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OH Scale
To access distant parts of the project, I ended up building a regular-scale passenger train inside each rail.
Title text: To access distant parts of the project, I ended up building a regular-scale passenger train inside each rail.

    Explanation

    This comic references the HO (or H0) scale of 1:87, commonly used for model train sets. Due to a typo, the ratio values were switched by accident, becoming 87:1 meaning the trains, tracks, and all other pieces are 87x the size they would be in real life, resulting in a humorously and impossibly large[citation needed] model. To reflect this, or perhaps as part of a similar error, it therefore has been nominally called "OH Scale". "Oh" is also a usual spelling for a common spontaneous expression of surprise, such as might be emitted by someone seeing such a scale model for the first time.

    HO scale is 'half of O' scale. O (or, originally 'zero') scale tends towards a 1:48 scale, depending upon the vendor, where 1/4 inch on the model equals 1 foot in real life. HO scale models are therefore around half the size of O scale models.

    The title text further expands the joke, saying as the model rail is so large he had to build a regular sized train within it to get to far portions of the project.

    Model rail and its size constraints have been covered previously in 878: Model Rail.

    Transcript

    [A two-story house is sitting in a a plain surrounded by several assorted trees, the highest of which rise to double its height. To the right of the house, taking up most of the panel, is a large metal bar (a rail), resting on two giant railroad ties (seen end-on) to which it is anchored with track clips; the bar is about eight stories tall, and the clips are comparable in size to the house. A scaffolding tower leads to the top of the bar. Atop the bar is a huge, incomplete wheel, with the left half and the bottom quarter of the right completed. The wheel is approximately fourteen stories tall and has scaffolding going up both its sides (presumably to hold it in place) and up the incomplete portion.]
    [Caption below the panel]: Due to a typo in the plans, I've been building a 87:1 model train set in my yard.

          File:Codex icon speechBubbles color-progressive (v2.6).svg   View comic discussion



    Edit this week's pick!

    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
    When I look into your eyes, I see JPEG artifacts. I can tell by the pixels that we're wrong for each other.
    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

      Error creating thumbnail:

      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:

        The explanation could use some copyediting and reorganization, it is not polished and does not feel cohesive.
        Add an image to illustrate JPEG artifacts
        Better explain the meme this comic is based on and the context behind it.
        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.

      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.

            File:Codex icon speechBubbles color-success (v2.6).svg   View comic discussion

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