Zombienomicon Eisegesis is an Extend-A-Story website. It lets you write “Episodes”, which are individual pages of an endless book.
The point of it I guess is that if you are a writer or would-be writer this kind of collaborative approach is a wonderful cure for any writer’s block you may suffer – just jump into something someone else has started and add a little here and there.
In the same way Star Trek became a (manufactured) phenomenon the monstrously unoriginal but very safe Walking Dead has attracted fan addiction and kudos.
And in the same way Lost in Space is always considered the retarded camp cousin of Star Trek, Z Nation is the same backwoods retard version of the Walkng Dead, supposedly.
Having watched all of both, I actually prefer Z Nation to be honest. It has a quicker pace, the characters don’t do the same illogical and willfully stupid crap all the time and there aren’t the same number of “special” episodes to let a medium talent actor have his or her moment. It also has a much more interesting world.
Most of the weaknesses are inherited from the Walking Dead comic book, which like most comic books was incredibly derivative in the first place. Z Nation is just rattling along on its own vector, a little like the way Stargate on TV had to make its own road.
Perhaps another example is the Buffy versus Charmed experience. At the height of its mass appeal, each week Buffy would end and people would jones for a fix until next week– leading to Charmed changing its premise and content enough to cater to the Buffy audience. Z Nation helps Walking Dead fans scratch their itch, but it can find its own destiny.
I like Walking Dead too, but don’t suck its dick- it isn’t all that and neither is the 99% other people’s content comic it comes from.
A major step completed. Several actually. The ZE website is up, people are extending stories and inventing new ones, as desired. The physical graphic novel, the GN part of the GNARG, has gone off to the printers. Ten copies to the film festival for judging, giving away and such. It is more or less done. Whatever happens from here the work is released, the print version soon will be and it is more or less ‘done’. On to other works. But of course ZE itself will now never end.
In terms of entering such a retro (in some ways) work into a category clearly pushing “futuristic” (even though it’s early 1970s technology) wraparound VR headsets, I think it is firmly and properly in the PKD tradition. It’s very much like all those guys in his stories still selling mood organs and having to convert to android manufacture, or galactic pot healers and so on. PKD wasn’t corporatist, and he wasn’t conformist. And he was deeply suspicious of immersive technology of all kinds, witness: Mercerism, the plastic doll gestalt and many more.
Unlike last time when webhosting was entrusted to someone else this time long term webhosting has been arranged so the online extendable version will endure. And as the years go by occasional new writers will deal themselves in, the Tumblr community will grow, and all will be well.
FUTURE, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured. – Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
The ZE site works like an online choose your own adventure, where you click through episodes until a story or an adventure ends. Some of them HAVE no ending yet, either because they’re long or because people haven’t written the ending!
That’s where the write your own adventure part of the fun comes in.
If you click on a link to an episode and it doesn’t exist yet, you have the exciting opportunity to actually write the episode!
Normal etiquette, and common sense, requires that for an episode to be any good and worth reading it has to make some sort of logical sense, and to follow on from what other people have written. However, there is NOTHING stopping you adding things that YOU want to see. If you think the adventure needs spicing up, or more battles, or a new character, or your favorite superhero – that’s what you can add in, like a guest star or a cameo or a crossover in a movie or comic book.
Some episodes won’t let you extend them, an when you write an episode you can also set it NOT to be linkable and NOT to be extendable. Usually if you want a choice to be serious you won’t let people add new options to weasel out of it or disrupt the flow of the story. Other times it’s a free for all and perfectly obvious that the “point” of the story is the fun and chaos. This sort of expansion also lets you take a classic book or story and change the outcome and the characters, a fascinating process in itself.
Why not give it a try?
https://thezombienomicon.com/eas/read.php?episode=701
An interactive fiction write your own choose your own adventure. The wizard Merlin sends you to seven different realms (at least!) to recover a Sonte of Power in each one and also face a Monster King or its minions.
Straightforward fantasy RPG fun!
This is the last election that will ever feature the lapdog media in any significant role. By next election online media will have entirely taken over.
The only reason the lapdog media still have any audience at all is that there are older people who have not adapted to the death of the journalist as a relevant tradesperson in our society.
It’s the equivalent of the 1910s – there are still horses and carts, but they’re on the way out, permanently.
Unlike the end of the age of the horse, the end of the age of the journalist is being hurried along by their own venality, corruption and incompetence. It’s the information age equivalent of the end of the corrupt pardoners and priests in the middle ages.
The wretched journalists will of course be the last ones to admit it.
…
Then we have the phenomenon where monolithic social media such as twitter and facebook make no attempt to disguise the fact that they simply want to replace the lapdog media and become the new slave owners. Unfortunately for them in times of revolution entire concepts are revised or thrown out. It isn’t simply a case of swapping bosses.
Of course, there are significant numbers of people who are lazy, moronic or badly educated -or all three. They will form the natural slave class to sustain control systems as they always have. But against that is the fact that “journalism” is dead. There is simply no need for propaganda organs when people can communicate directly.
The next phase of the attempt by the would-be elites to control everyone else will require paid bloggers, shills and trolls. In fact it has already become standard for such things to be done. Experiments in this regard have been carried out for decades, using fringe groups such as UFOlogy.
