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from the braaaaaaaaaiiiiiiinnnnnnssssssssss dept.
You can now order zombies using your ride-sharing app. In New York and San Francisco, Lyft has arranged for actors dressed as zombies to appear at your desired location this Halloween. Meanwhile, CareerBuilder has analyzed data about America's 53 largest cities to determine which one is most likely to survive a zombie attack, weighting 8 factors including the percentage of engineers in the population and the number of small arms manufacturers.
Exploiting the popular fascination with zombies has apparently become a new Halloween tradition for everyone from job-finding sites to self-published authors. One blog even notes the number of zombie-themed ebooks in Amazon's Kindle Store has doubled every year since 2011, peaking this year at 15,659 different titles.
(Score: 4, Funny) by VLM on Monday November 02 2015, @05:05PM
Exploiting the popular fascination with zombies
My theory is 2015 is 1975 rebooted.
I can't help but draw analogies from the last economic stagnation / stagflation era in the 70s where all movies had to be disaster flicks. For kids, I'll explain that the movie Airport was reactionary parody comedy against cruddy disaster movies, not a unique force in itself. Zombies are just 70s disaster flicks with more goreporn and better costumes and more guns and generally worse acting. And the reason why we're stuck with shitty 70s disaster movies is the same reason as the 70s, we're in the first decade of the great recession.
I'm not sure what the 2015s analogy will be for 1970s fondue, ABBA, bell bottoms, and disco. I'd hate to see yoga pants equated to bell bottoms and eliminated from wardrobes for decades, there should be a political action committee or something to prevent it. Clearly twitter/FB are the 1970s CB all over again, and we'll go from almost everyone using it for a couple years to nobody using it, statistically speaking. I would guess granite/stainless steel kitchens will be the analogy for woodgrain paneling and shag carpets. Clearly TV producers are using the same hard drugs today as they were in the 70s... I swear all Hollywood writers were high on weed from 1965 until at least 1980, and nothing sounds stupider to a sober person than the ramblings of someone who's high as a kite.
Speaking of weed legalization, just like the 70s there was some push during the economic downturn and some real gains, but it all turned around in the 80s. I suspect president Trump's new sunrise in America is going to disrupt a lot of that.
My guess is if this is the 1970s all over again, then moving forward we're either moving into the 80s or backsliding further into the 60s with downtown burning and white flight into the burbs and endless unpopular foreign wars err peace keeping missions. I know which sounds more likely, and it pretty much sucks.
Wake me when we get back to the Victorian era and steampunk is no longer ironic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2015, @06:00PM
VLM, every time you post stuff, I can't help but think, "that's something my dad would say." I'm not considering that a bad thing necessarily, but this is about the fourth damned time it's happened.
You... you don't live in central Illinois do you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2015, @08:25PM
"Everyone is high" "This world is full of idiots" "Get off my lawn"
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 02 2015, @09:08PM
You... you don't live in central Illinois do you?
LOL no I've lived pretty much everywhere but Illinois. Chicago is a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. I can take a high-ish speed train there pretty quickly if I want, faster than a car could get downtown. Every freaking state in the upper midwest has a "germantown" somewhere in the state boundaries and we all sound about the same must be genetic.
(Score: 5, Informative) by NotSanguine on Monday November 02 2015, @08:31PM
Airplane! [wikipedia.org] was reactionary parody comedy against cruddy disaster movies, not a unique force in itself.
There. FTFY.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Monday November 02 2015, @11:09PM
We appear to be moving into the 80s already. I thought it was just the fashion and toys (though I noticed the new Pound Puppies are actually clones of the original), but every store I've gone in over the past week was almost exclusively playing songs from the 80s, including U Can't Touch This and Ice Ice Baby.
(All of which is fine by me, given I'm definitely not a fan of most post-y2k music. Or as I half-jokingly commented to somebody recently, "I prefer male singers that sound old enough to have had their balls drop, and female singers that don't sound like they recently had a quart of silicon injected into their lips & butt...")
(Score: 1) by OwMyBrain on Tuesday November 03 2015, @02:32PM
I'm not sure what the 2015s analogy will be for...bell bottoms
Skinny Jeans