The Windup Girl ch. 17

Chapter 17:
                              Jaidee sits in his cell, shaven and dressed in a novice's robe, contemplating life and Buddhism. He gives up on the idea that his wife is still alive surprisingly fast and comes to terms with the fact that life is change. He meditates under a painted Bo tree and we learn that many species of tree have become extinct due to "Ivory Beetle".
                            "Who would have thought that the calorie companies would attack figs? The farang have no respect for anything but money." p.169. I really have no idea who Paulie is trying to appeal to here except those juvenile, self-righteous little shits who think it's cool to tell everyone why they're horrible and short-sighted in order to make themselves feel superior. It ain't aimed at Thai people because it's terribly unflattering to them as well. It isn't kind to anyone and maybe that's the point? Except no, because I think we're supposed to at least like, Jaidee. The whole, the companies can do whatever they want to the detriment of the whole world with no interference from any government, is shallow and silly. But I'm not a cynical twit.
                          Since his wife must be dead, he decides he can do as he pleases. He walks out of the monastery (this is a punishment, you'd think there'd be guards) and goes to find Kanya. He asks for a gun.
                             Akarrat (trade) is his enemy (environment). Well, it only took half the book to consciously get what Bacigalpi was doing. Oy. The morally repugnant against the maybe-not-as morally repugnant but still kind of asses. Isn't there some way for the two to co-exist? The set-up is too simplistic. There are greedy bastards who will ruin anything for a buck or power against...the world? Thais? Everyone else is down-trodden? Fundamentalists are evil as well; Green Headbands commit massacre and the Grahmites, arson. Is there no room for middle ground?
                            "How can one fight their money? Money is their power...We are fighting money." p.170.
                      Lots of lights for a land with no oil. Ah, coal. Cheshire cats. A rich girls party favor. I haven't mentioned them before because they're basically a side show meant to how illustrate the spoiled West brought ruin by being arrogant and privelieged. Jaidee and one of his former men, Somchai, break in to the Trade Ministry to find the file of the man who had been watching them when they burned the cargo at the airfields. He was also at Jaidee's demotion so that means he had something to do with the wife's kidnapping/murder. His file is curiously empty. They kill a couple of guards (guards always are expendable non-human entities) who try to arrest them for trespassing. Then the mystery man shows up, a battle ensues, and they are captured and brought to the roof. (Spring guns apparently fire blades.) Akarrat shows up with palace bodyguards. The Mystery Man works for the palace! Oh goodie. Jaidee kicks Akarrat, his muay thai background giving him +10 damage, and he's shot off the roof.
                     Notes: This book combines disgusting '70's plot and sexual politics with a smug, snotty 21st century overlay.
                        He continues to be incapable of showing rather than telling about the slums, poverty, food shortages, and world chaos.

