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New game! BOLTED 
Barb O. Saur 
This is unhealthy. A relapse into a dangerous and self-destructive behavior that can only end in tears.
Why can’t Ethan have a more constructive coping mechanism, like vigilantism?
America is addicted plastics.
What are the plastics addicted to?
Americans
I remember reading this factoid that said that, despite American children only accounting for like 3% of the world’s children, they own more than 20% of the world’s toys. O.o
Our economy critically depends on consumerism. Us buying stuff. All the stuff.
Kinda impressive coincidence that statistic almost perfectly lines up with the USA population and percent of the world’s imprisoned population (4% of the world population with 25% of the world prison population as of 2024 if I remember correctly). USA numbah one, in both treats and prison facilities/camps/whatever other spooky term used for foreign prisons to make them seem worse than the good old fashioned homegrown inhumanity centers.
We need more US children working factory jobs to make toys for the children of other nations.
Honestly, I think we probably have enough toys on Earth right now to last several generations.
Endocrine disruptors. They’re always full of those.
Good thing they’ll be with us forever!
…
Plastics are in your blood. I mean, literally, but also metaphorically.
And on Wednesdays they wear pink.
With us. In us.
We don’t call it ‘plastic crack’ for nothing.
Did Amber quit being Amazi-Girl because Blaine decided to cosplay as a supervillain, ruining the stabilizing effect being a superhero had?
It seemed more like it wasn’t something they needed any more. Turns out though, that there are others that still need her.
Started with Shortpacked not too long after it started. I’ve been reading Willis comics since…gosh, 2006?
Bloody hell.
Ethan discovers what his destiny is.
To honor Mike, he must become…a toy store employee.
Time is a flat circle.
“Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.”: Douglas Adams.
“Timeline? Time is not made out of lines, it is made of circles. That is why clocks are round.”
~Michael J. Caboose
“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey… stuff.”
“Duration is an attribute of consciousness and not of the plenum.”
Oh, that’s very deep! You should write “Reader’s Digest,” they have a page for people like you!
“Time is a weird soup” – Fearne
Ethan: Someone is WRONG on the internet.
That Raphael mask is *not* reading the room.
Crazy Theory Time: While probably too dark even for this comic, Mike was not dead when Asher asked the police to take care of covering it up. Is it possible the officer didn’t just kill Blaine but also finished off a recovering Mike?
I doubt it, but you never know.
Seems like a big reach. They said (lying) Blaine tried to grab the cop’s gun, largely the only way you’d get away with murdering someone in a hospital. Going to another room to kill a second person, before or after, would be pretty much unthinkable. It’s MORE likely Mike didn’t actually die but got into deep witness protection, and that’s already a ridiculous idea.
I think it’s unlikely, but my reading of detective stories suggests it’s actually (in fiction) quite easy to get away with murdering someone in a hospital, especially someone who it’s not clear is going to recover. You don’t shoot them, obviously. Also a good idea to make sure there aren’t any eccentric Belgians, little old ladies, or monocle-wearing toffs around.
Yeah, all you have to do is stop paying the bill, or get an insurance company to deny treatment. They do that often enough that 20 bucks in someone’s pocket ought to be enough.
There are significantly more ways to kill someone on life support than shooting them with a gun.
But how many of those ways is a cop going to come up with while in the middle of guarding/plotting to kill someone else?
And then carry out after shooting the first guy in a “fight over the gun” without drawing any attention in the ensuing panic and still being back in the first room ready with his story before security can respond.
It also assumes that Blaine told them that he was lax enough with their secrets that the kid found evidence of the mob involvement.
Cops aren’t known for their creativity, but they can look up how hospital serial killers have done it without being noticed until after a long time.
or, you know, just mess with the life support so it’s not longer effectively supporting life.
I’ve definitely seen it proposed, and it’s certainly possible.
Sort of depends on what Willis wants to do with Asher, because I don’t think you come back from that.
Yeah, it’d be only able to end with Asher leaving the strip forever.
I’ve had my suspicion. Asher might have directed them at Blaine, to keep him from blabbing to his grandfather or ratting to the feds. But he would have only told them the second part. And Mike had been shouting in public he knew about the cops on the mob’s payroll. The cops could have gone after him, to tie up loose ends, with or without Asher’s explicit direction.
But his noticing AG (and possibly looking for her at roller derby) suggest he might still be involved.
“Shouting in public” in the middle of the night in a mostly deserted area. I guess someone in a nearby building could have heard?
not so late there there’s not still people around outside. https://www.dumbingofage.com/stooge/
I’d say to big of a stretch for a corrupt cop on mafia payroll. But if the mafia is involved then it would be simple.to put a doctor or nurse on rotation. Inject something into the I.V. fudge the paperwork regarding cause of death and autopsy and cremate before anyone thinks to look closer.
