The title is what you get when I try to combine a post about the Starcraft boardgame with a game about zombies. Last week’s in-fashion game at CarcaSean was Starcraft which some of the hardcore regulars played multiple times over the course of the week. I only managed to play once which admittedly isn’t enough to form a good opinion of such a complex game. As its title implies, it’s a boardgame based on Blizzard’s popular video game. As in the original PC version, all three races are represented in the game and there are two rival factions for each race, so that up to two players can choose the same race. Lore-wise, everything is fairly faithful. The two rival factions for the Zerg for example are the Queen of Blades and the Overmind who as any Starcraft fan should know, have little love for one another.
The board for this game is actually made up of interlocking tiles representing star systems that each player takes turns to lay down, which is reminiscent of Twilight Imperium 3. Each system is subdivided into separate areas, each of which offer different resources or conquest points for the player occupying them. The resources, minerals and Vespene gas as in the original game, is spent to purchase technology, build bases and upgrade them and of course build new units. Naturally, the higher tier units can only be purchased once you own the appropriate production building.
Continue reading Zerg Zombies →
Three science articles for this month, one on how language shapes the way we think, the second one on Nokia’s plans to wirelessly recharge mobile phones and the last one, just for laughs, is a fictional piece on the neurobiology of zombies.
As the first article notes, whether and how much language affects how we think is a subject of much debate that even now is largely unsettled. This field is properly known as linguistic relativity. As someone who’s sympathetic to the views of the evolutionary psychologists, I found myself not quite agreeing with the full scope of this article’s implications, but nevertheless the results are intriguing. The most interesting part is easily the revelation of how language has affected a small Aboriginal community in Pormpuraaw, in northern Australia.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (June ’09) →
Max Brooks’ World War Z is a follow-up to The Zombie Survival Guide which became a commercial success largely through word of mouth on the Internet. While The Zombie Survival Guide was a fictional manual covering the biology of zombies and suggested methods of killing them and surviving a zombie outbreak, World War Z tells the story of a worldwide zombie apocalypse scenario through the oral testimonies of over 40 survivors. It has since become popular enough that there are plans to make a film version of the book with a screenplay by J. Michael Straczynski.
World War Z places the initial zombie outbreak in Sichuan Province, China, where a boy diving for treasure amongst the submerged villages of the Three Gorges Reservoir comes to the surface with a mysterious bite mark on his foot and is kept locked in an abandoned house by frightened villages after attacking and biting a number of them. They notify the local hospital and the doctor who is sent is shocked to discover that the boy is as savage as an animal, biting and clawing at anyone who comes near him. His skin has become cold and gray, and though numerous wounds are found all over his body from his struggles to free himself, no blood comes out of them. A hypodermic needle inserted into where his veins should be comes up filled with a strange, viscous matter. He is even able to snap his own arm in an effort to free himself and seems affected by neither pain nor exhaustion. Not unexpectedly, all of the villagers bitten by the boy have become comatose with cold and gray skin as well.
Continue reading A Book: World War Z →
I spotted this picture over at the Quartertothree forums and you can see a larger version of the photo here. The picture speaks for itself and it is seriously freaking me out. I thought at first this must be a digitally manipulated photo or something but people are saying that it is completely plausible. Someone please tell me that this is not actually possible!
The unexamined life is a life not worth living