This zombie craze

                   The Walking Dead convinced me that I should pay a little more attention to the Zombie genre. That's not why I bought Dead Island; that was because it was 10 bucks on Steam but it is why I watched Berlin Undead (Rammbock) on Netflix. Netflix has some weird stuff. Like that French zombie movie The Horde I wrote about a while ago. This German movie, sort of like that one, is only so-so.
                      We've got Michi (Michael) going to return a key to his girlfriend of seven years who recently left him and moved to Berlin. It's basically a McGuffin, I can't remember what it's for. She's not at home although the plumber is, angrily banging away at a radiator and it's quite obvious he's going to turn into a zombie. His assistant Harper shows up, the plumber goes apeshit and Michi and Harper end up locking him out in the hallway. Then the raging horde invades the apartment courtyard.
                  Technically we aren't dealing with zombies per se but rather people infected through bites with a disease that makes them foaming mad with an urge to bite (though not eat) anyone in sight.Their eyeballs go milky white and their skin gets all veiny, so, sort of zombies.
                       The tenants of the apartments can confab across the courtyard through their windows. Let's do endtime rollcall, shall we? We have Michi and Harper. We have a muscled, tattooed guy named Manfred who has obviously been bit. (He never says a word and he dies halfway through. He is my favorite character.) A weaselly dude who has "I am going to betray you as soon as you give me a chance" stamped on his forehead. Metaphorically, of course. A man who's wife has been bit. ( He's been keeping her sedated to stop the change.) Thorsten and his sister. (Of these two, if you think the named character is the one who makes it out alive, nice guess, but no.)
                       Thorsten foolishly wades into a horde of not-zombies in an attempt to close the courtyard gates. He fails and they have a zombie infestation.
                        Harper immediately starts planning to kill some bitches (I love that his first response to the zombiepocalypse is to fashion medieval death implements from cutlery) and Michi frets about the phone he dropped on the hall stairs. Someone has been attempting to call him and he worries it might be his ex Gabi. The two make a foray out to get it, Harper's homemade weapon turns out to not be zombie deterrent (seriously, there needs to be a spray), and they lose ground when they're forced to retreat to the bedroom. It is not Gabi on the phone.
                         Bit-Wife_Man offers them food (they lost the kitchen) if they get him sedatives from the crazy lady's apartment next door. Michi looks at a picture of Gabi and remembers her wearing a bear suit. He continues to fret and Harper falls asleep. When the next morning dawns Harper wakes up to Michi lying next to him wearing the bear suit complete with head. I am honestly unsure if this is an attempt at humor or sentimentality. Either way, if I were Harper I'd find that more terrifying than the zombies.
                         They break the wall so they can get into crazy druggie lady's apartment to scavenge sedatives but who should be there but crazy druggie lady herself. And guess what? She's now a not-zombie. More not-zombies rush in and Michi hides Harper on top of a wall and then scrambles into the attic. Who should he find up there but Gabi and her new man, son of crazy druggie lady. Michi throws a hissy fit because it turns out Gabi was probably cheating on him and Gabi and friend freak out because they mistake a scratch on Michi's arm for a bite. In the end they hand him sedatives and shove him out onto the roof. Michi briefly contemplates suicide before noticing a rowboat on the river. He can hear a horn out on the harbor and realizes there might be safety close by. Meanwhile, Harper has discovered that his camera flash is not-zombie kryptonite. An accidental discovery right up there with Pasteur's and Newton's I'm sure.
                     Michi makes his way to Bit-Wife-Man's place to give him the sedatives. Bit-Wife goes bonkers regardless and Michi immediately offers to brain her with a candlestick. Bit-Wife-Man declines and instead tricks his wife into tackling him off the balcony where they plummet to their death. Harper shows up driving all the not-zombies before him with his camera flash and locks them out of the courtyard.
                       The survivors gather. They only have a few scraps of food from Bit-Wife-Man's apartment because in the last day and a half everyone ran out apparently. They plan to use flashing lights to get to the river to use the boat Michi saw. Predictably, weaselly guy makes off with their supplies in the night. Michi goes after him and returns with a few lights and a fresh arm wound in the shape of teeth-marks. Sucks. He rigs a bicycle with lights so Harper and Thorsten's sister can make their getaway.
                           Michi stays in the courtyard to contemplate his future as a cuckolded not-zombie. He isn't alone for long because crazy druggie lady's son runs screaming in with crazy druggie lady attached by the teeth.Not-zombie Gabi shows up soon after and Michi hugs her to him while she paws at his back looking perplexed. Harper and Thorsten's sister make it out to the harbor where a ship honks at them, signifying rescue.

Dead Island

                      So. Dead Island. Bad accents and bad character modeling galore, but that's okay. I'm also seeing elements of Bioshock but that could just be me. Lots of searchable containers and drinks and snacks for health lying around that are consumed as soon as they're picked up. A voice over the intercom that tells you what to do. Crazy attack mobs. Steam has a surprisingly heartbreaking trailer for the game that shows the deaths of a vacationing family. You can see the couple in their room in-game.
                The action takes place at a resort on the island of Banoi in Papua New Guinea so the scenery is quite pretty and relaxing, only spoiled somewhat by the ravening undead. You can play as one of four characters, two male and two female. Their stats don't seem to differ much though and even if you play a woman the NPCs still refer to you as "him".
                       The game opens with a cutscene where your character barrels their way, drunk, through a party, completely oblivious to the signs of the impending zombiepocalypse. Somehow your character manages to stumble into all four of the playable characters which would suggest this is actually someone else but when you wake up it's in the same hotel room with the spilled bottle of Jack Daniels from the end of the opening cutscene.
                     Let's see who we have to play. First we crash into a failed American football star named Logan. Next we attempt to take the stage from one-hit rapper Sam B from New Orleans who is apparently used to this kind of behavior from his audience because pushing you back into the crowd doesn't break his stride in the least. This is where you meet Officer Purna, from Australia, in difficulties due to her shooting of a child molester. She offers her sneering take on your state of affairs before two helpful security officers attempt to take you back to your room. They, however, are unceremoniously jumped by the undead and, unfazed (or just plastered) we trundle off to the ladies to wash the blood off the camera lens that passes for our eyes. There we find Xian Mei, a Chinese spy (obviously) working undercover as hotel staff, trying to rouse a blood spattered woman. She scolds us for being in the women's restroom (which is seriously confusing if you've decided to play as a woman) so you swipe some pills off the floor to wash down with your JD and head on to bed.
                        I decided to play as Xian Mei because I like quick, agile characters and I was intrigued by her skirt which looks sort of like a sarong with an extremely ineffectual belt. I ultimately chose her because when you get to her character selection screen she narrates her entire life story at you and you can't scroll ahead and there was no way I was listening to another three sorry sack tales.
                        You wake up to the sweet sounds of chaos. It's the same room you passed out in which means you met yourself last night and not in a lifetime movie sort of way. I'd say it was the pills but you didn't down those until right before you blacked out which seems sort of a waste because they were a pretty red color. Once, when I was little, I took pills of my mother's because they were a pretty blue color but then she freaked and called the doctor. Anyway, maybe the zombiepocalypse is your fault by way of a time paradox, so it makes sense you get stuck doing the other survivors' scut work because you know you will.
                   Your first instinct in an emergency is apparently to loot everyone else's luggage for cash, soap, deodorant, and alcohol which I know I would be doing only I'd also pull candy and porn. Your second move is to follow the instructions of a disembodied voice as it guides you through the hotel with its endless supply of abandoned bags.
                I still might be imagining the resemblance to Bioshock. I mean, in that game you're led through a luxurious ruin piled with loot able containers and enough snacks to feed a soccer team by a man who can miraculously track you wherever you go but in this game he's Australian.
              This particular disembodied voice isn't as helpful as Atlas because almost immediately he nearly gets you killed by both an elevator and a horde or zombies. A group of survivors saves you and drags you to their safe house on the beach. You have to assume you've been bitten because a seriously hysterical man purposes to do devastating things to your head with a boat oar. Another man, this time with a wicked facial tattoo and his very own terrifying accent, gives you the zombie or not-a-zombie test which you pass with flying colors by nodding your head whereupon the threat of having your anatomy re-arranged is removed and, indeed, everyone seems to lose interest in you completely. You learn that this means you're immune to the zombie-virus and everyone expects you to put yourself back in the way of anatomy-rearrangement to do their errands. They do have a bottomless supply of cash with which to reward you.