I mean you delve into true crime and doctor/nurse serial killers have been doing that kind of shit for way longer than I’m comfortable knowing. Top of my list is Harold Shipman, Michael Swango (admittedly terrible at it), and many nurses male and female. It’s scary easy.
Did he hear about it, or is she currently, and he just… knows?
He saw her in costume and somehow didn’t think she was Sal.
Wait, that wasn’t Sal?
No, it was definitely Sal. Sometimes people like to troll and say she’s not Amazi-Girl, despite all the evidence and explicit depictions of her taking of the costume.
To be fair, not everyone has access to the Secret Patreon, which shows Naked Sal changing into her Amazi-Girl outfit.
Thanks for clarifying; I was really confused for a second.
See this strip.
Not currently, check the tags (and cheek blush).11
Ethan and Asher were in the lobby when she tangled with the costumed dork. I think they made eye contact even.
He was right there. Standing with Asher in the commons.
Aww this is a perfect strip for a Shortpacked anniversary
Hey, you know who else died hard?
I’d say Toe Dad but I think Blaine took him down pretty easy.
Hans Gruber
The best Christmas movie villain.
please don’t say he’s here to pester the staff about transformers toys they said they had on the website, but not in stock. . .
That sounds more like a Duncan thing to do instead of Ethan.
Yay, they’re talking!
So glad I’m mot the only one.
I know I’m a Shortpacked convert and not a Walkyverse guy but it’s so nice to see Amber and Ethan being friends again. It’s slow going but I missed them.
It feels appropriate that I am currently opening up some GI Joes while reading this.
(Croc Master and Fiona, and Junkyard and Mutt, respectively. Yes, I bought them for the animals they came with, primarily.)
Happy birthday to the universe!!
Long may it reign!!!
^^ <3
Happy birthday Shortpacked!
Sonic's there in the back!
ain't much in this aisle
so let's call Ultra-Vac!
Did you know, every day is the universe’s birthday! The real one anyway. Due to relativity and time dilating at different rates through the cosmos, the big bang happened on every day of the year simultaneously.
This may sound like a complete tangent, but this kind of spacetime disaster stretching into opaque infinities is exactly how making comics works.
Since Shortpacked! ended (not counting sporadic april fools strips) on its tenth anniversary and today is its twentieth, that means it’s now been dead for as long as it was alive. Have fun with the existential despair!
…oh no sonic has breached the comic, now DoA fanart is gonna go from 99% inflation fetish art to 99.9%
wait what?????????
… pure hypothetical, how much would fan games account for percentage-wise in that metric?
Colored-pencil drawings on DeviantArt make up the lion’s share of that figure.
it’s funny how “lion’s share” has come to mean the majority of something
however, apex predators like lions being at the highest trophic level in their ecosystem means that of all life-forms therein they in fact have the least amount of energy available to them in the form of food
The expression comes from one particular fable where different animals hunt together and the lion successfully intimidates the others to get the lion’s share.
Yeah, even in ecology it could be seen as top predators like lions getting the first share of a kill before leaving it to scavengers like hyenas and vultures.
the kill… of fauna, which lions are limited to on account of being obligate carnivores
their prey has much more energy available to them in the form of flora, not to mention flora themselves have the majority of energy available of all lifeforms in the ecosystem in the form of soil nutrients and of course light from our sun XD
Eh, patriarchy likes to mess that up, just like the “alpha male” thing.
Happy 20th, old man.
Here Amber reminds me of many species of the beloved and graceful goby. A tranquil, noble fish, that spends all day within its traditional burrow side by side with her man (man-fish?), gazing upon the distant heavens with big old-fish eyes and a slight resting frown. Later it will venture forth to devour the weak or explode into terrible violence when somebody trespasses in its domain.
If you throw one of those fish, is it considered rude to shout “Goby”?
can we get a character tag for sonic
Only if Mando gets one.
Let’s not forget ol’ Raph!
HAPPY 20th, SHORTPACKED!
Congrats on 20 years! That is amazing!
Happy 20th Anniversary Shortpacked! (Wild )
Watch over these idiots, Mando.
happy 30th to shortpacked
sorry, 20th
You come to us from Teh Future! [tm]
How are things in 2035? (i’m a-go out onna limb and say ‘not so great’)
Hey Willis!
I’ve been getting feedback from people I know on and have written up a new, 100% technology-words-free guide for BlueSky users, showing them how to give permission for Mastodon users to follow their accounts.
