I'm using this blog to demonstrate some of the things that you can do with yours - so have a look around my posts and see if there's anything you'd like to be able to do, too. If you can't figure it out for yourself, let me know!
What to Look Out For
Images
Don't get stressed!
Most of my posts have at least one image in them - they help break up the text, and add a bit of life to a page. It's a bit dull if all your posts are just a slab of dull-looking text.
Blogger gives you a number of ways to grab images - for instance, you can upload them from your own computer or link to images elsewhere on the web. In "Thing 17" we'll look at how you can use Creative Commons licenced images (including what on earth I mean by "Creative Commons" licences!).
Videos
Like images, Blogger also gives you several different ways to add videos to your post - the easiest of which is adding one from YouTube.
Tags/Labels
It's useful to put tags on your posts - it makes finding them easier, and also allows you to group things together. Try to add the label "Sot23" to all your posts about Sot23.
If you look on the right-hand sidebar, you'll notice that I've got a listing of the labels I've used, and how many posts have included each tag. Click on a label, and you'll be shown all the related posts.
If you'd like a similar list of labels, you'll need to edit your Layout, and add a Labels widget to your sidebar.
Pages
Posts are what you use to add content from day to day, but pages are permanent places for static information - your "About Me" page, for instance. You can also add in links to other related websites, perhaps the main Sot23 blog, your friend's Sot23 blog or your own personal web page.
I've added a page and several links - and then used the option to show them as Top tabs.
I've changed the default background of the template that I'm using, to fit in better with the style of my blog...
Custom Font Styling
...I've also changed the font style and size (use the Template Designer) to make it look more how I want it to look.
The Template Designer allows you to do a reasonably amount of customisation - but if you want complete control on how each part of your blog looks (right down to individual heading styles), you'd need to create some bespoke CSS code ("cascading style sheets"). But that's way beyond the scope of this 23 Things course.
I have one. Do you? I bet you do. And if you don't... you'd better get working on it sooner rather than later.
City or Countryside?
Can you milk one of these?
It's a bit of a no-brainer this - certainly in the long-term. You just *have* to get out into the countryside. Cities will be full of decomposing corpses, whether that's the undead or the properly dead.
However, they are also temptingly full of resources and provisions. Forget it. Far too dangerous - either from the infected, or from fellow survivors who also have their eye on those provisions and who will think nothing of using force to either keep the provisions, or take them from you. Not worth it.
If you have any intention of lasting more than a few days, you need to get away from danger, grab what you can, when you can, and plan to become self-sufficient. The Good Life? It's the only life.
Choice of Vehicle
Honda Africa Twin
Whatever you can get, when you can get it. Don't get attached to anything: be prepared to change vehicle often.
In fact, be prepared to be without a vehicle often, and for long periods. The roads will be choked with abandoned cars, and fuel will quickly become nigh-on impossible to get hold of.
Motorbikes - especially trail bikes (Honda Africa Twin, I'm thinking) - would be great for getting through congested traffic, or cutting across country... but they are vulnerable, off-road riding is going to be a challenge even for experienced road riders (let alone novices) and bikes can't carry that much.
To be perfectly honest, you're going to have to do a lot of walking. A lot of walking.
My advice? Learn to ride a horse very quickly.
Security
You need to think offence and defence. For defence, I'm staggered that nobody in films or books heads for their nearest motorcycle store. My first port of call is going to Hein Gerike, and kit myself out with a good set of leathers - boots, full suit, gloves and helmet. Full face helmet, with the visor down at all times.
Sure, a helmet will reduce your peripheral vision a bit, but it will protect you from attack - and if a zombie gets close and you have to bash its brains out, the visor will stop the infected blood and flesh getting into your eyes and mouth.
For offence, then a good club of some kind, whether it's a baseball or cricket bat will do. If you can lay your hands on a sturdy sword then that's great... but I wouldn't know where to get one. Sports shops are much easier to find.
As for guns - in the UK we don't stock them in the supermarket, so guns will not be easy to come by. A police station might be worth checking out (maybe)... but think about where your nearest shooting club/country club is.
Any nearby army base might be worth investigating - but it's also likely to be highly dangerous:
You could be facing soldier zombies
You could be facing perfectly human soldiers... who are heavily armed and who won't be keen on intruders: be prepared to join up with the military as conscripts if you discover they're still alive in there
Every other survivor is likely to think that military base is a good place to go to... either they're there already, and will already have the guns, or they'll be coming right behind you: do you stand and protect your find, or do you grab what you can and get the hell out of there?
One big plus for the military base: tanks and army supplies. You'll have several months' worth of rations sorted for you and your group (you have brought a group along, haven't you?) and tanks will make short work of those traffic jams. Well, until they run out of fuel... they're kind of thirsty, tanks.
Food
First stop: the supermarket. Get food that's going to last, and get food that's nutritious and balanced. If you're going to survive out there, you need to keep fit and healthy.
