the results, so I passed people coming back in as I was going out. And one time when I passed Richard Pryor, he wasn’t looking very good. His hair had changed to white and his skin was ashy grey. He was dead alright but he was still walking around. No one else seemed to realize it yet, and Richard Pryor didn’t even realize that he was a zombie yet so I still had some time before things got ugly.

But the only weapon I had was a hammer. I got it in my hand and I came up behind Richard Pryor. I knew that the only way to kill a zombie was to take its head completely off – at least that’s what I “knew” in my dream. So I was preparing to hammer at the back of his spine, over and over until his head fell off. It was going to be awful. I felt sick to my stomach thinking about all the gore and blood. When I raised the hammer behind my head, I woke up.

Nightmare #297 – Zombie U

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(Female, 40′s) I’ve been watching *Lost* on dvd so maybe that’s what brought on this dream about a group of zombie apocalypse survivors.

My partner and I were on a camping trip in a mountainous area. We had put up our tent and were making dinner when a group of armed people came into our camp. They started asking us questions like who we were and what we were doing there. When we answered them, they seemed relieved. They explained that now they knew that we were okay. Because we could talk, we weren’t zombies. Somehow my partner and I had missed the news reports that there was a zombie outbreak in this place. We weren’t safe in the woods, they said, so those people led us out of the mountains and back into town.

The town had a large university campus, and most of the survivors had moved to this area, we were told. Everything looked normal, but we were not to let that fool us. Danger was everywhere and especially after dark. Zombies were fast and clever but unable to talk.

My partner and I stayed at the university. We made a few friends and got to know the area. We went out to the bars with friends in the evening. I didn’t understand how life could appear to be going along normally if there was this zombie problem. Everything looked like it was working normally: the university had classes, the electricity was on, college students were playing frisbee and getting suntans.

My view of that relative ‘safety’ changed abruptly. My partner and I were walking home from the bar with four friends and a zombie appeared. We all ran as fast as we could. Someone fell down, and someone ran back to help him, hitting the zombie with a shovel. Then we all ran into a house and collapsed in the chairs and on the floor, gasping and trying to catch our breath. We looked at the friend who fell. “Are you alright?” someone asked him. He just nodded, out of breath. We should have been worried at that point, but we weren’t paying attention.

My partner and I went into the kitchen for a drink of water and so did two of the others, leaving the falling down guy and another guy alone in the living room. When we came back into the room, we realized our mistake. Both of them were silent, staring at us, hungry-looking.

We had been told that zombies couldn’t talk, but no one had told me they could communicate. As we watched, one guy’s head turned into a gray wavering smokey head sitting on his shoulders, and the other guy opened his mouth wide and inhaled this entire head, nodding like he understood. He exhaled the smoke, and the head materialized like normal. Then the second guy’s head turned into the same kind of gray wavering smoke, and the first breathed him in. This was how the zombies communicated. If we hadn’t been so utterly fascinated, we would have hauled our asses out of there, but we survivors just stood there watching.

When the zombies turned toward us and started to advance, we scrambled out of the house, pulling the door shut and holding it. “Hurry! Get the fire department!” the guys holding the door shut told me. The fire department would come and set the house on fire. That was a change, right? But it was the only way to deal with zombies.

Nightmare #289: Old Zombies

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(Male, 30′s) This wasn’t a nightmare like it was scary, just really really depressing.

It was long after the zombie apocalypse. Maybe 20 years. Humans had survived but so had zombies. We just couldn’t come up with a way to totally wipe them out. So I was walking down the street and I had to be careful to avoid the half dozen zombies that were just shuffling around. They weren’t really a threat. They felt like homeless people – a little smelly, shabbily dressed… well, homeless people with rotting faces, I guess.

But what was really depressing is that there was a general sense among the surviving humans that it was just a matter of time until we’d die out too. I know this is my rational wide-awake mind trying to make sense of things but maybe there weren’t enough people left of the right age to re-populate the planet. At least, we all were wandering around, bored and hungry, not really that much different than the zombies.

