UPDATING OCCASIONALLY (FOR NOW)

9 thoughts on “558 – Cotton Clad Calamity”

  1. Raznaak

    Yup, he’s a bastard XD

  2. Dr. Norman (not a real doctor)

    Are those pajamas available in XXXL in the gift shop?

  3. Otaku

    It’s been a while, so let me ask: Did we get a reason for him to WANT Susie dead? Not to backseat, but if we didn’t, I’m worried were about to move into “Stupid Evil” territory. Now, stupid happens, don’t get me wrong. It’s not bad storytelling for that to be the case here.

    You’ve just done a good job NOT having that be a driving factor, so the “Kill off the stars of my successful reality TV show.” seems shortsighted, otherwise. Oh, I guess I could be mistaken about the in-story reality TV show’s success. Like, if the company behind them is losing money, or they think a change in management at the ranch would make the whole thing more popular/profitable, then I can see the above scenario happening as well.

    I REALLY think I’m just forgetting something important, but that I don’t have time to deep dive to remind me of, hence the comment. >_<

    1. Deoxy

      It certainly has been stretched out over quite a while, but there have definitely been hints from quite near the beginning that whoever is running the reality TV show definitely wants her dead.

      But I certainly don’t recall any reason why.

      1. Clint

        Yeah it’s fair to not remember since it’s been a hot minute (many, many minutes) but if you feel like a refresher the most relevant bits would be the beginning of Episode 8 and the end of Episode 15. We haven’t explicitly spelled out exactly what The Exec means by his “side hustle” or who was on the other end of that phone call, though.

        I’m hoping that when the whole thing is eventually available it will make sense, or at least enough sense to have hung this narrative on.

        1. Otaku

          Thanks for the replies, Deoxy and Clint. Yeah, I’d totally forgotten about those things. Good to know!

  4. Evervigilant

    Seems about time for the two people who aren’t there to make a surprise entrance as the ace Susie didn’t even know she had.

  5. Scarsdale

    There’s still 3-5 people on her side that might be planning something. This guy is a megalomaniac with a god complex, so letting him think he’s the sharpest tool in the shed sets him up for a fall. Everything depends on those cameras, and I suspect their little stop over by the charging coffins had something to do with her actual plan, not the one the a-hole thinks it is.

  6. lyra

    Really enjoyed the opening of Zombie Ranch. I like the combination of the western setting with the zombie concept, it gives the story a really distinctive atmosphere. I’m a freelance illustrator and animator, and I’d be interested in seeing how some of these scenes could translate into motion, especially as a short animated teaser or character scene.

    If you’re ever interested in something like that, you can reach me here:

    IG: eve_verse_
    Email: [contact.lilaclines@gmail.com](mailto:contact.lilaclines@gmail.com)
    Discord: Lyralilac_

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558 – Cotton Clad Calamity
Posted on August 26, 2026 by Dawn

What would you call this? Armchair assassination? Merk-from-home?

Well, Suzie ain't dead (or undead) quite yet, so we'll just have to see if his gloating is justifiable.

The other shoe of the apocalypse…

Posted on April 29, 2020 by Clint

“Waiting for the other shoe to drop” is an English-language expression, one of whose meanings is that, having experienced an unpleasant surprise, you hesitate in anticipation of a follow-up. The proverbial BOHICA, as it were. It originates from tenement living in American cities of the 19th and early 20th Centuries where someone would get woken up by their upstairs neighbor coming home and taking their shoes off. After the loud thwack of the first shoe dropping on the floor, it was useless to try to go back to sleep until shoe #2 had followed suit.

This generally happened in short order, of course, as people don’t generally keep one shoe on when they come home at night.

But imagine the shoe dropped, and then the other shoe didn’t. All evening.

All week.

All month.

You’d probably go a little crazy waiting, right? I mean you’d definitely go crazy trying to stay awake for a week, much less a month, but here’s the Covid-19 pandemic, the dropped shoe that has all of us in a state of uncertainty. And we’re coping in different ways. Some are still insisting no shoe ever dropped in the first place, or both shoes have already dropped and we should all just get on with our lives.

This past weekend a lot of folks went to the beaches here in America, or in some states even went back to reopened restaurants and salons, and I really doubt the other shoe has dropped yet. Maybe they’ll be fine, but seriously, this virus ain’t nothing to mess with even if people aren’t dropping in their tracks a la The Stand. We’re still scrambling to figure out exactly what it can do and what it can’t and even if it doesn’t kill you it could leave you internally scarred for the rest of your life.

Is it fake news? Do we really want to take that chance, this soon? Just for a haircut? It seems like the kind of thing people are going to be shaking their heads at in hindsight, but hindsight is not shaping up to be 2020.

Maybe we’ve gussied up our apocalypses too much in fiction, to the point where when a real nastiness comes along we can’t even recognize it. I’m reminded of the 2011 tsunami in Japan where the videos showed none of the stereotypical towering walls of water sweeping in on the land. It was just water that would not stop coming, and coming, and coming, and by the time you realized that the ankle deep wash you were slogging through to get to wherever you needed to go had gotten up to your knees and then your thighs and then it was already too late and you were lost in the current. And 10 minutes later the water had built up enough it was higher than the first story of buildings, and the power was so intense those buildings were being ripped from their foundations and carried along like so many unwilling sailboats. And after all that was finally done, everything got sucked back out again. That was the other shoe dropping, and if you tried to go back home before it did you most likely ended up another casualty.

Natural disasters are at once something much less flashy and yet much more deadly than we come up with for books and movies. When I write about an apocalypse I’m concerned with good storytelling. Nature doesn’t care. Nature just wrecks face.