Related to this post, the UK emergency services are rehearsing “response to a co-ordinated terrorist attack”, well, that’s what they’d like you to think.
But really, they’re probably testing out Zombie infestation response tactics.
More info here (censored by the Government, so you’ll need to read between the lines).
Burn After Reading is witty, well paced black comedy with some very surprising ‘oh my god’ moments and although the ending feels rushed it doesn’t detract too badly from the superb performances throughout.
Although Kung Fu Panda is funny, entertaining and has a lot of heart it falls short of being a real classic, thanks in part to what felt like a missing act in the second half.
A solid and thoroughly watchable action movie with the smallest of surprises and the greatest of loud engine revving noises.
A silly and flawed movie which still manages to be reasonably entertaining, Mutant Chronicles could do with being shorter at the start, fatter in the middle and leaner at the end.
I started writing a blog post a month or so ago entitled “The Zombies are Coming” (hey! like this one!) in a faux-serious style, explaining that all the signs indicated an imminent zombie invasion and we should prepare. I was going to link to a load of internet sites discussing zombies and zombie attacks and suggest they were likewise serious and could offer information on how to survive the inevitable invasion.
However, I wasn’t up to the task of making it funny so it got canned. But I was thinking about it again today, and musing to myself that if emerging and enduring themes in roleplaying games, movies, gaming miniatures, board games, card games, computer games and entertainment in general are any indication of future events (which clearly they’re not) – then a zombie infestation really can’t be that far away.
Survival Horror really has gripped us tightly in the last few years, with a slew of games, movies and other entertainment media. Clearly we’re not looking at a new phenomenon, zombie movies have been around nearly as long as movies themselves, but the reason it struck me lately is mainly the number of 28mm miniatures dedicated to zombie games (both zombies and zombie hunters / survivors). Here’s a selection (sometimes it’s not clear if the online store is selling their own models, or someone elses, but I’ll try and be clear).
and on, and on and on.
Face it folks, the zombies are coming, you better be (next link not safe for work and very gory) prepared.
A turgid start full of cliche and obvious jokes slowly transforms into a much more entertaining second half of this comedy action flick, leaving you wondering what went wrong in the early stages.
We rented four more movies this evening, Kung Fu Panda (Blu-Ray), Mutant Chronicles (DVD), Rocknrolla (Blu-Ray) and Wall-E (DVD). Spur of the moment decision to head out and get some movies from Blockbuster, otherwise I was at risk of moping around all night and doing nothing. We’ve watched Mutant Chronicles and Kung Fu Panda, and we’ll probably watch the other two over the weekend sometime. I’ll post individual reviews of the movies (despite the fact that they’ve been out ages so no one cares). I felt Kung Fu Panda was lacking another act in the second half, and Grete feels the same. We could really have done with Panda and the other Five teaming up and either doing some training or some fighting, at least working together and building some kind of friendship, it felt a bit hollow without that. Mutant Chronicles is silly fun.
Wrote my first WordPress plugin today (for www.bookthing.co.uk), it’s a pretty simple plugin architecture especially if you’re not trying to do anything too clever. I just wanted a shortcode (some text you put into a post which is expanded by a plugin) to read some values from some custom fields and include them in the article footer. It saves having to paste lots of formatting HTML into each post and lets you just suck content from the custom fields.
I was surprised I couldn’t find a simple ‘template’ style plugin on the WordPress site, maybe I was just using the wrong search terms. It’s the kind of thing that would be very useful for building common information boxes for reviews, etc. Anyway, I hacked together a 59 line php file, of which around 1/3rd is info and license to read two custom fields and whack them into a div.
Took about 9000% less time than I expected.
I think the daily automatic twitter summary posts are annoying me already and we’re only two days in. They may have to go.