As President Lincoln here will tell you (from the funny t-shirt section) facial hair can make or break the man.  If you have the right face, a good looking goatee can do a lot for you.

Unfortunately, for certain types of men (and you know who you are) “growing a beard” is rapidly converted into an excuse to simply never shave.  Shaving is a key portion of looking sharp.  Also, if you grow facial hair quickly it can add a great deal of cool variety to your look.  But like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil.

First of all, the most important thing to remember about facial hair is: not shaving is not the same as growing a beard.  A beard should be cultivated and have a direction, not simply letting hair grow out of your chin.  Honestly, having a beard should always be more work than being clean shaven.

My face grows a natural goatee of sorts, and for years I thought that not shaving is all I needed to do.  Then a friend of mine showed me some stuff and I saw an immediate improvement.  First of all, I learned to even it out and keep the sides nice and thin, for a better look.  I had to trim the mustache to keep the hairs from hanging into my mouth, and shave the portions under my lip to either side of where the soul patch would be if I were to grow one.  Overall, a dramatic improvement.

At one of the malls near my house there is a place called The Art of Shaving.  If you have no idea how to deal with the hair jungle on your chin go there or somewhere similar and have them show you how to trim and maintain your face.  Buy whatever products they recommend.  If there is no such place nearby go online and find some tips and instructions.  Seriously, a good beard is an investment in time.  Good beards=Tony Stark from the last Iron Man movie, Riker.  Bad beards=Grizzly Adams, Sasquatch, most of the men from Deadwood, anything that could be accurately described as a “flavor saver“.

As for the decision to grow a beard or not, that is a matter of personal preference.  Some guys grow facial hair and have incorporated it into their persona to the point where you wouldn’t recognize them without it.  Others (like me) grow one until they get board.  If you are of larger stature a beard can be a great idea, as it will hide certain features and give people something to focus on.  It really depends on your face.  I would recommend taking a picture of your face, grow (and trim) your beard, and take another picture in as close to the same light, distance, and angle as possible.  Then ask every woman you know (not strangers) for their hopefully unbiased opinion.

If you have decided not to grow a beard, then shave every morning.  Fortunately if you are following my advice you will have recently showered and will be in your bathroom in a grooming frame of mind.  By the way, for the first 12 years of my shaving life I would shave before showering.  Then a girl in my dorm laughed her ass off at me and told me that if you shave after your shower the hot water makes the whiskers softer and less painful to shave off.  I am embarrassed to admit she was right.

Personally I recommend shaving cream and a safety razor.  Electric razors never seem to get it as complete as possible.  At one point I thought I would be more bad ass if I got a classic strait razor and learned how to do it the old fashioned way, but for the most part that was just an experience in bleeding.  Stay away in my opinion.

By the way, the bitterest disappointment of my life is that my face is incapable of growing good sideburns.  If you can pull it off cool, but your sideburns should never be allowed to grow out far enough to be in danger of occluding your ears.

Next post: Grooming Part 4 Scents

I will admit there are guys out there who are able to go with wild, unkempt hair that somehow attract women by the bushel, but I am willing to bet a decent amount of money that most of the people reading this post are not in that category.  Trust me, I grew my hair out to pony tail length twice and never accomplished anything but looking like a skinnier (relatively speaking) Meatloaf.

The simple rules for hair are fourfold: cut, wash, condition, and comb.

Cut your hair.  Honestly, the shaggy look can only be successfully pulled by a very small minority.  Like successful rock bands, for each success you see there are about 100 guys out there who are flailing madly with it (for bands it is about 10,000 failed band for each successful one.  God knows I have found enough while linking stuff for t-shirts like the band Mr. Blonde I found for one of the Reservoir Dogs t-shirts from the movie t shirt section).  Go with a clean cut look.  And actually go somewhere and pay someone a good amount for the cut.  Supercuts will not do.  I usually pay about $50 for a haircut ($40 for the cut, and I tip my stylist $10.  She is worth every penny) and it took me a couple years to find someone I trust.  Also I find sitting in an actual salon listening to the women talk about guys very enlightening, if you catch my drift.  Most good hairdressers can look at your hair and come up with a good look, so let him or her have free reign.  If they screw it up go to someone else.  Incidentally, there is no excuse for mullets.

Wash your hair with shampoo.  I hesitate to say this, as I am sure there are guys out there who will take this as license to wash their hair once a month, but the fact is you shouldn’t wash your hair every day.  Natural oils are the best thing for your hair and keep it looking good.  I wash my hair every 2 or 3 days (I still bathe every day, of course).  Use good shampoo.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

After you have washed your hair use some conditioner.  It will add body and health to your hair.  I like to leave my conditioner in while I wash the rest of my body, then rinse it out.  Don’t forget that part.  I have.

