OK, I just want to let everyone know that this is by no means about anyone in particular that I follow. And it definitely wouldn’t be about anyone that I actually know in real life. Unless of course you think I’m referring to you then yeah it’s probably about you.

Follow me!

Perhaps a few months too late, but it still makes me chuckle.

Forget creating an super popular website and flipping it to Google for a quick 100 mil when Mark Cuban is handing out free money! OK not free, but hey, at least he’s trying something and that’s more than I can say for the governor of California.

It sure has been a while since I’ve created a comic, but it is good to be back at it. Definitely took longer than I remember. Could be because I’ve been watching movies half the time. Damn you Hulu.

Getting over a hell of a virus atm. It has been going on for weeks now. Making it nearly impossible for me to talk and it sucks. I never thought I would miss the ability to talk so much. But, I’m sure my fiancee has enjoyed the silence.

These are not the fundamentals you are looking for.

When I decided to return to my comic many months ago I quit all Massive Multiplayer Games cold turkey. And thanks to some friends down at work and the now official release date of the next expansion, I am playing WOW again. While this doesn’t mean much to you, it is definitely eating up a lot of time and hopefully I wont let it get to the point that it affects my ability to get the comics out. Again… If so, blame this guy.

This comic hits close to home.

And yes I am that big of a nerd.

Have you seen the new Microsoft Ads. The ads are two fold. First is the Mojave Experiment that is designed to reform your opinions of Vista, and the Bill Gates/Seinfeld ads designed to change you opinions of Microsoft itself. All of this is an effort to push Vista and respond to those Apple ads.

The Mojave ads basically tell you to try Vista, its not as bad as everyone thinks it is. Not the best message IMO, but what do I know. I can speak from experience that Vista 32 and 64 really are decent little operating systems. Their biggest downfall being the multitude of Vista flavors, the crap machines the stores sell it on and the shovel ware that comes with your new pc. You want to save Vista Microsoft? Fix that crap first.

The Gates/Seinfeld ads are strange at best, having nothing to do with Microsoft. But according to the Vista Blog these ads are designed to break the ice and get people talking about Microsoft. Well, by George I’ve fallen into their trap. There just better be some damn Churros in my next copy of Vista!

So, no lie, I got bored with the story arc. If you couldn’t tell from the sheer lack of comic last Friday. So this whole Sink Scum story arc has been a ruse to introduce Jennifer, the new roommate. The sink scum has been tossed in the garbage and Jennifer is now on the scene.

What would it be like to live with a gigantic blob? Something like this I suppose.

I was wondering why I was seeing all this Spore advertisement right before the launch. And now I know why. The game apparently sucks!

You would think that after 10 years of development this would be the end all be all of life simulators. But, from the sounds of it, each stage of the game is rather lack luster and boring with Spore’s only saving grace being the creation portions of the game.

Ohhh and just to make it even more better; EA has tacked on a lovely draconian DRM. Limiting you to 3 installs of spore. Hope those files don’t get corrupted or your computer crashes or heaven forbid you want to install it on two machines in your same house. This has in turn led to a gigantic backlash that has pushed the player rating of Spore on Amazon down to a one star rating. To add further insult the full un-DRMed version of the game hit BitTorrent sites days before the game was released, so this is yet another case of EA punishing the consumers who legitimately purchased a copy of the game.

So sorry Spore I will be saving my money this fall for Warhammer Online.

Still waiting for some parts to arrive from NewEgg and then my system will be fully revived. But, managed to knock this comic on my laptop to help further the story line.

I hope everyone’s holiday was great. Looking forward to some extended vacations later this year. Woot!

A cliff hanger of wrist grabbing proportions. How will it end? Why is the sink scum now talking? Where am I going with this?

Find out the answers to all of these questions next week.

When there is a catastrophe there seems to be two political answers. Praying for those affected or actually doing something to help them. Now, I’m all for saving money, but perhaps shorten up things abroad to help those at home? Nah, that’s silly.

This might not seem like an important comic strip, but oh how it is. I have been tossing around a couple of story arcs to introduce some new characters and I decided to go with the stupider of the two first. Genius, I know. Follow me on this one and don’t completely jump ship when you see the new character.

Don’t you just love how you can buy a protection plan along with just about anything you buy now a days? And don’t you just love that look the clerk behind the register gives you when you say no? Listen, I understand you get some sort of up-sell perk but honestly, unless I am spending close to a grand I probably don’t need a protection plan. And I especially don’t need your scratch re-placement protection plan on a freakin video game. How about this, you knock five dollars off the price of the game and I will buy your five dollar protection plan so that you get that up-sell. Deal?

