Once the 19th-century famines set in, desperate families melted down precious metal, while skilled metalworkers died or emigrated.
DayZ is a thrilling evocation of zombie fiction, but what it can't capture in the same way as linear media like The Walking Dead or Day of the Dead, is the interplay between survival groups – those tense moments when one set of desperate people meets another.
Set in desperate times in which life, being precarious and easily lost, must be passionately and intensely lived while it lasts, for tomorrow we may die, it would be a pity for two photogenic leads – Claire and Jamie in Outlander, say – not to test their oft-conflicted loyalties through trial by rumpy-pumpy… Such activity should be deployed at regular intervals lest the audience switch over.
The dearth of returning migrants set off a desperate scramble this week to recruit the workers who did step off long-haul buses and trains returning from the interior.
These go-for-broke performances add a certain gritty authenticity to a play set in a desperate, destitute age in which people will do anything to put food on their tables.
In the film, set against the desperate fictionalising of the government, the hard-headed information management of Campbell, the pomp of Blair, the hubris of the BBC, this silence looks something like conscience.
That addiction is likely to change the very level of the seas the East India Company's ships sailed in their hunt for cloth and spices, and the floods and droughts ahead may set in motion desperate migrations dwarfing those of colonial times.
Two, it's set in the desperate, decaying city of Buffalo, New York, which is full of frustrated artists, frustrated young people, and thousands of psychiatric patients who were given one-way bus tickets when they were released from New York City mental hospitals in the early eighties (Buffalo was the last stop).
The sound and white smoke on Saturday turned out to be the first in a series of explosions that set off a desperate struggle to bring four reactors under control after their cooling systems were knocked out by the earthquake and tsunami.