Credit Sequence (Fan-Made) for “Walking Dead” adaptation

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I’m not that a true-fan of zombies as a mega-genre but this credit sequence has enough crack-snapple-and-bop to get me interested in seeing the actual adaptation of the long-running comic “Walking Dead.”

Walking Dead Credits

And of course, here’s the actual trailer:

Walking Dead Trailer1

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid83327935001?bctid=59356961100

Nightmare #238 – Flesh-Eating Mutants

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(Female, 50′s) First of all, when I told my partner about this nightmare about zombies, he told me they weren’t zombies. So what the hell were they? Second, this dream was weird because it seemed to take place over days, maybe even weeks. Like I woke up and went to sleep and lived whole DAYS in this dream. The other weird thing about this dream was the depth of emotions I experienced during it. I felt things. Like really, really scared. And really, sad. And then really depressed.

In this dream, some friends were visiting us, and it was evening– just getting dark out. Not friends we really have, and we didn’t live in our real house, but in this cottage-like structure. Their van was parked in our driveway, and they were getting ready to leave. They were a couple and their three little kids; one was already buckled in his carseat. The husband stepped over to say hello to one of the neighbors.

“…there was nothing that could be done about the monsters. People went on with their lives…”

Then in the distance down the street, there came this band of marauding flesh-eating mutant humans. They attacked every human they saw and simply tore them apart. We watched for a moment, horrified– the woman and I– and then I called her two children, a boy and a girl, to me. She hopped in the back of the van and tried to get the child out of the carseat. I scooped up the other two children in my arms and ran into the house. I waited at the door, calling “Hurry, hurry” but it was too late. A monster reached into the van and pulled the woman out, and I covered the children’s eyes as the monsters tore her apart. I closed and locked the door, and then I started shutting and locking all the windows and pulling the curtains shut. The little girl wandered over to a window, and there was a monster on the other side. The monster said, “There’s a living one in there” and tried to reach in so I quickly pulled the girl away and shut the window and the curtain, and then I moved the the center of the room and made the children sit still on my lap. Then the monsters couldn’t see us any more.

So a few patterns emerged: They only came out at night. They could only see you if you moved. They could talk to each other, but they weren’t smart or organized enough to get into houses; they only caught people outside. They didn’t change the people they caught into monsters like them but tore them to shreds and ate them. The next day the father came to pick up the kids, and they went home. It was so sad and so scary.

But the weird thing was that people seemed to cope. There was nothing that could be done about the monsters, but people went on with their lives. Like, our teenage daughter went to college every day and to her job– just making sure to be inside by dark. My husband drove her somewhere that took longer than they’d planned so they stayed overnight to be safe, but I was so worried about them and so relieved when they came home the next day.

For the most part, life went on, although there were occasional deaths in the community because people forgot the rules and stayed out too late after dark. Everyone else was managing, but I was frightened and worried all the time. Really sad. And really depressed. I couldn’t see any point in doing anything anymore.

Nightmare #235 – Junior High Undead

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(Male, 40′s) I tried to tell this nightmare to someone and they just laughed because it sounded too much like slapstick comedy. But it was scary when I was having the dream. I also woke up in the middle of the night and had to go to the bathroom but thought twice about it, y’know, because of the zombies.

I was driving a twenty year old station wagon that used to belong to my Mom. I was going to a rock concert that was being held in an abandoned factory but to get there, I had to cross a lane of freeway exit ramp traffic that was moving very quickly. I gave up on the concert.

And somehow I ended up at the junior high school where my dad used to teach. Both my mom and dad are dead. The place was trashed, probably because of the zombie apocalypse, now I think of it. There was a demonstration happening in my dad’s old classroom. There was someone showing, I think, how to make gasoline or something. Where most science experiments would involve tiny beakers of chemicals, this guy was using huge vats of chemicals that sputtered and splashed from one container to the other. He concluded quickly, saying “I hope you all paid attention because you’re all on your own now.” The zombies had found our location.

