Since my two busted vehicles are roadworthy again, it’s time to get back in the house.

Someone let water leak on this floor, and it rotted away. I haven’t messed with anything like this before, but it doesn’t seem like it could be too hard. I’m a bit surprised that the floor joists are further than 12″ apart. I wonder how far apart they are?

In other news, I have a job interview tomorrow – if you’re the praying type, put in a good word for me. I’d be a good fit for this job, but you never know, there could be a guy with 20 years experience in the same job applying. Hopefully that person has moved on to bigger and better things, because I’m on a long roll of coming up short.

Pg 55 got a record 10 likes though – first time breaking double digits!

Sometimes I think I overdid it with Yaoi Hokkaido’s character, and other times I think I’m understating the situation –

The global sex toys market size was valued at USD 35.2 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow from USD 44.5 billion in 2026 to USD 62.7 billion by 2030, at a CAGR of 8.7% from 2024 to 2030.

This comic isn’t meant to be a serious commentary on society, but – that’s a lot of sex toys, and I don’t see men bragging about owning one. Except for a few of the guys with silicone sex dolls, who are semi-anonymous online; and they usually take a ton of criticism for it.

It’s pretty sad when your currently active comic is about four times less popular than the old one that has been dead for longer than the current one has been alive. Counting book sales, the difference would be infinite.

I struggle to comprehend. Did people prefer the American comic art style to manga all along? Is horror better than comedy?

Well, I noticed that pg 55 is up to 8 likes now. Hopefully those are real people, and not A.I. companies testing the ability of their bots to click on websites. Bots are a quarter to a third of my traffic lately. Maybe they’re clicking stuff instead of just scraping.

Not perfect, but much better than pulling levels or curves around to try to turn a pencil drawing into an ink drawing. It won’t take long to correct these. Given the starting point was a badly lit photograph of a pencil sketch, not even a scan, I’m extremely impressed. It may not be worth committing the desk space to a scanner, when this works so well. A phone with the flashlight turned on might be a good compromise.

You all know how much fun I’ve been having blowing time and money on my brake repair job. I bought a new caliper from O’reilly’s today, one of their BrakeBest brand calipers. I should, at this moment in time, be done with this job. But here’s what actually happened.

See the little rubber boot on my old caliper bracket? I installed this myself, a couple days ago.

The O’Reilly’s caliper comes with a new caliper bracket and other hardware that I already have, but I’ll use it. However, what do we NOT have here?

Wow. WOW. I don’t know if they assemble these things on a line, or pay a drunk 5 pesos a day for as many brackets as he can rebuild – but someone forgot to install the caliper pin boots. If it was on an assembly line, the next person lubed up the caliper pin and installed the pins anyway, and then the next person bolted the calipers to the pins, and quality control passed it. Unbelievable. If someone had installed this the way it is, they’d have a locked up caliper in no time, and a ruined pad and rotor.

O’Reilly’s shows the boots installed on their website –

So, instead of drawing something you might want to see, I’m about to drive back into town and tell an underpaid O’Reilly’s clerk about it.

It might not have been the most responsible way to use my morning, but it’s done –

I’ll see what AI can do to clean this up later.

I’ve got a bunch of ideas for the next chapter. The maids didn’t get much time in this chapter. I will fix that. Things are about to get tough though, I don’t know what kind of update schedule I have. More than likely, very infrequent, so if I’ve built up any readership in the past year, it is sure to be lost.

It’s another dose of slice-of-life, for what it’s worth. Every morning lately has been like this – trying to fix some broken old thing before it gets too hot and miserable to be outside. I usually don’t make it, and I won’t today either. I might as well replace the caliper boots on this bracket as well. They aren’t torn yet, but they are 22 years old. So that’s more time down the rabbit hole.

I made a mistake last week and ordered the rotors and pads for the 2 piston caliper instead of this single piston caliper, so that’s more time and money down the rabbit hole. I’m kicking myself a little for that one, but, no one bats a thousand. I couldn’t guess how many parts I’ve ordered over the years. This is the first time I’ve completely screwed the pooch. I’ve got the right parts now, so I should be able to get this done today.

Yesterday I watched a video about anime fans duking it out over the question of how many female protoganists there are in anime, which reminded me that, at some point, I’m likely to lose a significant percentage of the readers I have (however small that number is); and it would happen if I was this kind of person, or that kind of person, or the other kind of person. So I will try to break it to everyone gently – this isn’t a picture of my Prius in the service bay of a Toyota dealership. It’s a 22 year old Chevy 4X4 truck that has to go off-road, not for entertainment, but because I will freeze to death in the winter if I don’t cut firewood. I will still be cold, but I’ll live, and the water pipes won’t freeze up and burst.

And now I’d better get back on that brake job.