Finally, comb your hair neatly.  My hair tends to lie nicely where I comb it for most of the day, but if I want to look particularly sharp I will use some gel.  If you are not sure how to best comb and/or style your hair, part of the $50 you are spending on your hairstylist can readily be applied to some instructions on what to do with your hair at home.

Finally, if you are unfortunately losing your hair, spare yourself the pain and do not get into plugs, spray on hair, or the worst hair decision a balding man can make, a combover.  You are not fooling anyone at all.  The thing to do is simple: shave it off.  Go skin.  You will gain respect for having embraced your condition, as well as saving a ton of time and money on washing, combing, and cutting your hair.  Also you can make snide comments about hair loss being caused by all the excess testosterone you have oozing out of your pores.  Seriously, just take it off.  The guy who did the Mensa lecture shaves his scalp and has no problems with women.

Ash is clean cut.

Next Post: Shaving

Ok, let’s get into the basics, and by that I mean the basics of how this is going to proceed.  In an effort to avoid being nerd raged spammed I will lay out where I am coming from and what I expect from those of you who might read this.

1.  None of these are directed at you specifically.  Don’t send me “I never do that” emails.

2.  Almost all of the mistakes I will be talking about I have made.  I am not kidding when I say I have learned all this the hard way.  Like this World of Warcraft shirt says, I am classically trained.

3.  If I advise you to do something and you think “There is no way women respond to that” before emailing me please take the time to ask a couple non-nerd women and see what they say.  You will be surprised, especially on the grooming issues.

4.  These tips and guidelines are very general and situational.  I am sure the girl you are interested in is an exception to every rule I lay out here.  However, if you have been courting (stalking) her for more than a couple weeks why don’t you try some of these things before posting a “Dave you’re an idiot” response.

5.  With regards to questions about my posts I will be happy to reply as well as I can but do me a favor and keep your questions as general as possible.  I don’t need to hear all the gruesome details of the object of your unrequited love (“and then the third time I saw her she was wearing the same shoes as the second time but different jeans…“) and like I said, each person is different and only you can interpret her actions and comments (although if you take my advice, you will not).  If you have a situation describe it as succinctly as possible and I will be happy to respond.

6.  While I support any lifestyle you may or may not choose to follow, I am straight and therefore my knowledge base is more or less geared towards trying to date straight women.  Lesbians may find some worthwhile advice here (although not really, I think.  I lived with two lesbians for a while and there is a whole different interaction I could never really understand), but gay men and women seeking straight men (honestly, if you are a woman having trouble dating nerd men than you have problems that go beyond the scope of any blog.  Just go to a comic book convention) I will not be able to help as much.

7.  Finally, if you are a woman reading this blog and feel the need to comment, please do so.  However, I feel that comments on the “Women never do that” level will more or less be a waste of time.  My advice has been forged on the anvil of dating pain and it will take more than a blistering response to change it.  I think if you read thoughtfully you will find, as the Mensa women at my first lecture did, that my advice is rather pithy and will actually make the men who follow it easier to date for you.  Know that I do respect women but am in all things a realist.  If you have a question about men and how to date them feel free to post and I will give you my best advice, but it is kind of out of my scope.

Next Post: Part 1 Grooming

So one of the nerd groups I belong to and keep from the general public is Mensa.  This is the High IQ Society (actually, it is the society of people good at taking tests and not afraid to broadcast the fact that they are smart) and claims to represent the top 2% of human intellect.  Of course, Einstein (as seen in this novelty t shirt) was considered developmentally disabled as a child and then later turned out to be a super genius.

By the way, Einstein happened to be quite the ladies man, so there is hope for all the brainy nerds out there.

Anyway, Mensa runs events every year and invite people to speak.  A good friend of mine and I were invited to present “Dating For Geniuses.  A Mensan Guide to Meeting and Dating Women“.  We were considered the “hot bachelors” of the group (lol) and more or less threw a bunch of basic dating rules into a 45 minute power point presentation.

The actual presentation was a little frightening.  We had as many women as men in the audience, all offended by the entire concept of the presentation and looking for an excuse to castrate the two of us.  Most of the guys, however, fit perfectly into the “desperate single nerd” demographic we felt obligated to help.

Anyway, the presentation went off extremely well.  We received any number of compliments from both men and women, and were invited to return the next year and do another seminar.  Overall, a good experience and one I am happy to reproduce here.

Next post: Part 1 the Ground Rules

So if you have been reading my blog you will know that for the most part I have been writing about what is going on or just randomly crossing my brain.  I have bee thinking about where to take my blog in an “organized” manner.  I was talking with a friend last night and was reminded of one thing I can share with my nerd friends, and that is meeting women.

