Talk:Kouichi Sakakibara/@comment-397235-20140820020502/@comment-397235-20140821011129

What's the first thing the group does upon coming to the Mall and realizing there are no zombies on the upper floors? Turn on the escalators. All three men are incompetent, and the woman is insensitive (when asked what skill she'd like to learn, she asks to learn to fly, so they'll be okay if anything happens to their pilot, who happens to be her boyfriend; the subtext of this is "Well, I'm sort of expecting you to die, so I might as well pick up the slack").

We had our own ice storm a few years ago (I believe it was 2007 because Bush was still President). No power and no electricity for two weeks (it probably would've been shorter had my neighborhood played the race/poverty card like folks in others did). It was bad enough they had to put generators at the stoplights (because Midwestern Americans drive everywhere, no exceptions), lest the city grind to an even more screeching halt (my town, while not mountainous per se, is built on hills, which become deadly in the winter). Several wonderful people started stealing the generators, which would've obviously caused accidents but for people very quickly reporting them. The local PD had a novel approach. In addition to booking them for stealing city property, they also published their names on the internet. Served the bastards right.

But despite the entire southern half of the state being declared a natural disaster area, the National Guard being called in, and work crews from as far away as Alabama (where I'm pretty sure they've never heard of snow), there was no widespread civil unrest, no looting, no serious spike in crime at all. (This must really confuse sociologists given the large number of guns in my region; all their data predicts full scale war whenever something like this happens, despite it never doing so). Part of this I think is because people who are really and truly in dire straights don't have time to steal TVs, and partly because, at least where I come from, we'd rather stand together than die alone.

So bring on your calamities, world. Bring on your zombies, send us your kaiju. Your terrorists, your plagues. At least around here, we'll weather them like we weather everything else. Do your worst.

And if you believe any of what I just said in that last paragraph, you've got a faulty sarcasm detector. :)