Saturday, December 17, 2011

The Last of Us Debut Trailer (Survive an Apocalypse) - PS3

"This is our routine. Day and night," says the girl character, Ellie, in a voice-over. "All we do is survive. It never lets up."

Survive an apocalypse on Earth in The Last of Us, a PlayStation 3-exclusive title by Naughty Dog. Here, you will find abandoned cities reclaimed by nature. Here is a population decimated by a modern plague. Here, there are only survivors killing each other for food, weapons, or whatever they can get their hands on. Here, you find no hope.

Joel, a brutal survivor, and Ellie, a brave young teenage girl who is wise beyond her years, must work together if they hope to survive their journey across the US.

A few weeks ago they released the following teaser trailer to whet our appetites:



They just recently release the debut trailer (which looks amazing by the way), not surprising at all since Naughty Dog brought us the Uncharted franchise.



Check out the official site:
http://www.lastofus.com/agegate.html

The Last of Us should be available for PS3 in late 2012 or early 2013

I AM ALIVE (Prepper-type post-apocalypse video game)

Came across a trailer for a game that goes over some rules of survival in a post-apocalyptic world.
 
I thought my prepper/survivalist readers might enjoy it.

The game is called I am alive by Ubisoft.

Here's the game synopsis from the official site:

One year after a worldwide cataclysmic event that wiped out most of the human race, a man struggles for survival in a desolate city as he tries to reunite with his long lost family. In this post-apocalyptic tale, there are no supernatural threats, just an everyman who faces a decaying and hazardous world and humanity’s darkest inclinations. Will you hang on to your humanity and help strangers or are you ready to sacrifice others in order to survive?


I am alive trailer "Rules"




I am alive trailer "general preview"



Official site:
http://iamalive-game.ubi.com/iamalive/en-US/

Release date is sometime in Q1 2012 - available for Playstation Network and XBox Live Marketplace

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Off the Grid: Million Dollar Manhunt (History Channel)


Hey there Apocalypse Hub-bers - did any of you catch this new show? I missed the first 10 minutes of it but the rest was pretty good.


From what I got from it, they have two participants who had to complete specific tasks (I believe there were 4 total, each one had to be completed in order to move on to the next)  armed with only a cellphone and a credit card. The real challenge was to try to evade 4 experts from tracking them down. These experts are basically using the grid - surveillance cameras, cellphone gps, credit card tracking, and various other methods to catch the contestants. 


Should the participants succeed - they are to be rewarded a million dollars.

Sounds easy enough right?

Keep in mind the trackers have expertise in various fields.

The team:
Kevin - human tracking expert
Rob - a hacker
Matt - corporate security IT specialist
Dave - former Navy SEALs

Matt and Rob stayed at the homebase and did all the surveillance / tech stuff while Kevin and Dave were out in the field. 

As for the contestants for the premier episode, they got really careless in their approach for completing each task. For their first one, they were given a call number for a book in the library that held a clue - their first mistake was storing this number in the cellphone. Really? You're in a manhunt show!!! And yes, as soon as they got to the library they accessed that stored information on the phone which only confirmed their location.


This led them to a drycleaners in which they had to pay up to retrieve a piece of clothing that had their next clue. They managed to convince the clerks/owners to delay scanning the credit card for a little bit to buy them time. At their next stop they weren't so lucky. The associate scanned their card to pay for the photo prints even after he said he'd delay it for a little while.


You'd think the contestants would grab the prints and assemble it elsewhere (it was a puzzle clue that revealed a phone number). Nope. They stuck around until they figured out the puzzle. Meanwhile, the tech experts called the shop and actually convinces one of the contestants to reveal info about the puzzle clue.

So do the contestants succeed in evading their trackers and win the coveted price? No, they don't.

*****
We were discusssing what we would've done differently if that was us trying to keep a low-profile and this is what we came up with.

Main thing is to ditch the phone and get some cash. 

1) We would've turned off the cellphone the entire time, committing the call number to memory instead. I probably would leave the phone where it would be found by a total stranger, which would throw off the trackers for a little while.

2) If we were going to take the chance of using the credit card we would've only used it once and would have withdrawn cash.

3) We probably would have used the majority of that cash to pay someone else to retrieve the photos and the train ticket.

4) We probably would have planned to split up if they were hot on our tracks then meet up later on.



But that's just me.




Show synopsis:
America has 30 million cameras recording four billion hours of footage each week. Everyone is being watched. Now witness host and master tracker Kevin Reeve give two everyday Americans the chance to escape this surveillance and win one million dollars. Contestants race to complete simple tasks and evade Kevin and his highly-trained team of trackers hunting them down with cutting-edge technology for the largest prize in cable television history.




Cool premise for a show. Will definitely be watching it again.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Zombies, Run! (App) - Working Out to the Tune of Zombie Apocalypse

We all can probably get into better shape these days, right?

You ask: What's my motivation?!

To which I answer: A race to survive the zombie apocalypse.

Yeah, you heard me. There's an app in development right now thanks to a successful Kickstarter funding.

It's called Zombies, Run! and in a nutshell, it's an interactive zombie story for runners.During your run you collect items (medicine, batteries, ammo) and at the end of your run you get o allocate these supplies then resume the adventure on your next run.




