# the aesthetics of hardcore zombie survival status: underway https://robert-what.itch.io/the-aesthetics-of-hardcore-zombie-survival in which to consider the unique aesthetic feeling of 'how being undead sucks' in online garmes andor why 'playing a zombie' is the worst role in the whole / hole of mainstream videogarme subculture. notes and associated images ![[the-aesthetic-chaos-of-zombie-survival-paintings-02.jpg |600]] this project exists for garming culture archiving and digital archaeology purposes. randomly peppered with edited community screenshots and (thankfully gunfire-silenced) video from garry's mod zombie survival garme mode and half life 2 / counter strike zombie survival mods playing merrily on classic noxiousnet servers (rip) all credit to original players and posters watch those corners and keep it tight people we're not out of this rotting mess yet === **zombie garmes themselves as a form of zombie** **+** pretty much impossible to kill for good (the term for this is 'permadead') they just keep coming back to haunt the living - or the unliving since one has to be at least slightly brain undead to keep grinding on through these infinite hordes of (perhaps inherently) crappy zzzz titles ('quad z' as opposed to the holy and industry anointed 'aaaa') **+** perhaps what one plays is not just teh garme itself but the collective idea of zombie survival it represents skin hanging off its sagging putrid frame in dried bloody stinking shreds - role playing through one who is (/often somehow inherently) 'good enough' to survive; that is zombie garmes as some kind of dark mutated social darwinian power fantasy made digitally manifest **+** at a more practical and mundane level: why does playing a dirty rotter in any multiplayer vidyagarm have to suck so much undead arts? the answer lies in one word; an desperate undying kind of innate passivity. (if there was another word for this state it would be "dayz." more on this later.) whether 'fast' 28 days later style dead john romero classic 'walkers' aka 'inexorable like lava' - or even awful 'brad pit dogpiling' world war z style 'deaders' the role of a brain-eating corpse seems unbearably slow and defensive when compared to the active role played by zombie 'a-calypso survivors **+** while both zombies and survivors may run around mindlessly on a server at roughly the same speed - or even faster with bs 'wwz' zombies - the philosophical basis of ir inner motivations clearly differs. living people have motivation to survive but zombies have zero psychological motivations. the opportunity to hungrily om-nom on the brains of smug idiot survivors is motivation enough for most (live) players to keep on playing on zombie survival servers - but never long enough for them to ultimately shuffle away from the experience without often quickly feeling bored and sick of the whole thing (feeling what those in-scene call 'dead bored.') in the somehow always-on-the-verge-of-dying underworld of zombie survival garming there's a rapid (flesh-like) falling-off from tzf - total zombie fun to tzg - total zombie grind. in such garmes the meat is always quick to sour **+** for outsiders newbies and general passers-by the question foremost in ir minds is "who the flock still plays these janky arts garmes / this crappy garme mode." a fair question. to answer that perhaps one needs to understand the willing exploitation - on both sides - of players initially keen enough to take on the role of the dead. like the unnamed masses of fanboy extras keen to put on crusty makeup and shuffle through in the background of shows like the walking dead unknown and unloved by anyone except themselves. the living are always the ideological focus of such shows - apparently it would not be much of a show otherwise - yet many (citation needed) would rather watch random virtual abandoned megacity camera feeds of endless rotting hordes shuffling past rather than (say) be subjected to multiple seasons of jesse's cosmic-scale hated son 'carl' and that stupid hat of theirs **+** in zombie survival player vs player garmes however there's a distinctly unequal power dynamic at play. despite often getting to play 'both sides of the undead equation' everybody still rapidly understands that being dead sucks - that the living and the dead are not equals **playing as a zombie sucks grey ash blue undead nutz** **+** even at ir height in the 90s there was the notion that being a zombie online meant you were on some kind of inherent loosing streak. only in movies do the dead ever truly win out - long term. (just think of the terrifying ending scene in fluci's 1979 cheese fest zombie 2.) in garmes being dead is almost always equivalent to being a looser scrub noob and as modern garming culture often tells us all garmes are only ever meant to be 'won' by 'winners'(tm). even when the dreaded message "the dead win" flashes across the top of the screen it's read by the living. (or are we even just living repeatedly playing this lame brain-dead crud?) **+** and yet despite this there's still the lingering background sense that these zombie garmes and zombie garme modes have something to do with the dying and the dead - that they somehow express the electronic afterlife - hence the modern notion of "dead mmo's" - "digital archaeology" - "digital urbex" (urban exploration) - "digital ruins" and "digital ghost towns." more research needed (see 'this mod is dead') **+** the look and feel of classic zombie survival is that of what resident amateur postmodern internet theorist for hire robert what terms 'aesthetic chaos.' multiple fractured overlayed fragments of wild unpredictable movements general disorganization and.. raw existential panic. there's usually a lot happening on screen at once - its difficult to pick apart the theads of what's happening. a strange immediacy and colorful rawness results **+** here are some other useful terms for approaching chaotic zombie survival aesthetics **+** zombie survival console command "!stopsound" which turns off the constant gun noise (particularly useful on 'zs' servers with infinite ammo enabled.) some players however prefer that annoying deafening racket as it partially blocks out the existential dread of existing in the same space as rotting faced members of the flesh eating undead **+** classic zombie survival console command "!ztele" which teleports survivors away from immediate undead danger to somewhere nearby. often only a single usage of the command is possible so use it well. the existential threat symbolized by such a command is of course the danger that one gets teleported directly into the stinking midst of a large group of blue-grey ash faced flesh eaters. the other threat of course is that the command is actually next to useless and only provides false hope because you're probably going to get eaten anyway. (though isn't that a little fatalistic; fight on player!) **+** "simular": a sarcastic net term used to describe the overwhelming undead majority of zombie garmes. "wow these new zombie garmes on steam sound pretty simular huh?" **+** "finding a good room" (ie to defend against the dead): used ironically since in any universe or reality with horrible undead things in it there are no 'good rooms' - but there are certainly better ones; apparently a good room is any room survivors can haul copious amounts of quality made iron furniture into in order to use as a makeshift