Pencil drawing in progress. My scanner is busted. These crappy pics are the best I can do until I can get a new scanner –

Here’s a story idea I was developing with the abandoned Instagram channel. During night shift on the Yaoiprize, the crew turn off their holograms and do all the horrible, awful tentacle monster stuff to the only Japanese girl on the ship. Because they have a sense of the theatrical, they created the alter personality “Kowai Hokkaido.” Kowai doesn’t know she is Yaoi, Yaoi doesn’t know she is Kowai. Kowai tries every night to defeat the tentacle monsters, but they are just playing with her, and it only ends one way.

This must be the first pencil drawing I’ve done in a decade, if not longer. I don’t think I’ve even done one real, finished drawing of any of the Way of the Waifu characters. I think there are very loose sketches from when I was working out the character designs, but that’s it.

The final number of unique visitors for the sixth was 1,442, a new record. It’s hard to believe these numbers will last, but if they do, July will see over 30,000 uniques. I’m telling myself that can’t be real, or doesn’t reflect interest in the comic; but it would be foolish to ignore the possibility that it is real. That would be more than enough for something to go viral. Not a guarantee, but the stage is set.

I’ll add a vote button for Top Web Comics in the next couple days. That will be a more meaningful measure of interest in the comic, and should bring more readers in. I’ve thought about reopening my Patreon, but I wouldn’t put any paying tiers on it at this stage of the game. I’d just use it as an indicator of interest, for now.

I’ve landed a new online job that is likely better than any of the factory engineer jobs I would find around here – if I could get one at all. I may be looking at a year, or more, of 12 hour shifts as a Production Operator before getting to move over to engineering. Twelve hours a day, however many days a week the factory needs (You can go a long time with no break in that line of work. A long time.). I’d likely have to start out as a temp, making half of what I’m making now, for three months. Then I could be in a situation where the management is more interested in keeping me as a Production Operator than moving me to engineering.

I’ll finish my degree, but my plan, as of this moment, is to be doing a combination of my current online job and the comic after I graduate. I can give the comic time to keep growing, but I won’t be able to work on it much until it can be at least a part-time job. I’ve been writing the next chapter in my head, and I’d love to go full-throttle on it, but we’re not there yet.

They don’t have the long ears yet, but here’s our iconic female Legolas dressed in green –

And here’s a guy overusing his sound effects board –

AFAIK the UBtech dolls don’t have any movement in the body, but the video shows similar robots walking around rather well. I don’t think those vids have anything to do with UBtech, but I’ve only started down this rabbit hole.

Now that we’re here, how did we get here?

It appears our first-world legal systems are having a full-hookah pipe-dream of magical thinking, one where the everyman sighs quietly in defeat and embraces cuckoldry. Was it too much to conceive of a system where the biological father of the child has to pay for his child? I still wouldn’t want some other man’s kids running around my house, but it would take some of the hurt off if I were paid for it.

I still don’t want his kids at all.

I imagine I’ll spend my last years like Scott Adams. If I were a Muslim in Iraq, I could go buy a couple 9 year old Yazidi slave girls; but I’m an American and if I tried to start a relationship with a childless and fertile adult woman in her mid twenties I’d be more of a villain than the Iraqi Muslim is in his country.

It isn’t hard to see how the math for waifus and husbandos works out. Secular legal systems and social norms don’t support lifetime monogamous relationships, and that isn’t going to change.

I see no purpose in a marriage that doesn’t produce my children. I’m also not terribly interested in building a “rotation” of “pump ‘n’ dumps.”

There’s a point of view that marriage should be viewed as a business. I don’t love the idea of robowaifus, but if one can suck the poison out of my leg when a rattlesnake bites me; and generally be useful, than there’s a strong business case for it.

Maybe-good news! The mystery of the non-SSL traffic is solved, and it appears to have been “real” after all. There was a bug on the web host’s end, and it has been squashed.

