Need something properly academic

The most irritating thing in doing essays is having to find something proper Cultural Studies degree academic to cite to show things you already know are still true outside your own head.

I need something about zombies. At the moment I have the first few minutes of Sean of the Dead, the GURPS Undead RPG sourcebook, and a vague memory of reading a thing on the internet about a time zombies in Haiti turned out to be mentally ill people.

Any suggestions?

I googled for the Haiti thing and found a bunch of paywalls.
Littlewood, R., & Douyon, C. (1997). Clinical findings in three cases of zombification. Lancet, 350(9084), 1094-1096.

and a popular science article about the Lancet thing
http://mindhacks.com/2012/01/11/a-medical-study-of-the-haitian-zombie/
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Following links from mindhack found a pdf that actually opened
http://www.who.int/mental_health/emergencies/culture_mental_health_haiti_eng.pdf
World Health Organization/PAHO. (2010). Culture and Mental Health in Haiti: A Literature Review. Geneva: WHO.
page 13
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Teacher barely glanced at my Zombies Life Writing story and said I should make it clearer that it's about childhood fears. It's not. As a child I didn't get around to worrying I'd be mistaken for a zombie due to mental illness, or reduced to the functional level of one due to meds. ( Read more... )

Teacher is worried my zombies aren't going to fit the criteria of Life Writing.
Her life obviously has different vocabulary than mine. And fewer zombies.

working

today I am doing the reading
for pretty much the entire semester
at once

I ... really miss the opportunity to have done this in its right place, alongside example texts, with weeks and weeks to think about it. But I was busy being ill so that didn't happen. *big sigh*

so today I'm reading and taking notes on ALL THE THINGS. And zombies. The zombies make the rest of it substantially better.
... this theory stuff is all going 'hey, people have lives! and they write about them! surprise!'
and they're all pointing out how memory is mostly made up, and people make a narrative out of a stream of random stuff, and they use language, and woah, does that mean it's all secretly made up?
if tis made up, then so is being human. we mostly bump along being done to, life kind of happens, and then being thinking beings we make up a story about it (and mostly post it to the internet)
and that's how we figure out what it is to be human
and that's the neat part.

but this theory stuff we've been given, it keeps getting stuck on the divide between truth and fiction, and how can anything be true? and myself, I reckon it's all fiction, and I don't care, because that's how we put the meaning in it. lives are full of made up stuff, like justice and mercy and love, and rather the better for it. but these theory papers, they never get that far, they're all sitting there making stoned Keanu noises about how you never really know anything. woah.

... I'm so bored. bored bored bored.
... yet I have already got more work done today than I have all semester.

Meds suck. ... depression sucked pretty bad too, but meds seriously suck.



Now I'm wondering if I can quote Hogfather in my Life Writing assignment or if I'll just run out of words if I try it.
... oh dear, I need to double check how the word count thing works this year, they were making noises about changing it last year and I've been away.

... *gets back to work* ...

Random names for cities

I was poking the internet for a map maker to make a fantasy city in and found some random generators that make the map for you instead. Also one that tells you what's in all the buildings. And a table for making random English-ish city names.
http://inkwellideas.com/worldbuilding/random-or-not-city-name-charts/englishunited-kingdom-cities/

I don't think it's quite right though. It splits up -er to be an ending on its own, instead of being part of caster cester chester. That's like writing cas in one column and tle in another.
... wait, they actually did that too...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_forms_in_place_names_in_the_United_Kingdom_and_Ireland
has a bunch of parts of places names, tagged as prefix or suffix, and also by language group, so if your fantasy world has no romans you can leave the roman parts out.
So now I want to make another table out of those parts instead.

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... except that is a very long table and wouldn't random roll well even if you had enough dice. Plus you'd end up with weird combinations of parts from different geography. Drawing board time...

Also, since it's made of common parts, it's easy to make places that actually exist.
Though you'd get Lowtoft instead of Lowestoft. 
And sometimes you'd need to tweak repeated letters out of the way.

No random generator will give you Wymondham though.  Maybe Windam, which is what it sounds like.  ... not this one though, there's only Winham.