World War Z: Hard Decisions and Stress Tests
World War Z is a much better movie than I expected from former heartthrob and beautiful person Brad Pitt.
He isn't exactly known for his deep intellectualism, which may not be his fault. Arnold Schwarzenegger jokes "First they let me be in a movie, then they let me speak, then they let me act." and has talked about Terminator being a big deal as his first movie where he MOSTLY got to WEAR CLOTHES, which is funny because all most people remember is "He teleported in NAKED!"
I had NO IDEA what World War Z was about. I figured Z stood for "The LAST world war" -- a la "alpha and omega", the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet and Z is the final letter of the English alphabet -- not "ZOMBIE Apocalypse, but we don't REALLY want to say that because this is a more serious movie than most shitty zombie apocalypse plots."
(MY interpretation. No, I did not research that. Don't confuse me with the facts. My mind is made up here.)
According to Wikipedia, it was made in 2013 and based on a 2007 novel. Some of the plot points are eerily like the ACTUAL worldwide Covid 19 pandemic that started in 2019, THUS THE NAME (and now I feel really stupid for googling that to verify the date, but there you have it: 19 probably stands for the YEAR it started).
I have read that Darwin's Theory of Evolution was "discovered" or dreamed up by THREE different people around the same time and it just so happens he got famous for it. You get a lot of sort of necessary but insufficient prescursors to things and then ideas can grow out of that in an emergent fashion, so we shouldn't be too shocked that people come up with similar ideas.
We also shouldn't be too shocked when people try to come up with plausible fiction and their ideas sometimes seem to closely mirror reality in an almost prescient fashion, like this movie and Covid. If you are educated enough and your plausible fiction is plausible enough, it really SHOULD tend to be somewhat predictive of actual reality.
See also Star Trek and how it ended up being a SOURCE for ideas for future tech the world REALLY developed, starting with sliding doors that open automatically. In the TV show, they walked with confidence towards doors that someone was going to pull open with a rope and HOPED they got the timing right and they didn't smack their nose into the door. AGAIN.
My recollection is the movie True Lies delayed their release date because of the uncomfortable similarity between the "Middle Eastern terrorists attacking the US" movie plot and the events of 9/11 which happened around the time the movie was supposed to be released. So this isn't even a first.
In my lifetime, we have had a lot of "post apocalyptic" films and other fiction and most likely this is rooted in a general awareness that humans have the power for the first time in recorded human history to just wipe ourselves out across the globe if we fuck up badly enough and at the moment it looks like we are working on doing exactly that.
People most likely write fiction about it as a kind of thought experiment or even personal therapy to work through these ideas and kind of wonder "Is there ANY way out of this GIANT MESS that seems like CERTAIN DOOM????"
I really, really, really like the film and watched it three times while it was available online for free in spite of being in the midst of an adrenaline spike the first time that had me UP A WALL trying to watch this film. It's really NOT as bad as I feared and a lot of potential GORN -- "gore porn" -- is NOT included.
They routinely NICELY imply the worst and nastiest things instead of giving you a close up of it in GLORIOUS stomach-churning, nightmare-inducing DETAIL. But I still took two or three days to watch it the first time through because I could see some things coming and was like "NO, I am NOT up for the shot I am certain is coming up, THANKS."
If you haven't seen the film, this post likely contains spoilers. SORRY. If you have, coolios. It may help you follow some things I want to talk about that don't really have ANYTHING to do with the film per se but the film illustrates a few things really well.
BUT, before I get started, I want to make the point that like a LOT OF FICTION, the film has a nice and neat SIMPLIFIED model of reality. I don't think ANY disease or OTHER world-eating issue will EVER be fixed in the simplified fashion presented in the film.
Actual reality tends to be complicated, not nice and simple, but I appreciate the way the film laid out some logic bits. I appreciate it a LOT. If you have some crazy health issue doctors can't fix, I highly recommend watching the film a few times as food for thought.
So well before I got "a better name than crazy" for my condition, I was having to make hard decisions under difficult circumstances and frequently wishing I could make those decisions when I WAS NOT feverish and short of sleep and stressed out and blah blah blah blah blah.
In the lead up to the health crisis that led to me finally getting a diagnosis, I ended up having multiple oral surgeries and ultimately getting a number of teeth extracted. And an early incident of that involved me running a red light and just narrowly missing hitting a much bigger vehicle (a van) with my little car, an event involving the metaphorical "my life flashing before my eyes" because I was like "Holy shit. I nearly DIED just now, and never mind there isn't a SCRATCH on me."
