Friday, July 20, 2012

How to make your Zombie Apocalypse Team

I will tell you how to make your zombie apocalypse team, but first I'm going to talk about why I'm telling you.  If you'd like to skip straight to how to make it, just ignore the next section.

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I was just looking at the all time stats for this blog and something jumped out at me: five of the top ten search terms leading people here are about a zombie apocalypse team.  The number one search term is that, and it has more than twice as many hits as the number two search term.

If you look at the top ten search terms by hits (rounding to the nearest percent):
  • 59% of people coming here wanted to know about zombie apocalypse teams, notably their own.
  • 21% of people were actually looking for this site.
  • 12% of people were looking for the original Mona Lisa.  (My only post on the subject wasn't about the original.)
  • 5% of people were looking for information on Selma Botman (the disgraced former President of the University of Southern Maine.)
  • 3% percent of people wanted to know what's going on in Hungary.  (My only post on the subject is from more than six months ago.)

Those figures obviously don't account for duplicate search terms that didn't make it into the top ten (I know, for example, that a lot of the searches for Selma Botman used different search terms) or anything else that doesn't make it into the top ten, and definitely doesn't account for the much larger number of people who don't come here via search.

Still, with so many people coming here wanting to know how to make their zombie apocalypse team, I figured: why not make a post about that?

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A lot of what I'll say here is already covered in Part Alpha of my own, and I've tried to include the basics in a note at the top of each post on my own team.

The very basic answer to the question, "how to make my zombie apocalypse team?", which I learned on facebook, is this:  Your team consists of yourself, of course, and the protagonists of the last three things you read, watched, and/or played.

That and/or is kind of important.  If you've just read three books without watching or playing anything in between, then it's acceptable to take the protagonists of those three books.  If you've played two games and watched one movie since the last time you read something then it's perfectly fine to say it's the protagonists of the two games and the one movie.  It doesn't have to be one of each, is what I'm saying here.

For me it worked out that it was, and if you want you can decide that it should be that way for you too and pick the most recent protagonist of something you've read, the most recent protagonist of something you've watched, and the most recent protagonist of something you've played, even if those three things are not together the three most recent things you've experienced.

Regardless, you grab your three protagonists and then you've got to take a moment to think of how everything fits together.  Most of the time that's not a lot of thought.

If you're a DC comics fan and got Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman then it fits together perfectly.  No more thought required, go and conquer the zombie hordes.

If the three things were reading Dune, watching Flipper, and playing one of the Tron games, well then you're going to have to have a lot more thought.

Consider the limitations.  The protagonist of Dune is very much defined by the planet he's on.  Without the spice in the air, without the sand worms in the ground, without... well, Dune, he's not the protagonist from Dune anymore.  Flipper is a dolphin, there are only so many settings in which he can operate and they all involve an ocean.  No oceans on Dune.  Any given Tron protagonist is a protagonist while inside of a computer.  A setting that never appears in Dune or Flipper.

Getting these three protagonists in one place at one time is going to be difficult.  You're going to have to be creative.  You're going to have to figure out how a protagonist inseparable from the desert, a protagonist inseparable from the ocean, and a protagonist inseparable from cyberspace can all get together and join you on your zombie apocalypse team.

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Regardless of who the protagonists are that make up your team, you're going to have to work out how these three protagonists, and you, can be in the same place at the same time working together against the zombie hordes.  And it might be difficult.

Or, as mentioned above, it might be easy.  A lot of the time it really will be as easy as grabbing the protagonists of the last three things you read/watched/played and leaving it at that because a lot of the time they won't be tied to incompatible settings.

And that is how you make your zombie apocalypse team.

According to facebook, circa April 24th.

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You have to know that there are somewhere around a thousand competing versions though, right?  

5 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. For anyone wary of clicking on a full sentence link by an anonymous poster, let me just say that that is not spam.

      I have lacked the energy to look into what's going on outside my countries boarders for some time, what goes on within them is draining enough.* For those with the energy, for those who care about what's going on and have the spoons necessary to face it, that link should be a good place to start.

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      * America could be a case study in self inflicted wounds, unlike others who struggle we have the solutions laid out in front of us and the means to implement them. Yet we don't.

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    2. Of course the addition of appropriate trigger warnings is probably all the "not-spam" proof that would be needed.

      Weren't there when I started typing which shows how slow am going at the moment.

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    3. Also I should note that when I talk about the US I'm not comparing it to Hungary, the footnote should be read as separate from all context other than the sentence it is expanding on.

      Sorry if that was unclear.

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    4. "A case study in self inflicted wounds". That's a great way of putting it. I'd be interested in reading more about that from you if you're up for it, but if you're not, that's okay too.

      *love*

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