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.

Nostalgia in the oddest places…

Posted on January 16, 2019 by Clint

I remember when I was a kid growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, the show Happy Days was a big deal. Happy Days was a sitcom set in the 1950s, and that appealed to people that had been teenagers back then but were now grown adults with their own families, and perhaps more importantly were old enough to have a yearning for the bygone times of their youth.

Nostalgia. It’s a powerful force. A money-making force if you can tap into it. Let about 20-30 years pass, enough time for there to be an entire generation with no personal experience of what their forebears experienced, and you can strike gold by digging back into that recent past. You don’t even have to be subtle about it, as evidenced by That ’70s Show. More recently, Stranger Things unabashedly hit me right in the proverbial feels (as the kids say) because yes, now I’m old enough to have the nostalgias. I would have been pretty much exactly that age at exactly that time, and you better believe I had a bike and blew through quarters at arcades and had my red boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons.

Although weirdest thing? The guys who wrote Stranger Things — The Duffer Brothers — weren’t born until 1984. So they are of that newer generation of whippersnapper Millenials that only know of the early 1980s by proxy.

But I digress. Last week I had Dawn draw something she had no personal experience with, a Mold-A-Rama souvenir machine. I renamed it to Mold-O-Matic because I think that rolls off the tongue better and hey, maybe we’re protected in the <0.000001 chance the makers of the Mold-A-Rama were to get testy about trademarks. Hey, don’t laugh, when I looked them up I found out that a) they’re still around, and b) they seem to be at every frickin’ zoo in America. Also Choose Your Own Adventure recently sued Netflix. Sometimes nostalgia bites back.

But anyhow I won’t lie, it kind of floored me to see a Mold-A-Rama machine when looking up recent images of the San Antonio zoo, lookin much the same as I remembered from little Clint at the L.A. Zoo putting in the coins for his very own overpriced, freshly produced plastic animal, warm and waxy from the bin.

So Dawn’s problem wasn’t that the machines were gone, the way a five year old these days looks confused at a CD — Dawn’s problem was her family never took her to the zoo.

I wonder if that’s why she was much more impressed by the concept of 3D printers than I ever was. I think I might be stuck in thinking of a 3D printer as being nothing more than a programmable Mold-A-Rama.

It tickles me though that while Dawn may not share my memory, more than a few of you readers did. And while I don’t have a kid, I’m pretty sure that if I did and I took them to the zoo I’d want to give them the money for a Mold-A-Rama souvenir and watch them watch the mold press together at their command. Would they be as fascinated as I was? I feel like the fact the machines are still around means some things are just weirdly timeless like that. Probably the best kind of nostalgia of all is the kind you can pass on.