They’re telling me this version is much better:
https://solarbird.net/blog/2025/01/16/hey-bluesky-users/
Basically, it takes two clicks to give us permission to follow your BlueSky account, and it doesn’t involve interacting with anything other than BlueSky.
I followed you back on Twitter before I bailed because Musk made his intentions clear, and it’d be nice if I could follow you again now that you’re out. I hope you’re willing to consider it.
(I don’t intend to keep bringing this back up – it’s just that my first how-to on this was apparently more complicated than I realised, thanks to user interface decisions by BlueSky that makes things like “find accounts by account name” more difficult than one might expect. So now that I wrote this new two-click guide, I figured I’d try again. And oh, yeah – happy 20th for Shortpacked! the first comic of yours I found. ^_^ )
well hot damn imma a queer-ass indie dev so i hella doin this
the more decentralized social media is, the better
Oh, are you on BSky? Nice.
For people on Mastodon, Federated WordPress, Pixelfed, and so on, I have different instructions. It’s the same idea tho’:
Follow the special account @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy
If you don’t know how to do that: copy @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy into the search box, hit enter. The profile will come up; click “follow.”
Done. ^_^
Great, we’ve reinvented FidoNet.
Not really; I mean, this connection is a little Fido-like, but the Federation is point-to-point like the web or email (as opposed to store-and-forward like Fido), and BlueSky is … basically centralised. It can theoretically be more distributed and maybe at some point it will be; people are trying.
Anyway, the intent is “make something a billionaire can’t buy and turn into a fascist propaganda and disinformation fountain like Elon Musk did with X.” Mastodon isn’t like that at all, and won’t ever be; BlueSky… could be like that, even if it’s not like that yet. And hopefully it will be.
Bluesky is thankfully open source
meaning that if some asswad billionaire “buys it”, literally anyone in the world can take the source and use it to spring up their own copy and we all just go there XD
SquidwardAlarmClockCloset.gif
It is, except.
There are three things which are currently super-centralised. One is identity. Yes, you could clone it, but switching millions of people onto a new identity handler is… not easy.
Two is search, but that’s basically tied to your Relay; changing Relay will change your search, so that should be okay, once you have the new Relay up.
The new Relay is… hoo boy.
There have been a lot of discussions about how much it’d take to run a new, full Relay. Not the little partials and test Relays that have gone up, but a real, full one.
One attempt to number this out when BlueSky was a lot smaller was $55K or so a year. That’s nontrivial.
The new organisational attempt to put up a new, full, second Relay – Cory Doctor’s involved, Mozilla is involved, a lot of people are involved – is estimating
FOUR MILLION DOLLARS
to get it up and running.
That… that’s a lot.
I mean, that was kind of their plan, right? To make search work better and to preserve timeline order across many users, funnel literally everything through a single pipe (a Relay) for distribution, but allow multiple of those large pipes, each one of which would be very expensive but could be run by different companies and/or organisations. E.g., Cloudflare might run one, Mozilla might run one, etc.
But you’ve got to have like $4M to start one up, looks like.
That’s a big barrier to entry.
Whereas the Federation has no equivalent concept. Every instance does its own delivery, like with email. The timeline order thing, turned out, was not actually a problem; search over here is a lot better than it used to be – a lot better – but yes, BlueSky’s will always be more comprehensive.
I’m not sure that’s worth the tradeoff, though, not gonna lie.
I mean, don’t get me wrong: I’m not rooting for BlueSky to fail. I want multiple systems up and running.
But “open source” – like Mastodon, like Misskey, like PixelFed, like Frendica – isn’t the be-all and end-all.
Everything that runs on ActivityPub scales well up and down. You can start a fully functioning instance that talks to people for literally zero marginal cost if you have some hardware lying around and unmetered internet with a spare fixed IP. I did it. It cost me zero because I had those things.
BlueSky seems to scale up well… but it doesn’t scale down well at all.
$4M to start moving messages if BlueSky gets evil.
That’s a lot $, and I really hope the BSky userbase never needs it.
my two cents:
1. Be it what could become of BlueSky, or Mastodon’s lack of accessibility to a majority of social media consumers, Tumblr’s censorship policies, etc, as of 2025 there simply is no single “good” social media platform which is going to solve the problems created by what’s become of Twitter. In any case, decentralizing (i.e. NOT having our content creation and activism majorly on a single platform such as what we unwittingly did with Twitter usage) is our best bet.
