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Gasoline Alley, 2/28/23

One of the fascinating things about the current state of AI is that in science fiction, we imagined that robots would be able to dryly give ultra-correct answers to concrete questions but struggle with nuance, emotion, and (for some reason) contractions, while what we have today are chatbots like ChatGPT that will respond to your questions in fully idiomatic English paragraphs full of confidently delivered vague bullshitting and outright errors. Similarly, I think it’s funny that this is a strip with a talking bear that seems to be fluent in English but gets hung up on the idea that the bear might not understand some pretty basic idioms, when it should be focusing on laying the worldbuilding groundwork for the coming Human-Bear Wars, in which our ursine foes combine their massive strength with their newfound ability to communicate abstract concepts to one another to become an unstoppable fighting force.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/28/23

Remember, Snuffy only recently awakened his father from a Rip Van Winkle-seque sleep that lasted for who knows how many decades, so this punchline is literally true and very poignant. Pappy Smif is a man ripped out of his time! All his contemporaries are long dead, as is every detail of the world he thought he knew.

Dustin, 2/28/23

Hey, were you worried that Dustin’s parents don’t have much of a social life? Well, they do! It involves hanging out with other old people who also hate and resent their children.

Dennis the Menace, 2/28/23

Wait, is it supposed to be somehow menacing when Dennis reveals that his mother thoughtfully tidied up the house before company came over? What … what are we even doing here, guys.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/26/23

This whole Truck-Wanda thing has been slow-burning in Rex Morgan for months now, but somehow it’s only now occurring to me that this is in fact the strip’s second “courtly older gent finds romance with a gal who owns a diner” plot. One is fine, but two is indicative of the sort of sick fetish that I don’t care to see played out on the funny pages where children can see it.

Dennis the Menace, 2/26/23

We make fun of Dennis losing his edge, but Mrs. Wilson is actively seeking out some menacing. She needs someone who’s willing to say “These cookies suck ass, old woman; you’re losing your touch,” because she needs to know if she is, in fact, losing her touch.

Family Circus, 2/26/23

“Almost as if a large, spherical object is being repeatedly bashed against the wall! Welp, guess we should continue to not investigate this and hope for the best [winks]”

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Hi and Lois, 2/24/23

Welp, I guess we all knew this day — the day when Dot and Ditto from Hi and Lois stand in the middle of the street staring at a relatively realistically drawn mangled squirrel corpse, making terrible puns with vaguely philosophical expressions on their faces — was coming, eventually. We knew we’d be looking at some poor little rodent with cartoonish Xs for eyes and a tire tread across its smashed gut, and wondering how we got here. But I at least thought we had more time to prepare.

Dennis the Menace, 2/24/23

Ha ha, it’s funny because the Wilsons are some of the last bio-humans left alive after some kind of cybernetic uprising! For some reason, these AI intelligences have chosen not to eliminate George and Martha, but instead pester them to death with irritating fees, possibly because Dennis himself designed their algorithms to create Mr. Wilson’s personal living hell, achieving maximum menace even at the expense of his own life.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/24/23

“And you can’t even begin to imagine the depths of her contempt for me!”