Team Fortress Classic will always have a special place in my heart and I had a blast playing Team Fortress 2 on the XBox. The heavy weapons guy is receiving a special sandvich ability. Eating the sandvich will restore 120 health. However it will leave the heavy completely vulnerable for 4 seconds. Which is good news for a crafty spy.

I understand that anyone that has not played Team Fortress will not get much from this comic. So here is a link to a movie on the sandvich ability.

This past weekend in Texas was the yearly tax free weekend. So combine that with 50% of sales and you have consumers acting like a recession isn’t looming around the corner. I took the chance to join in the shopping festivities and actually purchased a new belt. As a guy I have a grand total of one belt and have only purchased two since leaving home. It’s a strange gratifying feeling to have to ratched up to the second to last hole from the middle rather than the second to last hole from the end.

Me thinks I need to use that gym membership I am paying for.

Why do large electronic retail stores choose to treat their paying customers like common thieves?

On my last trip to Best Buy to purchase a XBox game I had a rather annoying experience. After paying I had to take the game still in its anti-theft plastic cover over to that smug asshole in the yellow shirt, receipt and all, in order to free my legally purchased copy of Orange Box. I just couldn’t figure that one out. Do they not trust their own employees to only open purchased copies of games? If that’s the case treat those bastards like criminals, not the consumer.

I think i will be sticking to EBGames, but if I ever find myself in Best Buy with some schlemiel in a yellow shirt asking for my receipt I’m either taking my legally purchased goods back and returning them or I’m just going to continue out the door and cut that stupid plastic cover of myself when I get home.

What if our microscopic hydrocarbon chain ancestors had decided not to evolve and just believe in creation. Would we still be here?

With the Spore release date coming September 7th all sorts of coverage is starting to emerge. One of my favorites is a video over at IGN centered around the cell stage. The cell stage looks like a lot of fun, but also looks like a lot of flash games I have played in the past, just better looking and with a cellular creature creator.

Will Wright has said that the use of religion in spore as brought about more criticism from the atheist community than all other organized religions. I just find that kind of interesting.

A guy at worked showed me this and after some intense, once or twice, google searching I couldn’t find anything relating to it on zee web. So I made a comic out of it.

When you jump down the rabbit hole of starting your own webcomic it becomes very easy to build up animosity towards other webcomics. Such as a really successful stick figure comic. But, somehow XKCD keeps me coming back with the sheer content and hilariousness of the comic. I just hope this isn’t old news and I just missed it.

*Note: This was by far the most successful comic of V2, it brought in so many Stumbles, Redditers, Diggers and general fans of XKCD. However it also made me feel bad to piggy back off of Mr. Munroe's success. However, I am grateful that hardly a negative word was muttered regarding this and tt is my sincere hope that if V3 were to ever see this kind of success again that it would come on its own merit.

What do you do when the It guy wont give up the password? I know, lets make sure all our passwords are written down.

Ever become just instantly uninterested in someone you thought was hot at the supermarket by the contents of their shopping cart? It would seem that this is the case for our two protagonists.

Real quick, virtual beer pong is coming.

I am very sad to admit that I never did make it to Oregon. Hey, I was young and never bought enough wheel parts. But now, I can show those squirrels who’s boss.

I wonder if kids these days have even better games to play now in computer class. Oh who am I kidding, schools can’t afford computers anymore.

The San Diego Comic-Con came to a close this weekend. A lot of news was announced at the con and the most exciting being the movie announcements and previews. Isn’t this supposed to be about comic books? Granted most of these movies are based on comic books. It just seems that you should get more news on comic books from a comic-con.

Though, I’m not complaining about the fan girl attire at said con.

I just discovered episodes of the latest season of the CGS on G4. And I’m trying to be supportive of competitive gaming, but honestly they are making it quite hard. These teams play 5 games. Some racing game, FIFA 08, and DOA twice once for the guys and once to force each team to have a girl. But like a bad game show the final event is worth the most points and usually is the decider. Unfortunately that final event is Counter Strike, a game that until yesterday I had thought died back in 2002.

Hopefully that paragraph is readable, I just woke up at 4 am to write this and I am going straight back to bed. Night night.

Do you ever get tired of being politically correct? Do you ever type out your true feelings in an email, address it to everyone and accidentally hit send instead of delete?

What? Am I the only one?

Notice all the flag pens on his uniform, that means he’s serious.

Cobra promises to strike fear into the hearts of our enemies by using the Weather Dominator.

A lot of Nintendo badmouthing gets thrown around when Microsoft and Sony get together to pander to the media. But, when it comes to console sales this generation, Nintendo is numero uno, even if they wont admit it.

Though I will admit, that the lineup for consoles for the rest of the year is definitely in Microsoft’s favor. So it looks like they will continue to win in the software sales department.

