I’ve been building this car with the idea that the show would be filmed inside the car – and it still could be, since the interior is mostly done – but perhaps this would be a better arrangement?

Pete Steele disliked bands that disregarded the visual side of their act, playing in their street clothes. I’m of the same mind. I see artists and writers making videos in a normal room in their house, not appearing special in any way. We’re supposed to be selling the fantastic, giving people something they don’t normally see. I put some thought into how I could pull that off with the stuff I have, and came up with this.

I’ve had this car for a third of a century now. It’s not the most desirable Charger (some people hate this body style), but it’s the one Richard Petty drove, the car he won the most with, and his favorite race car of the bunch. This one is a 72, which I believe is the first year Petty drove the Charger. 71 was the first year for this body style, but I don’t believe Petty drove that year. One of the drivers he employed drove the Charger in 71, while Petty continued to drive the Road Runner. I remember seeing footage of Petty getting passed by his junior driver in the Charger, and I believe the other driver went on to either win, or at least place higher than Petty. So in 72 Petty alternated between the Charger and the Road Runner, and I think he eventually switched to the Charger altogether.

I’ve read that racing provenance is what makes a car valuable, but these Chargers are largely forgotten despite being very successful in their time, and a little after. And they were driven by, arguably, the most famous race car driver of them all. Certainly the one with the best hat. They make good drag racing cars, and the front of the car is the same as the 71 Challenger, which Chrysler put a big effort into for Trans Am racing. So they handle well too.

Here’s a super cool road test from back in the day –

1971 Charger SE 440 – vintage road test

I’ve been building this one as a tribute to the King. It’s got his signature on it (I took the glove box door off and mailed it to the Petty Museum, where Richard signed it). The suspension is done, the brakes are mostly done, the interior is mostly done, and a lot of other stuff. I’m borrowing the color palette from Richard’s famous hat. Many have built Petty tribute cars, using the racing livery, but IMO Petty Blue and STP red clash rather badly. It’s not so bad on a race track, but it looks terrible on a street car. I’m planning to keep the car black, with the 71 stripes in gold, and gold rims.

I wasn’t planning to do anything with the comic, or the car, until next year. I was planning to spend the time between now and fall classes working, and replacing a couple of very bad floors in my house. But, there’s nothing to stop me from switching things up, if it’s justified. I could start making cellphone videos tomorrow. I don’t know how good that would be, but waiting for the best often means just waiting, with no best. Ever. Maybe there is a happy middle ground, or no one would want videos, so don’t worry about it? Maybe I should only draw the comic. If having my own website was the answer all along, I might not have to do anything else.

Well, it’s a mystery for now. Perhaps the answer will soon appear?

Almost all of my traffic is coming from the U.S., Japan and Brazil. That actually makes a lot of sense, since Brazil has the largest Japanese population outside of Japan. I believe what I’m seeing here is a strong indicator that the site traffic for Way of the Waifu is real after all, since these are the places where I would expect to find the largest audiences for English-language manga. The bandwidth usage makes sense as well, since most of it comes from the music and videos; which don’t have a typical anime look or sound. I wouldn’t expect them to be as interesting to a Japanese audience as the comic pages.

That’s the SSL traffic. Japan is nearly half of the non-SSL traffic, generating nearly as much traffic as the United States.

Logically, since there is no advertising for this site, and hasn’t been for over a year, all of the traffic is likely to be coming from “word of mouth” advertising. Which is the best kind, because it reflects real interest. But, I can’t find any mention of my webcomic anywhere. That could be partially explained if it’s being talked about on the Japanese speaking portion of the internet. It wouldn’t be easy for me to find. But, what about English speakers? Shouldn’t I see something, somewhere?

Well, you can see that I’ve tried to make my decisions based on evidence and logic – not wishful thinking. I haven’t been able to explain the explosion in site traffic, but I can’t disprove the realness of it, and I’ve tried.

We’re not talking huge numbers, but here’s the SSL for this year-

It will go over 2,500 for June, for sure, so June’s SSL will easily be six times bigger than March’s. AWstats is only showing 23 robots. Bots are supposed to shoot up page counts, but not unique visitors. Page counts appear to be scaling in proportion to uniques though. I’m no expert, but that doesn’t seem to indicate bot activity.

This looks more like someone made a social media post somewhere. If that happened, I’d sure like to see it.

Yep, let’s find out.