Category: Writer’s Blog

“Waiting for the other shoe to drop” is an English-language expression, one of whose meanings is that, having experienced an unpleasant surprise, you hesitate in anticipation of a follow-up. The proverbial BOHICA, as it were. It originates from tenement living in American cities of the 19th and early 20th Centuries where someone would get woken up by their upstairs neighbor coming home and taking their shoes off. After the loud thwack of the first shoe dropping on the floor, it was useless to try to go back to sleep until shoe #2 had followed suit.

This generally happened in short order, of course, as people don’t generally keep one shoe on when they come home at night.

But imagine the shoe dropped, and then the other shoe didn’t. All evening.

All week.

All month.

You’d probably go a little crazy waiting, right? I mean you’d definitely go crazy trying to stay awake for a week, much less a month, but here’s the Covid-19 pandemic, the dropped shoe that has all of us in a state of uncertainty. And we’re coping in different ways. Some are still insisting no shoe ever dropped in the first place, or both shoes have already dropped and we should all just get on with our lives.

This past weekend a lot of folks went to the beaches here in America, or in some states even went back to reopened restaurants and salons, and I really doubt the other shoe has dropped yet. Maybe they’ll be fine, but seriously, this virus ain’t nothing to mess with even if people aren’t dropping in their tracks a la The Stand. We’re still scrambling to figure out exactly what it can do and what it can’t and even if it doesn’t kill you it could leave you internally scarred for the rest of your life.

Is it fake news? Do we really want to take that chance, this soon? Just for a haircut? It seems like the kind of thing people are going to be shaking their heads at in hindsight, but hindsight is not shaping up to be 2020.

Maybe we’ve gussied up our apocalypses too much in fiction, to the point where when a real nastiness comes along we can’t even recognize it. I’m reminded of the 2011 tsunami in Japan where the videos showed none of the stereotypical towering walls of water sweeping in on the land. It was just water that would not stop coming, and coming, and coming, and by the time you realized that the ankle deep wash you were slogging through to get to wherever you needed to go had gotten up to your knees and then your thighs and then it was already too late and you were lost in the current. And 10 minutes later the water had built up enough it was higher than the first story of buildings, and the power was so intense those buildings were being ripped from their foundations and carried along like so many unwilling sailboats. And after all that was finally done, everything got sucked back out again. That was the other shoe dropping, and if you tried to go back home before it did you most likely ended up another casualty.

Natural disasters are at once something much less flashy and yet much more deadly than we come up with for books and movies. When I write about an apocalypse I’m concerned with good storytelling. Nature doesn’t care. Nature just wrecks face.

There was a day a couple of weeks ago where, for a short time at least, Los Angeles had the cleanest air in the world.

Yeah, L.A. The place where the term “smog” was coined. It was better these days (post Clean Air Act) than back in the ’80s where we got daily alerts and sometimes had days we couldn’t go outside for recess at school, but it was still a rare day that the near permanent haze hanging over the basins and valleys would clear. With the reduction in traffic after the county and state-wide stay-home orders, it’s been an almost mystical transformation to see crystal clear blue skies for weeks on end. We’ve gone from punchline to paradise.

Of course the balance sheet here is that we can’t really go outside to enjoy it, at least not without proper caution. Jogging without a facemask is permitted but you have to watch out you don’t get within 10 feet of others. Me, I’ve never been much of an outdoorsy type so the lifestyle change barely registers except that telecommuting sure is a hell of a lot easier to deal with than my usual commute where it would usually take me about an hour to go about 20 miles.

Meanwhile as all this has gone on photos around the world are showing other unforeseen effects of dialing back our “free-range” interactions with the Earth. Some, like dolphins in the canals of Venice, were faked, but the canals have undeniably become much clearer without churning oars and constant human detritus. And though the dolphins were debunked, other wildlife has tentatively (or confidently) made its way into the empty streets of cities around the world.

If you’re a fan of apocalypse fiction then you’ve probably run across some “after man” theories or concept art speculating what the Earth would look like in a future scenario with humanity (for whatever reason) out of the picture. It’s often pretty cool stuff showing things like fish swimming down a flooded 5th Avenue or hollowed-out skyscrapers covered in greenery as the natural world reasserts its dominance. But all of it assumes something like years or even centuries have gone by. Here we’ve got a milder take on the concept happening in real-time and it’s only been a month or so since a lot of us started staying off the grid.

Is it a good thing? A bad thing? Well, it’s definitely an interesting thing. Maybe Mother Nature has far more capacity for bouncing back than we ever suspected, if we’re just willing and able to take our foot off the gas once in awhile.