We all exited the classroom quickly. As I passed a display case that was smashed in, I took a large ceramic chicken award. It was pink and it weighed a ton. I thought it might be a good weapon. We continued to move through the dark school and we got ourselves trapped in a glassed in hallway. There were zombies trying to get in at either end and there was another batch of zombies outside the windows trying to get in. I had an idea so I got on the loudspeaker and somehow made it sound like we were all in the auditorium. And for whatever reason, the zombies all ignored us and started shuffling off toward the auditorium. I thought this would be our opportunity to pick them off, one by one. I tried to sneak up behind one of the zombies and bash its brain in with the large ceramic chicken. This task proved much more difficult than I expected. After about a half a dozen blows, the zombie was no closer to being neutralized and in fact, I’d started to attract the attention of other zombies. I decided to join the others but they were gone.

Nightmare #233 – The Shrinking City

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(Female, 40′s) This was a weird dream, with very slow-moving action taking place over what felt like a long time. I was in a city, with all the survivors. Outside the city were the zombies. They were the old-fashioned slow-moving kind. There was a big fence around the entire city keeping the zombies outside. We survivors on the inside felt rather smug.

“…the people you knew were slowly disappearing too…”

But the problem was that the city was getting a little smaller every day. The zombies would manage to break through in one spot and take over a building and kill all the people in it. Then we would move the fence in and life would go on. The people you knew were slowly disappearing too. Near the end of the dream, we were down to about a dozen buildings and maybe only 100 survivors.

Then I walked into a room where there were 3 or 4 people down on the floor. “Are they zombies?” I asked someone. Then I realized that no, they were survivors like me. They were down on their hands and knees eating the carpet, because it was all that was left to eat.

Things were looking pretty grim.

Nightmare #231 – Zombie Skunk

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(Male, 30′s) This nightmare I had kind of cracks me up when I write it down but there was nothing funny about it at the time. I’m almost embarrassed by how silly it sounds.

“…Seemed a pretty awful situation. …”

I was in the house where I grew up, a place I haven’t even seen in like 10 years. There were people on the front lawn who were doing something. I went out there to yell at them. They were painting the countertop of their kitchen cabinets. The paint was this hideous green, like a yellow green, a color from a 70′s rental property. I told them to get lost. And then there was a policeman who told me they’d be OK. See, their landlord was kicking them out because the building was being foreclosed and soon to be demolished so they were down on their luck. I asked the cop what was with the countertop and he said that the landlord was making them fix up the place or they’d lose their security deposit. Seemed a pretty awful situation.

I looked around the neighborhood and it was a decaying, urban nightmare. There were multi-story buildings that looked like they’d been bombed. Whole walls were missing, not just the windows which were all smashed out. The cop and I walked around a bit and there was just block after block of wasteland, tall buildings ready to collapse under their own weight.

“…”…It was a zombie. And it was a skunk. How much worse can you get from that!…”…”

That’s when we saw the skunk. It jumped out at the cop and started running for him like it wanted to bite him. The skunk was sealed in a plastic bag and chunks of its flesh were falling off. The cop was stupid, just standing there but I knew to start running away immediately. I knew somehow that this skunk was infected with the zombie plague, probably the same kind of epidemic that was causing the whole world to go to hell. The scientists has sealed it in a plastic bag to keep it safe because in this future skunks were an endangered specie. They were trying to protect the genetic material even though it was sick, er, I guess, dead. It was a zombie. And it was a skunk. How much worse can you get from that!

So I started running because I was afraid of what would happen when the cop turned to a zombie. Every pile of rubble I passed seemed to have another zombie creature creeping out of it. Possums, squirrels, a mangy old cat. I was just running and running, hopping over piles of rubble trying to get away and the terror was all around me.