2. the sooner we all start working towards democratic socialism, the better @-@
First, briefly: Mastodon’s onboarding is MUCH easier now. Very much easier, mostly by making “picking a server” an optional activity and defaulting to mastodon.social, the one run by the big nonprofit in Germany.
That said:
I think One Big Platform is honestly a bad idea.
I want many smaller platforms that can talk to each other. I think ActivityPub is better at that than ATProto, but both are trying it and I hope they both work out.
And I hope everyone doesn’t try to go to One Big Place ever again, because we can see how that’s worked out, and the answer is badly, and I think in large part that it’s just plain a bad idea. Let’s not do that anymore.
In other words I think we basically agree but I think the whole “one big platform” idea is fundamentally flawed and I kinda get the impression you don’t, it’s merely impractical because billionaires. But I could be wrong.
As for two, you can be the democratic socialist and I can be the social democrat and we can have very civilised debates in some better version of the world… and I just realised that this separation is almost exactly the same one I’m talking about in my previous paragraph, which is hilarious to me. Wow. Amazing xD
“[I]mpractical because billionaires” describes too damn much of currently proposed sensible fixes.
re: one big platform and socialism,
there are many kinds of socialism, ant not all them necessarily entail 100% centralized command economy if that’s what you mean?
if only because socialism is a *goal* without any fixed set of policies to achieve it — specifically, that of seeing to it that the capitalism and it’s resulting social order which results in billionaires being able to vote with their money is abolished entirely
Wow. Yeah, that sums up my problem with modern internet socialism pretty accurately. Not only is there no agreed on way to reach the goal, but the goal itself is just “end capitalism”
I guess we’ll work something out to take it’s place once that happens? What could possibly go wrong?
one thing’s for sure, we can expect things to go very wrong should the late capitalist social order which is basically feudalism with a 21st century coat of paint is allowed to continue where it’s going 0-0
heck, as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out, the United States is a mixed economy of “socialism for the rich and the white, rustic free market capitalism for poor and racial minorities”, and was a democratic socialist himself whose views were unfortunately white-washed over time
also, @thejeff, socialism has literally always been that way since the beginning
in Russia Revolution 1917, there were actually multiple socialist parties at play with varying stances on centralization of the economy, worker cooperatives, the need for violent coercion (with democratic socialists are markedly opposed to), religion, etc.
You don’t get to hear much from them because Lenin and the Bolsheviks had all other socialist parties executed in favor of a one-party state, if only because militarism and absolutism have been the norm for Russian politics since at least the days of the Mongolian Empire.
Fair that it’s always been that way.
Good to know that after the glorious communist revolution sweeps the old order into the ashes of history what we have to look forward to is years of open warfare between socialist factions.
A hollow voice whispers, “usenet.”
Ahh, the ancient times. The age before ours. I think Tolkien wrote of such times in his 700,000+ words-long historical documentaries.
And you thought the original Eternal September was bad…
What do you mean “original” Eternal September?
It’s still September 1993. September 11462nd, 1993 to be exact.
The original Eternal September is the one you just described.
I’m talking about a theoretical, even worse one when creatures of the modern Internet decide to invade.
Email is store-and-forward. Take a look at your Received: headers sometime.
The ability to load-share and internally-route mail internally within a site or even subroute it to domains from within your domain in a way that happens to involve some store-and-forward type activity does not make the (E)SMTP protocol fundamentally into a store-and-forward system any more than the ability of UUCP to single-hop direct-deliver a message in rare to unique edge cases made it a point-to-point protocol.
The primary operating mode of SMTP is domain to domain, without having to be routed explicitly through one or more third-party handlers as was done in pre-SMTP days of bang paths and worse. The sender and/or the recipient systems being able to choose to internally bounce a message around a while for co-hosting, load-distribution, filtering, spam-checking, and/or de-payloading purposes does change that fact one whit.
That wasn’t my definition of store-and-forward but, okay.
again: “Time is a flat circle.” :p
i mean other than the convenience of ordering online i’m sure some places would be accomadating enough to order it for that store specifically too and have it on hold for you unless it has to be a specific comic book shop as opposed to target which is more for like groceries/a general store lol
And , ‘official’ merch aside supporting the franchises and such i’m sure there are ppl in the community making good quality stuff tho stuff like full on figures and plushies arent’ as common as like, a keychain or so. (wonder if ‘garagekits’ would exist, i know therea re some for some ‘anime’ and vocaloid charas)
Honestly I’m pretty fucking sick of, say, Amazon’s bullshit. I would really like to be able to get things like computer parts and 3D printing supplies and locally, while at a still-reasonable price.