The ongoing pandemic is a global crisis, yet has (perhaps inevitably) resulted in people focusing closer to home. I swear that despite the world wide Internet of information it’s become harder to find out what’s going on outside the United States unless I specifically go looking for it. Even international news conglomerates have all their localized affiliates, and those affiliates are understandably more concerned with their proverbial backyards right now than what’s going on down the street. Perhaps it’s an outgrowth of the various quarantine lockdowns where for a lot of folk their own backyard is as far as they care to go (or even in some cases are permitted to go). The focus narrows. Like some of the classic scenes in zombie fiction, “just down the street” might as well be across a vast ocean.

So here in the States, we’re mostly focused on the States. That’s perhaps nothing new as the U.S. has historically always had its isolationist tendencies which it really only reversed from post-WWII, and the Trump administration’s friction with the U.N. and NATO was threatening to reverse course yet again. Covid-19 may have not only accelerated that but opened up new problems as our particular political system pits states against each other and against what I could certainly term as a weakened Federal government. Not so much so as the one I envisioned for the Zombie Ranch world but there’s certainly been some friction, and we haven’t even reached the forecast peak of the outbreak yet.

It could be worse, though. In case you’re wondering, India seems to be an absolute mess at the moment with thousands upon thousands of suddenly unemployed migrant workers trying to return to their rural homes. The government shut down the airports and it just meant they overloaded the buses or are trying to get home on foot. Then the government realized that these mass movements of people were potentially going to spread the virus to every far corner of the country and closed the internal borders… but now you’ve got a million plus people stranded, unemployed, and homeless wherever they happened to be, and those lucky enough to make it home might have brought an uninvited guest along that will make them wish they hadn’t been able to see and hug their loved ones.

Back to the States again, though, we’ve got a serious evangelical Christian streak in this country with a serious chip on its shoulder about government. Some of those folks are actually officials in government and have gone so far as to declare religious gatherings in their individual states “essential services” that are exempt from social distancing protocols. For those states of a more “no, really, please don’t pack your church full of people right now” viewpoint the orders to do so have become a point of friction that really flared up this past Easter Sunday. Trump wanted to declare the virus over and done with by then but cooler heads have prevailed so far on the national level. On more local levels, well, some pastors have been very defiant about continuing to hold in-house services and the results have been as you might have expected. Bishop Glenn was an early bird who last held a service on March 22nd before falling ill and dying this past weekend. Those who similarly packed into churches for Easter are more than likely now ticking time bombs. No zombie horde to throw oneself to, but the end result may, sadly, end up being the same.

Myself, I’m lucky enough to be working at home now both for this and my day job, but a co-worker died of Covid last week. He was 48.

Stay home, folks. Stay safe.

A man attacks and stabs an Asian-American family in a Texan supermarket–including a two-year-old–because according to the official report “he thought the family was Chinese and infecting people with the coronavirus”.

Another man intentionally derails the freight train he’s driving at high speed in an attempt to damage or destroy the USNS Mercy, a hospital ship deployed to L.A. to help with the Covid-19 pandemic, because he found its presence “suspicious.”

I would venture to say we’re all coming a bit unglued as the virus swirls on through the world’s populace, but some are coming more unglued than others. The train incident in particular sound like someone may have watched Fury Road once too often:

Coming up on week 3 of the lockdown here in California. Well, “lockdown” isn’t the right word, since again we’re not really seeing any enforced travel restrictions as of yet. And honestly because of that, there have been enough people taking advantage of leniency to cause many local closures of parks, beaches and hiking paths since group outings are still occurring with alarming frequency and distinct lack of social distancing.

Trevor Noah on The Daily Show (now live from his apartment, as the virus shuts down professional studios and makes YouTubers of us all) asked if this sort of blase attitude would still be happening if COVID-19 were zombies rather than an invisible virus that sometimes doesn’t even cause symptoms in those carrying it — and I suppose my answer to that would be: maybe? I mean we’re now seeing reports and even pictures out of NYC that should be downright terrifying but don’t seem to be moving the needle much for the average person who is just annoyed that the supermarket still has no toilet paper.

We’re living in an age where people seem to feel like they can choose whatever reality they like to believe in. Mass graves in Iran? Fake. A C-19 death in the Big Apple every ten minutes? Overblown hogwash. The attitude seems to be: if I don’t see personal evidence of it, then it’s not happening, or at least not happening on the scale I’m being told. It certainly can’t happen “here” (wherever “here” might be).

The worst part is that there actually are fake reports out there muddying the waters. So *can* you trust what you read? Or even what you see? But this is absolutely a global-scale pandemic, and people absolutely are dying and many more are getting sick.