But, can this much site growth really be real? The increase has been incredible. The number of unique visitors for June was 6,765, more than doubling the 2,342 unique visitors that showed up in May. But the number of unique visitors for July is already 5,177. It’s only taken six days for July to almost be caught up with June. July 3-5 averaged around a thousand uniques each, and the sixth is 800; but the final number usually doesn’t show up till around noon of the following day. So the sixth may have had more.

The growth is too much to be believed, but it’s been a steady trend for months now –

Those numbers only reflect the SSL traffic, non-SSL was larger up until July.

On the other hand, we have this number from Toocheke (a WordPress plugin for comics that this site uses) –

Pg 47 went up on Thursday, so 47’s number reflects five days of views, but sometime on Sunday, around the time the web host bug was fixed, the page count hit a brick wall. Before the brick wall, every time I refreshed the page, 47 was up another hundred views. After the brick wall, hours would pass with no views. 48 is performing the same – averaging less than one view an hour. Is that the site’s actual traffic? Or did the web host fix break Toocheke?

As the saying goes – “If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.” I’m expecting the rug to be pulled out from under me . If there were a bunch of comments flooding in, I’d believe the traffic increase reflected real interest in the comic. There must be some other reason for it, and it’s going to suck when I find out what it is.

AI actor Tilly Norwood set to star in first feature film

Film actors should work on buffing up their theater credentials, because it’s difficult to see how the long-form movie format, with live actors, survives and remains profitable in the future. I haven’t watched any long-form content in years. I’m not sure what the last long-form show I watched was – maybe the first two seasons of the anime where the guy gets reincarnated as a slime.

That said, what is the point of having the same AI face appear in multiple, unrelated movies?

The only thing Tilly might offer is an AI model with superior consistency. It’s an issue, but I’ve got a few different shots of Dreilide and Stuka in Bar Fight. The only consistency issues that bother me are in the logo on their shirts, which sometimes gets garbled. AI often has trouble maintaining the consistency of Dreilide’s ears, and I couldn’t get AI to animate her ear movement; but every other issue was something I could work around. All of these issues will likely disappear as AI improves, and I wouldn’t bet on it taking a long time.

I promise to post something more entertaining later, but, here’s how I spent some good drawing time –

I’ve been able to address this part of the house, so this much of it looks o.k. – but if I pulled the camera back, you’d see all the parts that still aren’t.

The switch that was here had been dysfunctional for decades. The original switch had trouble holding the “up” position. Last night, I finally got around to that item on my long, long list of fixes. This new switch is wired totally different than the original 50 year old switch – which was a three-way switch (two switches controlling one light). So we’ve got two extra complications here – the new switch is different because a ground was added, and it’s harder to understand how it works because it is a three-way switch. It took several trips to the internet, and several wrong attempts at wiring the new switch, to find the correct arrangement of wires.

And now it works right, and with the new metal wall plate it’s super pretty –

If you made it this far, here’s a pro tip – most cleaning jobs can be made easy with the right brush. That won’t sound like much until you have to apply it, then you’ll realize how big a difference such a mundane piece of knowledge can make in your life.

These little outlets and switches collect dirt and gunk, and look awful. A toothbrush and rubbing alcohol will get the dirt out, and the alcohol will evaporate away.

Most of you will never live in a log cabin, but if you do, a tire brush with bristles shaped to go around a tire works just as well on logs. Logs are terrible about collecting dust, and there’s no other good way to clean them.

I know this isn’t exciting, but, the absence of practical knowledge will have you beating yourself up over things that aren’t actually hard to do. Then you’ll end up living life poorly, for no good reason.

Since we’re moving to a civilizational model where everyone is alone with their internet buddies, we’ll all need to learn how to do the practical stuff. There’s no more splitting chores with a spouse anymore, for most of us. Most of us will have to learn it all and do it all.

So when you go into a store, look at their brushes. These things punch far above their weight. Some good ones show up once, and never again.