One of the things that Better Dead Than Zed does much better than the original All Things Zombie is to give me an emotional connection to the Star and his group of companions; partly because it starts on Day One of the outbreak, not two years afterwards, and partly because you are encouraged to play Day One as if it were actually happening to you.

As background for the 28 Months Later campaign, I wanted to understand better what would still be available to survivors over time once civilisation had collapsed. (Wargaming is very educational, and takes you off in all sorts of strange research directions.)

I originally planned to work this out myself, but then thought: It’s so obvious a topic that someone else must already have done it. And indeed they have; you can find timelines in increasing levels of detail here, here, and here. Since civilisation in ATZ collapses over roughly a one month period, you may want to adjust the timelines for the first year or so to reflect that.

One of the things that struck me as implausible when reading Earth Abides was that decades after the collapse of civilisation, the protagonists were still eating food out of cans they scavenged from old warehouses. “That can’t be right,” I thought. Yesterday and today, though, I did some research – this was driven by my starting to play All Things Zombie again, finally catching a repeat of Life After People on TV, and wondering how long our preserved food would last before completely non-survivalist types such as myself would have to learn farming.

It turns out that Earth Abides is correct, much to my surprise. The US Army is cited on a number of websites as studying this sort of thing, and determining that canned food is still good after 46 years in some cases – the record seems to be tinned veal from 1824, still edible when opened in 1938. The limiting factor seems to be that it starts to taste funny, and the testers begin to comment that they wouldn’t eat it even in an emergency, despite the fact that medical analysis shows it still to be nutritious (although vitamins A and C are lost after a few years).

Dried goods last nearly as long; things like rice, pasta, and flour are good for 25-30 years if stored properly, and salt, sugar and honey seem to last literally forever. (Or in my cupboards, until the ants find a way in.)

With the exception of some anti-malaria drugs, which fail stability tests after a few years, drugs seem to last a long time too.

Admittedly, these sites are secondary sources; the original reports are supposedly buried somewhere in the US DoD and DFA websites – I can’t find them, but since this is idle curiousity rather than life or death, I’ve given up after a few hours’ cursory search.

So now, apart from the obvious manufacturing need to have a steady throughput of products rather than one bulk order every decade, I wonder why we have such short shelf lives on most products?

FX, one of our satellite TV channels, is rerunning Babylon 5 in its entirety at one episode per weekday; and Nick has become quite taken with it, watching it religiously. Most of us are joining in with him; I’d quite forgotten how good it was.

I expect that watching one episode per day will give us better insight into the 5 year story arc, which will now be compressed into about four months or so.

A novel by Toby Frost. I have just finished this – after about three months, which shows how much time I’m allocating to reading these days. It’s the mongrel offspring of space opera, Victorian adventure stories, and The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Captain Smith and his crew – a psychopathic alien headhunter and a fugitive android sex toy – are sent on a mission to pick up a hippy herbalist and return her to the Empire, during the course of which they must contend with the Ant Men of the evil Ghast Empire and their born-again religious dupes, amongst other things.

Here is a short extract, wherein Captain Smith briefs his friend Suruk on the mission:

“…We’re actually going to collect someone from a space station inhabited by pacifists.”

“Fierce warrior pacifists?”

“No.”

“Edible pacifists?”

“I would advise against it.”

“Will we then deliver this coward into the sun?”

“No.”

“Is anything good going to happen on this holiday?”

“Not by your standards, I’m afraid…”

I was gently amused throughout, and moved to outright laughter at points. This is the first in a series, and is followed by God-Emperor of Didcot and Wrath of the Lemming Men.

The whole family have been huge Stargate fans since the beginning. Sadly, the latest incarnation may break that track record.

Stargate Universe takes the tropes of Stargate and inverts them. Instead of an elite group of Earth’s finest working together to overcome obstacles in daring tales of adventure and romance, as in the earlier series, we now have a bunch of losers who are deeply suspicious of each other, struggling to survive in a gritty, downbeat milieu.

At the end of episode 5 or so, I have a distinct feeling of “OK, so much for the dark foreboding and character backgrounds. Can we have an actual story now? A bit less about Colonel Young’s imploding marriage perhaps?”

It was a bold move to take the setting in a new direction. I was intrigued by the idea of a random group of strangers cast adrift on a broken-down Ancient ship. Frankly, however, it is not working. In the same way that Doctor Who tried to generate a dark, gritty spinoff series with steamy sex scenes (Torchwood) – and managed to produce something largely uninteresting. At least to us.

