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_

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*


 

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.

More wondering about Cons

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Clint

I think I’ve mentioned before how lately I’d gotten somewhat pessimistic going into convention appearances. There have been occasions of terrible sales, terrible boredom, and on a couple of occasions a deadly combination of both, and running into one of the latter when you go in bright-eyed and full of hope is a disastrous toll on the soul. So I suppose it’s a defensive measure, right? Expect the worst, be pleasantly surprised when it’s not as bad as you expected. Much better than the other way around.

I should probably try to mitigate this attitude, since it makes the pre-convention travel and setup more unpleasant than it needs to be. Also I look at some of my convention reports from 2010, for example, and see how happy I was just to have a table regardless of any issues… I figured at some point I’d start to get jaded about things. Has that happened? After three years, I think you do have to consider yourselves as maybe moving beyond the “starter” stage where you can just shrug off the expenses as being made up for by promotion/networking rather than profits. That was part of our recent decision to scale back from non-local conventions after we do Phoenix this year.

Or will we?

That decision was based on the fact that we just never seemed to be able to do much more than make back our expenses reserving a table, and sometimes not even that much. Again, not something we realistically expected at first, but by our third year I admit to getting antsy. WonderCon 2012 was a particular sore spot where our sales totals didn’t justify the table, much less the gas, parking, or anything else. Emerald City 2012 was much better, but despite that put us much more in the red what with plane travel and such being involved. Had it been local it might have been a different story, but that was my same lament for this year, plus our sales saw almost no increase and that seemed to be a bad sign.

And we just couldn’t seem to make the numbers work at a local con, at least until Long Beach last November. I’ll still call that one a beacon of hope, both for us and for the convention itself, but before I got too celebratory I wanted to get another good show going. When Emerald City didn’t improve over the previous year, I started doubting again…

WonderCon Anaheim 2013 hit like a bolt from the blue. I can’t even begin to grasp at what went right, but… things went right. Do we finally have a good enough spread of merchandise? Have we finally gotten our table set-up worked out to maximum effect? Or was this just an amazing fluke?

We more than doubled our best sales total ever. Ever. It was like fate decided that it had had enough pessimism out of me, thankyewverymuch, and provided us with a weekend of unassailable success. Shut up, Clint, and take their money. Combined with the relatively low overhead of a local show, we might have actually made a profit on this one… or at least broke even. I’ll take being able to break even.

The next big question will be how the one day Long Beach Expo does for us, and then of course how things go at Phoenix. Could Phoenix possibly be good enough to us that we balance the expenses of being there? Before this weekend, I would never believe it. Now? Maybe.

The thing is, every convention is a bit of a crap shoot, even when it’s the same show on a different year. The date matters. Your position on the floor matters. The organization of the show matters. All of these can be variables, and you never know when you might end up with a booth that has a support pillar stuck in the middle of it that screws your usual sweet set-up. I did have a conversation at Emerald City with a friend who has been at this far longer than we have (but still has a day job), and asked him how they made the ends meet every year… and his response was that you can never be 100% sure how things will go, but hopefully the shows you do well at will at least balance out those that are disappointments.

This year’s WonderCon has given us our first taste of being able to do really, really well, and Long Beach and Emerald City weren’t shabby. We’ll see how the rest of the year goes.