Zombies in the Stacks: A Pathfinder

As the end of Zomtober approaches, we're all preparing ourselves for the festivities at the end of the month.  Zomtober is a great time of year to hold a Zombie Awareness Walk.  These demonstrations help prepare your community in the event of an undead uprising.

Participants in these walks vary - some disguise themselves as the undead while others pose as victims or exterminators.  If you are interested in taking the former role, check out this resource to put together convincing camouflage.

Just make sure it's not too well done or you might end up a foot shorter.

There are some days when I don't know what I would do if I didn't have John Pappas, my Outreach Director.  He's got a mind for numbers and tactical internet invasion that make my feeble non-attempts look like Charles II.

So anyway, today John pushes me into site optimization for this pathfinder.  It's not really something I think about, but looking at the Google trends page for "zombie" was really interesting.  If anyone was looking for some hard data on how popular zombies have become over the last decade, look no further.  Or do, but start here.  Because it's awesome.

I've also added two links to the page - one is to The Zombie Librarian, a blog that reviews both zombie literature and film.  You can find it under Web Resources.  The other is the graphic novel library orientation guide produced by the Miller Library at McPherson College - Library of the Living Dead.  Both are excellent resources to check out.

Today's Zomtober link is the reason why we're all here this month. Well, apart from the fact that we have survived perpetual decay and avoided accident up until now. Ahem.

That's right. Zombies.  More specifically, the idea that zombies are going to rise up, en masse, and turn to the rest of the remaining human race as if we were a rather loud and mobile buffet.  The TVTropes.org article on the Zombie Apocalypse describes this device and also links to related tropes. As always with TVTropes, they provide examples of the device in a wide variety of pop culture media.

So go check it out, then decide which apocalypse is your favorite.

I warn you, the video is from Cracked.com, and while I love Michael Swaim, he's...well, he's Michael Swaim. Consider yourself warned.

When the undead masses are crowding at your door and scrabbling at your hastily barricaded windows, it's important to know exactly what you're dealing with.

For the second day of Zomtober, I give you this: a guide to Zombies via TvTropes.  Not only does it outline the different geneses of zombies, but it also gives examples of each kind.  Want to find a movie or television show that has zombies made by Dr. Frakenstein types trying to reanimate a lost loved one? You'll find it here!

But wait - there's more!  TvTropes is about more than TV and film; it also includes examples from video games, tabletop RPGs, and webcomics.