But yet, in the absence of a statewide order some beaches in Florida are still open and crowded. Time will tell if that was the smart thing to do. My gut and everything I’ve been studying over the past few weeks says it’s not.

Trevor Noah seemed to think having a physical, tangible threat would make a difference… but maybe it’s not so far-fetched after all that even in a worldwide zombie apocalypse people wouldn’t be taking things seriously until the crisis literally shambled up and bit them.

Well the Covid-19 pandemic continues to spiral into new funkiness. Last Thursday L.A. County declared a “Safer at Home” order with a tentative expiration date of April 19th. The State of California shortly followed with a similar order but no expiration date, which is probably wise what with the number of cases still currently expanding rather than contracting and most health professionals warning the worst is yet to come.

Psychologically we seem to be having a whole range of reactions, from people hoarding food, toiletries and firearms like societal collapse is just around the corner, to people still taking their whole family to the beach like they’re on vacation, where they were packing in nearly shoulder-to-shoulder with hundreds of other families thinking the same. The latter behavior has already caused a lot of the U.S. to issue even stronger moratoriums on public (and even private) gatherings deemed non-essential.

Yesterday Dawn tentatively ventured out to one of our local supermarkets and found it mostly empty of people but with shelves full of meats and produce once again available. Still no toilet paper though, and a clerk she asked confirmed they restock it every day but every day people are still lining up an hour before opening and buying it all out. That’s impressive considering most stores we’ve been to here have put per household limits on certain high-demand items like the aforementioned TP. My theory on the TP shortage was that there was a first wave that included several, ah–let’s gently call them “entrepeneurs”–who bought up as much as they could with the intent to resell it at exorbitant prices. That didn’t work out so well once Amazon and E-bay caught on and started prohibiting private sellers from doing that, leading to a lot of attempted returns at Costco. One guy infamously made the news by complaining about being stuck with his whole garage full of hand sanitizer (he later donated it after a serious dragging on social media).

This second wave? I don’t know, maybe people caught by surprise during the first wave and so doing whatever they can to score some precious paper? During the announcements on the 19th the city mayors assured us the supply chain was intact and there would be no shortages, which seems to be bearing out so long as you don’t need to wipe your ass.

Along with some of the rush to the beaches are reports of a rush inland, particular to various national parks, which recently caused Joshua Tree to close to vehicle traffic after it ended up looking like a parking lot. People haven’t gotten the hint. I’m hearing personal reports from friends in rural mountain and desert communities with growing concerns as the city folk seem to have en masse decided their hometowns are the place to “get away from it all” even though again, it’s turning out everyone else had similar ideas. This is likely not what the governors and local authorities had in mind when they encouraged that people could still talk a walk outside as long as they did so responsibly.

But there are certainly people staying home as well, as evidenced by the comparison picture at the start of this blog. The fleeing of the cities isn’t so hectic that you have the scenario imagined in TWD where the side of the freeway going in is clear while the side going out is an auto graveyard. Instead, the whole freeway is empty. The Las Vegas strip is empty, and that’s a shocking sight, much moreso than L.A. where there’s still traffic on the streets but bumper-to-bumper rush hours are a memory and the air has gone clear and blue just apparently from the reduction in active commuting.

I hope that the virus doesn’t hit as hard as expected, because if it does it’s ironically going to hit worst in these rural communities suddenly playing unwilling hosts to hundreds of quarantine-defying strangers who might very well be carrying the infection with them to a place with far less infrastructure in terms of hospital and emergency services than a big city. This is a scenario I admittedly never thought about in my zombie apocalypse, probably because the assumption is always that travel is snarled or suspended in such short order that most everyone’s stuck in place whether they want to be or not. Here we have a virus but no enforced travel restrictions (at least, not yet).

Well, I’ll be back again in a week to check in, and meanwhile if the world holds to form all the big new developments will come shortly after this blog goes live.

Sarah Palin dancing in a pink bear costume and singing “Baby Got Back” may just go down as my number one Harbinger of the Apocalypse.

I joke at times that everything interesting happens on a Wednesday, i.e. the day after I publish this weekly blog, so that by the time I get around to writing the next one whatever it was might be old news or I might have just plain forgotten about it. This… I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

And the dominos started falling fast after that. Trump’s speech where he went off prompt and caused a shaky Wall Street response, the NBA announcing they were canceling their entire Season… the next day a National Emergency officially declared, the day after that the Los Angeles Unified School District closed down, and over the weekend it just kept snowballing.

