Review: The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology

I will admit, I love zombies.

I have loved almost everything dealing with zombies since I was first blessed to watch Night of the Living Dead all those years ago. Granted, I didn’t see it when it first came out, I was a bit too young at the same, since it came out about 14 years before I was born. Since I have watched many more movies on zombies and been really glad that zombies seem to have had a resurgence in popularity over the past 5 years or so now. Perhaps they are riding on the interest the paranormal, perhaps not, either way; it’s a boon for those like myself who enjoy the undead.

One of the many things that I have always enjoyed from some of the zombie books and movies is how they are often used as a social commentary backdrop for the timeframe that the movies are created. How they can be used to showcase the insatiable hunger that the human species is capable of, whether it’s in the case of eating, greed, corruption or spending or any number of ideas, zombies can be used as a backdrop to teach a lesson. Or, on the other end of the spectrum they can be used as nothing more than a horror element and a reason to have gore, intestines, and blood by the bathtub full. Either way, I am more than happy to spend my time watching or reading.

With the Anthology at hand, The New Dead, this takes the themes of human suffering, survival, gluttony, greed, and mans ever desire to outwit death and brings it to a book near you. Like most anthologies though, not all, at least in my opinion, of the stories are great. I really enjoyed several of them; among them was the story by “What Maisie Knew” by David Liss. In this story you take a simple mistake created by the main character and follow it through to the surprise conclusion. The

moral of the story is, had he just come clean to begin with, the mistake that the whole story is about would have probably been averted.

“In the Dust” by Tim Lebbon puts you in a town that has been barricaded because of the pandemic that had destroyed all but a couple of the citizens who lived there. With the government quarantine stopping them from leaving, they are in a position to try to help the scientist prove that the virus is not alive within them; by bringing to the scientist the corpses of the infected. With this we have a man who is darn near psychotic because of the events that have lead them here, a women who is so fragile she can barely think for herself, and a man who wants nothing else then to find the body of his lost wife. Through the course of the story you get to see these characters grow as their situation goes from being bad, to being in a place of sanctuary.

One thing I have loved about these collection type books is the range of authors that I have gotten a chance to read. Jonathan Mayberry is among those who I have found through their short stories to be among the top of my favorite authors of the genre. His story “Family Business” is probably my favorite story in this which is a tale of two brothers. Without giving anything away to the plot of this great story, we get to see the growth of the younger brother as he begins to find out who his bigger brother is and why he has made the choices he has made. This is a must read and alone makes the book a must buy. I also strongly recommend this author to anyone else as well, his book “Patient Zero” (review coming later) is also a must read for zombie related interest.

Now though, not all the stories are gems. “Copper” was pro

bably one of the most uninteresting and boring reads I have probably read from any collection book so far. I found the style of the writing to be uninteresting as well as the story from it. Nothing seemed to really happen in it, it’s sort of told from the perspective of a zombie though, which was interesting at least a little. Though the ending to it was just anti-climatic and not worth the nearly 40 pages this short story was.

Otherwise though, the rest of the book is pretty good, and more then worth a pickup if you are interested in horror or zombies. If you are looking for something that is filled with different types of zombies and just not your run of the mill gore fest that most people tend to associate with anything zombie related, this book is a must read. Even with the couple of less than stellar stories the couple extraordinary ones more than make up for it.

Rating: 7/10

Review: Star Wars – Red Harvest by Joe Schreiber

Before the rule of two came into play for the sith, there used to be thousands of sith warriors in the galaxy. In fact, they were an empire of the day, back 3500 years before the rise of Emperor Palapatine and Darth Vader were even whispers of being the consummate evil in the galaxy. The Sith and the Old Republic fought a war for control of the galaxy, the classic battle of good vs. evil.

In Red Harvest, the partial prequel to Death Trooper that came out on October 13, 2009,  Joe Schreiber takes us back to this time to the sith training world of Odacer – Faustin, a world not to dissimilar to the planet of Hoth, consisting of mostly just snow ice and deathly cold. Here, the ruling Darth Scabrous has an interest in completing an ancient sith ritual of immortality. Of which, in order to complete the ritual, he would need the petals of the Murakami Orchid; a flower that has the ability to speak to force sensitive’s via a force link between it and its caretaker. In this case, Hestizo Trace, a Jedi (dropout?) who has an innate ability to communicate with plant life, more specifically the murakami orchid.

