There are a few cats in my house that I don't legally own. Jackie is one of them. She came in as a foster with her sister and I was never able to come anywhere close to taming her. And there is also an extreme lack of feral cat colonies to relocate cats like her to.

So she lives here. But we don't own her. She's technically in the custody of a local rescue.

She has free reign to go outside whenever she wants through the cat door and come in whenever she wants. Every once in a while we will have to trap her in the bathroom to give her any worm medication she might need.

It's rare for me to see her on this side of the house. As soon as she sees me seeing her she runs and hides. My wife tells me that she can give her a little bit of petting as long as she's filling the food bowls.

Otherwise she is a ghost cat. A thing normally seen out of the corner of your eye. Not something you observe.

I wanted a newsprint sketchbook so I could just do loose sketches without caring about wasting good paper. Except it turns out that newsprint sketchbooks are stupid expensive $20+ for large pads.

So I grabbed 50 sheets of 15x22 inch packing paper from Walmart for $5, sons scrap cedar plywood and some twine and made one. It sucks. It works. Minimum viable and all that.

But I had to test it. Nothing says "let's be prepared to ti throw this away by drawing a symmetrical subject with a brush pen.

My wife says she is going to color it.

I needed a cheap sketchbook for just penciling stuff out and not wasting good paper. But newsprint sketchbooks are ridiculously expensive.

So I decided to make my own. I grabbed some cheap packing paper from Walmart. $5 for 15x22 inch news print. The closest size on Amazon is 18x24 and it's $20+.

A little plywood and some string and I've poorly bound my first book. I am both proud and ashamed of it.

Cedar plywood. Because that's what I had on hand.

It's been one year since the illegal Trump tariffs were put in place. Almost everything you buy is more expensive now. There are less manufacturing jobs in the US now than there were a year ago. There are less factories in the US now. You didn't get a Tariff rebate check. Other countries have started making trade deals between each other and avoiding US goods.

Feeling liberated yet?

When you go to select a picture to save it now only offers a copy option. So now you have to take a screenshot and crop it manually.

The select screen is fundamentally broken.

The flashlight button was a simple on/off from the swipe down. Now it's got a sub screen. Done doesn't mean "done using flashlight" it means "done using this sub screen". It's a whole extra thing that never needed to exist.

Let's just roll back to the way it was. Because this is horrible. Decreased functionality or unnecessary extra steps.

Charlie is the twin sister Tasselhoff and littermate of Lucy. Charlie will be there for you when it's time to go to bed. You're going to wake up several times during the night and she is going to be there. Purring. If you rub her belly she will try to bathe you.

Sometimes you can hear her scream because her ears bother her and she will scry until it hurts. It's not mites. It's not ear wax. It's just the thing she deals with. But despite that, she's always up for a good rub.

The passing of Sam Kieth got me thinking back to an overdue drawing. We never got a drawing of the three man states of Julie Winters together.

Micron 03-08, A5 sketchbook paper.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44705607