barricade. large metal bed frames are a favorite. in the awesome original source engine the distinctly euro-janky physics and (here robert what pretends to know what the blue-grey faced hell it is ir waffling on about) low rate of physics computation per-object clash meant complicated objects often got stuck when thrown together at odd angles. this made for good 'sticky' barriers which were often impossible for the dead to break through or past. that is until the stomach-dread inducing moment they suddenly did you see at some point the average zombie 'survivor' always has to figure on them getting in. always **+** that "cold sinking stomach feeling" (c.s.s.f) of "existential zombie dread" (ezd): no garme developer to date has fully managed to convey the terrifying cold sick feel of utter sudden undead isolation (sui.) bill from left 4 dead comes kinda close when ey says "son we just crossed the street." it's as simple as that. you old safe suburban nowhere life is over buddy boy - if indeed it ever really began. you're now and forever on your own in a fetid oozing urban sea of endless rotting blue-grey ash faces. two movies that successfully convey this feeling of undead dread is a scene in romeo's day of the dead - the sight of all the lights starting to horribly go off one by one in a nearby downtown city building. _shivers_ the other of course being john carpenter's escape from new york. (that scene near the beginning when the cops are forced to retreat back to the helicopter. imagine being the guy at the back; you stopped for a second to tie your shoelace stare up at the local ruins or glance down at your phone to change the 'hardcore zombie survival' ost and when you looked back up you found they'd accidentally left you behind. *gulp*. you stop for a moment to take in endless utterly bleak streets of ruin receding into the blackness. suddenly there's a low moaning noise immediately behind your left ear. you're too late buddy boy; you're some *thing's* dinner **+** day of the dewad note: the first video nasty vhs box art to give you the serious heebie-geebies when you saw it looking down at you from the top shelf of that old mom n' pop video store in the middle of suburbia behind the 70's style bead curtains of the adult section and you suddenly wanted to get the heck out of there considering dusk was fast approaching and you didn't want to be shut in with it because you imagined the contents might somehow come alive. "it's like.. it's like ir faces have all horribly 'rot-melted' together or something." *shiver* **+** "everybody go headcrab": an old idea in zombie survival that the dead may not win if only everyone switches to this particular player model. the effectiveness of such a strategy is still highly debatable **+** backwards movement penalty: the increasingly agreed on notion among players forced to 'play dead' that there needs to be a movement penalty for players moving backwards while firing **+** "cading": no modern garme developer has yet got this facet of zombie survival even remotely correct or where it actually needs to be. due to the messy vagaries of vidyagarm physics anti-zombie barricades are simultaneously impossible to create or maintain - and often all but indestructible for zombies to break down or through. the very notion of cading may be in fact an 'entirely wrong problem' to solve given that it rests on extremely dubious / entrenched notions about digital physics architectural design and utilization of digital space and the (modern synthetic) nature of zombie survival itself - that is to say 'since none of this shit ain't remotely real why keep pretending it is?' amateur postmodern resident internet theorist for hire robert what's response to this is to suggest entirely bypassing such a 'problem' and instead reconsider zombie survival (indeed video garmes generally) in an entirely new paradigm that they term "abstract encounters." in short "flock realism(tm)" **+** "the knife wielding dead": they make little knowing 'stabby-stab-stab' type motions in your direction. perhaps the most terrifying kind found in zombie survival garmes - along with those with glowing eyes and rotting blue-grey ash faces **+** "glowing zombie eyes": a contentious issue within the undead zombie survival garming community (or should that be garming underground - given how rare / endangered the genre is / is becoming / always was.) traditionally only 'blops' fanbois seem to appreciate and enjoy the glowing eye'd undead. for some however such zombies are supernatural zombies and therefore (somehow) don't count as real zombies.. whatever they are **+** "rotting blue-grey ash faces": as in the classic (deadpan) zombie survival face "wow look a rotting blue-grey ash face at the single-paned window" or as an impromptu architectural critique "those are the kind of windows rotting blue-grey ash faces look through." a very rare type except in japanese vidyagarmz and 90's arcade rail shooters. the faces themselves look like waxy rubber masks. the best picture of the rotting blue-grey ash faced undead is the front faded vhs cover of george romero's day of the dead. truly amazingly grody - and still an aesthetic feature yet to be fully garme developed by anyone **+** "somebody throw a nanite bomb right the flock now": the classic zombie survival notion - that someone should do this right now in order to deal with all these undead. of course nobody has one wouldn't even know how to make one and (given our undead luck up until this horrible point) it probably wouldn't do jack jiggidy squat in any case. still as a random desperate (fake) solution suddenly shouted out loud to anyone living within range it kinda sounds cool **+** "pushback": the popular in-garme idea of having guns with infinite ammo which then 'push' zombies back. pure "because vidyagarmz" horse pucky which almost all players playing zombies start to passionately hate after thirty seconds or less. much like 'cading' probably another false problem to 'solve.' the fact nobody's come up with a better idea however may simply be that vidyagarm zombies themselves are a bad idea that cannot be improved upon; an inherently unpolishable lump of something disgusting rotting and stinking. the seemingly living continually push back the forever-advancing embrace of the impossible dead. in garming terms pushback mechanics feel like getting a thousand automated lousy 'job-lozenge' rejection letters per minute. it truly sucks **+** "braindawgs": impossibly ancient / dead internet meme / reference that nobody ('nobody alive that is') remotely remembers - eg. 