This week at E3, Sony’s CEO said the the PS3 is still the number one way to buy a Bluray player. He forgot to mention it’s still the only reason to buy a PS3.

Is it just me, or do the new Microsoft avatars look vaguely familiar. And the new dashboard layout look a lot like what you would find on an iPod… Lets just hope Microsoft mimics Apple on the XBox better than they did with their latest operating system.

In good E3 Microsoft news: NetFlix is officially coming to XBox Live, no more hacking! Which means that in order to watch your instant que on TV you need at least a $15 a month NetFlix plan, a now $299 XBox, possibly the ridiculously overpriced $100 wireless peripheral, and a $60 a year XBox live account or a $100 box from Roku. But hey, I already have all those stupid XBox things so I’m good to go, give me the firmware damn it.

But referring to the comic, did anyone else watch the Microsoft E3 Media Briefing? It was painful to watch. Numerous awkward and obvious pauses for applause that never materialized. It was just hard to watch.

Cheers.

Can they please just release Spore already?

The Apple hype machine has failed. OMG! There are no serious lines like last year, I’m not hearing about the iPhone every time I fire up the podcasts or the TV. What the hell? This new phone is supposed to kick ass and be 2.8 times faster and have better battery life and blah blah blah.

I’m guessing the culprit is buyers remorse and lack of copy/paste, serously. Everyone I know that has the first gen iPhone is on a wait and see path. Let someone else buy it and see if the 3G in my area is actually any better.

I have a month or two until my current cell phone plan is done with, so I have some time to kill, so I am definitely go to wait and see what people say about the iPhone, the Instinct and god willing an android phone.

On a completely different side note: This is comic number 75 since I started ShortMinds and my 10th comic with the new characters.

Good news, Ted now has a job, and what better then something in the IT industry. Hilarity can only ensue.

I used to be “that tech guy” at a previous job and I have a lot of good stories to tell.

Damn Delilah and her retarded personal advice, but she does play the freakin classics. This weekend, flipping through the radio, my fiance and I found ourselves in an impromptu duet thanks to Chicago.

Cheers to the classics.

You know, I’m as excited about Spore as the next gamer. But, have you ever noticed that all the videos around the internets are very limited in scope? Sure watching Robin Williams creating a creature and adding funny comments, and seeing the cities your creatures build and the space ship that you will eventually fly around in is great and all, but I want to see more.

I want to see my creature in paramecium form flailing its cilia and conquering the neighboring ciliates. Well maybe that is too much to ask, I just want to see more from a game that is so hyped and everyone is clambering for.

Comic a bit late today, fell asleep last night and had some problems ftping today.

Apparently kids can now go to a video game camp. Where they get to play Unreal Tournament, learn about video game machinima and even learn how to make video games.

Oh give me a break, its just an excuse to play video games all summer. Save yourself the money and buy your kids an XBOX360.

Blizzard announced Diablo 3 this weekend. So add that to StarCraft 2 and the WOW Wrath of the Lich King expansion and die hard blizzard fans have some fun times to look forward to. Hopefully, that’s assuming they don’t spend 4 more years on each and just end up canceling them because they are working on a StarCraft MMO, which you know they are.

I hear good things about the women in Europe, too bad I’ve never been. I love myself the football, the feet only kind, and all I can say about the Euro 08 is Go Germany!

After a weekend of playing with the Spore Creature Creator and a few hours of completely nerding out and watching Korean’s play StarCraft at Blizzcon, things just started to run together a bit, resulting in this comic.

I must say. Watching those YouTube vids for a while I am totally psyched about the upcoming StarCraft squeal. No release date yet, but from listening to the Blizzcast podcast, it sounds like they have been working on this game for quite some time and are in the balancing and polishing phase.

So between Spore, StarCraft2 and Warhammer Online; I’m in limbo waiting for a great game. Meanwhile I’ll keep running the same missions over and over again in GTA4.

If you can’t tell, I have decided to take the comic in a somewhat new direction. The characters are basically the same, just different. Follow? Good. As it turns out the comics that you have seen thus far have been drawn by Ted in a failed effort to start a successful webcomic.

This new direction will allow me to relate a lot better to my characters. There were too many nights that I sat and stared at the wall for hours trying to think of something funny that a ten year old would say or do. Thus resulting in a person or two telling me my jokes suck. I had realized this some time ago and wanted to take the comic in a new direction. Until a few days ago I did not know how I was going to do this. Hopefully this idea is not hated. It will allow me to expand the characters in a way more to my liking and I always have the opportunity to re-visit the old characters through Ted’s webcomic. And hopefully the new art style is not complete “trash”.