Archive for the ‘Compound news’ Category

Tis the month of April…

Tom On April - 18 - 2010ADD COMMENTS

There isn’t much to say about my recent hiatus. I took a few months off to get my life straightened out after the events in Africa. I’m not worried of a repeat performance by any means. I do worry that those out there who are looking to us for the latest news on zombies and viral infections might take this a little too seriously.

It’s with this in mind that I’m going to be separating the business of the Compound and the NR website altogether. I’ll be on here more than usual, but I want to move this whole thing more toward a fictional zombie site. I’ve been playing Left 4 Dead 2 nonstop since it came out and am looking forward to turning the NecroResistance website into a fan site. A guild, if you will.
I would also like to see fan fiction, zombie art, and written fiction on zombies in particular.

I’m not bowing to “the man” if that’s what you’re all thinking. I just think that business and pleasure shouldn’t mix unless you are a prostitute. My business is the Compound. My pleasure is zombies altogether. So with your help, all of you, I would like to move this thing along and become the biggest and best L4D/Zombie site online. Let me know what you think and submit what you have.

I’ll be waiting!

Tom

The return of Tom (finally)

Tom On September - 22 - 2009ADD COMMENTS

It’s been a couple of months since my last full post. I would like to apologize for the lack of updates during that time. No one here knew how to access the website and make updates for me, so the only thing the other members could do was wait and worry during my absence without letting the rest of the world know what was going on. Once again, I am sorry for the extended leave from NecroResistance and the Compound. But now that I have rested and can go about my daily life and resume the training schedule we had acquired, I can finally let the rest of the NecroResistance members and anyone else interested know why I was gone for so long. So here goes:

On August 3rd of 2009, I boarded a flight with a friend to visit the South African Lowveld where a recent sighting of zombies was reported. The flight was long, nearly thirty-six hours total, and when we arrived at the final airport we exited the plane to a welcoming committee of three gentlemen in suits holding a sign with my name on it. I assumed this was my ride to my hotel, which was booked as part of the trip. The men seemed nice enough, carried our luggage, even opened doors for us when we reached the SUV parked outside. They even offered us refreshments from a refrigerator built into the SUV. It was a popular cream soda from that region called “Sparletta”. It was delicious, and I drank the whole thing in a few minutes. It was very hot and for some reason the air conditioning in the SUV didn’t seem to work as well as it should have. There were two men in the front seats, my colleague and I sat in the middle, and another man sat in the back with our luggage. The one in the back told us it was at least an hour to our hotel, so I figured I would catch a nap during the trip. My friend was just as worn out as me, I guess, because he was asleep before I even had my eyes shut.

I’m not sure how long I was asleep, but when I awoke it was dark and I was alone in the SUV. When I got out I realized the SUV was parked in a garage with the doors shut. Only one regular door led outside and I opened it to find the three men surrounding a person on the floor. One of them held a tube about the size of an ink pen. I soon realized it was a needle and the person on the floor was my friend. The two other men led me over to a small windowed room on the right side of the larger room. As I watched, I realized that my friend was still alive, but his breathing was shallow. One of the men informed me that he had been given a sedative to keep him relaxed during this. The man outside injected whatever was in the needle into my friend then joined us in the room. Fifteen minutes later, my friend stopped breathing. I now began to worry what fate they had in store for me. Another hour went by, and I was started to get very paranoid and anxious. Then, my friend started moving. his eyes opened and he writhed slowly like a fish that had been out of water for a long time and was just about to die.

He did this for a few minutes before the man who had injected him walked out and gave him another shot. His body went into spasms before he went limp again. One of the other men told me that the one who had done the injecting had been working for South African government officials over the last four years to develop a temporary zombie-type effect in the dying. The liquid in the needle was injected in those who were dying in battle (or in the veins of a healthy enemy), then found its way to the frontal lobe of the brain. Consisting of highly conductive metals and tiny electronic micro-computers that were preprogrammed to accomplish certain commands, this drug killed a person, revived their frontal lobes, then when the mission was over killed them off indefinitely. They hadn’t yet perfected it, the most they had gotten out of it was a series of muscle contractions. No real programming had been used so far.

They kept me there for the duration of my trip, which was just over a month, dropping me off at the airport with all my luggage and information on the experimental weapon. They informed me that they, along with the man working for the government, were part of an underground African movement to fight bio-weaponry. When they found out that I was coming to Africa for an investigation (which turned out to be fraudulent, to my disappointment) they came up with a plan to kidnap myself and my friend, who it turned out had agreed to undergo the experiment after they explained the premises of it. The second injection had jump-started his system and he had been rushed to a local hospital where he remains even now. We converse daily and he is doing great. But the point of the whole thing is that while everyone is laughing at us here at the NR and claiming that the Compound is a waste of time, real evil is going on right now under our noses. If a small government in a South African country is getting results like these on their budget, what is our government doing right now? Let us not forget the undead sightings after Katrina struck New Orleans, nor the sightings after the tsunami that wiped out those cities and towns only five years ago.

This is only the beginning of a new world that might end abruptly and violently. We have two months until the release of the new Left 4 Dead training simulator and much work to do. I have low hopes that this crisis will be averted after witnessing what I have witnessed, so all we can do is hope, train, and keep an eye on those who work against us. They just might be the ones who unleash Hell upon us.

Tom B.

Training Lab built!

Tom On December - 15 - 2008ADD COMMENTS

Thanks to several hefty donations, we have now completed the new Computer Training Lab.  We now have 75 gaming-level computers in the room, all connected with 3 Gigabit switches, and a dedicated simulation server.

The simulation we are talking about, of course, is Left 4 Dead by Valve software.  This “game” pits four survivors in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, and is a good sandbox to put my methods of survival to good use.  What I’ve been telling recruits all along is that you have to work together and support each other.

The simulator’s programmers have obviously read some of my work, because they mirror what to do and what not to do in an emergency situation.  Some things are a bit innacurate though:  in the first level you have to go to a hospital for safety.  Every zombie survivalist knows that most hospitals are going to be Ground Zero in a zombie outbreak.  Also, with no humans to run things, many subway tunnels will be filled with groundwater within a matter of days.

But I digress.  We are working with others in the community to create customized maps to demonstrate how shopping malls and other “movie” locales are literal deathtraps, and should be avoided at all survival costs.

This new zombie training simulator lab is one of my proudest achievements for The Necrosistance.

I have heard rumors about a zombie PC game that would be very realistic.  Of course I was intrigued, so I headed off to the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle.  It took a few hours to get there, but boy was it worth it.

Valve Software had a booth set up for their upcoming video game/training simulator called Left 4 Dead. They have four comptuters set up, where people could go through an entire level as a party.

As I’ve always said, you need to work as a team in order to survive.  Since many of these people playing this demo had little military experience, they were quickly devoured by the undead.

There were a few innacuracies, for my taste, but overall this is a viable training system for the Necrosistance.  I am going to start setting up a computer training room on the compound, and will talk to Valve about providing copies of their new simulator for us.

We have been sinking a lot of money into building physical training grounds, but this new simulator may revolutionize how we prepare for the inevitable.