I would have a tooth with a large filling go "hot" and they would do a root canal as my first surgery and then schedule me for a crown and have that oral surgery separately. And then the tooth would go septic and need to be cut up into little pieces and extracted surgically -- because you can't PULL a tooth with a root canal and a crown -- and that would be oral surgery number THREE for ONE goddamned tooth.
Rinse and repeat and I had quite a few oral surgeries before at some point telling the dentist "Just PULL THE DAMN THING. No, I don't want to try to save the tooth. I want it OUT."
And I don't remember if I did that more than once or not. I'm pretty certain I did that with the LAST tooth I had removed and that extraction resulted in me having phantom pain from a phantom tooth for like the next year and a half.
So I know a little something about phantom pain even though, no, I am not missing any LIMBS.
So back to the near-death experience of accidentally running a red light while hella feverish.
I was going round and round with the dentist about my tooth and I think he was probably still trying to offer me options to save the tooth and I don't know if it was before or after the near-miss not-accident, but at some point I decided "Just schedule me with the oral surgeon to have it removed. I have had enough surgeries trying to SAVE my TOOTH. I want this OVER with (and I want to SAVE my LIFE -- PRIORITIES, damn it)."
In my childhood home, there was a glass door on the back of the house facing the backyard that became a symbol in my dreams of a "point of vulnerability" and during this ordeal I dreamed of a bear in my backyard, an animal a glass door has no hope of keeping out.
Between that dream and my near-death not-accident, I made my peace with making tough decisions under difficult circumstances and with time constraints. I went "Well, DUH, of COURSE that's when those decisions get made. If you had the luxury of time and yadda, it would NOT be a HARD decision. You could research it and decide what was best and feel confident you made the right decision."
So rule of thumb: Hard decisions are ALWAYS made under DURESS and usually with a fairly short time constraint. That's part of what makes them HARD DECISIONS.
If the shit were not hitting the fan, you wouldn't be contemplating THIS decision AT ALL.
I'm pretty sure damn few people sit around asking themselves "I wonder under what circumstances it makes sense to pull a tooth instead of getting yet ANOTHER surgery trying to save it" when they AREN'T dealing with potentially LIFE THREATENING dental problems. I didn't even think life threatening dental problems were a THING in the world until it was a THING in MY life.
I eventually came up with another rule of thumb: If you have two options, x and y, and x is near certain death or similarly A BIG FAT FUCKING NOPE as a "bet" with poor odds and y is more or less "salvation," do y.
Do NOT sit around HOPING for some movie-style SALVATION from on high to show up at the LAST SECOND when you are all out of time for trying SOMETHING else first. Save your life and THEN sit around fantasizing about future tech that regrows your lost damn tooth or whatever the fuck.
And I eventually came up with a third rule of thumb: When current known medical options can ONLY offer you CERTAIN DEATH as an outcome and the best case scenario is "Die SLOWER and suffer horrifically every fucking step of the way," that's a REASONABLE time to TAKE "stupid" risks -- LIKE read my blog and wonder if these unproven ideas from a random internet stranger might help you.
If you aren't under sentence of DEATH and yadda, just go to a doctor. Don't treat yourself like a guinea pig in an experiment the FDA wouldn't approve. DUH.
(Alternately, there is NOTHING risky or crazy about reading the site, wondering if X -- like metal poisoning -- might be YOUR problem or part of your problem and ORDERING TESTS for it. Totally reasonable and prudent.)
I had to watch World War Z twice to appreciate this but the movie illustrates the above principles rather well.
I had to watch it twice to fully comprehend WHY he KNEW it takes like 10 or 12 seconds to "turn" (into a zombie) after you are bitten or otherwise infected. There is a scene where his kid drops her toy and he picks it up just as someone has been infected and the toy begins to COUNT out loud and comes to TWELVE and changes the dialogue.
There are two scenes where he uses this knowledge to make a hard decision.
In one, he runs to the edge of a skyscraper roof ready to hurl himself off and is COUNTING out loud waiting to see if he turns or not. ("Spoiler": He doesn't.)
In another, he cuts someone's hand off which prevents her from turning after being bitten. She later asks him "How did you know cutting it off would work?" and he says "I didn't."
It didn't MATTER if it worked or not. If it failed, she was dead anyway. It was her ONLY hope given the 10 or 12 second time frame in which to DO SOMETHING or just stand there and watch her turn.
One place tells us "They respond to noise" and another place tells us "Try to NOT kill any of them. It only makes the others MORE aggressive."