Ghost Stories - Train

When I was younger my friends and I liked to tell each other ghost stories. One, specifically, I don't remember the particulars of, sticks in my mind. There's supposed to be ghost trains that travel, lonesome, through the night at times and places where they shouldn't be. They ride forgotten tracks across the country and blow through deserted stations, sounding their whistle like a warning or a plea.
 In my bed, in New Jersey, with my sister sleeping nearby, the train whistle across the street was a natural part of the world and it didn't frighten me.
But in a tent up in the mountains that same keening sound was remote and so much less familiar. Where were the tracks that held that train and where was it going? Who were its passengers?

 I imagined a great, tall man driving that train, grin like a skull, pushing on through forever and his cargo in the cars, hands and faces to the windows hollow-eyed, watching the speeding landscape, mouths open like pits. What are they thinking? Are they thinking? Or are they past that now and left only with an instinctive wanting. A wanting for home, a wanting for an end to their journey, a wanting for whatever happens to be on the other side of that glass. And they continue to race by the overgrown stations of rust and rot, staring out into eternity and taking this slap dash race to nowhere like a punishment. But what do I know, I've never seen any.

Killing time

There are somethings in the wall. There are many different stages of sleep.
 She hasn't quite figured out what they are yet but she's sure they're there. They mumble while she sleeps. They form a soundtrack for her dreams. They want something from her and until she figures it out she won't be able to leave.

 It was a whim. Coming here to this big, old place to take pictures. The outside is broken and being overtaken by kudzu but the house is still stately and the decay has given it a hint of sinister elegance. The windows, surprisingly unbroken, looked Every lowered voice is whispering about herdown over the warped porch from under lowered lids. The first time she approached the place it struck her as one with personality. A home that influences its occupants, for better or worse. Probably that second one, she's finding.

She keeps moving from room to room because the constant sense of being watched is making her back teeth ache.There is also a girl in the basement. Dark voids for eyes that look at her and want.The air is filled with an unsatisfied presence and smells like mold. She's been here almost twenty four hours and she's getting hungry. If she could get to a door she could get out but they're never where she expects them to be. She's tired and dazed because this can't be real and if she wakes up maybe things will make sense again so she sleeps.
 As she dropped down through the thickening layers of sleep the whispering somethings reached out and kept her from penetrating that last barrier to oblivion, leaving her mostly unconscious but slightly aware, until a particularly sharp voice from the crowd would bring her rocketing back up into her own senses, leaving her painfully alert to try and start the whole process over again.
 There was a rusty old key hidden in the flowerpot at the bottom of the porch stairs. The whole house was like that, like the owners had just left on a trip and meant to come back. Faded furniture collected dust and a fifty year old newspaper withered on the kitchen table. There were dishes in the sink but, curiously, no spiders. She took pictures of everything. She didn't know what else to do. She understood now that people weren't really afraid of the dark, just of the things that might be in it. It's a fear of possibilities.

More photos - little project I'm working on