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| Fault Taunting |
 Title text: One of the first things they teach you is to NEVER play with the geology toy over a mantle hotspot. |
Explanation
Tectonic plates come from the titular theory that explains why sections of the Earth's lithosphere move, which is the rocky terrain that covers the planet. Such of its driving forces are defined to identity how these tectonic plates move. In this comic, someone (probably a geologist) describes three of them to an audience, but only the first two are genuine:
- Slab pull: a force exerted by a subducting slab, which pulls higher parts of the slab downwards.
- Ridge push: a force that occurs when the rigid lithosphere slides down the hot, raised, mechanically weak asthenosphere below a mid-ocean ridge.
As presented in the comic, taunting seems to be the act of dangling something to tempt the plate to lunge upwards in an attempt to grab it, as if it were a cat chasing a toy. This creates a reverse fault that allows them to study the layers of geology it exposes. Geological faults do not really form in this way, since the Earth's crust has no motivation to chase after any kind of bait.[citation needed]
In reality, this would be extremely dangerous, with the force of the rising fault behaving not unlike an earthquake. The characters in the comic seem unbothered by this. It's possible that there has been some miscalculation by them, since the dip of the fault (the angle from horizontal) appears to be about 60°, but a thrust fault (which they supposedly have set their taunting device for) should have a dip of less than 45°. The dip angle is what distinguishes a reverse fault from a thrust fault.
The title text lists a further danger. It advises not to try this over a mantle hotspot, as it would presumably result in a volcanic eruption that spews molten lava everywhere.
Transcript
- [A cross-section of a portion of the Earth is seen from a distance, with four layers shown. On the surface is a large device resembling a typical fishing-rod-style cat toy, but so large that the people next to it appear as mere specks. Two helicopters are in the air around it. The helicopters are probably included to offer some sense of scale. A voice comes from the specks to the left of the device.]
- Voice 1: The key to exposing new geologic layers is understanding the three forces driving plate movement: slab pull, ridge push, and taunting.
- [The giant fishing rod starts being wiggled by a hydraulic activator to make the toy dance around in the air. Another voice comes from the left of the first voice.]
- Voice 2: Taunting? What do--
- Voice 1: Initiate thrust fault pattern!
- [The toy continues to wiggle around in the air. A diagonal fault starts to appear underground.]
- Sound effect: RUMBLE
- [The toy continues to wiggle around in the air. The land at the right thrusts itself above the rest of the land.]
- Sound effect: LUNGE!
This Week's Explanation for Improvement
As part of the Explanation Improvement Project, each week the community selects one older, neglected, or otherwise stagnant explanation to expand and polish together. This week's pick is comic 331: Photoshops; help us by editing its explanation!
To get involved with the project, you can also nominate an explanation that you think should be improved, or vote on current nominations!
| Photoshops |
 Title text: When I look into your eyes, I see JPEG artifacts. I can tell by the pixels that we're wrong for each other. |
Explanation
|
Welcome to This Week's Explanation for Improvement! Anyone is encouraged to help explain comic 331: Photoshops; click here to get started! If you are new to wiki editing, you can read our editing FAQ for guidance. Here are some suggestions for improving this explanation: .svg){kind=icon} The explanation could use some copyediting and reorganization, it is not polished and does not feel cohesive.
.svg){kind=icon} Add an image to illustrate JPEG artifacts
.svg){kind=icon} Better explain the meme this comic is based on and the context behind it.
.svg){kind=icon} Add parallels to today's AI image editing. |
This is another comic in the My Hobby series. It plays on the then-popular internet meme "This Looks Shopped". Adobe Photoshop is a popular image editing application that was first launched in 1990, and it reached its peak in popularity around the 2000s as the industry standard for editing graphics. The verb "photoshop" (as in "to photoshop") is a verbalization/denominalization (informally known as verbing) of the noun "Photoshop", referring to the act of using editing software to digitally alter an image, often to make the image look more appealing, dramatic, or to trick people online. Its derived adjective "photoshopped" and its shortened version "shopped" are applied to an image that has been manipulated in this way. One particular popular usage of Photoshop is image compositing: combining two or more images together into a single, seamless picture. This allows the digital artist to create humorous and/or falsified scenarios, like making someone who does not hold a rapier hold one. Adobe Photoshop is still considered a prominent image editing service, but has since lost its monopoly in the market.
Cueball insists that real-life items can be digitally manipulated, even though it is generally not possible to do this to actual physical objects outside of a computer[citation needed]. Megan claims that the sabre she found is a 19th-century heirloom, but Cueball is insisting for fun that the sabre is in fact photoshopped, presumably for fun or to rile Megan up. He then goes on to cite the wrongness of the shadows as why the sabre is photoshopped. This is an especially bizarre claim to make, because real world objects generally cannot cast wrong shadows, unlike a photoshopped image might.
Alternatively, calling the artifact "photoshopped" could be Cueball's unique and strange way of suggesting it's a fake. The joke could also refer to the paranoia some internet users have when trying to discern whether images online are real or edited, suggesting that this behaviour might extend into real-life situations, mistaking actual physical objects as "photoshopped" because of how petty such people can be.
This comic also unintentionally (probably) foreshadowed the rising and unavoidable presence of AI image creation and editing on the internet, several years after its publication. However, manipulating images on social media to create misleading content has been and still is very commonplace. Today, people would often accuse content creators or websites of using images generated by AI, as creating visual aids and content this way is considered lazy and minimizes the purpose of human artists. There are a lot more layers to the debate with AI creating digital media, which are thoroughly explored in this article.
Identifying both photoshopped and AI images both follow the same base principle of examining minute details for inconsistency. With photoshopped images, it can include inaccurate shadows (as mentioned by Cueball) and differences in quality in sections of the image[actual citation needed]; with AI, the best tell is inconsistencies with reality.
The title text contains the second part of the internet meme, the complete text of which is: "THIS LOOKS SHOPPED / I CAN TELL FROM SOME OF THE PIXELS AND FROM SEEING QUITE A FEW SHOPS IN MY TIME." Most people have seen this from the popular image file format JPEG, which uses an image compression algorithm that works by converting an image's color data into small blocks, changing those blocks into cosine frequency patterns, rounding off details human eyes cannot see easily, and packing the final data tightly. This works remarkably well, but can sometimes leave artifacts (noticeable distortions or errors in the image) that are visible when zooming in far enough. Cueball is treating Megan's eyes as literal digital images on a screen, claiming that he can tell that he and Megan are "wrong for each other" based on the supposed JPEG artifacts and pixels her eyes are made of.
Seeing in someone's eyes that you're wrong for each other is a common poetic/clichéd expression for the experience, during intimate moments, of recognising from something unidentifiable about someone's expressions or wider demeanor that there is a lack of personal chemistry between you. It is not usually based on the physical appearance of their irises.
Transcript
- [Megan holds a sword, handle outward, to Cueball. A dark blotch is on the center of the blade, and hangs off it slightly.]
- My hobby: Insisting that real-life objects are photoshopped.
- Megan: This sabre is a 19th-century family heirloom.
- Cueball: It looks photoshopped.
- Megan: Huh?
- Cueball: Yeah, the reflections are all wrong. Definitely photoshopped.
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