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.

From Hunger?

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Clint

220px-HungerGamesPosterThere’s a slang phrase you don’t really hear anymore, so much so I’m pretty sure most people have forgotten its meaning: “From hunger”. In fact the last time I can recall hearing it recently wasn’t technically recent, since it was a line of dialogue from the 1950 movie Sunset Boulevard. In that film, a potential movie script is rejected by its reader as being “from hunger”. Modern audiences have to guess at that from its context… or you could do a quick search and find this explanation from The Free Dictionary: “very mediocre; acceptable only when nothing else is available”. The suggested etymology is that of the idea of food you would only choose to eat if you had no real other choice, save starvation.

So I watched The Hunger Games. And before you draw too many conclusions from the first paragraph: I liked it. It’s not a new idea; but then, what really is? The writers of the Book of Ecclesiastes of The Bible were already considering the well of human imagination to have run dry almost 3000 years ago, and they certainly weren’t referring to the prior existence of Battle Royale. The author of Hunger Games is on record as saying she never heard of Battle Royale until she submitted her manuscript for publication, and you know what? I believe her. If you wanted to claim rip-off you could point both properties to The Running Man, but I’m sure The Running Man has its own parallel ancestry to deal with. This is why you can’t copyright ideas, only the specific way those ideas are executed. And that’s also how you have to judge a work… it helps of course if the premise isn’t one that’s been done to death in recent memory, but even an idea which seems like a true breath of fresh air to the audience of the day still has to succeed as a story.

We retell stories because our memories aren’t perfect, even in this day and age where even our humblest drunken ramblings are recorded for posterity. We also retell them because, while certain themes and types of stories remain universal, the way it’s delivered to us changes, and that can matter more than we perhaps like to admit. Beethoven and Trent Reznor both use the same 12 note scale to make music, but although Reznor does have a classically trained background, his industrial, computer-assisted compositions spoke a lot more viscerally to my teenaged self.

I realize I still haven’t said much about Hunger Games itself, beyond saying I liked it. I did see a lot of Running Man in its presentation, which brought me to the curious realization that unlike many other sci-fi movies of my youth (Total Recall, Robocop) it hasn’t been remade. Maybe now it doesn’t need to be? I think I can happily christen Hunger Games as a Running Man for the millenial generation, and if I had a teenage daughter I’d much prefer she be a fan of it than Twilight. Jennifer Lawrence is a fine young actress and Katniss as a character spanks Bella Swan on pretty much all counts.

Lest this sound like faint praise, it’s not. I’m of course predisposed towards post-apocalyptic settings with an overbearing media aspect, and there were many fine moments and places where I thought the director made some ambitious choices. Not all of them work, but some do, and the ambition is to be appreciated in a time when a lot of what’s coming out of Hollywood has a mucky sameness to it, particularly in action movies. Hell I can’t even remember an instance of “shakycam”, and for that I am *profoundly* grateful.

If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s definitely worth a watch. Is it mind blowing? No. Is it a classic for the ages? No. But it at least engages your brain a bit, looks pretty, and it can’t be overstated that a young woman is there as the competent, complicated, and (most importantly) non-fetishized action hero, even though that’s not the central message. It can’t help but be a message because we just have so few of those in our larger mass media, but that’s perhaps a discussion for another day.

In the meantime, I’ll just sum up by saying that from hunger, Hunger Games is not.