Across the globe, shelves are now empty not only of toilet paper but other essentials that make more sense to this particular scenario, such as canned and frozen goods. The end of last week saw panic buying ramp into high gear in the States and elsewhere and there were reports of angry confrontations and even fist fights sprouting up in packed parking lots and picked over store aisles. We tried to buy a new thermometer on Friday. No dice… unless we wanted to pay $500 to some price gouger on Amazon. Oh, and the bars here (and many other places) were shut down just before St. Patrick’s Day.

On the other hand, there are stories of compassion and communities pulling together in the face of crisis. People making sacrifices for what they hope is the greater good, taking the hardship hit up front in hopes of flattening the curve and preventing their own nations from getting hit as bad as Italy has.

Stay safe and healthy out there. This will probably get worse before it gets better.

Ten years ago I wrote the following on my World FAQ for Zombie Ranch:

“There’s been a bit of a zombie apocalypse, and as a result many of the major cities were rendered uninhabitable by hordes of flesh-eaters and the human response to them…”

That last bit is the kicker, isn’t it? Humanity as a species has always persevered throughout any number of localized or not-so-localized armageddons, but it can’t be denied that we…

Well, we can get weird.

Take this for example. A literal case of a cure being worse than the (potential) disease:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-updates-iran-dozens-killed-alcohol-poisoning-trying-to-ward-off-virus/

I expect there will be many more instances like this before the scare blows over. Assuming, of course, it does blow over and coronavirus isn’t–at long last–the dreaded Superplague that will wipe us out or at least put a serious crimp in civilization as we know it.

Plague scares the bejeezus out of us, which is why 99% of modern zombie fiction treats the zombie hordes like a viral outbreak (although a virus presenting itself in a form that can be cathartically shotgunned). In fact as I’m writing this blog I’m wearing a free t-shirt I got years back at a convention promoting the H1Z1 computer game, which took the big recent plague scare of that time (the H1N1 “bird flu”) and proposed a mutated strain of it that created hordes of walking dead.

I myself have a morbid curiosity about this stuff, in particular the weirdness I mentioned above. Coronavirus here in the States has so far triggered several declarations of States of Emergency although the amount of verified cases remains relatively small, and if you dig into the news articles the deaths that have occurred seem to mostly still be confined to the elderly and/or health compromised individuals that tend to be the usual victims in any sort of illness lottery.

But on the other hand, I’ve observed both the SARS and H1N1 scares in my lifetime and this feels different… but I still can’t quite get a handle on whether that means coronavirus is going to end up being far more serious than either of those, or it’s because we’re reacting far more–pardon the pun–virulently to its emergence. On Monday the entire nation of Italy announced it was quarantining its population, and that’s a pretty fricking drastic thing to do unless you’re in verifiably bad shape. The States of Emergency in my area are emphasized by the authorities declaring them as being a matter of preparedness, a “better-safe-than-sorry” early mobilization just in case it’s necessary. If we go by Hollywood disaster movies, that would be the point where said authorities argue about whether releasing the news would cause public hysteria, but unlike most of those movies it was decided to trust the public.

So far, any hysteria has been limited. But the weirdness has begun, like people lining up around the block to buy out our Costco wholesale stores’ stocks of toilet paper and bottled water. This isn’t an earthquake or a snowstorm. But people heard of other people making a run on supplies and apparently decided they’d better get in on that before it was too late. Similarly and perhaps more worryingly, our local hospitals have been complaining that they’re running short of face masks because of people buying them up — and gold star if you note that on places like Ebay there are masks currently being sold by private parties at vastly inflated prices. Even Amazon is apparently jacking up hand sanitizer to ludicrous rates.

But nastiest of all on the store front are going to be the “cures” and “preventatives” that at best are snake oil placebos taking advantage of a fearful public and at worst are literally killing people.

So there’s the outbreak, and the response to the outbreak, and while we don’t know yet how bad the virus will get, or how bad it would have gotten without the precautions, it is already having very real effects on the stock market and people’s livelihoods as several big conventions and festivals have been postponed or outright canceled. Emerald City, SXSW, Coachella, the L.A. Times Festival of Books… all major gatherings and all pushed back, which has left certain friends I know dependent on the convention circuit scrambling for alternatives to make ends meet in the meantime.

No word yet on WonderCon, but if it does meet the same fate I’ll be keen to know if my hotel and/or booth costs are refundable. Or maybe by then we’ll be scavenging for scraps in the shattered remains of the Old World. I’m taking notes with interest.

