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12 thoughts on “540 – Trick Hello”

  1. Scarsdale

    Called it, she figured he’d do this, if by choice or by zombie voodoo. I’m sure the “friendlier” questioning will start soon, if she doesn’t just kill him out-right. Or just add him to the herd.

  2. Crazyman

    Gotcha! 😉

  3. Zombatar

    This turn of events is a surprise only to Eustace. And, maybe, Eustace’s subconscious. After all, this way he doesn’t have to actually risk actually attacking Suzie, which gives him a greater chance of survival than actually attacking her. I wonder what he was promised/threatened with?

  4. ConcordBob

    Not to nit-pick, but since sights are on target, finger should be on the trigger. Especially this close.
    The usual rule is “keep finger straight and off trigger until sights are on target”.

  5. Dr. Norman (not a real doctor)

    Not to nit-pick, but since that was current philosophies regarding trigger discipline have evolved.
    Of course, it will depend on who you get/got your training from.
    Experiments have determined that the fraction of a second to go from finger off the trigger to finger firing when appropriate is insignificant, and the risk of firing unintended is greatly reduced.

  6. Dr. Norman (not a real doctor)

    I did the google thing and I believe I saw how you reached this conclusion … but there are two parts to it – One should not omit the second part.
    “Trigger Finger Discipline: · The practice of keeping your finger “off the trigger” until your sights are on target AND YOU ARE READY TO DISCHARGE THE FIREARM.” (Caps are my own)

  7. Crazyman

    She wants him alive so she can question him; otherwise, he’d already be dead. 💀

  8. ConcordBob

    Good discussion on trigger discipline!
    His skin is very pale / gray. Is this malnourishment, or has he been poisoned with a mind-control drug? I would have to go back and look a t all various of skin tone.

    1. TKG

      On a prior page we discussed what he’s likely got running in his system. I suggested that it’s probably Borrochero (Brugmansia arbora) which is already used by Colombian cartels to eradicate the free will of their victims.

  9. ConcordBob

    Oh, the gray is just the dim light. Here is McCarthy eating dinner, and has the typical white dude flesh tone.
    https://www.zombieranchcomic.com/comic/531-inquisitional-etiquette/

    1. Dawn

      Yeah, I was trying to show that it was dark. But went with the old Hollywood method of adding a blue grey tint over everything.

  10. Dr. Norman (not a real doctor)

    Now can we satisfy my curiosity? Colt, Smith & Wesson, Ruger, or other timeline variant?

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540 – Trick Hello
Posted on February 26, 2025 by Dawn

Suzie hearkening back to the last time Eustace was faked out. She probably regrets not being able to sneak the Lawn Ranger into the bedcovers to be the victim of the stabbing.

And with that, it's Episode 23 time! Welcome back to the Ranch, everyone!

Historical motivators…

Posted on October 19, 2016 by Clint
I’m a bit of a history buff. I feel like it’s a good trait in a writer, and not just if you’re someone looking to set your tale in a former time and place. I think it’s good research into human nature itself. Does that sound strange? Maybe so, if your experience of history is defined as “that class that put me to sleep in school.” Someone rattling off lists of events and the dates they happened so you can regurgitate them onto a test every so often isn’t precisely compelling stuff. It’s much more compelling if you go beyond the dates and get into the details, and the trials and tribulations of the men and women involved. “What happened?” can be an interesting question, don’t get me wrong. “Why did it happen?” tends to fascinate me more. What was in the particular psychological makeup of a Robert E. Lee or Catherine the Great or Archimedes that, combined with the happenstances of the Universe, made things turn out the way they did? Of particular note here are the failures. The decisions of notable people which we, looking back on them from our Comfortable Armchairs of Hindsight (+3?) , find to be logic-defying and, not to put too fine a point on it, just plain dumb. This is where the writer’s mind, or at least my writer’s mind, starts to speculate. In the absence of pure practicality, what motivators could have been in play to cause Robert E. Lee, a man up until then famous for not throwing away the lives of men under his command, to order a suicidal frontal charge on the Federal position at Gettysburg? Certainly Shakespeare was no stranger to the idea of dramatizing the lives and key events of historical figures, to where their motives made internal sense to the play even if the motives he came up with happened to be completely fabricated — Richard III was no more a deformed hunchback than Napoleon was a midget, and yet to this day we’ll nod knowingly when someone looks at a power hungry guy who happens to be short and states, “he’s got a real Napoleon complex.” That’s the kind of guy who thinks he can invade Russia successfully in the Winter. But it doesn’t have to be on that global a scale, does it? Micro begets macro and vice-versa. It’s well known in the annals of psychology that a certain smell might evoke feelings of happiness in one person and dread in another, based on past associations. Going further than that, think about a smell such as chocolate which tends to be considered pleasing by humanity at large. Having a character in your story who remarks on how pleasant they find the smell of chocolate is not nearly as interesting a moment as a character who has a bad reaction to it. The latter defies our logic, or at least our “conventional wisdom,” and so we’re naturally intrigued at the anomaly. Well, I am, at least — and hey, they’re always saying that you should write the things you want to read. So I like weaving up those skeins of the past for my characters and letting them surface every so often in the form of behavior that doesn’t quite seem level-headed. You have to of course establish a baseline first, but sometimes it’s the inconsistencies in their behavior that actually brings them to life.