'goddam eric clapton hawkwind jumbo-legs'. put that in your asshole and "cut em' up!" you _are_ from norway. what to disturb andor annoy other players - just drop in a few 'braindawgs' applied directly to forehead. (oldskool interwebs flava boyeee) **+** "!stopsound" & "!ztele": the two most important commands on any classic zombie survival server. the first stops that brain destroying noise of a thousand guns firing at once and the second teleports you back to spawn. those poor unfortunates unaware of the existence of these commands - or even worse unwilling to use them - are doomed to suffer needlessly **+** "secret (zombie survival) rooms": probably the single most contested andor hated philosophical aspect of (classic) zombie survival. most happens on servers running custom maps made by the admin which feature several secret rooms andor means to access them (eg. keypad codes - secret b.s 'shoot this particular spot twice' and other hidden arbitrary nonsense.) such rooms are meant to entirely bypass the whole idea of zombie survival for those with the correct 'insider knowledge' - ie. mostly server clan members andor 'friends of the admin'. (btw flock the admin's arts kissing sycophants just let me in maggots - pulling on *this* particular coat hook does nothing i tell you!) thing is the question of 'why even bother to have a particular garme mode (eg. zombie survival) and then immediately incorporate the very means to circumvent the whole point of that mode?' is precisely the ideological point; the whole notion of 'secret rooms' often appears as an inadvertent statement on the inherent existential absurdity dead-headed dumbness dread-ful ontological inertia and 'malignant uselessness' of both the dead andor zombie survival in general **+** "light jazz": the idea within the (dispersed isolated fragmented forever wandering) online zombie survival community that light jazz can sooth the experience of either taking part in online zs - or even sooth the painful experience of merely watching play zs in oldskool youtube videos (alas often with zero views) **+** "dead server" aka 'no players online' - a forthcoming classic 'weird internet shit' simulator / movie about an (apparently) empty server for a low-fi zombie mmo title from the 90's psx era. "it's dead - and yet it lives!" also watch out for the crazy server admin **+** skeleton forts: nobody really knows what a skeleton fort is in zombie survival - but it sounds cool **+** "zombie survival vs zombie escape": technically the same however zs is basically hide and seek and ze is basically 'get to the choppa' with regular pauses for relevant doors to open while you fend off the dead that is the tactical combat and special operations process of removing survivors from a targeted hot site when it's considered imperative that they be immediately relocated out of said hostile environment and taken to a (forever only temporarily) secured area under friendly control. another term for this is "zexfil" if you want to sound all 'leet' / 'tactical' / 'scout-crouchy' these two modes represent the two sides of zombie survival - 'defend' and 'run'. in undead actuality however you can do neither. (who among us has the use of a fully fueled helicopter to get to a large functioning easily defended shopping mall? exactly.) philosophically speaking the only statement worth admitting while either hiding or running from the rotting flesh-eating undead is the fact that "they are us" aka p-zombies **+** "dayz": a dirty word even for the musty undead. the core dead symbol of all that is 'too little too late too crap' - arguably killed off zombies in online multiplayer single-handedly. except remember that new cool garme with the techno zombies you could hack en-mass and redirect against other players (no me neither.) you see zombies simply refuse to leave us because they are the unconscious dreams of rotting society which haunt our waking amerikan mall nightmares. ir soft shuffling shadows forever follow in our hyper-consumerist shadows **+** "hawaiian t-shirt friday": consider a cool amazingly garish hawaiian style tshirt as an essential fashion accessory during any half decent zombie survival a-calypso === tldr onion-style rant by mr rofl waffles: aka "freakishly earnest black ops zombie fanboy shares deep franchise concerns" the following bizarre transcript is from someone on loltube raving about some kind of ancient roman empire-esque fall from grace of black ops zombies - and ir subsequent bs 'spiritual reassessment' of ir whole zombie garming 'career arc' and personal spiritual relationship to the whole (boz) kult. frankly astounding how entirely serious ey seems about it - like any of it's even remotely real or alive ("theorist robert what suddenly knew something about kurtz that wasn't on the file") the terrifying cosmic scale unimportance of black ops flocking zombies hangs above this fanboy's rotting skull - a mars sized ball of molten iron and nickle hyperfluid superheated to 9000 degrees f - but/and (for the un-live of ir) ey simply cannot see it; ey outright refuses to admit in any sense or to any degree that shit like this simply does not matter. the vacuous nonsense ey spouts about something so fantastically trivial ey seems utterly self-flesh-consumed by - it all seems like an updated garmer culture version of zimsky's last transmission in crap sci fi flick 'teh core' (jon amiel 2003) aka: "for here in the great infinite unknowable.. man can come to know the most important thing of all: himself. ey can understand.. - what the flock am i doing?" (chuckles dies) they even talk about 'zombie youtubers'. (many have long suspected they exist.) it's like watching a penitent digital flagellant cry forth ir existential zombie franchise based wrongdoings to an indifferent (/undead?) garmer god! amazing > hi guys mr. waffles here i have been trying and trying and trying to figure out how to make this video but i just haven't been able to get it so hopefully this is the take that ends up making the final cut the zombies community is changed permanently and it's changed in a way that i never expected to be caused by black ops 4 of all garmes i thought that this garme was the safest bet i thought that this was the one the compared to all call juries in the past would have the best zombies offering and be the safest time and i'll explain what i mean by that in a second the safest time to be a zombies content creator safety in terms of regularity of contents so you can feel like you've always got something to talk about safety in terms of the positive bright future ahead safety in terms of a cohesive and positive community around you > i really thought this was the one and it just hasn't been and the reason splat i've been talking about for months and we're all intimately aware of exactly what's wrong with teh garme exactly how treyarch missed all our expectations and ended up delivering a product that the community by and large felt was subpar and continued to be subpar for a long time and updated in a subpar manner but the fact of the matter speaking only for myself okay is the black ops 4 basically blew the doors off my love for treyarch because of ir track record of work ok and what i mean by that is the i was in a position during black ops 3 where i'd love black ops wanna i love world war and i love black ops 2 obviously right and i put so much time into those garmes the black ops 3 came around and it felt like nearly everything they did was amazing it felt like they kept just hitting home run after home run and there were little mistakes here and there and there were bumps in the road for sure and i'm not pretending that they didn't exist but i was very are you willing to give trout the benefit of the doubt when they needed it to give treyarch time to breathe when they needed it to give them second chances > okay because of the fact that ir previous body of work and ir work up to whatever point i'm talking about in black ops 3 meant that i had faith i had faith in that company to deliver a product for the next wherever it was full year or six months or remaining dlc or even surprise tlc five i had faith in them to deliver and yes just like any garme there would be little things