Storytelling, physical fitness, and zombies. What else do you need?
To be released for iPhone and Android in 2012

Check out their site http://www.zombiesrungame.com/

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

The Darkest Hour (Movie Trailer) - Alien Invasion / Apocalyptic Thriller

Been seeing trailers for this film a lot. Looks mildly interesting - the general premise of it anyway. Invisible aliens take over to harvest all of Earth's energy resource. I'd watch it just for the special effects. Otherwise, it looks like your standard alien invasion flick.



Synopsis: Director Chris Gorak (Right at Your Door) teams with producer Timur Bekmambetov for this tense apocalyptic thriller centering on the fight for survival waged by five youths who find themselves stranded in Moscow during an alien invasion. As the invisible extraterrestrials absorb all of Earth's energy and life forms, finding a means of escaping the unstoppable attackers becomes a seemingly impossible task. Emile Hirsch, Olivia Thirlby, and Max Minghella star.

As the tagline in the following teaser trailer puts it: 

Phase 1: Seize the planet
Phase 2: Devour energy
Phase 3: Destroy all life





Check out the official site: http://www.darkesthourmovie.com
Out in theaters on December 25.

Monday, December 5, 2011

NASA's Kepler Mission Finds Planet in Habitable Zone: Kepler-22b

Artist's rendering of Kepler-22b
The planet-finding Kepler space mission has discovered a planet 2.4 times the diameter of Earth in the liquid water habitable zone (the region around a star where temperatures are neither too high or too low for liquid water to exist) of a star 600 light years away. This is the first confirmed planet in the habitable zone of a star to be found by Kepler, but many more may be on the way. 

The planet's confirmation was announced Monday by NASA along with other discoveries by its Kepler telescope, which was launched on a planet-hunting mission in 2009.

"This is a phenomenal discovery in the course of human history," Geoff Marcy of University of California, Berkeley, one of the pioneers of planet-hunting outside our solar system, said in an email. "This discovery shows that we Homo sapiens are straining our reach into the universe to find planets that remind us of home. We are almost there."

“Kepler 22b is exciting for two reasons; one, because it is right smack in the middle of the habitable zone,” says Natalie Batalha, Kepler’s deputy science team leader from NASA’s Ames Research Center “The second really exciting reason is that it is orbiting a star very similar to our own Sun, it’s a solar twin.”

Although the planet lies 15 percent closer to its star than Earth does to the Sun, Kepler 22b’s star is a little dimmer and cooler than the Sun, so the planet can get away with being a bit closer. However, exactly what this planet is like is a bit of a mystery: being in the habitable zone isn’t enough to state that a planet is habitable – it requires an atmosphere for starters. Worlds of this size are however a bit of a mystery at the moment.

"If this planet has a surface, it would have a very nice temperature of some 70° Fahrenheit [21°C]," says William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center here, who is the principal investigator of NASA's Kepler space telescope. "[It's] another milestone on the journey of discovering Earth's twin," adds Ames director Simon "Pete" Worden.

Unfortunately, the true nature of the planet, named Kepler-22b, remains unknown. It is 2.4 times the size of Earth, but its mass, and hence its composition, has not yet been determined. "There's a good chance it could be rocky," Borucki says, although he adds that the planet would probably contain huge amounts of compressed ice, too. It might even have a global ocean. "We have no planets like this in our own solar system."

The planet is 600 light years away. Each light year is 5.9 trillion miles. It would take a space shuttle about 22 million years to get there.


Watch the press conference announcing the discovery of Kepler 22b (vid is over an hour long)

A shorter news coverage of the findings:

Newbie Prepper Progress Report

Switching it up a bit and trying out something new here in which I go over what I've done so far as a newbie prepper. 


I'm starting a new Twitter hashtag for it for those who want to follow and join in.

#newprepper

Even with the last two weeks being more hectic than usual I've managed to get some things sorted out.

Being new to prepping, I had to set some short term goals (6 months). Here's pretty much how I broke it down.

1) Acquire new skills
   - read
   - learn
   - then put into practical application

2) Put together an emergency medical kit (we already have a rudimentary kit put together, which definitely needs to be improved upon)

3) Customize my EDC (everyday carry), BOB (bug out bag), BOV (Bug Out Vehicle), and our bug-in supplies.


I currently have a very basic EDC. Also a bugging-in emergency kit/supply is already in place. I just need to expand on it.

Food and water supply is not too bad, we tend to be always well-stocked, I just need to see if it's well-balanced supply.

Some things I have to keep in mind as I go about this:
storage space, budget allocation, and time constraints - I'll try to address each one in a future post.

What I've done so far in the last couple of weeks:


  • Created a reading list related to this site and uploaded it to my Kindle app. I'll post reviews of it here as I finish them.
  • Started decluttering one of the hallway closets. I've moved one of the supply bins down to where it's easily accessible. 
  • Started putting together a binder for important documents which I'll end up digitizing for multiple backups
  • Purchased a wet/dry shop vac to clean up both vehicles as well as a larger storage area in the basement.


So that's where I am right now. I think it's a good idea to track your progress for any endeavor since it helps put everything into perspective. See what works and see what doesn't as you learn from it all.



-----
As for this site, it's continuously evolving. I hope to do a major overhaul in the near future (target date is approx. 2-3 mos.)

  • For now, a few small additions: A food storage calculator
  • A Favicon (it's that little square that shows up next to the url when you bookmark a site or on the actual web browser tab - you can also see it if you add my blog to your google reader).
  • Added a link exchange page: If you have a site that you think is relevant for apocalypse hub send me an email with a link to your site so I can check it out.