Original Commentary

The original plan was for us to do a week-long arc about the various couples in the comic getting coffee. I couldn't get it to work right so I'm going into this; there's a lot more to Robert and Jane than was previously shown. This arc will show all that. Not much more I can say today; this is all lead-in - Terrence

Modern Commentary
Man, that ad was everywhere 20 years ago. Styled to look like an error message. And the trick to get your computer running at full speed again was to give them forty bucks or so.

Or, rather, to give them your credit card info and hope they stopped taking money after $40.

I kinda wish I had a screenshot of it, just to provide context. Can't find it anywhere. Glad that it's gone though. That's an unfair trick and it looks like today's advertisers have switched to clickbait instead. - Terrence

Original Commentary

If Brisbane new more about computers, he'd know that he has no use for a firewire card. I'm sure Robert picked it up for a couple dollars somewhere. When I wrote this, I wasn't sure if Robert's last line should be spoken or thought. I went with spoken - Terrence

Modern Commentary
Firewire let you tranfer data quickly between devices. It was mainly used for video cameras and such, since it was 300 times faster than the original USB1.0. Then USB kept getting faster and firewire kinda died in the late 2000s.

I've never used it, but back then I probably thought it'd be cool to have one back then. Not enough to actually buy one, though. I don't know what Brisbane would even do with one.

But yeah, Robert picked it up because it was a great deal, then he found he didn't have any use for it and he'd rather pass it along than throw out a perfectly good computer peripheral.- Terrence

Original Commentary

I said to Isabel - "I need one more question for Brisbane to ask Robert in the third panel". Isabel says "Why don't you just have Robert cut him off mid-sentence?". It makes things easier sometimes...and yes, Robert has a bunch of computers, unpacked boxes, and not much else. I should mention that we have three computers between the two of us, not counting the laptops - Terrence

Modern Commentary
I'm kinda susprised that Brisbane can tell where one computer stops and the next one starts.

We've discovered that there is a whole "Man who is bad at taking care of himself" aesthetic. Unopened boxes from his last place, bare mattress on the floor, and so on. - Terrence

Original Commentary

Now we finally get to the root of the issue that I've been trying to work in for the last few months. I actually introduced Jane and Robert with the intention of bringing a second romantic relationship into the comic. It just took me a while to actually get to this point. Robert's second line got expanded significantly when I was lettering this, so that it explained more and moved the plot forward; originally it was along the line of "we used to go out in high school". I especially like how Brisbane feels that he's giving genuinely useful advice - Terrence

Modern Commentary
Things are more complicated than they initially appeared. Brisbane, like the audience, reacts the way he reacts because he doesn't know the whole story. - Terrence

Original Commentary

Now, Jake does treat Robert as well as he treats anybody else. With the occasional jabs about Robert's technical skills and rants about how unfair it was that he got fired from Lemon Technology. But Jake does that to everybody else. He's the kind of person that it's hard to tell if he likes you or not - he treats his friends worse than his enemies because he knows his friends will put up with it - Terrence

Modern Commentary
"Hey, I want to ask you about my specific situation but I'm not going to tell you about it". Great communication, Robert. No wonder you're single.

Re-reading this story makes me wish I had cut a week out of it. If Jake used to complain less, it's because he had less to complain about.- Terrence

Original Commentary

Did you ever have one of those weeks where one thing after another seems to physically break down inside of you- sometimes even before the last one got better and by the time everything is mostly fixed you're stuck in a deep, deep funk that not even Maple Story can fix? Well, that was my week last week. I now have a ton of backed up work to do, which isn't helping my will to work. So, today I asked Terrence to write a one panel comic, in the hopes of trying to get ahead tonight- which unfortunately didn't happen because it's 2:30 in the morning on Sunday as I'm writing this.

Oh, you want some commentary about the actual comic and not my failing body? Well, ok. Today I asked Terrence just how much he is going to reveal about what happened between Robert and Jane- all he said is that there's going to be a flash back that will go into it... so now you all know as much about what he did as I do. -Isabel

Modern Commentary
If I've got a storyline in progress and I can't or won't explain it to Isabel, that's never a good sign. I don't usually have the whole thing planned out when it starts - especially for longer stories - but if all I've got is "Here's how it begins and trust me, it's going to be awesome", then it's usually not ready to go.

I ought to have the whole thing written before it starts, or at least outlined. It's not uncommon for stories to leave the outline as I write them, but if all I've got at the beginning is a one-sentence pitch, unconnected scenes, and loose feelings, then I probably ought to take another week and get my thoughts together.- Terrence