After having seized both Hestizo and the orchid, Darth Scabrous is able to put his plan into motion. This is where Joe Schreiber’s writing style shines. His descriptions of the havoc the zombie(ish) creatures that are unleashed due to the orchids unique abilities, are truly grotesque. I say zombie(ish) as while the creatures in the book has similarities to the conventional zombie, i.e. eating flesh of the living, infecting those who are bitten with the contagion and such, they differ in the sense that these creatures abilities far exceed those of your typical zombie. Either way though, you are treated to plenty of people being ripped apart and disemboweled in a very graphic fashion.

While through the story, you are always sure who shall survive till the end, everyone else is fair game. Of which seems every few pages another gets picked off in a ever greater. The story keeps a really fast pace from the onset, which truly allows the atmosphere to hold on to your attention which I truly loved, although, this is truly a double edged sword. While I loved the quick pace for the horror elements, the side effect is that none of the characters are really fleshed out. At the end of the day, you really don’t have any knowledge of who the characters are, where they came from, or really anything about them outside of their names. It seems as well that, the few characters that start to get fleshed out tend to get ripped apart in the book around the same time you start to have any feel for who they were.

While the ending was sort of anti-climatic, as well as a bit easy to see coming, it was what I expected from a horror genre book. For those who are looking for a straight Star Wars novel, this one may disappoint. For those though who love the Star Wars series and are ok with a side story that really has no effect, characters or otherwise, on the rest of the timeline, or those who in general just love a good horror book, this one comes highly recommended.

8/10

Tutorial: Batch Processing Camera RAW to JPEG

The problem I came across the other day was that we had been out all day taking pictures of a bunch of flowers. I came home after taking some 250+ pictures all taken in camera RAW. Awesome idea, but when I came home, I didn’t realize how tedious it would be to just look at all of the images to see which ones I liked. On top of being time consuming, I would also have to then take into Photoshop all of the images I liked, edit them and re-save them as a JPEG or whatever other file type I wished for posting purposes.

Knowing it was possible to process all of the files automatically, but yet, not knowing how to accomplish that goal myself, I went about online to figure out how to do it. The problem came though that I was really unsure of what the process was called. So I spent some time looking around and finally came across something that gave me the basics but didnt really tell me everything. So I sort of had to just guess my way through it.

Anyway, to save myself sometime, figured I would post it here for later use, as well as hopefully helping anyone else who may need it as well.

Step 1: Obviously the first step is to open Photoshop up. (assuming at least that photoshop is the program you are using. If its not, why are you here then? )

Step 2: You need to create the action over in the actions flyout. If you do not see the action flyout, you can bring it back up by clicking on the Window tab in the toolbar and activating the Actions option. Or for those like myself who prefer shortcut keys ALT + F9 will also bring it back up.

Step 3: The next thing I would do is to create a new folder for your custom actions. So under the actions flyout, click the new folder option.

Step 4: With the new folder created, click on it to highlight it, then selct the create new action option.

Name – Self Explanatory

Set – This is the folders that you have created for your actions. If your custom action folder is not selected, select it here now.

Function key – I have not used this myself, but I would imagine you could use this option to fast track the specified action. In the case of this type of action here, I don’t imagine this would be too helpful. Perhaps in the case if you were creating custom selections for creating perhaps a border for your images, it might be a bit more helpful for something like that.

Color – I have yet to figure out what this actually does. I am guessing perhaps if you are using an action to create a background piece that perhaps it is used for the background color? I am really not sure.

When you have everything completed, click the record button

Step 6: Now this is important. From here on, everything you click will be recorded and added to the action. So make sure that anything you want to add to this action, you go through in the EXACT order it should be. Granted things can be edited later, but its just good practice to try to get it right the first time then to have to spend all the extra time editing later.

For the case of this action, all I wanted was for an action to open Camera RAW images then to resave them as JPEG.

From this point I opened up the first image that I wanted to be done. The camera RAW options opened up inside of photoshop. As I mentioned before, everything you edit will be done to EACH image. So in the case of this, I figure less is more. I don’t want to go through and edit the exposure and everything else that I would normally. Those edits might not be accurate from image to image. So in this case, the only thing I opted to change was the white balance from “As Shot” to “Cloudy”. I liked the look of that option, so I went with it. I then precedded to click on the Open in Photoshop option.