It’s not the Stargate we knew, loved, and largely watched together. I hope that it will find its way back to something more like the original feel soon. Otherwise it is likely to doom the franchise in the way that Enterprise doomed the Star Trek one.

You know the idea: You’re suddenly transported back in time and use your superior 21st century knowledge to bring social and/or technological advances to society.  (We will conveniently gloss over avoiding slavery or death, and learning the local languages.)

Just for fun, The Universe As website has a technology quiz to work out how much good you could do if this happened. I got 10 right, which they say makes me a “technologically useful human” who might be able to rebuild 20th century levels of technology; what about you?

I gave up webcomics again last week. Well, except for Girl Genius and Schlock Mercenary, obviously. The plan was to use the time for something more constructive, like, umm, painting toy soldiers. Or watching Primeval.

Then, by accident, I discovered Gunnerkrigg Court. I couldn’t stop reading it, at least not until I got to the latest strip. Imagine if Neil Gaiman were writing the Harry Potter stories, and you’re about there. Highly recommended.

When non-gamers look at the gaming table, they just see scruffy bearded types rolling dice. In our heads, it looks more like this…

One of Andrew Boulton’s Traveller mini-movies. There are more on YouTube.

This is a novel by David Weber and Linda Evans, which I’m unsure whether to flag as SF or fantasy, despite the little rocket ship on the spine by which my local library announces its classification.

It’s a long book, and very clearly the first in a series, for which it sets up the main characters and ongoing conflicts, while hinting at other subplots yet to come (what are those whales cross about?)

We have two dimension-hopping civilisations, which use “portals” to cross from one parallel universe to another. Neither has space travel, so all universes are limited to slightly different versions of the same planet. Neither is related to contemporary Earth; I found this confusing for the first few chapters, as I had to assimilate two sets of unfamiliar names, ranks, organisations, nations, and so forth, rather than the usual one.

One of these civilisations is based on magic, and as a consequence has no mechanical technology more advanced than a crossbow; but it is able to use spells to do what we would call genetic engineering, as well as levitation, fireballs and the usual trimmings. Their use of dragons for air superiority and as airborne ferries gives them an edge in transport and reconaissance.

The other civilisation has no magic, but does have psionics, and a roughly Victorian technology. They have telepaths, artillery and lever-action rifles, which gives them an edge in communication and allows them to project power (or at least artillery shells) through a portal without sending people; this the magicians cannot do.

The novel did a good job in making me care about the main characters, and in depicting the inexorable slide to war between these two civilisations after two exploration parties bump into each other, and open fire.  I’ll keep an eye open for the second and subsequent volumes, but do not feel compelled to rush out and buy them.

I’ve been quiet for a few days, because my bride is back from Sicily! Yay!

And since then, our evenings have been spent in front of that worthy addition to our busy modern lifestyle, the Sky+ box. Even after I culled a load of stuff, and a determined assault on the remainder over the bank holiday weekend, we still have about 40 hours left to watch. So what has filled our box? I’m glad you asked.

• Chuck: A fish-out-of-water sitcom, featuring a guy who works in a discount warehouse who has bizarrely learned the bulk of the secrets held by the CIA and NSA, which they have then lost. An average guy trying to keep up with the superspies. This is territory that has been covered before in things like Jake 2.0 and (to an extent) Reaper, but it works well. Like Father Ted, in that I sit down each week thinking it will be awful, but find myself enjoying it.
• Dollhouse: Which I have enthused about before. A grown-up version of Joe 90, but none the worse for that.
• Life: Which I like for its bizarre plots and strange protagonist (a millionaire Zen Buddhist detective).
• The Mentalist: Another detective show with a strange protagonist, a fake psychic turning his powers to fight crime. Entertaining, but takes liberties with things like NLP for the sake of the plot.
• My Own Worst Enemy: An interesting premise, but it struggles to hold my interest after half a dozen episodes – it would have been better as a movie. The premise is that there is a group of secret agents who have deliberately induced split personalities; their cover is unbreakable because it is a separate personality completely, which knows nothing about the agent – except for the protagonist, who due to a technical fault switches randomly between the two. There’s only so much you can do with that.
• NCIS: One of the better detective shows. Perhaps because it is limited in scope (NCIS investigates crimes involving US Navy and Marine personnel only), it develops bizarre crimes for the team to unravel, and has a range of fully developed and unusual (not to say weird) characters. Probably the best of the bunch for us.
• True Blood: Was there for awhile, but we lost interest halfway through the pilot and erased the lot. Twilight meets Californication. Not our cup of tea.
• Ugly Betty: Which my better half watches while I’m playing with my toy soldiers, of which more anon, no doubt.