Escape Artists
PseudoPod => Episode Comments => Topic started by: Bdoomed on May 12, 2007, 06:46:09 AM
-
Pseudopod 037: We Are All Very Lively (http://pseudopod.org/2007/05/11/pseudopod-037-we-are-all-very-lively/)
By Richard A. Becker
Read by Cheyenne Wright (http://arcanetimes.com/)
The really big cities had already been given the military treatment anyway, and that was mostly just plain stupid. Hallelujah, we used fuel-air explosives on the things! Nuked ‘em! Genius! We destroyed ourselves to save ourselves, and if only they’d completely vaporized the targets it would’ve been fine. Well, apart from the fallout and the millions who died by friendly fire, that is.
You know, you really ought to make sure you move around a little bit more. It’s not our shift’s sleep time yet.
(http://escapepod.org/wp-images/podcast-mini4.gif)
Listen to this week's Pseudopod. (http://pseudopod.org/podpress_trac/web/55/0/Pseudo037_WeAreAllVeryLively.mp3)
-
Good one, how can you not love a story with zombies in it?
-
I thought it did a very good job of keeping what was really going on in the background and really focus on the narrator.
Defiantly one of best on Peusdopod.
-
Holy hell. Best Psuedopod story ever. Best podcasted story ever.
-
Very enjoyable - not as gut-wrenching as some of the stories I've heard (Bliss, anyone?), and maybe that's why i like it so much. But chock full of great ideas and a snappy, enjoyable style of prose.
This is my first post here, so I thought I'd also say - great job so far, all! Something about Pseudopod makes it one of the most disturbing podcasts I listen to. Keep up the gruesome work.
-
:o!!!!!!!!!!!!! Earl Newton! I wuv you man! Seriously what you are doing is beyond awesome!!!
heh, that aside
i loved the story! By far not one of the scariest, but it was well written, well read, and was fun, interesting, and overall a great story! (I mean comeon, who doesn't like zombies?)
-
I love zombies as much as the next guy. But, except for the headbands which we find out about in the last few minutes, there wasn't really anything new here. Granted that after the zombies thread in the forums, it would be difficult to come up with anything new in the zombie genre, but much in the story deals with how the zombies eat flesh and die if you smash their brains, which are the two things everyone already knows about zombies.
Also, I personally find the technique of the old guy telling the young guy about the old days annoying and condescending.
But I have to admit that I enjoyed it just because I like zombies.
And the reading was great.
-
There was a bit too much "as you know, Johnny, a microscope works like this..." but the pacing was good and I loved the "solution" to the zombie problem. All in all, a great tale. And zombies in audio are really much scarier than movie zombies. The stench... oh god, the stench.
-
Hey, I really liked this one: the slow revelation of the current situation was genuinely chilling. Not just another zombie story; the true horror was happening in the present day. And it was good to hear a story that actually frightened me instead of just grossing me out (don't want to name names, but there has been a lot of plain old body-horror and gore on Pseudopod lately).
-
yeah, really a great great story. And the reading by Mr. Wright was phenomenal.
Also it shows how unprepared the guys in this thread http://forum.escapeartists.info/index.php?topic=20.0 (http://forum.escapeartists.info/index.php?topic=20.0) really are. They haven't even thought about exploding headbands. Amateurs...
-
The reading was very good. It was awesome in fact.
I loved the story, the slight foreshadowing when he took breaks, the way it just sort of snuck up on you. I very much liked it. Even the title got my attention.
-
The part about the string of zombies eating the entrails was my favorite. : )
-
Agree with 600south: I enjoyed the slow revelation of just how permanently screwed they all are. No 28 Days Later in this one!
One aspect I will carry around with me is the idea that it didn't happen all at once. People were still going about their ordinary lives while it was happening around them. He was in line at Mc Donalds when he felt the warm squirt of blood on the back of his neck!!
-
I thought the style of this was its best feature, a nostalgiac look at the zombie wars. The reading was great and served to enhance the story very well.
There was definitely too much "As you know, Bob" dialogue with the kid though. Not only is he telling the kid everything that happened before, but everything that he already ought to know about the present, and the details of how to kill zombies are well known both to the characters and to anyone who's heard of zombies, so the story could've been tightened considerably.
For most of the story it appeared that you had to be dead before you would zombify, but then someone turns into a zombie when they were apparently alive and aware moments before. Perhaps I missed something but that didn't make sense at all given the information in the story before that.
And apparently I'm the only one who didn't understand the big headband revelation that seemed to be the point of the story. The best I could figure is the following:
Every living human has to wear a headband with explosives and a microchip.
Not everyone was willing to agree to this at first, those people were killed.
If you are not "lively" enough in some undefined way, then the headband explodes, though I wasn't sure if the "lively" meant psychologically or physically.
So the idea is that zombies are less lively in that undefined way and this will dispatch the zombies since they are both too stupid to act lively, and too stupid to remove the headband?
So why did the narrator take his headband off at the end? Won't the kid shoot him? Is he testing the kid? Or is he committing suicide? Maybe it was supposed to be an open ending, but it just plain didn't make sense to me. And since everything in the story seemed to be structured around the reveal of the purpose of the headband, since I didn't understand that, I just don't think I got what was intended out of the story at all.
-
I believe the "aware one minute and zombie the next" was because they died.
I took it that by tinkering with the headband too much, you would cause it to explode. He couldn't take it anymore and committed suicide.
It's been a while since I listened to this episode, though.
-
Loved it. I must really like society-all-gone stories like this and Day of the Triffids and 28 Days Later, where society goes all to hell because of some plague or event, because this one captured that feeling in spades.
And the reading was fabulous, awesome. No surprise he also read my PP fave so far, Bait.
-
I do not usually like Z-Apocalypse stories, but I totally enjoyed this one. The tone was excellent, the pacing was excellent, the expected commentary on humanity was there and the reading was excellent. This was a story made for audio and definately was worth the listen.