Hourly Comic Day!

As previously seen on BlueSky! This year Hourly Comic Day coincided with The Superbowl!  Click for big, as usual:

And a special bonus epilogue comic!

"Gotta Catch 'Em All": My Adventures With the "Seek" App

It was around the time I was focusing my smartphone's camera on the fly swimming in my glass of wine that I realized I might have a problem.

 

"What are you doing, Trish?" a part of my brain screamed at the rest, "That bug is going to fall in and contaminate your drink!  What if you swallow it?"

So I fished the little fellow out and was very impressed when "Seek" helpfully identified the tiny creature as everyone's friend from biology class, Drosophila melanogaster.  "Seek" is powerful enough to recognize a nearly microscopic half-drowned bug.

And that is why it's my new obsession.  When "Seek by iNaturalist" works well, it works like something from my wildest dreams.  The ability to carry a tiny computer with built-in camera in my pocket has changed the game when it comes to my wildlife observations.  "Seek" changes it even further: aim it's camera at a flower or an insect or a shell and it will identify it to the best of it's ability.  If it identifies the organism to species, it'll snap a picture and add it to your list of observations.  You can also upload photos you've already taken; it happily identified even incredibly blurry digital photographs, and I've even had success aiming "Seek" at my vintage hard-copy photos from Discovery Island and St. James Park.

In other words, "Seek" gives you a photographic Life List.  And you can bet that my Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and I love having a very official-looking record of, if not every single living thing I've ever seen, then at least those I've photographed.  There are rewards for identifying certain numbers of birds or snails or dicots, and there are Achievements to be, uh, achieved, and they are all incredibly satisfying.  (Whether the game-ification of citizen science is good or not is a discussion for another day.  I'm fine with it since "Seek" is extremely kid-friendly anyway.)  Here's my rewards as of time of writing (a week ago), and... I'm equally impressed with and very terrified of myself right now. 😰

So there's what I love about "Seek".  Now let me tell you why I've also screamed and cried and sworn at it.  It is the best-worst app I've played with in a while.  "Seek" crashes on a whim.  It eats battery like nothing since the earliest version of "Pokemon GO".  And the blasted thing doesn't know what an Okapi is:

Okay, in fairness - a lot of humans don't know what they're looking at when they see an Okapi, more's the pity.  But then you get misidentifications like this:

That's... that's not a beetle...

A reoccurring problem I've had with "Seek" is that it refuses to correctly identify any of my many photographs of White-Tailed Deer, no matter the quality.  So then it goes and asks if this kangaroo is a deer. 😒

Now, thankfully, as frustrating as they are, misidentifications can be deleted from your record.  To end on a lighter note, the funniest incident I've had is technically not a mis-ID at all.  It's just... that's not what I was trying to photograph here?

And, since we're in New England here, I have to share my funniest ID so far:

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Art of the Day!

T'is a Catbird!  How Cute!

 

 

So, how about that "Matrix Resurrections" trailer...? O.O

Everything is Hell so Let's Watch "Saturday's the Place" From 1984!

Well, it sure has been a while hasn't it?

You might have guessed, given the wait between Blog posts, that your germphobe Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder suffering buddy Trish hasn't been having a very fun time during the pandemic.  And, you're right.   The past few months have been surreal.  Back in the beginning, when people were taking Covid-19 more seriously, almost everyone suddenly agreed, "Always have disinfectant spray or wipes. Use them to sanitize everything in your home and clean everything that comes into your home because your home is your Safe Place. Avoid public transportation and above all Wash. Your. Hands!!!"  

And there I was, already deep in the middle of a sustained anxiety attack for everyone I care about and incidentally also myself, thinking, “Normal people DON’T do these things?"

Because if I have to fill the bird feeders or ride the subway, my entire day centers around that because for me it is a Whole Thing.  My home is my Sanctum Santorum of Sanitary, so after such activities, I must go through a thorough dermatopic purification (hot shower) before entering.  Everything is a potential danger you must prevent somehow or Bad Things Will Happen and it Will Be Your Fault.  

What I'm saying is, in the early days of the pandemic, what people were freaking out about was my "normal."  (I and a few others were very quietly hoping that maybe, just maybe, OCD people would get a bit more sympathy from all this.  Or at least that most folks would start going over your phones with a wet wipe when you charge it at night because I honestly still can’t get over the fact that most of you apparently wouldn’t normally do that?!?)

But I don't want to dwell on that right now.  For the first blog post in ages, I want to post something silly and upbeat instead.  

And so, let me share the ridiculous 1984 CBS Saturday Morning Preview show!  I talked a little bit about these programs way WAY back in the Archaen Eon of my Blog, and I'm surprised I've never revisited them since.  After all, if there are things I love to write about here, two big ones are 1) Animation and 2) Unintentionally Hilarious Vintage TV Specials. 

 

So here's the preview special for the... honestly pretty bleak lineup for CBS in 1984.  The highlights were "Dungeons and Dragons" (better than I remembered), the then-brand-new "Muppet Babies" (not as good as I remembered), and Looney Tune and Charlie Brown anthologies series.  Lowlights include about a half-dozen cartoons based on arcade games.  Mediocre-lights are the "Shirt Tales" and "Get-Along Gang".  The IDKWTF-light is a live-action show I completely forgot about, kind of a precursor to "Pee-Wee's Playhouse", made by Sid and Marty Krofft, and starring Richard Pryor.  (When I need to tell a kid what the 90's were like, I usually tell them, "Monks had a double-Platinum hit record."  From now on, when I need to tell kids what the 80's were like, I shall tell them, "Richard Pryor hosted a children's show.")  

What's really interesting about this special, the reason I want to share it, is the "plot".  Janet from "Three's Company" is a reporter who hates hates hates cartoons but must write about how they are made.  And so Henry from "Too Close For Comfort" is going to show her.  What follows is more delightfully strange than you'd expect, but hey we get to see the cast of "Muppet Babies"!

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Art of the Day!  And now, totally botanically accurate humor.