It may be a cliche to use Louis Armstrong singing What a Wonderful World over a disturbing video, but anyone who has been through the meat grinder that is L4D will experience a few little shudders of fear and recognition while watching this Machinima footage. Enjoy it for what it is and then go shoot some infected. Careful of the Witch…

Another zombie-related video from monkeyjunkie160 is this Zombie Panic instructional video:

Seems like the whole Internet has been talking about the mathematical model of an outbreak zombie infection written about in WIRED a few days ago. It’s being tweeted and retweeted, mentioned in the Times, and was even linked to from the front page on the BBC News website today (August 18). An interesting aside from the BBC article was that an earlier version (it has since been revised, which is rather exciting to the little conspiracy theorist inside my head, but probably just reflects that it was a misquote by the journalist) reported that the researchers “say that their work has parallels with, for example, the spread of ideas”. Search for “mathematical model zombie” and you will see that it has been spreading very effectively.

If you haven’t yet seen Pontypool, you should stop reading now. Here’s a poster from the film to give you a chance to click away before I spoil the ending. Do check it out. A smart and funny take on the genre.

This section reveals some of the plot of Pontypool, so probably better to stop reading if you haven’t seen it. You have been warned.

The “conversationalists” (what director Bruce McDonald calls his zombies) in Pontypool are infected when they hear English being spoken. There’s something in the language that acts as a vector for the infection.

There are three stages to this virus. The first stage is you might begin to repeat a word. Something gets stuck. And usually it’s words that are terms of endearment like sweetheart or honey. The second stage is your language becomes scrambled and you can’t express yourself properly. The third stage you become so distraught at your condition that the only way out situation you feel, as an infected person, is to try and chew your way through the mouth of another person.

Perhaps there’s something in this mathematical model, in the formula, which causes it to spread like the zombie infection it represents. Probably not, but it is a diverting little idea. Check out the PDF and see if you can resist spreading the meme…

io9 took the time recently to describe two clips from Zombieland. Killing zombies with a banjo sounds like a stretch, but the dialogue sounds good and it is a comedy, so they can get away with things like that. One quote stands out as being especially relevant to the WotLD view of survival in the zombie apocalypse. Columbus and Tallahassee – “the characters call each other by the names of the cities where they’re from, so they won’t develop warm fuzzy feelings for one another and hesitate to deliver the brain-bashing blow when one of them is bitten” – have been tricked into handing over their shotgun to another pair of survivors:

Columbus asks why they have to steal their stuff, why the four of them can’t just pool their resources. “You made the mistake of trusting us,” Wichita tells them. “We won’t make the mistake of trusting you.”

Cooperation or competition. One of the basic choices a player or faction will have to make.