EDIT TO ADD: As of Tuesday evening our first direct “casualty” has occurred in the form of ArtNight Pasadena, which we were scheduled to table at this weekend along with some other local luminaries but has now been postponed indefinitely despite there being no confirmed cases of coronavirus in our area. Not a huge deal for us, but I’m wondering what’s going to happen when someone does actually turn up as a Patient Zero…

There’s a trope I’ve discussed before called Death of the Author. It’s not about the literal passing of a given scribe, but rather the idea that their work is something that exists independently of their personal intents, politics, etc.

So for example, not everything Orson Scott Card wrote has to be viewed through the lens of Mormonism (or worse). It’s also a useful philosophy for reconciling, say, still being able to laugh at old Bill Cosby or Jeffrey Jones performances despite revelations about their personal behavior that weren’t so funny.

These thoughts came back to me the other day as Dawn and I were using our Disney+ subscription to watch some of the classic black-and-white Zorro show from the 1950’s. Come on, sing it with me: “Out of the niiiiight, when the full moon is bri-i-iiiight…”

No? Ahem. Well, anyhow, here’s a show set in 1820s Los Angeles under Mexican rule, where every character is meant to be Hispanic, and the cast list features such Latino luminaries as Guy Williams, Gene Sheldon, Henry Calvin, Britt Lomond…

Now part of this is due to the (in)famous nature of old Hollywood where if you wanted a career of note you got yourself a good ol’ American stage name. Guy Williams was born Armand Joseph Catalano, raised by his Italian immigrant parents in New York City, so I suppose the argument is there that he’s at least Latino-adjacent. Does it matter when he’s such a dashing Don Diego de la Vega, aka Zorro?

These are questions we ask nowadays, and it’s in large part because the history of Hollywood is–not to mince words–pretty god dang racist in terms of who was allowed to be on the silver screen. Zorro is chock full of white folks. But Dawn (who, recall, grew up a Sanchez) watched the Zorro show in syndicated re-runs as a kid and loved seeing the adventures of all these Mexicans and Spaniards on her television. Valorous, villainous, beautiful, hideous, and everywhere in between… that plurality I still feel is so important to in-depth representation.

And now here she is grown up watching again, aware that almost exactly zero of the people she’s watching are actually of Hispanic descent (shout out to Sacramento-born Elvera Corona for the recurring character of dancer Pilar Fuentes… oh, she wasn’t credited in the original airings? Well, uh, she has speaking lines, at least). But it’s still a fun show, and not really an offensive show (especially for its time), and young Dawn had no idea and even less care that the Mexican flashing that gallant smile as he fought for justice was in reality some Italian guy out of New York who wasn’t even allowed to go by his Italian name.

King T’Challa (better known as Marvel’s Black Panther) was created by white New Yorker Jewish dudes. Ripley, Buffy, Xena… all creations of white men. Does that take away from their myth and inspiration? It doesn’t seem so. The Hero is greater than the creator, greater than the circumstance, and inspires regardless of intents and purposes.

The Hero is dead. Long live the Hero.

DISCLAIMER: The following “script” image is satire. Thankfully.

I believe I will keep this saved as a perfect case study in “how to get your artist to kill you in your sleep.” No, strike that. The artist will probably want you wide awake, able to feel every moment of suffering.

Of course like all good satire, Walter Ostlie has presented something here that is uncomfortably close enough to truth to make one squirm. I’ve written before about the pitfalls of presuming too much where the graphical component of bringing your imaginings to life is concerned, but I love this for being oh, so wrong on so many levels — from the instructions to somehow fit three “splash pages” onto a single page, to the indication there is going to be a literal encyclopedia of text crammed in (which they didn’t even bother to make explicit), to insisting on seeing each individual scale of a dragon visibly sparking in the “moon and sun light”(?!).

And of course the icing on the cake, the exhortation “really go for it here.”

An audible *chef kiss* to this abomination, and my condolences to any artist that’s ever gotten anything close to it. I’d be fleeing the city, too.

Oh, not in the usual sense you’d use role model, no. That ain’t me, folks. I drink, I cuss, I let empty soda cans pile up on my desk until they get in the way of my computer screen and cause me to begrudgingly clean them away. Just a few of my myriad sins and misdemeanors. Don’t try this at home, kids.

No, I refer literally to modeling for a role, in that from the start of the comic Dawn has used me as her photographic inspiration for Uncle Chuck. Friends picked up on this, naturally. “Uncle Chuck is you!” they would cry, and I would assure them that any resemblance was entirely coincidental. Were I to concoct a thinly-veiled self-insert for my comic, I would hope I could do better than Uncle Chuck. For one thing, I wasn’t nearly as, um, “rounded.” Or grey.

