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 dating game

Posted on October 29, 2014 by Clint

So, I’m intending this to be my last blog entry inspired by Wasteland 2. We’ll see if I keep to that, but like Carter J. Burke told Ripley in Aliens: “That’s the plan.”

You may or may not have noticed that Zombie Ranch has never given any fixed timeline for what year the Great Plague began. It’s not too far in the future from our own world, but so far I prefer to leave it deliberately vague. After all, according to Back to the Future Part II, next year is supposed to be the year we have flying cars and hoverboards. Awkward.

I briefly mentioned in my last blog how Wasteland 2 presents a sort of “stopped clock” vision of a world-as-we-know-it that ended in the late 1980s. This sounds perfectly reasonable considering the idea of a worldwide nuclear apocalypse, but for one niggling detail: the background material makes it clear that the missiles started flying in 1998.

You will not see any real-world technology from 1998 in the game. In fact, at least one bit of flavor text references a certain famous real-world theater and declares that the very last movie that premiered there before the bombs fell was Ghostbusters 2. Assuming you’re too lazy to click that IMDB link, that film was released in 1989. To take that at face value means that no more movies were released, or at least released to that theater, for nine years before civilization officially ended. Again, awkward.

So why not just declare the apocalypse happened in 1989? Well, to keep continuity with the original Wasteland, the apocalypse has to happen in 1998. That’s what was stated, and since this is the same world, that’s what’s set in stone. The problem being, of course, that 1998 was a speculative future during the 1988 release of Wasteland, but is over a decade in the past for us now in 2014. We know that a lot of interesting things happened between 1989 and 1998, but somewhere along the line the call was made by the development team to just pretend the real-world breakthroughs and events of those nine years never happened, but preserve the fictional stuff like killer robots, power armor and man-portable energy weapons. Meanwhile despite the presence of super advanced artificial intelligence, flavor text on a recovered hard drive oohs and ahhs over its massive 20 Megabyte capacity.

Now you might say that this is small potatoes when you shine a light on Fallout, which preserves a pseudo-1950s aesthetic even though the apocalypse didn’t occur in that setting until the year 2077. Even the most cutting edge technology firms whose ruins you root through have tiny computer monitors with text-based monochrome screens, and if that seems jarring now, wait until the real year 2077 rolls around. I mean, assuming anyone can still play the game at that point.

I know what the point of the timelines is. Dates have a grounding effect on us, and it’s a rare post-apocalyptic game that doesn’t have you running across old journals and logs that would look odd if they didn’t have dated entries. The nuclear apocalypse also is such a powerful concept of sudden collapse that you kind of want that “The Day Of…” specified. Maybe even down to the precise moment, to homage the chilling images of frozen time from Hiroshima. The literal “stopped clock”.

But there are those drawbacks to fixing a point in time, where your audience may just have to end up ignoring that detail to prevent them from being taken out of the setting instead of drawn into it. Sort of like how you can do what you want with a fictional location, but once you start playing with a real-world location you’re going to run into possible discrepancies between what you need for your story and what people who actually live there know as fact. I’ve risked that already. I’ve blogged about it. So why am I still gun shy of announcing a Date of Doom, if I’m okay with stuff like Santone and Fort Huachuca? Well, for one thing I could argue that there are relatively fewer people who live in a certain locale than there are people who live through a specific year.

For another, I’d say that the zombie apocalypse and the nuclear one are different breeds. The nuclear apocalypse always seems to want that year, that day, that moment where everything changed in a flash. The zombie apocalypse is a more nebulous thing, a gradual avalanche. It doesn’t matter so much the exact time when things changed, just that they changed. Either it’s a “now” or “tomorrow” scenario where the people involved are trying to survive as it happens, or there’s the trope of someone waking from a coma or returning from some sort of isolation to find the dead are a-walkin’.

Or there’s this story, where it all went down about twenty or so years in the past. That’s important, but the specific year? Not so much. Not too far from now, but not too soon, either. It gives us some flexibility, both in terms of real-world details and speculative, fictional ones, and I’ll never have to worry about someone poking me and asking something like, “Hey, it’s 2023, where’s the AAVDROs?” I still have a timeline, it’s just in terms of “this happened at z-minus-two years, and this happened at z-plus-six years”, with z remaining a variable. It’s not something that would work for all stories, but I still think for this one the best way to win the dating game for now is not to play.