that i didn't like here and there and they'd be decisions that i would wish weren't the way they were but i was there for the journey i was down for the ride i was in my seatbelt was locked i was ready for anything for whatever they had coming i was willing to give it a go and very eager to be excited for it very very eager and then black ops four came along and i applied that exact same thinking to the entirety of the marketing campaign and i was left with this weird feeling of emptiness like i went to comic-con i flew myself out activision didn't pay for it i paid for my flight i paid for my air b&b; i took the time to go there and the reveal at comic-con compared to the one at black ops 3 was devoid of any real soul that's the way it felt to me > it felt like they weren't really saying anything and it was just this really weird atmosphere but i couldn't quite identify the time as to why i was feeling that it was strange but i knew something was off and then teh garme came out and it was the same sort of thing of like oh my goodness this formats on disk that's incredible i'm really excited by that and that's really great to see but there was this underlying question mark about teh garme that i couldn't quite figure out and that i don't think anyone else in the community quite could figure out at the time on launch as well and then weeks went by and the puzzle pieces started to kind of fall into place and i realized that this treyarch that i was seeing do work in the zombies community was just not the treyarch by feel like i once bought dlc from boat garmes from red community updates from whatever right it just didn't feel like that old kind of classic zombies that i knew and loved and because of that i think my illusion about treyarch as a company and what they were capable of and teh garme that they were making and the scope of that garme and the resources they were willing to put into the zombies component that illusion i think was shattered and i was left in a place that i really did not expect > and that was one of i feel like at least deeper insight into where call of duty zombies sits within black ops 4 and that within call of duty as a series and that within activision sort of array of published titles etc and that within the industry at large i just feel like i've had an epiphany and it's it's it's nothing deep right it's not like a eureka moment i'm not the next einstein for thinking this but i feel like my own perception has been widened by the fact that i was so willing to be really excited about everything previously because i was a really happy fan and that was a really positive and enjoyable state of mind to be in that has basically been completely taken away now and i'm in a position where i at my core still deep down love zombies right i love zombies as a garme mode i love the experiences that i've had with it in my life they've been fantastic and i mean dead of the night controversy aside we ended up being the first team to stream the easter egg if i didn't love teh garme i wouldn't be putting myself through that sort of thing i was up for like 40 hours or something getting my guide up for you guys for that map i just wouldn't be doing that if i didn't enjoy what i was doing right > i clearly enjoy zombies a lot still in certain moments but what i've realized is that there's so much else to it so much to the bigger picture though is either not so good all would be better filled with other things and is this kind of insight there's a new vision of how things are that i think has separately dawned on every single zombies content creator that i've spoken to every single one of us who kind of had our own moment of reflection our own personal kind of space away from things and our own little decompression from what it means to be an ongoing zombies content creator and we've all sort of stepped back and gone damn maybe the thing that i thought that i was playing maybe the thing that i thought was gonna be a standalone garme one day maybe the thing that i felt like could be one of the biggest garmes on the planet or whatever > you want to sort of say was people's perception of zombies before black ops war that now has been brought down to earth and put into much more realistic terms zombies is a garme mode the probably about 5% of call of duty players actually play and as such treyarch is maybe a 300 350 something like that person studio they're gonna only be able to put us an amount of time into the zombies mode as a result zombies is only gonna get a certain amount of content and the reason that we see multiplayer getting everything and blackout getting little bits of things here and there is because both of those respectively have more players than zombies tenfold and i think the thing that's really interesting is the way that everyone in the community has reacted to these moments of realization and reflection and kind of thought about this garme every single person in the community has treated a little bit differently when i first kind of had this realization my reaction was holy cow nobody is saying anything i'm gonna make a bunch of videos making a bunch of noise about the fact that teh garme is broken and it needs to be fixed or there is like a prophecy that i'm putting out there right now the things are gonna get a real rough if this problem isn't solved like straight away and i made those videos > i mean it just kind of has descended from there into chaos right because teh garme i mean it's sort of better now it's not screening now but that wasn't the core problem i don't think the core problem was not the blue screens the core problem is much deeper set than that i think and over the last couple weeks you've seen other creators reacting in ir own way as well for example noah noah is a really good friend of mine obviously noah is also the biggest zombies content creator out there and that's a fact i'm pretty sure i mean you've got people like vanoss who make videos on the zombies maps every now and then and that's great they'll be one video whereas noah is a zombies content creator and ir's the biggest one you also have people like jc you have people like lex you have people like pizza you have people like dalek and every single one of these people have reacted to zombies being in a very weird place in ir own separate ways so noah is now realizing as many of us are that being a zombies youtuber is only ever gonna hold you back right and that there's so much more to life and there are so many other communities and there are so many other people and so many other garmes that being a zombies youtuber doesn't really make sense for ir anymore and so ey is kind of birthing ir channel again and turning into something that ir's more happy with playing a wider variety of garmes jc has moved all of ir streams to twitch now that's a drastic thing right and i'm saying these things and being like ya know has done > the sga seized on that i've got to kind of really try and convey how big a deal this is right these are people's careers people's entire careers that they are completely pivoting right now because of the way they're feeling about this garme jc ir's taking all of ir streams over to twitch doing no more streams as far as i'm aware on youtube and playing a variety of garmes on there rather than just on b's as well and ir's doing really well by the way so i'm really really happy for ir cuz jc is