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This book is gratefully dedicated to Gian-Paolo Musumeci and Michael Ellis. They each asked me a question. This is my answer.
George Romero
I belong to the Hunter S. Thompson School of Journalistic Fashion: If I have to think about it, I have no business wearing it.
Before them, blogging was something people thought should be done by bored teenagers talking about how depressed they were. Some folks used it to report on politics and the news, but that application was widely viewed as reserved for conspiracy nuts and people whose opinions were too vitriolic for the mainstream. The blogosphere wasn’t threatening the traditional news media, not even as it started having a real place on the world stage. They thought of us as “quaint.”
a bunch of Bay Area blogger kids are going to tell the truth as they see it, and damn the political consequences.”
The prediction that bloggers would be more truthful and less political than other reporters has not aged well.
“You’re here because of what you represent: the truth.”
George Romero didn’t mean to save the world any more than Dr. Alexander Kellis meant to almost destroy it, but you can’t always choose your lot in life. Most people wouldn’t have had the first idea of how to deal with the zombies if it weren’t for the lessons they’d learned from Romero’s movies. Go for the brain; fire works, but only if you don’t let the burning zombie touch you; once you’re bitten, you’re dead. Fans of Romero’s films applied the lessons of a thousand zombie movies to the reality of what had happened. They traded details of the attacks and their results over a thousand blogs
...more
Yeah, that can happen in fiction when the author decides to make it happen, regardless of plausibility.
Cameron Crowe…
filovirus
People who died before getting dosed with Kellis-Amberlee stayed dead. Those who died after infection didn’t. Why it brings its hosts back to literal, biological life is anyone’s guess. The best theories hold that it’s an enhanced version of normal filovirus behavior, the urge to replicate taken to a new and unnatural level, one that taps into the nervous system of the host and keeps it moving until it falls apart. Zombies are just sacks of virus looking for something to infect, being “driven” by Kellis-Amberlee. Maybe it’s true. Who knows?
"Why it brings its hosts back to literal, biological life is anyone’s guess. The best theories". The best theory is that an author decided to write a zombie novel.
Cruise versus Gore in 2018.
Feed was published in 2010. I suppose then those were plausible primary candidates. (Presuming Cruise is actor Tom Cruise.) though I am a little confused by the year. There was no US presidential election in 2018.
Of the two thousand six hundred and fifty-three deaths directly attributed to Kellis-Amberlee within the United States over the past year, sixty-three percent were persons under the age of sixteen.
2653 deaths in the USA annually is a surprisingly small number. This suggests that even in a nation supposedly overrun by zombies, the zombies are not really a large threat.
Steve was there, scowling at the fallen infected like he was challenging them to get up and let him kill them again. Sorry, Steve, the virus only reanimates a host once.
Why? This seems like another of those scientifically arbitrary factoids that make the zombies into a contrived plot device.
Urban Survival Barbie, now with her own machete and blood testing unit.
Governor Tate, on the other hand, is so far to the right that he’s in danger of falling off the edge of the world. Few people are willing to stand for both the death penalty and an overturning of Roe v. Wade these days, but he does it,
Another case of the story being overtaken by events.
Three-star general, saw combat in the Canadian Border Cleansing of ’17, when we took back Niagara Falls from the infected, and then again in New Guinea in ’19, when a terrorist action involving aerosolized live-state Kellis-Amberlee nearly cost us the country.
I'm confused. An action in New Guinea "nearly cost us the country"? Which country? The USA? NG is on the other side of the world from the USA.
“This country was based on the three Fs, Miss Mason: Freedom, Faith, and Family.”
It’s all a matter of learning how to think, learning how to eliminate the impossible, and admitting that sometimes what’s left, however improbable, is going to be the truth.
Sherlock Holmes rides again!
Formalin is a formaldehyde-based compound
No, actually formalin IS formaldehyde.
Mammals under forty pounds can’t convert—they
Why? Is this just so that people can still have cats as pets?
I had already decided the fourth pass would be the last in that area when the tines pulled an intact syringe into view. Not just intact: loaded. The plunger hadn’t been pushed all the way home, and a small amount of milky liquid was visible through the mud-smeared glass.
No one uses glass syringes any more.
Ten microns of live Kellis-Amberlee are enough to begin an unstoppable viral cascade that inevitably results in the effective death of the original host.
A micron is a unit of length. It is not a unit used to measure the amount of a virus. "Ten microns" of virus is meaningless.
An elephant can be infected with the same amount of Kellis-Amberlee as a human. Ten microns.
If anyone’s going to find a cure for Kellis-Amberlee, it’s almost certainly going to be the Centers for Disease Control, with its near-global approval ratings and even more extensive pocketbooks.
Post-Covid the CDC's near-global approval has taken some damage.
I opened an FTP window and fed in the address for our secure server.
A sentence obviously written by someone who has heard of FTP but who doesn't know what it is or how it is used.
