[Spring 1997] LabZombies.Part(1);

Commentary

The Helpdesk saga continues with a Lab Zombie sub-thread!

At the beginning, Bastich is looking forward checking the Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5, an insanely-thorough fan-run website that predates the zillions that now exist on Fandom.com and other services. There were detailed episode synopses (i.e. spoilers), analysis, speculation, and TONS of behind-the-scenes dirt from JMS, pulled from his posts across CompuServe, Usenet, and other pre-social media forums. I started watching B5 with Season 2, so the Lurker's Guide was how I got caught up on all of the threads (since in these days, there was no way to watch prior seasons unless you knew somebody who recorded them on VHS).

I didn't coin the term "Lab Zombies" but I can attest to their existence, especially after I started patrolling the computing building as part of my duties. People were glued to their workstations and often had to be dragged out kicking and screaming at closing time. Sometimes they were desperately cramming to finish a programming assignment and sometimes they were just hanging out or basking in the faster internet compared to the dial-up they had at home. It wasn't fun throwing people out, but it had to be done before I could clock myself out.

The zombies at the end are partaking in the following nerd activities:

• MUD (Multi-User Dungeon)
• IRC (Internet Relay Chat)
• Perl (Programming Language)

NOTE: I want to be up-front that the titles of these four strips (LabZombies.Part(x);) are complete gibberish. It looks kind of like Java, but violates Java best practices in a few ways:

• Capitalizing LabZombies implies this is a static class method which is fair enough, but LabZombies seems like an overly-specific class. It probably should be an instance of a more general ComicStrip.
• Method names should be lower Camel Case (start with a lowercase letter).
• Method names should be verbs that clearly explain what the method is doing (so Part implies that something is going away, but it's ambiguous).

This would have been better, albeit still problematic.

labZombies.getPart(1);