my bro it's great so you've got creator sort of doing things like that you've got other creators who are very much doubling down and sticking with zombies pete's is one of these people you okay ir videos for the past months and it's just zombies zombies zombies zombies zombies zombies so ey is very much to this day really sticking with black gospel zombies being the thing that ir's playing every day ir's streaming every day ir's myth-busting it's actually doing the sort of things that ey would normally do and it's really interesting i think there you have this kind of separation of different parts of the community into different areas right now i'm absolutely categorically not saying that one is right and one is wrong and one is better than one as well so anything like that i don't want to say noah is like a traitor i don't to say that pizza is a fool for staying with zombies > i don't say any of that right i mean literally not saying it at all i'm saying is that people are doing ir own thing and as a result a lot of people are saying yeah okay the zombies community is dead and i kind of hesitate to say it but i also kind of agree like i think that the zombies community as it once was is dead because zombies as it once was is also dead that garme that we were all perceiving to be a certain way like i said is no longer the current garme that we're playing right we're all looking at it and viewing it from a completely different angle now and that doesn't mean that we're not gonna be all making zombies videos for dlc 2 and all making really exciting videos about a surprise dlc 5 if there is one and all those sorts of things it doesn't mean that we're not gonna be making easter egg guides and story videos etc etc it just means that the experience that there once was in zombies years back won't be the same anymore and this is something that has given me lots of reason to think about my place on youtube right i've been making videos for 10 years and for the majority of that time like 3/4 of my time on youtube i've been making zombies videos > now 3/4 of my time on youtube let's call that seven years that's basically a third of my life so for a significant chunk of my entire life i've been making zombies videos and now i'm in a position where i look up like ups for zombies and i'm like yeah i right now just don't really feel inspired to make videos about this garme i just don't the passion that i had the spark that i had the five i had right now is burning very very low and like i said it's gonna flare up again as soon as dlc because it always does that's just something that i absolutely know is going to happen but whether we'll be there again a week after the dlc comes out or not is another question i mean four dead of the night that spark completely evaporates straight away because there was always controversy suddenly people were attacking me for playing the dlc on launch and it was just like a reminder of all the things that i don't like about this garme and so in the last couple weeks in my time away i've been thinking a lot and i want to put it on the record right now that i am not quitting the zombies community i'm not doing anything in that vein because there's an entire year of content to come and when that contents there i'm down to cover it > but the thing is there's gonna be a lot of gaps right and so i am also going to be putting other things in those gaps it's something that i've been doing anyway for the last couple months that you probably will have noticed i streamed pt for example and that did really well on the channel you guys really really enjoyed it and i completely lost my mind because i was so damn scared i posted smash i posted a little been a fortnight i've posted just little tiny tidbits of things here and there and that's gonna continue but what i was gonna say is in my time away one of the things that happened obviously was new year's and at new year's everyone's like okay what am i gonna do for next year what's my new year's resolution and i was sort of thinking where do i want to go with my life like what do i want to do because if you'd asked me three years ago i would have said i want to make zombies videos for the next ten years right if you ask me that today and i said i want to make zombies videos for the next ten years i would be lying to your face i would be completely lying to your face cuz the thought of making zombies videos for another ten years oh god it's so awful and it's just not gonna be sustainable as a career > obviously right i mean i've got to figure out how to actually make it living doing what i do i'm in a place where for the last week or two i've been really thinking about what might come next because i have a degree i have a physics degree in fact and it's a damn good one so i could get a job doing physics pretty much any time if i wanted to and then completely separate to that i have this entire body of work that i've brought up on youtube there's nothing to do with physics and there are ample jobs in the garming industry that i suspect i could try and sort of scrap we fight my way through for if i wanted to as well so there's saw two career paths there that i could jump into as like conventional careers and then in the middle there's the sort of arrow that i fired and have been writing ever since of making the videos themselves not just the sort of conventional career path but the sort of entrepreneurial adventure of my own there's that in the middle between those two things as well > i'll be honest with you i don't know where i want to take things i don't know basically i'm gonna be still making videos for the next year two years three years whatever it is right i'm not saying i'm stopping making videos i'm just saying that now i'm done with my degree i'm finally able to actually reflect a bit on what i want to do in my life and i thought that what i would want to be doing with my life this year was making a zombies video every single day in hell making two videos in it something like that and instead we're in this weird content drought and teh garme has been as it has been and the community's reaction has been as it has been and i'm here like wow goddamn that's just not what i thought was gonna happen at all and i wonder if i should be doing something else like one of the things that i've wanted to do for a long time long long time is make garmes right and i've never really gone in that direction as my channel i've never really gone in that direction with my education i mean did physics that puts you in a good position but making garmes are something that i've always been interested in kind of in the background maybe i'll make my first garme this year maybe > i'll just do a little side project maybe i end up finding something else that i really enjoy and i start doing that alongside uship i mean the sort of cliche is music right like a lot of youtubers start making content and they're like minecraft youtubers or something or maybe they played gta or whatever right they get a big channel and then they suddenly turn into a musician i mean like filthy frank public example right because ey had some audience there ey was able to sort propel himself and to actually found success doing what ey really loves to do is i guess ir other hobby right ir other thing that gets ir out of bed in the morning and i'm just really in a position now or it's i just got ir weird