But now, Fry’s moved up here, drove all the locals out of business, then enshittified itself and closed and now we’re just SOL and I’m just hoping that sooner or later we get a Micro Centre or something. Sure, BestBuy has some stuff, but they’re bad at everything and the price different is not 10-20%, which I’d pay in a heartbeat, but like 40-80% and that’s insulting.
So please keep going in and looking at stuff occasionally, Ethan. Maybe you’ll get lucky. And maybe the store will stay alive.
Have you tried the thing on Etsy that lets you cut/extrude plastic pop bottles into filament? I could see that being a cheaper alternative. You’d be limited to clear, brown, or green depending on your pop of choice, but it’d be something.
I follow those projects – there have been a few, and they’re neat! I might play with it someday.
But for my day-to-day operations I want plant-derived filaments like PLA and PHA, partly because of the lower toxicity, but mostly because these plastics are medium-term carbon stores. All the carbon in the base filament material comes from plants, and those plants got it from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 1kg of PLA filament is like 2.7kg of carbon dioxide removed from the air, which is pretty neat.
And the current state of PLA is genuinely pretty good. Much better than it was when I got into this a few years ago.
(I just wish the original filaments.ca hadn’t gone away. They had a custom PHA which was a huge advancement in PHA, and I wish I’d been able to grab some extra rolls before they went under. The people who bought them haven’t revived that line and I don’t know that they will.)
oof the fry’s near my neighborhood shut down, which is a shame, other than some pokemon games/plushies i think i spent more on their inner cafe or so while my dad browsed the electronics , but yeah would be nice if stores were more reasonable
Nobody really does layaway or rain checks anymore, but you can order things online and have them shipped to the store for pick-up. You usually don’t pay shipping that way, either.
Does Ethan not know about Amazi-Girl being a distinct personality from Amber? Alternately, does anyone know and I’m just misremembering her friends knowing?
Ethan knows to some degree – they had a big blowup about it over Mike at the hospital. I don’t know that he understands really, though – and that’s a very different thing.
I think he’s using “being Amazi-Girl” to mean “running around in a mask getting into fights”, which is something Amazi-Girl, the alter, had largely stopped doing in favour of roller derby.
“And the artist is drawing us in a toy store”
“Some habits die hard”
Technically, this is a Target, and a poorly stocked one at that.
Alas toy stores no longer exist.
Like malls or bees.
https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/it39s-the-biggest-toy-store-there-was
Shortpacked forever!!!
Can’t two girls sharing a meatsack have hobbies?
It’s bonding time. A way to develop friendship.
Happy anniversary, Shortpacked! This strip really brings the nostalgia.
You can blame Amber’s habit on roller derby. You can blame Ethan’s habit on… going outside?
Nothing beats the instant gratification in a physical store. Some habits die harder.
I love when Willis works the updates and manages to update in anniversaries!
Happy 20th Anniversary!!!
And for those that were there back then.
Damn… we are old…. <.<
*hugs*
Sonic is either staring at Ethan’s butt, or trying to see in his pockets.
Trying to see if his pockets are full of butt.
he’s looking for a monster that can fit in his pocket
There’s a higher-than-zero chance that Sonic x Ethan fan art already exists.
Checking for the Rings
that they do
If Ethan is a Batman fan in a comic where people don’t age, does that make Shortpacked’s Ethan comparable to The Dark Knight Returns’ Batman? I’d read a revival where he goes back to the toy store and fights the newest manchild customer in the mud.
The One Where Everybody Returns?
I am glad Elon Musk didn’t buy Hasbro because the thought of him owning Transformers would like someone kidnapping Willis/Ethan’s kids and sending him photos.
Oh gods above and below, I hope he never ever learns about rpgs and wants to buy Hasbro and pull his billionaire-bullshit on D&D or ttrpgs in general.
Fortunately, the potential for techbro profits just seems too unlikely.
Oh he threatened to do it to D&D but then forgot about it. Thank Paladine.
2nd panel: I rather going to see in place than buying on-line.
That’s me with bookstores.
It’s kind of fascinating to realize that it was Ethan’s Dad who was a G1 Transformers fan now. Ethan would have grown up with an entirely different one.
In her defense, Paul started it
So it was 20 years ago, today, David Willis started a comic aboutGalasslorunningashopfortoysthatweren’tforplay!(their collectors’ items!).
Or something like that. Too Boomer?
Is this from an old TV show?
The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Album and first selection.
That’s not an old TV show, you burglar of virtue, it’s a musical album.
I love DOA, but I do have great nostalgia for the days of ShortPacked and those big-box toy stores that spawned it. Sigh. Good times. Need a KB Toy fix now. Dammit.