UPDATING OCCASIONALLY (FOR NOW)

4 thoughts on “Issue 22 Cover”

  1. Dr. Norman (not a real doctor)

    Ooohhh … He looks – desperate.

  2. Zombatar

    No hat. He lost his hat. Which had a lot of his personality. Alert! Alert! We have a Lost Hat emergency! This is Not a Drill! Alert! Alert!

  3. Scarsdale

    Hang in there, I’m a retired fireman, and those pictures/videos have me sweating… The closest thing to a forest fire I ever fought was when a stupid tried to burn raked leaves on a windy day. 4 houses! Mostly grass and bush fires but, yeah.

  4. Clint

    Good news, we are back at home and there was a home to return to. It’s been a crazy week and a serious near miss seeing as several other homes on our block burned. Terrible stuff but the Ranch persists.

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Issue 22 Cover
Posted on January 8, 2025 by Dawn

Traditional post-issue comic cover! Episode 23 is currently TBA but we're hoping to have the first page out on January 22nd so as to not leave y'all hanging from the proverbial cliff for too long.

[1/9/2025 NOTICE: Some of you may know we live in the Greater L.A. Area and if you've heard about the wildfires here: yep, we're currently evacuated from our home and still unsure as to its fate. We grabbed our computers and backup drives so whatever happens we still have our files, but definitely expect some delays and cross your fingers that the worst we're going to end up having to do is throw food out of the fridge due to power loss.]

[1/11/2025 UPDATE: Good news, we are back at home and there was a home to return to. It's been a crazy week and a serious near miss seeing as several other homes on our block burned. Terrible stuff but the Ranch persists.]

Vulgar commonalities

Posted on June 26, 2019 by Clint

“The Moor’s abused by some most villainous knave./Some base, notorious knave”

— Shakespeare, Othello (Act 4 Scene 2, Line 143-5).​

When you’re a writer you naturally think a lot about words: how they sound, where they come from, what they mean. Words make up language, which is molded by our thoughts and molds our thoughts in turn. And every so often, in thinking about words I observe certain trends in human psychology that are old enough (but seemingly universal enough) I can quote Shakespeare to illustrate them. To put it simply: we don’t like the simple. The plain. The common. The title of this piece is all but redundant, because the term “vulgar” has its roots in the Latin word “vulgus,” which just meant “common people.” I remember the original Vampire: The Masquerade RPG book had a section labeled “Vulgar Argot” — which was really just a fancy way of saying “here’s a bunch of slang terms modern vampires use informally.” But outside of academia the common meaning (heh) is to refer to something or someone crass, or gross, or generally not meeting the standards of polite society. “Villain” is another interesting one. In modern usage it is the go-to term for an evildoer, to the point where in fiction if authors are going for a more grey area feel they tend to describe the person or persons who oppose their main characters as antagonists rather than using the loaded words hero and villain. Villains are bad guys, m’kay? But “villain” comes from the Old French “villein,” and you’ll note it shares several letters with the word “village.” This is not an accident. A village was used to mean a rural township, and a villein was someone from a place like that. A rube. Rural, uncultured and ignorant, to be shunned and looked down on by a better class of folk. And I guess also considered prone to criminal behavior, given how we use the word now. You might begin to get the idea that a bunch of hoity-toity city folk are responsible for all this, but here’s a really interesting one: ornery. Calling something “ornery” ain’t what you’d expect from some city slicker snob, but “ornery” turns out to be nothing more than a countrified contraction of “ordinary.” And there we are again. You’re not just average — you’re stubborn, mean-spirited and just a general pain to deal with. Any fans of The Good Place here? Let’s bring this full circle:   Basic. Base. Our modern slang (sorry, “vulgar argot”) has come right back around to an insult Shakespeare and his audience would have totally understood. It’s as simple as that.