Of course that was ten years ago. I am now much more round and much more grey. I have yet to cover the outside of our dwelling with tacky signs, thankfully, but I cannot deny that I no longer have to artificially stick out my belly to effect the proper gut circumference for Dawn’s reference poses.

A lesson perhaps for my fellow creatives. Create characters that are older and not in the best of shape, and you too can grow into them and make your artist happy since she doesn’t have to do as much alteration.

[This somehow didn’t get published last week, though it was written out! Oof. Well, here it is anyhow — Clint]

So as you might recall, we full on got accepted into San Diego Comic Con 2019 as a jury selection for Small Press, as opposed to previous years where we still exhibited but had to be called up off the waiting list.

You have to go through the jury selection every year, but we had high hopes and were looking forwards to tabling in 2020 next to the great folks we met.

And… you guessed it, we opened up our letter from SDCC towards the end of last year and we were wait listed again. Sigh.

Now we have that good track record of getting called off the wait list, like I said, but there would be no guarantee of being in the same location. More importantly, we miss out on the crucial early hotel selection for exhibitors, and while we’ve been able to compensate for that in previous years, it’s always expensive and stressful.

So this time around Dawn and I searched our souls… did we want to once again push for being called up off the list? Or… maybe being turned down again like this was an opportunity? It’s been so long since we were able to just go to the big show as attending pros. And our niece expressed interest in going for the first time and this will be the last year she can do so for free. And there’s a horror convention called Midsummer Scream that people we know do really well at but we’ve never done it because it’s the weekend right after SDCC and we just never quite mastered being able to recover like that.

So rejection becomes opportunity, and for once we’ve resolved that this time around, even if we get the call from SDCC we probably will turn it down. It’s not like it seems to help us get in on any permanent basis, after all. Oh, we’ll of course submit our application again for next year, but for 2020 we’re basically ready to just take the break, have some unobligated fun with family, and then try out Scream as our exhibit show for the Summer.

Terry Jones, one of the founding members of Monty Python, passed away last week. Man, it just hasn’t been a good decade for British humorists named Terry, has it?

But much like Terry Pratchett before him, Jones was suffering from progressive dementia, and in Jones’ case it was already to the point six months ago that he couldn’t really speak or otherwise communicate effectively. I would feel like a prisoner in my own body. Death may have been a relief for him.

It’s therefore best (in my opinion) not to be sad for his shuffling off of this mortal coil but to celebrate the legacy he leaves behind, and wow what a career that was! I admit when I was a kid he was the Python I was most prone to ignoring or overlooking, but when you realize that he was more or less the guy who got the films directed as good as they were, herding his fellow funny men through the hurdles of production while somehow keeping the frenetically absurd Python humo(u)r intact…

Terry Jones was a Talent with a capital T and his work will continue to bring belly laughs for generations to come. He may be gone now, but we’re definitely the better for him having been around.

A lot of folk are aware there’s a big video game release in the pipe for later this year produced by CD Projekt Red, the same people behind the acclaimed game adaptations of The Witcher. Mind you the very latest news is that Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed until September, but it’s still on track for 2020. This is important, if you pay any mind to the arbitrary numbers we assign to our Earth’s revolutions around its sun.

Why? Well, the property was originally a tabletop role-playing game released in 1988 and called Cyberpunk 2020, depicting a polluted, dystopian future world where multinational corporations ruled, the lines between the haves and have-nots were stark, and “cyberpunks” moved between the cracks of society, using their wits and gadgets to evade a pervasive, invasive information state seeking to catalog and control their every move.

Technically speaking, now that I’m refreshing my memories, the 1988 first edition was Cyberpunk 2013 and it’s the more well-known (well-known to old nerds, anyhow) 2nd edition published in 1990 that was Cyberpunk 2020. But I suppose the point is, when updating the property they couldn’t still call it Cyberpunk 2020 anymore because that future is now.

I mean I’m not even talking the multinational corporations and class warfare, we’re getting the first salvos of that technological gizmo arms race.

If you don’t have time or inclination to follow that link, I’ll just mention a couple of things. One, you can now buy “Reflectacles” for your eyewear, and that name and their description sound like something straight off an RPG sourcebook equipment list: “…made of a material that reflects the infrared light found in surveillance cameras…”

In other words, all that facial recognition software people are increasingly worried about?

Or how about a clothing line that makes apparel printed with fake or out-of-use license plate imagery that can throw traffic cameras for a loop by drowning them in false data? Adversarial Fashion has you covered, and again seems like the kind of thing that would have been a darkly absurd Phillip K. Dick dream until recent years.

