5 Reasons You’ll Want A Credit Card During The Zombie Apocalypse

Halloween was here and that means witches, vampires and the occasional Miley Cyrus were arriving at your front door for treats.

If your neighbor’s zombie outfit looked a little too real, you might want to be aware that NBC News has reported real-life zombies may be roaming at large.

Since we here at Money Talks News are all about bringing you the best financial advice for whatever life hands you, here are some reasons you might want to keep your credit card handy once the zombie apocalypse begins.

1. Tap ‘n’ go technology

Anyone who has seen “Zombieland” knows the first rule of surviving the apocalypse is cardio. Meaning, if you are slow, you are going to be some zombie’s dinner.

Fortunately, your credit card can be your best friend in getting you on the go as quickly as possible. New contactless payment methods mean you can fill your gas tank, tap your card to pay and hit the road faster than you can say George Romero.

2. Express checkouts

But wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t even have to stop and pay at all? I mean, when Rick on “The Walking Dead” woke up in the hospital, the apocalypse had already taken place, but wouldn’t it have been a bummer if the hospital was being overrun by zombies and he had to wait to make a payment during his discharge?

Registering your credit card in advance can get you out of a hotel fast and keep you one step ahead of the flesh-eating zombies.

3. Online shopping

The Zombie Squad recommends you have a good stockpile of food, water and essentials on hand so you can hunker down and ride out the return of the dead. But if you didn’t plan in advance, you really don’t want to make a grocery run when a zombie could be hanging out in aisle seven.

Instead, go online with your credit card and have your supplies delivered right to your door.

4. Priority seating and travel upgrades

It sure was lucky that Gerry Lane was seated at the front of the plane in “World War Z” rather than in the back where the zombie was hiding in the bathroom.

Now, he didn’t use his credit card to get that sweet seat, but you can definitely use your travel rewards credit card to get upgrades like priority seating. In addition, your airline card may even give you access to exclusive airport lounges which, we hope, will also be zombie-free.

5. Travel insurance

Finally, many credit cards come with extras like travel insurance for airfare purchased with the card. That may come in handy when you discover zombies have been sighted in Korea and that is where you were planning your next getaway.

Take our advice: Cancel your Korean vacation, file an insurance claim and use that money to book the next flight to Jerusalem. But when you get there, you’ll want to contain your enthusiasm. Trust us. (If you’ve seen ”World War Z,” you know what we’re talking about.)

Of course, your credit card is really only useful at the start of the apocalypse. Once mass hysteria takes over and the world turns into a wasteland, you’re going to want to hope Daryl Dixon and his crossbow are nearby. Because at that point, ain’t no credit card going to help you.

~mlaponsie/moneytalksnews.com

Whoop-whoop!!

Zombies + Algebra = Win!

Kickstarter Project: Teen High Zombie Squad

Teen High Zombie Squad is a 120 page graphic novel about a group of misfits thrust together in the midst of a high school invasion.

After a seemingly routine lunch break detention, four teenage misfits find their school has been deserted and nothing is as it seems.

They’re soon confronted by hordes of their mutated classmates and monstrous faculty members hungry for blood.

It’s up to four unlikely heroes from completely different worlds to save their high school and home town from a full scale invasion.

Here are a few pages from the graphic novel. How did our heroes end up here and what’s going to happen next? That’s why we need your help!

Teen high is inspired by a heavy diet of 80’s and early 90’s films like  The Breakfast Club, John Carpenter's The Thing, The Goonies and Aliens. Its dark humor, mixed with horror and a splash of science fiction. It’s a character driven story that focus’ on themes of identity and friendship with a strong emphasis on the relationships that evolve between the story’s heroes.

James Brouwer is a Brisbane-based illustrator. When he’s not up at ungodly hours of the morning trawling the internet for cat pictures, he creates art for video games, film/TV projects and comics, including the award-winning graphic novel series “The Deep”.