I appreciated that about the movie a LOT. I appreciated it in part because that bit is surprisingly realistic -- that different people in different places will notice different details, so pooling knowledge that can somehow be verified is a good methodology to help you get past local blindspots and figure out a path forward.
I also appreciated it because it ALL sets up for the final scene, which is a STRESS TEST that PROVES his hypothesis.
A stress test is where you get real world conditions that show you something. If you drop it and it bounces, YAY! It works. If you drop it and it breaks, oops, it doesn't actually work under real world conditions.
If you know the story about the Navajo Code Talkers in World War 2, it didn't get adopted until it passed a stress test. No one was using the Code Talkers until someone was in a dire mess and the only way to help them was to BROADCAST instructions the ENEMY could hear.
So they used the Code Talkers to get them instructions without the enemy knowing what they were being told and it WORKED. After that, EVERYONE used the Code Talkers who had been just ignored as dead weight prior to that.
So he comes up with a PLAN to infect himself with something that he THINKS will "innoculate" him -- or, more accurately, cloak him so the zombies don't notice him -- and someone is like "Dude, that's CRAZEH. The ONLY way to prove it is for you to infect yourself with this DEADLY thing, HOPE it works and then INTENTIONALLY do the IDIOTIC thing of go in that room over there where we are holding a zombie."
That's not how it goes.
Instead, he ends up TRAPPED with no way out EXCEPT to infect himself with something deadly. If he doesn't, he has no hope of escape anyway.
It works and then he ALSO needs to get past a huge ZOMBIE HORDE between him and safety occupying a narrow hall, so he uses what he knows about them reacting to noise and sets up a diversion, then walks past them while they ALL run screaming towards the diversion and ignore him like he's invisible.
And NONE of them react to him. So now we KNOW this WORKS and not with just that ONE zombie for some damn reason.
I get told all the time I'm some nutter IMAGINING that I'm getting well and it's PLACEBO effect and all this stupid shit. No, dumbass, I'm BRAD PITT.
Not a gorgeous sex symbol like the Shania Twain song suggests, no. I'm Brad Pitt in the movie World War Z who KNOWS shit works because I field tested it when my only other option was death and I'm not dead.
So fuck you and leave me alone. THANKS.
He isn't exactly known for his deep intellectualism, which may not be his fault. Arnold Schwarzenegger jokes "First they let me be in a movie, then they let me speak, then they let me act." and has talked about Terminator being a big deal as his first movie where he MOSTLY got to WEAR CLOTHES, which is funny because all most people remember is "He teleported in NAKED!"
I had NO IDEA what World War Z was about. I figured Z stood for "The LAST world war" -- a la "alpha and omega", the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet and Z is the final letter of the English alphabet -- not "ZOMBIE Apocalypse, but we don't REALLY want to say that because this is a more serious movie than most shitty zombie apocalypse plots."
(MY interpretation. No, I did not research that. Don't confuse me with the facts. My mind is made up here.)
According to Wikipedia, it was made in 2013 and based on a 2007 novel. Some of the plot points are eerily like the ACTUAL worldwide Covid 19 pandemic that started in 2019, THUS THE NAME (and now I feel really stupid for googling that to verify the date, but there you have it: 19 probably stands for the YEAR it started).
I have read that Darwin's Theory of Evolution was "discovered" or dreamed up by THREE different people around the same time and it just so happens he got famous for it. You get a lot of sort of necessary but insufficient prescursors to things and then ideas can grow out of that in an emergent fashion, so we shouldn't be too shocked that people come up with similar ideas.
We also shouldn't be too shocked when people try to come up with plausible fiction and their ideas sometimes seem to closely mirror reality in an almost prescient fashion, like this movie and Covid. If you are educated enough and your plausible fiction is plausible enough, it really SHOULD tend to be somewhat predictive of actual reality.
See also Star Trek and how it ended up being a SOURCE for ideas for future tech the world REALLY developed, starting with sliding doors that open automatically. In the TV show, they walked with confidence towards doors that someone was going to pull open with a rope and HOPED they got the timing right and they didn't smack their nose into the door. AGAIN.
My recollection is the movie True Lies delayed their release date because of the uncomfortable similarity between the "Middle Eastern terrorists attacking the US" movie plot and the events of 9/11 which happened around the time the movie was supposed to be released. So this isn't even a first.
In my lifetime, we have had a lot of "post apocalyptic" films and other fiction and most likely this is rooted in a general awareness that humans have the power for the first time in recorded human history to just wipe ourselves out across the globe if we fuck up badly enough and at the moment it looks like we are working on doing exactly that.
