I’ve added a new page up on the top right of the screen: Things To Do Before I Die.

I’ll be adding to it when­ever I think of new things I’d like to do, but also feel free to sug­gest things I could do in this post. If they’re good, I’ll add them.

EDIT: I’ll be using strikethrough (well the CSS equiv­a­lent) to cross items off as I go.

The undead have fas­ci­nated me for a while now. There’s just some­thing inter­est­ing and unnerv­ing about walk­ing corpses that feel noth­ing and hunger for human flesh. A few months ago I had a chance to play a board game called Zom­bies!!!. The offi­cial text describes it best:

Zom­bies!!! puts you in the mid­dle of the action as you try to escape the ever advanc­ing zom­bie hoard. Play­ers must use a com­bi­na­tion of wits and brawn to be the first to the heli­port and cer­tain escape. The only prob­lem is, the zom­bies are every­where, they appear to be very hun­gry and your oppo­nents would really pre­fer if you didn’t escape.

The game itself con­sists of a num­ber of “Magic: The Gathering”-style cards that you flip out on to the table to affect your player, other play­ers and even the game world. Speak­ing of the game world, The clos­est exam­ple I can think of would be Mouse Trap in that the game is built up as each player puts down a map tile (unlike Mouse Trap you then pop­u­late the new area with items and undead) at the start of their turn. It also shares a sim­i­lar­ity with Monop­oly: games can last for hours if you have a large group of peo­ple.
Zom­bies!!! has been pop­u­lar enough to spawn five expansion/standalone titles. All of which incor­po­rate ideas from movies like as Evil Dead (For­est) and Dawn of the Dead (Mall). I know you can get this game from Mind Games, but if they don’t have it you can always try Gamer’s Par­adise.

About a year ago Mike turned me on to a lit­tle browser-based game called Urban Dead. The basic idea of the game is that you’re a post-apocalyptic sur­vivor in a city called Mal­ton. Choos­ing a Civil­ian, Mil­i­tary or Sci­en­tist class you roam the city defend­ing your­self from the ram­pag­ing zom­bie horde. New fea­tures like mobile phones, power gen­er­a­tors and the like are added when the cre­ator is done but in a way that sug­gests the city is slowly recovering.

I played this game for a few months — right up until I was brought down by zom­bies when I for­got to enter a safe house for the night. I tooled around with being a Zom­bie for a while, but realised it wasn’t that fun for me. My char­ac­ter sat on the server for months doing noth­ing, until just recently when I logged back in and dis­cov­ered I’d been res­ur­rected by some enter­pris­ing chap. Since then I’ve got right back into the game. The zom­bies are tougher and smarter, but the humans have a lot more tech­no­log­i­cal options avail­able to them, like the afore­men­tioned mobile phones and power generators.

Going with my usual role-playing roles I’ve cho­sen a sup­port class, in this case the Military’s Medic sub­class. Although it seems that if you level up high enough the con­cept of indi­vid­ual classes is greatly blurred. I’ve died a few times since I restarted, but thanks to resurrect-happy sci­en­tist play­ers I’m back up again in no time!

We’ve moved from board games to web-based games and now it’s just a short jump to video games. Specif­i­cally: Dead Ris­ing. I spot­ted this title in the list of games for the upcom­ing Xbox 360 about this time last year. Dead Ris­ing has you play­ing as a pho­tog­ra­pher stuck in the mid­dle of a zombie-invested mall some­where in the USA. While you’re asked to per­form var­i­ous side mis­sions, it’s open-ended enough that you can just walk around tak­ing pho­tos, dress­ing up and bal­anc­ing items on zombie’s heads. It’s also the only game I’d con­sider get­ting for the Xbox360, so much so that I’ve taken to walk­ing around the house mak­ing zom­bie noises to try and entice my house­mate to buckle and buy both.

Mov­ing into lit­er­acy now: when­ever I’m in Bor­ders the first thing I’ll do is walk up to the stock com­puter and do a search for a book called “Zom­bie Sur­vival Guide”. It’s never in stock, and I keep mean­ing to get one of the staff to order it in for me. Iron­i­cally I’m usu­ally put off by the long reg­is­ter queue that’s filled with quiet, shuf­fling peo­ple mov­ing at zom­bie speed when doing every­thing from walk­ing to pulling money out of their wallets.

You might be think­ing that all this zom­bie talk had to have an affect. And you’d be right. I do have an idea float­ing around for a story based in Mel­bourne some time after a zom­bie inva­sion. I’ll reveal a bit more about once I have a bet­ter idea of how I want the story to progress. I will say this: it fea­tures bag­pipes, con­scrip­tion, a ludi­crous body count and a car chase.

Well, well, well. After see­ing that even Damien could get a Flickr badge work­ing on his site I wasn’t going to be left behind.

I’ve started tear­ing out the default Word­Press code and replac­ing it with my own hastily cob­bled together code. I know it’s not much to look at but you wouldn’t believe how much I’ve actu­ally torn out.
I’ve also writ­ten up some text for the About page. Default text be damned.

I’ve got no new images for you to look at though. You’ll just have to wait until I get another burst of inspiration.

As Damien and Mike have already men­tioned, we spent the bet­ter part of last Sun­day wan­der­ing the city tak­ing pho­tos. Our seven hour wander-thon covered:

• St Kilda Pier
• The South end of the CBD and it’s many alleys (includ­ing the graffiti-ridden Hosier Lane)
• Carl­ton Gardens
• The Exhi­bi­tion Building
• Alexan­dra Gardens
• Shrine of Remem­brance; and the
• Royal Botan­i­cal Gardens

Pho­tos taken that day can be found here. Damien’s are here, and Mike’s are here.

I had a lot of fun, espe­cially when I got to use the big boy lens. (Thanks for mak­ing Cap­tain Stumpy look inad­e­quate by the way.) The pan­cakes were a wel­come energy boost before we crossed the bor­der and headed into the Botan­i­cal Gar­dens and it’s sur­rounds.
I’m look­ing for­ward to the next ses­sion, guys.

Oh and top marks to Damien who, when asked if we were ter­ror­ists, pointed to his back­pack and said: “This isn’t a back­pack. It’s a bomb.”

Bravo, good sir. Bravo.

It’s been about 6 weeks since the last site-based update so I thought I’d bet­ter give a short update.
I’ve found a few sites to help me play around with the back­end of the site. But even then I’ve been unable to even add a Flickr box to the right-hand side of the screen. The code is there, it’s just not appear­ing for some rea­son. I’m miss­ing def­i­nitely something.

I watched Catch Me If You Can the other week and really liked the style of the open­ing cred­its, which are help­fully acces­si­ble from the design company’s web­site. With that fresh in my mind I put down a few sketches which I’ve help­fully uploaded here, here and here. I know the name “Inno­cent Bystander” does sound a bit omi­nous to a lot of you, but I do want the site to have a play­ful edge. Light colours (at the moment I’m think­ing blue with black and white high­lights at the moment) and no images-of-death.

I’m still in “sketch mode” until I fig­ure out how to update this thing prop­erly. So expect more of them to be uploaded.