SPLICED Magazine Issue 06 August/September 2014 | Page 3

SPLICED MAGAZINE / ED'S NOTE / ZOMBIFICATION ISSUE 06 Zombification “I think the fascination with zombies is that they don't obey the rules of monsters. The first rule of monsters is that you have to go find them.” – Max Brooks Y LETTERS We'd love to hear from you, so if you have any comments, ideas or criticisms drop us a mail at ed@splicedmagazine. com and we'll feature them in forthcoming issues of Spliced. Who knows, the best letter might even win a prize. Nudge, nudge. Wink wink, say no more, say no more. ou might have noticed the proliferation of zombies in this issue. Not that it’s obvious or anything. We decided to produce an all zombie issue pretty much just for the hell of it, and any of our writers that didn’t know much about zombies had to go out and do their research. To be fair that was only one of them I think, and he still managed to do a pretty bang up job! Yup, zombies. The walking dead. Traditionally we know them as slow, shuffling creatures that groan and move toward their victims inexorably, ultimately overwhelming them by sheer numbers, not because they’re particularly smart or fast. How could they be of course, with all that damaged and rotting tissue. A lot of that has changed in pop culture in recent years however, with games like Left 4 Dead giving rise to fast, much scarier zombies than we’ve come to expect from B-Grade horror films. Zombies are no longer just confined to these overly cheesy (but awesome) films however, they’ve evolved into an entity with a life of their own. Awesome pop culture zombies, zombie related opinion pieces, zombie related music reviews – pretty much everything we could tie in to this phenomenon, we did. Even down to our pin-up cover feature. Although we have a huge amount of varied content, honestly some things were cut simply because they were either too gross or too difficult (or both) for us to produce. Like our food feature for example. We considered a variety of brain recipes (apparently my grandmother used to make crumbed lamb brains for my grandfather – barf!), but all of us were simply too grossed out to make this a reality. As an alternative we considered something that instead looked like brains, but was in fact just brain shaped risotto, but honestly that was a disaster. So instead we scrapped the food feature altogether. In case you’re wondering. Never fear however, you’ll still find a multitude of zombie related content, and if zombies aren’t your cup of tea, we still have a couple of standard features for your perusal, as well as a pretty awesome Destiny competition which trust me, you want to enter! You’ll notice that the structure of our magazine is also a little different this month, as a result of some serious research we’ve been doing over the past few issues. We’re attempting to make your experience not only more enjoyable and relevant, but also more manageable for the team as a whole, so if it takes us an issue or so to work out the kinks, please bear with us, we’re doing our best to find a formula that works well for us and for you! In conclusion, in the words of Shaun of the Dead, “You’ve got red on you.”  - Pippa Tshabalala { Editor } 3