People most likely write fiction about it as a kind of thought experiment or even personal therapy to work through these ideas and kind of wonder "Is there ANY way out of this GIANT MESS that seems like CERTAIN DOOM????"
I really, really, really like the film and watched it three times while it was available online for free in spite of being in the midst of an adrenaline spike the first time that had me UP A WALL trying to watch this film. It's really NOT as bad as I feared and a lot of potential GORN -- "gore porn" -- is NOT included.
They routinely NICELY imply the worst and nastiest things instead of giving you a close up of it in GLORIOUS stomach-churning, nightmare-inducing DETAIL. But I still took two or three days to watch it the first time through because I could see some things coming and was like "NO, I am NOT up for the shot I am certain is coming up, THANKS."
If you haven't seen the film, this post likely contains spoilers. SORRY. If you have, coolios. It may help you follow some things I want to talk about that don't really have ANYTHING to do with the film per se but the film illustrates a few things really well.
BUT, before I get started, I want to make the point that like a LOT OF FICTION, the film has a nice and neat SIMPLIFIED model of reality. I don't think ANY disease or OTHER world-eating issue will EVER be fixed in the simplified fashion presented in the film.
Actual reality tends to be complicated, not nice and simple, but I appreciate the way the film laid out some logic bits. I appreciate it a LOT. If you have some crazy health issue doctors can't fix, I highly recommend watching the film a few times as food for thought.
Hard Decisions
I have a genetic disorder and was not diagnosed until my mid thirties. Before that, I was mostly treated like a whiny hypochondriac.So well before I got "a better name than crazy" for my condition, I was having to make hard decisions under difficult circumstances and frequently wishing I could make those decisions when I WAS NOT feverish and short of sleep and stressed out and blah blah blah blah blah.
In the lead up to the health crisis that led to me finally getting a diagnosis, I ended up having multiple oral surgeries and ultimately getting a number of teeth extracted. And an early incident of that involved me running a red light and just narrowly missing hitting a much bigger vehicle (a van) with my little car, an event involving the metaphorical "my life flashing before my eyes" because I was like "Holy shit. I nearly DIED just now, and never mind there isn't a SCRATCH on me."
I would have a tooth with a large filling go "hot" and they would do a root canal as my first surgery and then schedule me for a crown and have that oral surgery separately. And then the tooth would go septic and need to be cut up into little pieces and extracted surgically -- because you can't PULL a tooth with a root canal and a crown -- and that would be oral surgery number THREE for ONE goddamned tooth.
Rinse and repeat and I had quite a few oral surgeries before at some point telling the dentist "Just PULL THE DAMN THING. No, I don't want to try to save the tooth. I want it OUT."
And I don't remember if I did that more than once or not. I'm pretty certain I did that with the LAST tooth I had removed and that extraction resulted in me having phantom pain from a phantom tooth for like the next year and a half.
So I know a little something about phantom pain even though, no, I am not missing any LIMBS.
So back to the near-death experience of accidentally running a red light while hella feverish.
I was going round and round with the dentist about my tooth and I think he was probably still trying to offer me options to save the tooth and I don't know if it was before or after the near-miss not-accident, but at some point I decided "Just schedule me with the oral surgeon to have it removed. I have had enough surgeries trying to SAVE my TOOTH. I want this OVER with (and I want to SAVE my LIFE -- PRIORITIES, damn it)."
In my childhood home, there was a glass door on the back of the house facing the backyard that became a symbol in my dreams of a "point of vulnerability" and during this ordeal I dreamed of a bear in my backyard, an animal a glass door has no hope of keeping out.
Between that dream and my near-death not-accident, I made my peace with making tough decisions under difficult circumstances and with time constraints. I went "Well, DUH, of COURSE that's when those decisions get made. If you had the luxury of time and yadda, it would NOT be a HARD decision. You could research it and decide what was best and feel confident you made the right decision."
So rule of thumb: Hard decisions are ALWAYS made under DURESS and usually with a fairly short time constraint. That's part of what makes them HARD DECISIONS.
If the shit were not hitting the fan, you wouldn't be contemplating THIS decision AT ALL.
I'm pretty sure damn few people sit around asking themselves "I wonder under what circumstances it makes sense to pull a tooth instead of getting yet ANOTHER surgery trying to save it" when they AREN'T dealing with potentially LIFE THREATENING dental problems. I didn't even think life threatening dental problems were a THING in the world until it was a THING in MY life.
I eventually came up with another rule of thumb: If you have two options, x and y, and x is near certain death or similarly A BIG FAT FUCKING NOPE as a "bet" with poor odds and y is more or less "salvation," do y.