No doubt the makers and users of the surveillance equipment will react to this eventually. Then the fringe will react to the reaction, and so on and so forth. I mean, as Rosa and Chuck are currently in the process of trying to defeat unwanted surveillance of their own, these things are close to my wheelhouse, but I don’t think I’m too far-fetched in surmising that (jacking your brain directly into the ‘Net aside) the Cyberpunks have arrived.

I gotta tell you folks, when you take as long a break as we just recently did you can wonder how it’ll be to “come back to work,” as it were. I did wonder at times. Thankfully, Dawn and I seem to have managed to slip right back into our groove.  Even better, so have Chuck and Rosa.

Yeah, yeah, I’m assigning life-like qualities to beings that technically don’t exist. Writers are notorious for doing this with their creations. In fact we come up with all sorts of flights of fancy… I mean, what if all we’re doing is tapping into some alternate dimension where all the people and things we’re writing about are real? And what happens if they ever get wind of that and take us to multiverse claims court for using their likenesses without permission?

It’s also not uncommon for writers to do their own forms of “dimension hopping” and intrude upon the worlds they’ve conjured to discuss all sort of existential issues. Grant Morrison famously did this in Animal Man, and Stephen King did it in his Dark Tower books.

But that ain’t me. I’m just gonna say it felt like Rosa and Chuck welcomed me back along with the rest of you, like they’d just been on a long and peaceful coffee break waiting for me to give a knock on the door and summon them to the stage. Whether or not you buy into that hogwash, it probably at least says something about their strength of character.

*according to Clint

I’ve given my opinions on many a movie, television series, and/or video game in my decade-long tenure here at the Ranch, and in the case of the latter two media have often encountered a problem in that I tend to give my opinions before I finish the dang thing. Sometimes that’s fine. Sometimes I end up with very different opinions after eventual completion. Sometimes I get so disenchanted with a thing I was initially excited about that I don’t end up finishing it at all. So… if you believe I’m not to be trusted on account of that, I understand.

But if there was any upside to be had from our last-quarter-of-2019 crises that led us to our longest hiatus ever, it was that I actually managed to watch some things all the way through before getting back and blathering about them in this blog. So for once I can say, having watched it all the way through not just once but twice over…

The Mandalorian is the best Western of 2019.

Oh sure, it’s technically Science Fiction (or Science Fantasy given how the Star Wars franchise has never been much for the fiddly details of its physics). But where the original Star Wars might have cribbed some of its details and ambience from the Western and Samurai genres (who themselves have been long intertwined), The Mandalorian is completely unabashed about wearing its John Ford-Sergio Leone-Akira Kurosawa love upon its Beskar-armored sleeve, with a healthy dose of the famous manga Lone Wolf and Cub infused as well.

Not only do showrunners Dave Filoni and John Favreau display a deep affection and knowledge of the above, they have the same affection for Star Wars, capturing a spirit of that DNA written into my childhood that I’ve felt somehow missing in more recent efforts. They pay respect to the lore and also expand upon it in new and fascinating ways that don’t feel jarring. What kind of nerd do you have to be to visually demonstrate the behind-the-scenes lore that Devaronians are immune to fire? Well, they are those nerds, and nerdy me was giddy about it along with many other moments.

I could go on but there’s no shortage of praise out there. Just gonna say, even if you have to spring for Disney+ for a single month so you can watch, this is well worth the price. Even the music is top notch, and it would have seemed impossible to think that of a Star Wars score that is 100% not John Williams. Instead credit goes to Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson, who perhaps made his biggest mark so far with the score for Black Panther but his work on The Mandalorian is just next level. It’s as if Favreau and Filoni came to him and said something impossible execs say like “We want a theme for this show which seamlessly blends Ennio Morricone and John Williams” and instead of that being impossible, he locked himself in his studio for a month and then went, “Here you go.”

Listen to it. Then listen to it again. And again. And reflect that there are still good things in life.

You know, we’re still on hold but I’m tired of seeing my ugly, busted-up foot in the blog entry and I’m sure you all are, too. The exterminator is coming again tomorrow morning for another inspection and hopefully, hopefully we’re going to get an “all clear” at long last.

In the meantime we did at least get our Volume 2 book off to the presses to hopefully meet our November timeframe we promised on our Kickstarter. Yay for already finished art and digital workspace that’s not tucked away in a box or has a box in the way.