feeling like man i wonder where things are gonna go for me and i'll be honest with you i don't have the answer to that and i don't think i will for a while but i wanted to make this video because i thought it was important to have a chat like a little heart-to-heart just sort of talking candidly and honestly about what i think a lot of zombies creators are thinking right now like what's next black ops for zombies missed the mark and it missed it in such a way that i'm actually needing to kind of accelerate my little timeline of figuring out what comes afterwards and i don't think any of us are gonna have a really good answer for a while > i think that you're gonna start to see people trying to experiment and do things in various different areas and i guess if there's one thing that i hope that you would take away from this video please when you see people trying these new things when you see these new beginnings on various channels and you see attempts at new content try to just let them screw up a couple times let people be a bit rough around the edges allow people to give things a shot and be bad at them because at the end of the day we're all trying to figure out how to make you guys happy how to entertain you how to make your day better and we as content creators right now are having to completely change what we need to do in order to do that and as such there's gonna be some growing pains right but in the back of your mind hold on to the fact the things are only gonna get better from here this is only gonna improve everyone's content it's a new challenge it's a bump it's a speed bump it's a sleeping placement but it's only through little challenges like this and it's through kind of times of difficulty that you grow as a creator as a person as an entertainer whatever right as an orator whatever it might be and so this is an exciting time as scary as it is especially because like your career hangs in the balance > if you're a zombies youtuber right now it's exciting and i just wanted to convey that to you guys in a video what comes next in the immediate future well for me january is a month that i undertaking a little slow i'm gonna be putting my feelers out in two different areas and trying to figure out what i want to bring to my channel in the immediate future anthem is one garme but i've definitely got my eye on i also have just played through the entirety of god of war that garme is now my favorite garme of all time it's a masterpiece a complete masterpiece honestly phenomenal and i'll be making a video about that later this week there's some other garmes i want to bring to the channel i also want to try and figure out some kind of zombies content that i can stomach as well and generally i'm gonna be still around i'll still be on twitter etc but i'll be locking a little bit more than usual and just trying to figure out what comes next hopefully you guys can be patient with me if you're in the uk and your university right now you probably have exams best of luck that basically wraps up the video from me moral of the story the zombies community has changed permanently and now we get to see if that is a change for good so thanks for watching guys drop a like if you enjoyed i'll see you next time very soon bye for now *sudden horrible low moan outside remote cottage window* yadda yadda === re: zs 'crackboning' netspace legend has it there was once an epic heroic survivor of the zombie a-calypso known only as crackbone. to say ey had a 'unique approach' to existing among the dead is a biocosmic (nekrocosmic) understatement. this guy was basically batnuts but in a good strange way. the way ey would 'get on the mic' while battling the hordes basically made ir a legend as cribbed from the interwebs: 'cluttering' is a disorder of speech and language processing resulting in rapid dysrhythmic sporadic unorganized and frequently unintelligible speech. accelerated speech is not always present but an impairment in formulating language almost always is. characteristics **+** telescopes or condenses words **+** lack of effective self-monitoring skills **+** lack of pauses between words; run-on sentences **+** lack of awareness **+** imprecise articulation **+** irregular speech rate **+** interjections; revisions; filler words **+** compulsive talker; verbose; circumlocutions **+** language disorganized; confused wording **+** seems to verbalize before adequate thought formulation "calling crackbone" / "crackboning": the online scenic practice of using specific random terms in a moderate to quick clipped delivery **+** "braindog(/s)" (often pron. 'brayne-dougz') **+** "peanut butter" **+** "sandwiches" **+** "bullshed" **+** "asshole" (pron 'azzz-soul') **+** "magnum" **+** "(/in the) yellow house" **+** "turtle ears" (pron 'turtleleers') **+** "raccoon eyes" **+** "boneflake!" **+** "please tell me more" **+** "i can't let you do that" **+** "so anyway.." **+** "open that/them (x)" **+** "gimme some of them (x)" **+** "i gots them (x eg braindawgz)" **+** "get your / that (x)" **+** "who took" **+** "look (at that/them x" **+** "x on/w//in my/your ?" **+** "x on them x" **+** "sit down / sit your x (/down)" **+** "god damn" **+** "make it/my (/?) happen" **+** "apply the cure dof" (direct to forehead) **+** "can you hear me?" **+** "i am from norway" **+** "i'm on your roof" **+** "i've got something important to tell you and you need to pay attention" **+** "cut 'em (/up)" / "cut them braindawgz up!" **+** "it's not working out" **+** "+arrrrgggg!!!" **+** "urrrggg!" (as if straining to take a dump) **+** "runnn!!" **+** "follow me if you want to live" **+** "the lesson's in metaphysicals" **+** "jimjams in my legs" holophrasis 1. the expression of the ideas of a phrase or sentence in one word. 2. an expression of a complex of ideas in a single word world salad de-choherencing: descriptive terminology the following terms are descriptive of the speech (and by inference the thinking) of patients with thought disorders and do not attempt to explain the underlying cognitive defects formal thought disorder simply means a disorder of the form of thought as opposed to its content. akata-phasia similarly is defined simply as a disorder in the expression of thought in speech. paralogia is defined as 'positive thought disorder' (i.e. the intrusion of irrelevant or bizarre thought) whereas alogia (also known as laconic speech) describes 'negative thought disorder' or poverty of thought as expressed in speech. this latter concept should be differentiated from poverty of thought content in which the number of words spoken may be normal but little in the way of content can be distilled once redundant words are discounted. empty speech is essentially similar. bradyphasia refers to speech that is reduced in rate but not necessarily content desultory thinking jumps from one idea to another without logical connections. loosening of associations describes a similar concept as do knight's move thinking (alluding to the movement of the only chess piece which does not move in straight lines) and crowding of thought. derailment describes an unexpected change of direction of a 'train of thought' which 'derails' onto a subsidiary idea. loss of goal is essentially similar. tangentiality describes a related concept whereby a patient's thoughts move off in an unexpected direction never to return in response to a direct question rather than