But very quickly, most of the supermarket produce is going to run out and/or decompose. You need to head out into the country so that you can start growing food as soon as possible. And you'd better man-up and learn to breed chickens and pigs for food, unless you want to go vegetarian...
Communications
Radio. That will be your contact with the outside world. Who knows how long mobile phones will work for, and how long you'll have access to the electricity grid to recharge them? No, radios - wind-up portable radios, and walkie-talkies with rechargeable batteries (with wind-up rechargers... unless you can get a generator going, which of course will need fuel).
Any official announcements, or calls from other groups wanting to make contact, will be done on the radio. Get plenty of radios, and keep scanning the airwaves.
Meeting Others
Ahh... now here's the tricky bit. You won't survive long on your own, but forming a viable group is also going to be difficult. Survivors will have very different ideas about how to live successfully. Some will want to track down family (not a particularly great idea, from a cold, logical point of view) some will want to set up very democratic communes - whilst others will form militaristic hierarchies.
As you meet other survivors - either individually or in groups - you'll need to make very careful decisions about who to team up with, and who to avoid. You need numbers to make your group work... but not everybody is going to be friendly or willing to co-operate.
This blog is part of The University of Southampton Library's first attempt at the "23 Things" programme. It's been knocking about in academic libraries for a few years now (we don't really seem to be at the cutting edge in many things!), and now we're giving it a go.
I'm actually involved in delivering some of the sessions - I'm co-lead on the blogging part, and sole lead on the browsers, Twitter, Flickr and Creative Commons images sections.
What On Earth Are You On About
I should explain... "23 Things" is a programme designed to introduce library staff to a wide range of the new social media and online tools that have appeared in recent years. Since so much of academic libraries' work involves online content, and so many of our staff and students use all of these tools, we think it's useful to encourage our staff to experiment with these resources.
Sadly, there isn't a huge amount of opportunity for us to use these tools in our work - but this programme will at least introduce staff to resources they might not otherwise have encountered, and they may discover that some of the tools are useful outside of work.
So Why On Earth Are You Blogging About Zombies?
Because it's an interesting way to flesh out the blog, and to show off some of the things that you can do with Blogger - such as inserting images and videos. And now I have a taste for it, I might put some of these posts up on my personal blog.
And, let's face it, the zombie genre is fascinating for many reasons. Whilst the reanimation of corpses might not be particularly likely, a devastating outbreak of a pandemic flu virus is quite possible - in fact, it's long overdue - and many of the same themes about transmission of the virus, infection control, quarantine and public order are strongly related.
What's more, good zombie stories actually revolve around the human aspects of the story - coping under extreme stress, survival when society breaks down, relationships with fellow survivors, defence against other armed and violent groups... after the initial survival stage, the zombies themselves often become just a side issue.
If I've not made it clear already, this is very much a personal exploration of likes and dislikes. I'm not a zombie expert - there are loads of zombie movies I haven't seen, and loads of zombie games I haven't played. Frankly, that doesn't bother me in the slightest.
And I'm not even going to comment on all the films I have seen, and games I have played - let's face it, zombies are everywhere at the moment - you've even got a zombie-based survival horror game on the new Wii-U, for goodness sake!
But one game I will talk about is Dead Nation. If you have a PS3 and you've not played Dead Nation then you are missing out, big time. Created by Housemarque, who also brought us the brilliant Super Stardust, Dead Nation is a top-down, twin-stick shooter that has you working through ten levels of increasing chaos in your attempt to escape the clutches of runners, bombies, stompers and the fearsome cutters.
You start with a rifle, but you can add a variety of weapons to your arsenal including the classic shotgun and rock launcher - but also multi-use mines and a blade cannon (sweet!), amongst other things.
The action is constant: whilst it may ebb and flow from relative calm to utter zombie-infested chaos, periods of not shooting at all are few and far between. The lighting and scenery are beautiful, and the control is tight and responsive - and there's always a temptation to go back for more, try to play the game again better next time.
What's even better is that it's great as a single player game, and also as a two-player co-op. I've formed a cracking zombie-killing partnership with my wife: at one point we had the 2nd-best co-op score in the UK.
I don't know if Housemarque have any plans to release a sequel... I would absolutely love it if they did.
In my previous post I didn't express a great deal of enthusiasm for The Walking Dead TV series - I may go into further detail about that later - but I have been playing The Walking Dead game on my PS3... and I've thoroughly enjoyed it.
Now I hate spoilers, so I'm going to try to write this whilst giving as little away about it as possible. That's hard - but it's worth my effort, because if you're in the slightest bit interested in following Lee Everett's journey through the Walking Dead world, then I strongly recommend that you give it a go.
This first thing to say is that this very much an interactive story, rather than an open world, sandbox adventure. Much of the action is scripted, and you have a limited set of options at each point. But - and this is a very important "but" - the story is really well written, the characters are believable, and there's a distinct lack of people doing really stupid, horror-movie, things: wandering alone into dark basements, setting up camp next to trees without sentries active at all times - you know the kind of thing.