Now with Photoshop open, the image itself is fine. If I wanted to change the size of the image to a smaller format, I could do that here first. In this case though, all I wish to do is to resave it. So I go to File> Save As> Select JPEG as my file type, name my file.

The final thing I need to do now is to close the file out and leave just Photoshop Open. Done.

Click Stop Recording in the Actions flyout. You will now see the Action you created in the folder you opted to attach it to.

Step 7: Now go to File> Automate> Batch and look at the options here.

The Play Options:

Set – Once again, the action folder that you are using, in this case, Custom Actions

Action – the name of the action you are using.

Source Options:

Source – Folder is what you will need for this option. I have not found a need for the other options so far.

Choose: This option is the folder in which all of your camera raw pictures are located. Ideally I believe they should be somewhere on your harddrive and not inside of the memory card. Doing this I believe would save time and also not have the chance of corrupting your memory card if something went wrong.

Override Action “Open” Command: Unsure

Include all Sub-Folders: Have all of your images from a weeks worth of photoshoots in one folder seperated in their own subfolders, click this and it will go through each subfolder one after the other.

Suppress File Open Options Dialogue box: I am not 100%, but I believe this option stops you from having to manually click an options that happen during the opening of the file. For instance, I know some images might have a different color profile then the native setting inside of photoshop, so when this happens, photoshop always asks me if I wish to convert the profile to that used by the program, or that inset with the camera RAW file. Having this command selected will bypass this and I think it will just stick with whatever you had set during the original recording.

Suppress Color Profile Warnings: Unsure

Destination Options:

Destination – Once again, I opted for Folder as my option. I have not found a need for the rest of them yet.

Choose – The folder you are putting the new files into. I created a folder on my desktop called JPEGs, which is where I opted to save all of the converted files.

Override Action “Save As” Command: This makes it so you don’t have to keep selecting all of the options to save a file. You don’t need to change the name or the file type or anything.

File Naming – Now I am not 100% sure what all of the saving options use here. I know with the first section, I opted to use the 3 digit seriel number as my file name. This would make all of my files look like this as they save: 001, 002, 003, etc etc. The option to the right of it I chose extension. This option will take the File Extension, in this case JPEG, that you originally saved the file to during the action recording as the file type for all of your images.

Step 8: Click ok. This will start your batch process. Now walk away from the computer and do what ever needs to be done while the computer does all of the work. At any time say you forgot to set something up, just hit esc on your computer and you can cancel the Batch process when needed.

Now I know this process works inside of Photoshop, but I am unsure it works inside of Lightroom or another photo editing software. At least with Lightroom, since it is an Adobe product, I am sure there is the chance of a similar procedure, but as I do not have access to the program I am unsure. If anyone has it and knows how to do a batch process in it, please let me know as I am curious now. Also, if I have forgotten a step, or if I explained something wrong, please let me know! I am still learning alot of this stuff myself, so any thing I post is just how I understand things as of now. Thanks again 🙂

I have found a new home?

So this is actually not my first blog. I have another one and actually came across this site while trying to find better alternatives after I had some issues setting up the blog with more then one picture in it. As of right now, I am unsure which way I am going to go. I originally started this one in the pretense of wanting to use it for just a book review type setup, which I still intend to do. Although, the more I use it the more I am starting to really like it.

Either way though, right now the main idea of this blog is to use it for reviews which I fully intend to do here soon. Here are the first few that I plan to add here.

• Star Wars: Red Harvest – by Joe Schreiber —- Review up
• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed – by Sean Williams
• The New Dead – by assembled authors —- Review up
• Chasing the Dead – by Joe Schreiber

There are many more I intend on doing, but this is just the beginning list. I might change the order, as I do intend to re-read the books that I have not read in sometime as to refresh my memory on it. I do plan on rating them as well. I will be using the common 10 point system, 1 being bad, 10 being great.

The genre’s I will be hitting are going to mostly be science fiction and fantasy, but I shall also but horror and pretty much anything else that I find an interest in as well.

Now, as I mentioned before, in addition to these, I am thinking about also making this my main blog as well and killing the other one. If I do this, then the variety of the posting shall be wide and varied. Photography, 3d modeling, random rambling, out right non sense, could be anything. All in good fun though, trust me on this. 🙂