“Wait a minute” I am sure you are thinking.  “Don’t most of your blogs and shirt descriptions talk about how you didn’t date at all in high school or college and are constantly being rejected?” That is pretty much true (this Buffy t-shirt from the television show t shirts is a good example of this) but I the truth is I am qualified to speak on this subject for two reasons:

The first reason is the best way to learn something it to fail at it.  I learn to be a better Warhammer player more from losing games than winning them.  The best way to learn something is the hard way, and trust me, when it comes to dating I have done everything the hard way.

The second reason is that most of those stories is about me getting rejected after dating someone for a while.  The fact is I am actually good at meeting women and getting them to go out with me a couple times.  The problem is I am a lousy boyfriend and get dumped by them all.  So if you are looking for advice on how to maintain a happy relationship you will have to go somewhere else, as I am not at all qualified.

So I will give you my hard earned tips in hopes that you will glean something and potentially procreate, as I am afraid the human race is breading itself to stupidity as in Idiocrasy.

Next post: How I got mixed up in this.

So a friend of mine taught me some stuff on Search Engine Optimization and that short lesson has translated into a ton of work.  Oh, well.  Life is still great, even if at the moment I feel like I’m on the Failboat from my World of Warcraft t shirt section.

Going to build more terrain for the Quake City Rumble, the Warhammer tournament we are running in a couple months.  Really I should be working on the paint for the army I am running, as well as a new display board.  I promised myself I would be working on it this weekend, but here I am working on my site.

Also going to see Kick Ass again tonight.  Really looking forward to it.  I’m hoping I can pick up some subtle nuances that I missed first time around and blog about them tomorrow.

I have been working an a whole slew of new Star Trek t shirts and am starting to burn out on them.  I do have a huge tolerance for Star Trek but even I have my capacity.  I think I will let them sit until tomorrow.

Going to see Kick Ass again tomorrow, I think.  I have some guys who want to go, but another friend of mine wants to go see it in the city and I think I am more inclined to go with her.  I see those guys every week.

I just got my first shipment of lunch boxes, coffee mugs, and drinking glasses.  I need to figure out how to ship them.  Another great weekend project.  I also think I found the display units I want to use for our next trade show, but I don’t know if they will arrive in time.  We’ll see.

Anyway, that’s it.  Still have a ton of work to do.  Talk to you all soon.

So I am looking for store fixtures to use at our next comic book show and saw a listing on Craigslist in Niles, Ca.  I’ve never been there, even though it’s only about 20 miles away.  I drive down there and it’s like teleporting into another dimension.  The street I was on had 3 bars, all of which could be considered “dive”, a bead store, a few other oddball shops, and at least twenty (20) antique stores.

No joke.  They all seemed to be about the same size, shape, inventory, and employees, except for one that I stopped off in and got a huge chuck of fudge.  It was very cold (for California), windy, and raining like hell, but I was so fascinated by the surreal nature of the town I walked all the way up and down the main street.  It was like being in the midwest 80 years ago.

I also saw the local Merchants Association, which is located in an old streetcar (again, no joke).  There was a record store that only sold vinal, a roach coach taco wagon, a pizza place, and a nice looking Italian place.  In spite of being there at lunchtime, the whole place was definitely sleepy.

I met a guy at the store I was visiting who was interested in my site.  He was a big Justice League fan so I told him about this new JLA shirt I uploaded last weekend to the comic book t shirt section.  I hope he checks us out.

There have been hundreds of different comic book movies made over the years, but few movies pale in comparison to the depth and majesty of the original comics.  The most successful comic books made into movies are those that draw little from the comic books other than the actual characters.  Having a director with a love for the comic books and vision helps a lot too.  For example, the first two X-Men movies are regarded as being quite excellent, with the directing of Bryan Singer.  However, when Singer departed to make Superman Returns, the X-Men movie series turned bad with all haste and left those wearing Wolverine t shirts in dismay.  Other good comic book movies made in recent years include Spiderman 2, Hellboy: The Golden Army, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Iron Man.  Three of these films were released in 2008, in a year that would see a comic book film, The Dark Knight, win the first Oscar for acting, a nod to the deceased Heath Ledger.

Despite a smattering of successful comic book films, the comic books themselves are still what fans turn to for the purest and most enjoyable renditions of the superheroes and characters that made the series.

So I have been know to go off on irrelevant tangents in the past, but I think I hit a new high while working on this new Battlestar Galactica t shirt last night for the television show t shirt section.  Unfortunately I lost the full sized image, but will shoot another one tonight.

I really enjoy going off in weird directions on my descriptions.  It is a very freeing experience.  I start off on one thing but then it reminds me of something else and next thing you know I am talking about something completely irrelevant (yet, I hope, entertaining).  For example, on this shirt I started off on the shirt itself and ended up discussing the issues I have with the surf industry.  It all kind of makes sense when you read it.

Other than that, I have ordered a ton of replacement shirts.  As soon as they arrive I will be doing some new stuff that I hope will help out a lot with promotions.  I’m sure I’ll talk about it soon.