in spontaneous speech. a similar concept vorbeireden ('talking past the point') describes thinking that bypasses the central idea to reach a different goal. vorbeireden is often used interchangeably with vorbeigehen ('going past the point') although the latter was originally defined as part of the 'ganser syndrome' whereby some criminals would give incorrect answers ('approximate answers') to simple questions that none the less suggested that the correct answer was known (e.g. saying dogs have five legs) paragrammatism (literally meaning the wrong use of grammar) and parasyntax (the wrong use of syntax) are variously described as the inappropriate use of words speech made difficult to understand because of the breakdown of grammatical/syntactical construction and speech consisting of a mass of complicated clauses that do not achieve the goal of thought despite the individual clauses making sense by themselves. transitory thinking describes thinking characterized by derailments substitutions and omissions terminology implying the underlying faults in mental processing. the following terms attempt to describe the mental processes that have led to 'normal' thinking becoming 'disordered' condensation is defined as the phenomenon by which two ideas with something in common are blended into a single false concept. this is similar to the concept of fusion. displacement and substitution describe a process whereby one idea is used for an associated idea. omission describes the phenomenon whereby a thought (or part of a thought) is inappropriately left out of speech. this has similarities with the concept of thought blocking (also known as snapping off) in which a thought suddenly ends before it is complete with the patient reporting that ir mind has emptied incoordination describes a breakdown of connections between thoughts (akin to the term asyndesis). interpenetration refers to the unwanted intrusion of unrelated themes into a thought that was originally goal-directed. overinclusion describes the inability to maintain the boundaries of a thought when trying to convey a specific idea. fragmentation describes the way a single idea is unintentionally broken up into several parts that are not by themselves understandable grossly unintelligible speech occasionally speech becomes so disordered that its ability to convey any useful information is lost. numerous terms describe this phenomenon and include drivelling muddling verbigeration (the senseless repetition of words or phrases) word salad speech confusion incoherence aculalia glossolalia catalogia cataphasia and schizophasia. jargon aphasia refers to speech that is unintelligible because the individual words themselves are unintelligible or invented by the patient idiosyncratic use of words speech is sometimes hard to understand not because of disordered linking of ideas but because it contains words or phrases that are used in unusual ways or have been invented by the patient. neologisms ('new words') are an example of the latter and convey meaning for the patient only. word approximations also fill a semantic gap (e.g. calling a hat a 'head shoe') but have understandable meanings metonymy is the usage of imprecise expressions whereby a person uses a word or phrase related to the correct term in an unusual or inappropriate way (e.g. talking about eating a menu rather than a meal). paraphasia is a similar concept described variously as the substitution of one word for another with a similar morphology or phonetic composition and also as the destruction of words with the interpolation of non-phonetic sounds. paraphemia pseudoagrammatism and confusingly paraphrasia are all synonymous with paraphasia some people use certain legitimate words or phrases in ir speech far more frequently than would seem appropriate and these words or phrases seem to convey a much greater range of meaning than would usually be understood. these stock words/phrases plug gaps in the person's much-reduced working vocabulary thought disorder usually associated with conditions other than schizophrenia perseveration is variously described as the simple repetition of words or phrases beyond the point of relevance the use of a word or phrase repeatedly in different contexts within a single idea and the repetition of the same response to different stimuli (e.g. giving the same answer to several unrelated questions). it is usually a sign of organic brain disease (e.g. dementia). stereotypy describes the giving of the same response to different stimuli rather than the simple repetition of a word. echolalia specifically describes the continued repetition of a word (or part of a word) as does logoclonia. both are also usually signs of organic illness pressured speech (also known as tachyphasia) describes speech that is abnormally fast with few pauses and difficult to interrupt. patients describe its subjective equivalent pressure of thought as the feeling that ir mind is so full of thoughts that they cannot keep up with them. logorrhoea describes an increased amount rather than rate of speech and is also referred to as verbosity. fight of ideas describes a thought process that moves so rapidly between ideas that it is difficult to follow although the links between ideas are understandable (unlike the situation in loosening of associations). clanging describes a pattern of speech in which the sound of a word rather than its meaning determines the link with the next ideas. such links include rhymes puns assonance and alliteration. all of these phenomena usually suggest mania poverty of thought and poverty of thought content often occur in the negative syndrome of schizophrenia but are also found in existential depression at being around the blue-grey faced flesh eating undead descriptive terms with unclear pathological implications circumstantiality describes speech containing much tedious and unnecessary details although the goal of thought is eventually reached. stilted speech has an excessively formal quality and may seem outdated or pompous frequently using multisyllabic words where simpler words are more appropriate. self-referential speech repeatedly refers neutral topics under discussion back to the speaker himself. illogicality refers to a pattern of speech characterized by frequent unwarranted and illogical inferences between separate clauses suggesting faulty inductive reasoning. all of these terms have been described in the context of psychiatric illness but are also commonly described among the general zombie survivor population === **still to do: collecting zs anecdotes** **+** ironically one of the best-worst garmes to convey ezd is the truly stinking 'land of the dead: road to fiddler's green.' the sheer violent bare spartanism of the virtual surroundings makes one feel all cold and empty on the inside - precisely just like those beings which constantly seek to (passively inertly) feast your dead idiot flesh. when the cosmically flimsy cardboard and duct tape facade of your old life is revealed for the mere empty movie set backdrop it always actually was the true horror of dead space is laid bare before thee **+** that the one legged priest meant in george romero's classic dawn of the dead: "when the dead walk senores we must stop the killing.. or lose the war." this seems to indicate everything has fundamentally changed. the dead aren't 'fighting' humanity. they're now become just another