Darren Randall is a writer, director, animator and artist who has worked on projects like Happy Feet 2, Red Tails, Star Wars the Force Unleashed, Saints Row 3 and a bunch of other stuff. Aside from publishing his own mini comics, Teen High is his first ever graphic novel.

Jeremy Love is a Brisbane-based concept artist who’s worked on game titles like Hellboy, The Clone Wars, and the recent Avengers game. He’s been a concept artist on The Chronicles of Narnia and featured in Expose, 2D artist, Imagine FX and many more.

Show your team spirit by sharing 'Teen High Zombie Squad' with your friends & enemies on Facebook & Twitter. You can also check out more from the project at our website www.teenhighzombiesquad.com

Risks and challenges

James, Jeremy and Darren have over 10 years experience delivering projects on time and in budget. It is of the utmost importance to the team to ensure that backers rewards are delivered on schedule and at the best possible quality.

To make a pledge, click here!

Baby Judith (Li'l Asskicker) Next Season On 'The Walking Dead'

Writers wanted for new Zombie anthology

The Spooky Isles is searching again for contributors to a new horror book.

Following the successful reception of ‘Dracula’s Midnight Snacks’, Spooky Isles and Red Rattle Books are already preparing the next collection in this really rattling spooky series. This time the walking dead will have a go.

“Zombie Bites” will be open to both first time and established horror authors.

The Spooky Isles is sponsoring the competition, and Red Rattle Books will include “Zombie Bites” alongside other exciting horror books in their 2014 collection.  We will tell you about their other books early next year.

We asked Howard Jackson, editor at Red Rattle Books, why he agreed to follow “Dracula’s Midnight Snacks” with a zombie collection. Here’s what he said:

“The wandering sickness” which is how H G Wells described the phenomenon is very evocative.  It anticipates a listless apocalypse and that is a seductive idea.  People are attracted to the gore but the concept is actually subtle and intriguingly remote.  Of course, we all have our own favourites and we have views as to what constitutes zombie fiction and appeal. There have been plenty of zombie movies, and ‘The Walking Dead’ has been a huge hit.  Zombie literary anthologies, though, are more rare.  Our view is that short stories can really demonstrate the zombie possibilities. Modern movies are fundamentally about survival amongst the doomed that carry infection and eat flesh.The zombie is the dark physical alter ego of humans.  That is fine but zombies are in danger of being misunderstood.  For instance, not only can they beused for scientific research, they are willing,and generally alienation free, manual labour.

“In some mythic tales, the zombie would return to the family and be disruptive.  Chekov has never written a zombie play.  Today, he would have been unable to resist.   Dr Zhivago is a fine novel about resurrection but the zombies were there first. Zombies were also used to enhance the power of the magician that summoned them, and children, too,had special powers that could create the living dead.  The myth is not just about horror and cannibalism.  Like the vampire tales, there exists the possibility of enchantment.  The anthology will be exciting and will have surprises.”

Howard is taking a more hi-brow view of zombies than the folk here at Spooky Isles, so don’t be afraid to send in stories relating to zombie guts and gore, because that’s the way we love our zombies – dead from the neck up and screaming for BRAINS!

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How to take part in the competition

• Stories can vary in length but should contain no more than 6000 words and no less than 2000 words.
• They should be typed in Word and submitted electronically to Howard Jackson at Red Rattle Books, editor@redrattlebooks.co.uk
• The best stories will be published in a new collection of zombie tales called “Zombie Bites”.
• Red Rattle Books will publish the book in late 2014.
• Red Rattle Books will agree remuneration with authors of successful submissions after the entry has been deemed suitable for inclusion in the anthology.
• Entries should be submitted before Sunday, 31st March 2014, 5pm (UK time).
• Spooky Isles and Red Rattle Books will launch ‘Zombie Bites’ in London in October 2014.
• Successful authors will be notified that their story will be included in ‘Zombie Bites’ and they will be invited to the launch in London.
• Authors will retain copyright of their story and will be able to use their story in other publications.

