Update: Zombie Apocalypse
FYI, my constitut6ional convention simulation class (post-zombie apocalypse), now has 11 students registered, with several days left in the registration period. This means I not only have enough for the course to run, but I have enough to have real debate, sub-committees, partisan sides, etc. (I was dreading getting just 5 or so to sign up).
This means all your contributions will not go for naught. Thanks, all. I will give updates. My next step is to draft one-page overviews of each state, so the delegates have a sense of who they’re representing, and I’ll probably post those for approving plaudits and blistering critiques.
Awesome! I’m looking forward to the updates.Report
I believe the zombieism outbreak began in Austin, TX, at a Gourds concert.Report
Ah, I can see that happening. I expect the apocalypse every year during SXSW anyway.Report
And people went out of their gourds at a Zombies concerts.Report
@mike-schilling
How do you know? Why should I care?Report
@mike-schilling
Nice. But what would you have done with my first thought, Ray Wylie Hubbard?Report
No ideas. (The cupboard is bare.)Report
Some higher power must have led me to where I’d be a good straight man.Report
If you need ‘constituent’ lobbying during the convention, I’d be happy to lob a few demands their way.Report
Huh, that’s an interesting wrinkle. I might have to bleg for constituent demands, and hold them in my pocket until a good opportunity to throw them at delegates, whether a lull in the action or a moment when I just want to throw them a curveball.Report
I recommend ping pong balls. Numbered (there can be repeats). And literally thrown. You get hit with it, it’s your constituent’s demand.
/half kidding.Report
Free melons!Report
It just seems to me that when you get a seat at the Constitutional Convention, you become a target for lobbying, special interests, quacks, and crazies, not to mention actual concerns and ideas about how things should be from all over a plethora of ideological paradigms. Lots of opinions to sift, weigh, and balance, and not much room left over for your own thoughts and notions without some serious effort at compartmentalizing.Report
zic,
That’s undoubtedly true today. It brings up an interesting question whether it’s actually better to do it the American Founders’ way and meet in secrecy. Both openness and secretiveness have benefits and drawbacks.
Keeping with my interest in making this a realistic exercise, going the Founders’ way would be inappropriate, because the most common way now, I believe, is with more openness. I hadn’t thought of that element before your comments, so thank you. Now I just have to figure out how much complexity I can handle as the general manager of the simulation.Report
Abortions for some and miniature American flags for others!Report
Are the convention attendees zombies or non zombies or a mix?Report
The zombies are all gone. That’s why social structures have revived enough to think about a union of the new states.
That is to say, the zombies are just an excuse for positing social collapse and reformation of new states along different boundaries, and play no role in the game (unless the students insist on having some zombie provisions in the Constitution, which I’ll reluctantly allow, since I’ve sworn not to direct them except to head off obvious silliness).Report
Zombies are also still a decent marketing ploy.
You might have to go with a pandemic or a post-alien invasion next time, though. Zombies might be played out. They’re close.Report
What do we want?
Zombie rights!
When do we want them?
Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains!Report
I suppose I should put this here, then:
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@patrick–From the response of students I’ve pitched this to, zombies are still golden. But I, too, expect a day when students will roll their eyes. Hopefully by then the class has good word of mouth, because I’m not doing werewolves and vampires (and hopefully Twilight is out of print and forgotten soon anyway). As a child of the cold war, I automatically think nuclear apocalypse, but that doesn’t resonate with college students today the way it did for me in the ’80s. And I’m skeptical about fanning fears of terrorism, when I think the issue’s badly overblow already. So what’s that going to leave me? Asteroid strike?
@chris–I’m soooo glad you left that there.Report
@James Hanley
Zombies are fine, but if you are simply looking for a there and then gone cause of partial collapse, it seems like a pandemic would be just as good and less implausible (i.e. easier to extrapolate an internally consistent answer when a student asks an unanticipated question). Besides, that way it’s probably easier to tune the pandemic’s agent and vector(s) to “plausibly” produce the starting conditions you want.
I don’t remember on the prior post whether you went through your thought process about how you came to decide on zombies.
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Life on a post EMP-storm planet.Report
Whitley Streiber’s Warday is a great portrait of that. No zombies, though.Report
I was thinking Stirling’s “Dies the Fire” as well, but figure a post-EMP world has physics we won’t have to argue over.Report
@scott-the-mediocre–My thought process was that I was teaching a brand new experimental course, and if I didn’t get enough students to make it work well it was going to be a long hard semester. So anything that would hook them in. I might have promised donuts and bourbon every day, too.
@jaybird–post-EMP would work well for explanation; ideally perhaps. But it wouldn’t draw the students in as much.
I’m really counting on word of mouth in the future. And curiously, today I bumped into a student I hadn’t seen in over a year, and she told me she was recruiting students to take my Nuclear Weapons and Power course, because it was “probably her favorite course ever.” That’s what I’m hoping for next time. (Plus it’s a nice ego boost.)Report
@james-hanley
Donuts and bourbon, eh? Are you sure you want to make your simulation of 1787 that realistic? If so, as a starting point, here is the well-known bar bill for one of the two celebratory dinners in Philadelphia, which somewhat to my surprise contains no whiskey or brandy, though it does include a lot of other potables.
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That’s what the course fee is for.
(How else do you think I can afford to drink fine bourbon?)Report
What’s the schedule for this? I have to know how high on the list thinking about a contest goes…Report
Begins last week of August, ends in mid December.Report