Doomsday diseases

Of all the doomsday disease scenarios I've read about -- ebola mutating to be infectious in the incubatory stage, airborne AIDS -- the one I'd never seen was zombie mutation malaria.

I certainly hope that there are massive inaccuracies in this report. And that something entirely not that is actually happening. Malaria is bad, bad stuff. Malaria which is fatal in two days is nightmarish. Malaria which is fatal in two days and then brings the victims back as zombies is just. . . I lack adjectives to describe what it is, because I lack CONCEPTS to describe what it is. But "bad" is probably part of it.

At one point, I'd wanted to run a GURPS campaign based on news headlines. Just find the weirdest headlines I could find, and use those for plots. There would be some sort of great Illuminati-type black magic conspiracy behind them. jehanna, copperpoint, and vonbeck all made characters for it. We played like one session.

But every time I see news articles like this one, I kind of regret that I'm not running this game.

I even remember the news story that made me want to do this campaign. As a matter of fact, a couple years later, when I took an Intro to Journalism class at Northeastern, the instructor used that story as the example of the best lede (opening sentence) of any news story he'd read.

The AP article starts out, "BOSTON (AP) -- An insurance executive was charged with tearing out his wife's
heart and lungs and impaling them on a stake in a fight about overcooked ziti."

The instructor's point was that, if the story is dramatic enough, you don't actually need to work too hard to write the lede. It pretty much writes itself.

(That particular story only gets weirder the more you look into it. Apparently, Richard Rosenthal claimed that he killed his wife because she was really an alien vampire. And he was arrested because, after killing his wife, he followed another couple home and started talking to them about gun control, because their license plate was 357-BAN.)

Anyway. My point is, it must be tough being a writer. And the world is very scary. And ZOMBIE FRICKIN' MALARIA.