~spookyisles.com

What’s with our fascination with the undead?

You can’t keep good zombies down—or badly decomposing ones, for that matter. They’ve been lurking around for 45 years, since filmmaker George A. Romero redefined what it means to be a zombie in his low-budget classic Night of the Living Dead.

So what’s behind our undying fascination with the living dead?But this year, zombies have shambled their way into pop culture like never before. Swarming hordes of the ghouls gave Brad Pitt a box-office boost, driving the worldwide gross of the apocalyptic World War Z to more than half a billion dollars. On TV, the fourth-season premiere of the zombie gore-fest The Walking Dead drew a record 16.1 million viewers. And with retailers selling zombie costumes in all sizes and stages of decay, there were plenty of “walkers” roaming neighborhood streets this Halloween.

“There’s no negotiation with a zombie,” says Bill Beard, professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. “Zombies are human beings whose humanity is gone, human beings interested only in predatory feeding on other human beings.”

Beard says that simple concept of the zombie, for all its clumsy, exaggerated ridiculousness, has kept authors and filmmakers coming back to the fertile ground Romero tilled first in 1968 and again 10 years later with the sequel Dawn of the Dead.

“Night of the Living Dead used zombies to say a lot about families. The horrifying thing about that movie was the idea of families getting infected, loved ones coming back as zombies, parents and children devouring each other. It was a picture of the unconscious, about what can go on in families that isn’t greeting-card sentimentality.

“Dawn was brilliant because it showed how zombie behaviour could be applied to consumer behaviour—zombies wandering around a shopping mall with a faint recollection that this place was somehow meaningful to them.”

“There’s a paranoid, survivalist mentality, an imbalance of not understanding a hostile world of others trying to get you. The culture or society that is your basis for understanding the world is dead. There are only a few people you can trust.Beard points out a “profound alienation of humans” that runs through the zombie-apocalypse mythology—the separation between small groups of humans and the zombies that vastly outnumber them.

“And of course, anyone who dies comes back, then there’s the necessity to blow their head off. The day may come when you can’t even trust your nearest and dearest.”

That sense of isolation and impending loss may explain why Dawn of the Dead was remade 26 years after the original for a new target demographic.

“Generations X and Y seem to have an additional element of automatic alienation and skepticism. The zombie apocalypse is without politics. It justifies a kind of radical alienation, a sense that things are hopeless. The enemy is something you can’t influence and can’t defeat, finally, because in a zombie apocalypse you’ll never wipe out all the zombies.”

Beard also suggests that the zombie apocalypse plays to generalized fears about the worst-case scenarios of things like climate change.

“There won’t be any electricity, and people will be reduced to little groups of close friends and loved ones, in makeshift alliances under conditions of extreme duress. There’s a psychological state of uncertainty that society will form any barrier against those scenarios.”

No end in sight to love of zombies

As for how long the current zombie craze will last, Beard says he doesn’t see it going away anytime soon. And if there’s a secret to the zombie’s enduring appeal, Beard says it likely lies in the way the zombie embodies two contradictory ideas at the same time: fear and pleasure.

“Like vampires, they’re the most fashionable. They have more penetration in pop culture. The zombie is more crude, more raw, more violent than the vampire, the monster you desire. The zombie is a figure of horror, but also a reduction to a parody. You can laugh at how ridiculously horrifying the zombie looks, like a game, staying detached despite the unsettling psychological associations.

There’s also a primal pleasure that comes from seeing zombies dispatched in ever more creative and gory ways, says Beard.

“What’s satisfying for spectators is seeing humans reduced to the most brutal, primitive, violent means possible to kill zombies.

“The convention of the zombie can be used to express, in a very non-literal way, underlying tensions and forces in society. And I think that’s still the best way to read it.”

~seantownsend/beaconnews.ca