Here is a little rot I found next to the toilet drain –

In case you weren’t taught how to repair toilets either, the white plastic part is the top of the drain pipe. If you look on each side of the toilet base, there will either be a plastic cap (if it was installed right), or a bolt (if someone couldn’t be bothered to finish the job correctly, or didn’t have the tools to cut a bolt. Bolts come longer than they need to be.)

In the top right corner of the picture is a bolt that has been blackened by exposure to decades of humidity. The head of the bolt goes in that long slot – the head shouldn’t be lined up with the opening of the slot like that. Seeing it makes me think the pipe is installed incorrectly. The head can obviously pull out through the opening to the slot. Those bolts clamp the pipe to the bottom of the toilet, which they obviously can’t do if they can pull out of the pipe.

A wax seal gets squished between the drain pipe and the bottom of the toilet. The wax seal eventually breaks, and then waste water seeps out over your floor. Or, in this case, under the floor tiles. If it goes under tiles or a rug, you might not notice for some time that it is leaking. Which is what happened here, causing the floor rot. But, the fact that it is leaking is bad enough. You don’t want to call a plumber every time the gasket breaks. It’s a simple fix that can be done in an hour, if you have the tools and know how to do it. All you have to do is remove the water from the toilet (I use a shop vac with a water filter. I may get a dedicated wet vac, because swapping the dry and wet filters is a pain), unhook the water line to the toilet, undo those two bolts clamping the drain to the toilet, lift the toilet up and put it somewhere else (it will be dripping water). I like to put the toilet on 4″ blocks so I can work on the bottom, because the next step is to remove the remnants of the wax seal from the toilet and the drain pipe. Use a hair dryer to heat it up, when it’s melty the wax will come off easier. Then put a new wax seal on top of the drain pipe, lower the toilet back into place, making sure it is at a 90 degree angle to the wall and the toilet outlet is going into the drain pipe, and squash the toilet down on the wax seal.

Everyone should know how to do this. The wax seals are only a couple bucks, so the repair is practically free if you know how to do it. Lifting the toilet does require some physical strength.

If you were fascinated by that, here’s some wood repair.

The little bit of rot was more extensive than it originally appeared to be –

Structurally, I don’t think this is a problem, since the pipe doesn’t support the toilet. I dug out most of the rot and used Minwax Rot Hardener to harden the remaining wood. Unfortunately, it darkened the wood too – but the splotches are mostly under the toilet, and the areas that stick out beyond the edge of the toilet won’t be very noticeable.

I used wood filler to fill that hole in, since I don’t want waste water pooling up in it the next time the wax seal breaks. I’ll sand the filler down and put polyurethane over it. It should be fine.

In site news, supposedly site traffic goes up when school starts, so I’m looking forward to seeing if that happens or not.

I had this intriguing result with page 57 –

How can more people have liked the comic, than viewed the comic? That looks like the view count did break when the SSL/non SSL problem was fixed. It doesn’t make sense to get hundreds of views a day, but only single digit views on the main page.

More people spent a long amount of time on the site this week, instead of almost everyone bouncing in their first 30 seconds (not necessarily a bad thing – how long does it take to read a page? Not very.) So that’s another big positive.

Here is some more life news – I didn’t get the good job I applied for, in fact they ghosted me. So it looks like I’m going back into hard production work, and cutting back on my classes. So it will two years to finish college, instead of one. And when I’m out, I’ll be older again. It’s going to be next to impossible to get comic pages done, but maybe I can make videos on the long ride too and from work.

The woman in the glasses is onto something. A percentage of women checked out first, at least part of the time, when they got the only part of the male robot they need to be satisfied. In truth, cats, dildos, and a thankless job are a better deal for a woman than a useless, out-of-shape bum. I’m not wearing pro-male blinders. There’s a large percentage of men who would rather pig out, play video games, and find relief for their woes in self medication, than put in the work. And there’s a certain logic in that too – if attractive women don’t want you, why not coast through life?

But I think the thing missing from this conversation is, “What will men do when the work guarantees the reward?” When a man has put in the work to buy the car, he gets the car. When he’s put in the work to buy a nice house, he gets the house. What happens when every man who puts in the work to be able to support a family, can have an android wife and then have his kids through surrogacy or the artificial womb? Will he become a more productive member of society, because the reward is guaranteed?

Most of those female robots aren’t very good, but the one cued up here might pass in dim lighting. Some of the glancing expressions are hitting –

Now this is why I don’t like to let any other mechanic touch my vehicles. Do you see the problem –

The second caliper I got from O’Reilly’s was also defective. The rubber boot is not seated properly on the piston. Here’s what it looks like after I seated it properly –

Everything is like this now, so you’d better know what you’re doing and be able to spot problems.

I wish the thumbnail was the big booty doll. Click for the big booty doll –

I’ve got to admit, the Bruce Lee and Heath Ledger Joker dolls are kind of cool.

I’m laughing now, but in a few years, with a couple more generations of improvement, androids may well be the norm. Once you’ve seen a few couples fall out of love, and realize marriage is a business over the long term; an android can make a case for itself. It’s going to get interesting when these can move, communicate, and generally be useful. I’ve struggled to cover jobs that need a second pair of hands. Usually I figure it out, but it would be great to have someone to hold a board while I cut it, or hold drywall in place while I screw it in. If the android comes across as real and can do assistant work, it would cross over from something I can do without (sexbot only) to something compelling.

It is realistic, but that’s not a good look bro.

That hip motion could make you feel like a pathetic loser from a million miles away –

Somehow, it doesn’t get any better.

Here’s the next thing that decided it was more important than the comic. This shut off valve for the toilet does not entirely shut off anymore. It is 50 years old. It did well, but this is the end of the road. I can’t put poly on the floor while I have to have a bucket sitting on the floor to catch the water this valve is letting drip through. The store had about six different versions of this valve. I found one that looked like it would work, but the threaded section on the new valve is too short to screw into the nut on the bottom/left of the valve in the picture. Maybe we shouldn’t have made so many different versions. As a homeowner, I want to quickly replace this part and get my toilet back into service. Not pay a plumber $2-300/hr and wait for them to show up and find they don’t have the part on their truck.

I think the new valve can be plumbed directly onto the pipe at the wall, if I cut the 90 degree bend off. It would be great if I could find an escutcheon for that little pipe, and cover the hole in the wall. I’m going to go see if I can turn one up.

I did find some time to begin writing the next chapter. Merry and Marty have an origin story now. Naturally, it doesn’t spend much time on them. Most of it happens before they are made, but finally, they will be a bit interesting.

I haven’t heard back from the company I applied to work at. They said they’d let me know by the end of the week. I didn’t hear anything either way, even though I texted HR, so I’m going to move on. That job was just what I needed, but there’s no point in dwelling on it. Maybe I can get a little further with the online job.