Anyhow I figure some of you might be passingly interested in what I’ve been doing all these months since the Kickstarter ended so I wanted to show you a side-by-side of the before and after of an original page vs. the page we sent off to the printer. Here ’tis:

The first thing you may note is the extra white space around the edges. This is added because during the printing process printers want what’s called a “trim,” which is basically extra room around the art so nothing gets cut off. “Bleed” is another related concept and you may still see pages in the book where the art extends all the way to the edge, or nearly so, but most importantly there’s a third imaginary border defining what’s called the “text safe” area and you want to keep all your word balloons within that.

So the art has to be slightly rescaled to keep its proportions and make sure that it looks good when trimmed. In addition, when you’re dealing with a 200-plus page book another factor to keep in mind is the binding. If the white margin on the left of the revised page looks bigger than the right, good eye — that’s intentional. This will be a right side page in the book so I’ve adjusted slightly to make sure nothing gets lost in the “spine” when everything is put together. I had to do the opposite for all the left side pages, and then lined up left and right in Photoshop to make sure they looked properly even.

In addition to that, I made a pass at the text and in some cases like this one even rearranged some word balloons I was never quite happy with. Hopefully it makes for some easier flow and reading. Also, yeah, I added a sound effect. Seemed right, plus there was a chink in the drawing of the tube where it fit perfectly.

If this all sounds like a lot of work, especially repeated over the course of a couple hundred pages, well… yep. But it’s done, and I think I’ll be pretty happy with the end result. Which is important when you’re pulling the trigger on a print run costing well upwards of a thousand dollars!

Now if we can just get our place fixed and cleaned, that’ll be nice, too.

An important safety tip to remember: the Universe does not understand what a rhetorical question is.

For example, one might be tempted to go through a list of recent woes like losing a car, various health issues, and a bed bug discovery which turned out to be a full-blown, sleep-depriving, skinfection scratcheggedon requiring us to tear our home apart and throw away tons of things we might have liked to otherwise keep, and ask: “Could this possibly get any worse?”

Do not challenge the Universe with such questions, for it will take them as a challenge and inevitably answer, “challenge accepted.”

One will just hope in this case that my lost toenail shall be considered penalty enough as a reminder.

Well, as noted in the last blog, parasites are big on our minds at the Wolf homestead. Unfortunately the bed bug we found was not a cool, rogue loner after all. That bed bug had a family, man. He was two days to bed bug retirement. Now much like Muriel and her clan, the others came out for revenge. Good news is they’ve apparently stopped biting me. Bad news is they started biting Dawn.

So we have to toss over the bedroom in preparation for some professional exterminator action later this week. I try to look at the positive side, in that we’re motivated to finally go through the closet and various bins and dressers and get rid of a lot of old clothes and other forgotten odds and ends that might have been nostalgic ten years ago but have not anytime recently been sparking joy.

On the downside, Dawn has been losing more sleep than usual as bites and paranoia about bites have been keeping her up at nights, so please forgive if this week’s comic isn’t as polished as it could be. At times she seems more zombie than woman, with the exception that a zombie in the Zombie Ranch world doesn’t worry about bed bugs or fleas or mites or or any other such pests. At least not that we’ve shown or discussed so far — and thankfully the mammalian exception means there wouldn’t really be zom-fleas, fun as that might be to say.

The title here is most likely nonsense, because–like many writers–I know just enough Latin to get myself in trouble. It’s a play on the far more meaningful “e pluribus unum” (“Out of many, one”) which was a favored motto of the United States founding fathers. Like, many states, but united, dig?

Anyhow, pruritus is the official medical terminology for itchy skin. Seriously.

Sounds a lot more serious than it is, right? “Sorry Paul, I’m going to have to cancel our dinner date. My pruritus is flaring up again.” Unless Paul is a doctor, a Latin scholar, or has read this blog, chances are his response is going to be concern and understanding rather than being pissed off at you.

Then again I know this because I’ve had several recent medical visits documenting my pruritus on account of some damn thing biting me repeatedly, causing nasty welts that itched so bad I would go nearly insane from not scratching… and then would scratch and then have to go on antibiotics because yay, I opened up the wound and the bacteria on my skin dove right in for party time. Was it a mosquito? A spider? We were baffled and so were the doctors, until finally Dawn just recently found (what we dearly hope was) a single bedbug hiding out in the mattress just under where I sleep.

Good news is that (literal) sucker is now dead and neither we nor the pest control guy found evidence of any further infestation. It appears to have been a lone rogue male. We’ll know for sure in the next couple weeks if I get chewed on again.

Also on the plus side, when the doctors were calling it a spider bite I found this article and it is a very entertaining piece showcasing the quirky world of entomology, populated by folks at least as nutty as your average zombie rancher. Give it a read and scratch that intellectual pruritus, eh?