Do NOT sit around HOPING for some movie-style SALVATION from on high to show up at the LAST SECOND when you are all out of time for trying SOMETHING else first. Save your life and THEN sit around fantasizing about future tech that regrows your lost damn tooth or whatever the fuck.
And I eventually came up with a third rule of thumb: When current known medical options can ONLY offer you CERTAIN DEATH as an outcome and the best case scenario is "Die SLOWER and suffer horrifically every fucking step of the way," that's a REASONABLE time to TAKE "stupid" risks -- LIKE read my blog and wonder if these unproven ideas from a random internet stranger might help you.
If you aren't under sentence of DEATH and yadda, just go to a doctor. Don't treat yourself like a guinea pig in an experiment the FDA wouldn't approve. DUH.
(Alternately, there is NOTHING risky or crazy about reading the site, wondering if X -- like metal poisoning -- might be YOUR problem or part of your problem and ORDERING TESTS for it. Totally reasonable and prudent.)
I had to watch World War Z twice to appreciate this but the movie illustrates the above principles rather well.
I had to watch it twice to fully comprehend WHY he KNEW it takes like 10 or 12 seconds to "turn" (into a zombie) after you are bitten or otherwise infected. There is a scene where his kid drops her toy and he picks it up just as someone has been infected and the toy begins to COUNT out loud and comes to TWELVE and changes the dialogue.
There are two scenes where he uses this knowledge to make a hard decision.
In one, he runs to the edge of a skyscraper roof ready to hurl himself off and is COUNTING out loud waiting to see if he turns or not. ("Spoiler": He doesn't.)
In another, he cuts someone's hand off which prevents her from turning after being bitten. She later asks him "How did you know cutting it off would work?" and he says "I didn't."
It didn't MATTER if it worked or not. If it failed, she was dead anyway. It was her ONLY hope given the 10 or 12 second time frame in which to DO SOMETHING or just stand there and watch her turn.
Stress Tests
I rewatched the movie twice in part because a lot of the high stress scenes that had me UP A WALL the first time through turned out to be essential to fleshing out a set of details about the infection and the zombies in the movie. He travels all over in the course of trying to figure out how to stop this global apocalypse and gets different bits of info from different places.One place tells us "They respond to noise" and another place tells us "Try to NOT kill any of them. It only makes the others MORE aggressive."
I appreciated that about the movie a LOT. I appreciated it in part because that bit is surprisingly realistic -- that different people in different places will notice different details, so pooling knowledge that can somehow be verified is a good methodology to help you get past local blindspots and figure out a path forward.
I also appreciated it because it ALL sets up for the final scene, which is a STRESS TEST that PROVES his hypothesis.
A stress test is where you get real world conditions that show you something. If you drop it and it bounces, YAY! It works. If you drop it and it breaks, oops, it doesn't actually work under real world conditions.
If you know the story about the Navajo Code Talkers in World War 2, it didn't get adopted until it passed a stress test. No one was using the Code Talkers until someone was in a dire mess and the only way to help them was to BROADCAST instructions the ENEMY could hear.
So they used the Code Talkers to get them instructions without the enemy knowing what they were being told and it WORKED. After that, EVERYONE used the Code Talkers who had been just ignored as dead weight prior to that.
So he comes up with a PLAN to infect himself with something that he THINKS will "innoculate" him -- or, more accurately, cloak him so the zombies don't notice him -- and someone is like "Dude, that's CRAZEH. The ONLY way to prove it is for you to infect yourself with this DEADLY thing, HOPE it works and then INTENTIONALLY do the IDIOTIC thing of go in that room over there where we are holding a zombie."
That's not how it goes.
Instead, he ends up TRAPPED with no way out EXCEPT to infect himself with something deadly. If he doesn't, he has no hope of escape anyway.
It works and then he ALSO needs to get past a huge ZOMBIE HORDE between him and safety occupying a narrow hall, so he uses what he knows about them reacting to noise and sets up a diversion, then walks past them while they ALL run screaming towards the diversion and ignore him like he's invisible.
And NONE of them react to him. So now we KNOW this WORKS and not with just that ONE zombie for some damn reason.
I get told all the time I'm some nutter IMAGINING that I'm getting well and it's PLACEBO effect and all this stupid shit. No, dumbass, I'm BRAD PITT.
Not a gorgeous sex symbol like the Shania Twain song suggests, no. I'm Brad Pitt in the movie World War Z who KNOWS shit works because I field tested it when my only other option was death and I'm not dead.
So fuck you and leave me alone. THANKS.
