What is a ZOM-BOT ?

Well, first and foremost, 'zom-bot' was a way two combine my two favorite fictional creatures, the zombie and robot.
As you think more about it, they are both frightening and intriguing because they are not alive, but 'act' it. They are both 'golems' of a sort.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem

One is made by man -the robot- and represents the next stage or age in mankind. Better, stronger, smarter...and even though we can program them to never harm us, our own programming and their massive intelligence usually tend to spell certain doom for us. Once they can reproduce themselves and see that we are a threat or a parasite on the world, they will remove and replace us. Robots are our pride and dreams run amok. Man's best intentions becoming his destruction. Fear of technology, but also fear of becoming obsolete. They also represent the old century's dreams for the future. It almost seems silly now how they used to think we would all be living on the moon with a robot butler in every home, but there is something so charming and hopeful about the way robots were portrayed nearly 50 to 70 years ago. An alternate future most of us would desperately love to live in.

The other -the zombie- is US...but not us.
Controlled by something we do not understand. Puppets. Perhaps acting out primitive urges from the corners of the inner brain. Eat. Attack. Spread the infection. Yet there is also an aspect of the hive mind, a herd mentality, and that's what frightens us most. It's certainly one of the things Romero was thinking when he wrote Dawn of the Dead. The last thing we want to do is settle into the mediocrity of acting and thinking like everyone else. Afraid that if they touch us, if we get too close, we will become them...and they are shuffling, blank faced in the malls of America right now. They are both Vampires and the Body Snatchers. The fact that they are corpses isn't even as scary as they fact that if we are infected we will lose control of our thoughts and individuality. It's not just about a fear of death, but our fear of what comes after. Or a reminder that some lives are more pointless and worse than death.
That's why those bitten or cornered in zombie movies would rather suicide with that last bullet then become ONE OF THEM...just like how you jokingly plead to your friends 'if i EVER act/dress/grow old/conform like that, please shoot me!'

So ZOM-BOT became my 'label' as well as my handle.
When trying to come up with a web address that was 33% relative to my work, 33% nonsensical (google, anyone?) and 33% phonetically catchy, zombotdotcom seemed to fit. It had a nice 'A-B-B-A' rhyme scheme that helps it stick in your head
a ZOM
b BOT
b DOT
a COM
zom rhymes with com, and bot rhymes with dot. simple enough.

Initially, I wanted to own ZOMBOT.COM (no dash in zombot) but it was owned and being sat on, unused. So I sucked it up and added the dash, which i like so much better now anyway. It's much more retro.

When it came time to have some products to sell, I struggled for a bit to try to picture- what would a zom-bot really even look like? A zombie with cybernetic attachments or limbs? Nah. what's the opposite of that? a robot with an undead brain!
and so the Zom-Bot was born.

I'm still working on more retro 'zombiganda' and advertisement posters in this series, 3 of which can be found HERE in various degrees of faux aging- from clean to folded to folded and dirtied.

oh, and i guess years ago, Hot Wheels beat me to the name..lol

http://hotwheels.wikia.com/wiki/Zombot