And in any case, the lack of freedom isn't that different to most other games - even the sandbox adventures. Let's face it for all the freedom GTA IV gives you in roaming Liberty City, the number of storyline options you have are extremely limited. And, despite being heralded as the poster-boy of sandbox games, it's the only entry in the series that has any storyline choices at all.
The thing about The Walking Dead game is that it isn't afraid the hit you with some quite serious choices. Ones that quite frankly there is no right answer to: you're forced into a split-second decision, where either choice is unpleasant: you can only save one person, so is it Person A or Person B? Two people in your group have completely opposite views - so who do you piss off? (Knowing that the person you sided against will hold that against you, and the person you sided with won't give you much credit for siding with them.)
As soon as I started playing, I decided that I needed to play through it again when I'd finished so that I could go back and make the "best" decisions. But by the time I finished, I came to the conclusion that I'd make choices throughout that I was happy with and there's very little I'd change. (Well, perhaps one thing right near the end - but I'm not sure that would have made any difference.)
That's not to say that I think any less of the game for me not wanting to replay it (well, not right away) - far from it. It was an excellent story, an excellent exploration of the collapse of society and the struggle within a group to survive.
My only gripe was that when the game decided to kill off companions (which it did quite a lot), there was nothing you could do to stop it. If you replayed the game and avoided one decision that had killed off a particular companion, you'd discover that they died in a different way not so long after in a way that you had no control over.
I guess that's a construct that enabled the game designers to keep the scope of the game realistic - if you give a player one decision that fundamentally changes the game then you have two branches from that point on. Give them another fundamental choice and you now have four branches; another and it's eight... Eight branches based on just three meaningful decisions - you can see what a headache that would give the designers!
As for the ending... ahhh! I so want to talk about the ending, but I won't. Suffice to say that there's every possibility of a sequel - and I'll have no hesitation in buying it without a moment's hesitation.
And the final thing I'll say is that my wife was just as keen on playing the game as I was, and throughout we compared notes on what responses and decisions we chose... interestingly (and perhaps reassuringly!) we were extremely closely matched throughout. Come the zombie apocalypse, I'm pretty certain we'll make a great team :)
The past few years has definitely seen a revival in the zombie-genre, so much so that zombie films and TV series are pretty much mainstream entertainment. Especially so, if you combine it with the closely related pandemic virus and other similar genres.
Whatever the protagonist - reanimated corpses, flu-infected humans, walking carnivorous plants - the really scary thing isn't them, it's the sudden collapse of society. In the space of a few hours, days or (occasionally) weeks, the heroes of the story are wrenched from their comfortable lives as office workers, teachers, nurses, policemen or telephone sanitation engineers and thrown into a world without friends, family, electricity, running water or law. Not even a regular helping of The One Show.
I'll leave the analysis of the zombie genre to a later post - for the moment I want to name-check a few of my favourite, and not-so-favourite on screen (big and small) zombie romps. Note that I'm going to use a very wide definition of "zombie story", to cover all the pandemic virus and similar stories. Frankly having to write that out each and every time will drive me nuts - so if you object to me including pandemic flu and Triffids in zombie discussions... well, that's just tough.
The Day of the Triffids
Talking of Triffids, where better to start? Walking carnivorous plants, escaping into the world just after the vast majority of the population is struck blind in a meteor shower? Great stuff!
The film in the 1950s? Meh. Their Achilles' Heel was ridiculous. Fail.
But the 1980s TV series - that was another matter entirely: brilliant. The recent TV remake? Not brilliant, but pretty decent. I'd still take the '80s effort over the modern version.
Dawn of the Dead
Utter classic. The 1970s movie, that is. Genre-defining brilliance. The recent remake? Dreadful. Running zombies? Give me strength. That suggests intelligence, which kind of defies the point of "proper", undead zombies. If they're going to be undead, stupid, shuffling zombies, how do they suddenly find the ability to sprint? Either they're stupid or not - you can't have it both ways.
28 Days Later
Yet the running zombies in 28 Days Later are perfectly acceptable: the scenario of living, infected humans (as opposed to reanimated corpses) - more to the point, infected with the "Rage" virus - now that left the infected with understandably ability and good cause to run. Good film.
28 Weeks Later
Whereas the sequel was dreadful. All-too predictable - with characters doing ridiculously stupid and unbelievable things time and time again. Rubbish.
The Walking Dead
Now this one's a little complex, because there are many strands to The Walking Dead - so I'll cover it in more depth later. But I'll just say very briefly that as regards the TV series... meh. Again, too many people doing predictable horror-story stupid things, and too many things that just stretch your suspension of disbelief to breaking point.
Sean of the Dead
Now this is more like it! What should you do in a zombie apocalypse? Head to the pub, naturally. 10/10.
.jpg/320px-Zombie_statue_(7283588922).jpg "By Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (Zombie statue Uploaded by MaybeMaybeMaybe) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons")