Hard way to wake up- to the artificial call of a cassowary as performed by Raleigh the Raccoon.
Raleigh is very convincing.
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I decided to carry on with The Buckets and Hubris as though the world they live in doesn’t have a COVID-19 outbreak.
Mostly because:
1) Not That Funny,
2) Hopefully, in a couple of years, all the COVID cartoons won’t make much sense. Like looking back on French Political cartoons by Daumier now- you see ’em, you read ’em (or the translations) and you say, “Huh. I don’t get it.”
This is more serious than I like to be here, but I really hope that the stress and strain I see online and in people around me (when there are any) becomes incomprehensible sometime soon. Kind of like hearing about the 1918 Flu epidemic and not, until recently, being able to picture how much it changed lives for months and months. Historical events are tiny points that have names and dates. We personally don’t remember the spiraling months of death and fear from 100 years ago. We remember “Flu Outbreak of 1918. Killed a lot of people.” Those people lived all the little weirdnesses we’re living now, and ours will go the way that theirs did. Honestly? I hope this outbreak doesn’t go far enough to get a historical name. I hope it’s a chapter in the next century’s epidemiological textbooks, with the kind of information that will help next time, and doesn’t stick around as a historical milestone of misery.
In fact, if you’re reading this in some archive of Hubris comic strips any time after, say, 2021, I hope you’re baffled at how morbidly serious I just got about something that you have no genuine feelings of loss over.
Well, for some of you, this isn’t a new comic, and I apologize.
I still don’t have my system down for doing up cartoons well in advance and then posting them to Patreon, then posting them here and … keeping them in proper order, apparently.
Anyhow, here it is! Again, for some of you.
Well, assuming nothing has happened between the time I’m writing this and the time it posts… The website will be a week out from the big bad crash.
Thanks to all of you who tried (and the ones who succeeded, especially) to get word to me that there was a problem.
I’m fairly pleased that we got it worked out as fast as we did. It wasn’t looking good at first.
Honestly? Drawing and re-drawing that goofy green table and chairs is not my favorite thing in the world, but y’know… It makes for a jolly looking cartoon.
Sorry for the delay, troops! Big storm here yesterday (check out the radar animation they put up on Washingtonpost.com- the storm looked like an explosion on the radar. Anyhow, no internet here at Hubris central. I’m doing a workaround by running up giant bills on my cell phone.
I don’t usually use spelled-out harsh language, but I trust I won’t offend anyone today. We’ll see if this cartoon makes it onto GoComics in a month or so. Oh, the times are changing. Fifty years ago, comic strips made fun of national and cultural stereotypes but didn’t use any salty language at all. These days, we try to be sensitive with the social and cultural issues, but ‘ass’ is in common parlance. What’s the world coming to, I ask? What?
Why teddy bears, anyhow? I mean, I’ve heard the stories about Roosevelt and whatever, but… Bears. Man, those things are dangerous!
I got one of those audiobooks of the year’s best science fiction. It had a story in it I liked a lot. Now that I look at this cartoon, I think I liked it more than I realized.
In it, a computer programmer had given her sister a beta-version language translation software suite that was ramped up to account for the fact that her sister communicated in a couple of different Sign Languages. The software would translate sign, and whatever other languages it could recognize, or learn, and display a CGI avatar of the person with a synth voice as though it were speaking American English aloud.
All well and good until, through a series of domestic vagaries, the woman’s daughter finds herself going through interminable conversations with someone while the computer flounders to understand the language of the caller involved. The avatar would repeat “Hello” and “I’m hungry”, but the caller never seemed to understand the responses.
Finally over days, the computer breaks the language and conversations get a little better. And, in the end, as you’ve possibly guessed, the avatar had been randomly assigned to a pet crow. The augmented and advanced language software worked like crazy to understand and translate a language, but the avatar imaging software was only concerned with making lips match American English words, and didn’t have a setting for ‘non-human’ face.
Good story.
Welcome back, Mr. Stuffins!