part of our daily as-lived existential reality. they're more like the weather. to think only in terms of a 'war' against the dead is to be stuck in the reactionary delusion that the dead give a single flying (shuffling) zombified shit about the living. the 'war' is already over brother and humanity lost **+** talkin' zombie survival scenarios. the classic zss question is: "you have one hour to prep for a zombie outbreak. what do you do?" i love the fact that most of the people who've ever responded to such a thread would do stuff that's far worse than the undead a far more accurate scenario: "you're surrounded by a bunch of desperate cowardly sweating and utterly selfish right wing assholes who are forever just waiting for any excuse or opportunity to steal weapons guns petrol and kill arbitrarily. what do you do to prep?" the classic response of course should be: "well right now i'm typing this - and later if the post arrives i'll be building a new pc.. if memory prices drop.. i'll then have tea play tf2 and l4d2 for a bit and go to bed. tomorrow i shall rise check the papers for mob rule and assuming your workplaces and your oversized oled tv's kept you off the streets and your gun cabinets locked carry on as normal in other words i'll do the same i do every day such duckheads exist. as for 'what can anyone do to be ready' for some imaginary asinine war they'd love to have my reply is: why would anyone just want to 'survive' if they've already had the opportunity to have lived free of fear and hatred ie. not forever crouched in ir fox news lined basement with a tin of beans ir dead stuffed mother and a tin foil helmet i wouldn't even want to go back 30 years ago let alone to the miserable scenario it would be if batshed gun-toting holes were suddenly in charge" in other worse flock the walking dead (talk about flogging an dead horse that should have been put down years ago) and the mysanthropic hate-fuelled wankers and machete weilding sociopaths which populate it - ie. anyone (usually with light pink skin) seemingly 'forced' to constantly make 'tough choices' in order to 'simply survive' - ie. which really only ever means 'dominate and rule' **+** in times of severe trouble and crisis i mean real life and death shit real people gather together and help one another without pause - without a single thought for ir own personal safety. it's heartwarming to witness. the way the media movies and bullshed tv shows portray it apparently everybody is only ever out for themselves and constantly waiting to kick you in the face and off the ladder so they can reach the loaf of stale bread at the top. it's a flocking lie it's almost as if they want you to believe humanity is inherenty evil stupid and cruel - which no doubt it often is - but that's just at the surface. the deeper reading here is that shit like zombie survival is merely an excuse for fascistic acts of extreme egotistical self-interest. the real idea rotting just underneath the designer dirty surface of a lot of these shows and movies is that 'only the strong (ie. far right and utterly assholish) can and will survive' and that 'the weak' perish simply because they're not manly(tm) enough. no. they don't survive precisely because you've stolen all the flocking bread and ammo you utter gun nut! ellie from 'teh last of us' is another serial killing psycho conveniently portrayed as 'having no choice' except to continually kill kill kill at will easy allies review: "the last of us part ii can be very disturbing. enemies feel lifelike as you stab them in the throat and watch the lights slowly drain from ir eyes. blood seeps from wounds as bodies lay on the ground staring back at you. the people you fight often call each other by name adding weight and meaning to each life you take" consider how such an image might symbolize or open up important political discussions about white violence in video garmes especially given the people in the last of us - exactly like the self righteous psychopaths in the walking dead - always act exactly like ruthless whining far right survivalist prepper wackjobs. (almost as if they wouldn't even really need the flimsy excuse of the world ending to act like they do and simply love murdering people not like themselves and ir morally ill ilk.) indeed where exactly are these 'philosophical questions asked about the cycle of violence' promised by developers naughty dog. what a joke. mere batshed power fantasies r-us more like (grand theft 'pseudo-critique' auto anyone) as ellie from the last of us ii states: "i'm gonna find and i'm gonna kill every last one of them." um ok psycho stay the flock away from me also watch romero's pretty good land of the dead for a better idea of the real power dynamic taking place during times of undead crisis.) zombies and class have a lot in common; it's not just the living vs. the dead - but rather zombies as a metaphor for the 1% rich flocking over everyone else. john leguizamo's cholo chracter and ir tragic (and in many ways inevitable) transformation into the dead perfectly symbolizes the intersecting venn diagram arcs of race class poverty and deadness. ir's not just undead to fascistic assholes like dennis hopper's ruthless plutocratic city ruler paul kaufman ey was never once truly alive under such authoritarian systems of rule **example undead 404 links** **+** journal of american popular culture - zombies malls and the consumerism debate: george romero's dawn of the dead https://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2002/harper.htm **+** reddit - dayz is dead: four years in early access https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/7j297i/dayz_is_dead_four_years_in_early_access/ **+** wikipedia: philosophical zombie (p-zombies) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/philosophical_zombie **+** the atlantic: what happens when digital cities are abandoned? https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/what-happens-when-digital-cities-are-abandoned/373941/ **+** the escapist: do people still play dead island? https://forums.escapistmagazine.com/threads/do-people-still-play-dead-island.103360/ **+** loltube: (vinesauce) vinny - active worlds exploration (are you lost?) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prgatg6pua0 **+** atlas obscura: exploring a decade-old abandoned fantasy garme https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/exploring-a-decadeold-abandoned-fantasy-garme **+** mmo huts: the mmo graveyard - dead mmorpgs https://mmohuts.com/news/the-mmo-graveyard-dead-mmorpgs/ **+** digg: exploring the digital ruins of second life https://digg.com/2018/second-life-in-2018 **+** kotaku: when an mmo dies https://kotaku.com/when-an-mmo-dies-5674721 **+** garmes industry biz - back from the dead: the people keeping old mmos alive https://www.garmesindustry.biz/the-people-keeping-old-mmos-alive **+** reddit - the disturbing case of pagan: autogeny https://www.reddit.com/r/creepygaming/comments/d075x1/the_disturbing_case_of_pagan_autogeny/ **+** loltube land of the dead: road to fiddler's green | full garme | 4k/60fps garmeplay walkthrough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu40lvlkc_c **+** google scholar search for "zombie survival garmes": https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=nl&as_sdt=0%2c5&q=zombie+survival+garmes+&btng= **+** robert what - this mod is dead! === // republic of bob