Self-locating

Here's a pair from Charles Boyce's Compu-Toon about finding oneself or looking at yourself with a GPS:

Questionable GPS

A few months ago we had a nice story arc from Questionable Content by J. Jacques that featured spectacular views of Earth from space.  Today we have an installment of Questionable Content that involves a GPS joke.  The pink-haired girl in the middle there is an android so her GPS isn't something she's checking on her smart phone... she is effectively a smart phone... or more correctly an artificially intelligent sentient independently mobile .... entity... I don't think any part of her could be used as a phone.... and before her recent chassis upgrade she was about a foot tall.

So I'm not understanding why the car isn't autonomous. Maybe it's vintage.  Some of this crew seems to like "vintage"... although that usually means steampunk.

GPS Warming

In this episode of Bleeker: The Rechargeable Dog by Jonathan Mahood we have the completion of a story arc about Skip and his titular electronic dog getting lost in an icy "wasteland".  

Interference

Jef Mallet's Frazz having an embarrassing moment revealing his dependency on electronic devices.  But the strange thing is that this strip was from 2010... when it would have been possible to get the GPS on the smart phone... and probably a heart monitor app as well... and phones didn't interfere with those other devices anyway.  

I dunno, but I think Mallet may have wither stretched the tech point a little too far in an attempts at a punchline, or he could be revealing his own gaps in tech knowledge.

Grimm Positioning System

With the tech media abuzz about this month's new Apple gadget announcements I'm posting this Mother Goose & Grimm strip by Mike Peters from 2010 to remind y'all that the App Store is only 4 years old... and Android and Apple apps together constitute a $15 billion - $22 billion market already and smart devices are the fastest growing technology adoption ever. Faster, even, than the dot-com boom and social networking.

D.W.T.

Calvin Grondahl has this item about texting while driving.  I still think this makes a fantastic case for the quick implementation of autonomously-driving cars.

Beetle & the "GPS Lady"

These two strips from Mort Walker's Beetle Bailey ran several years apart, the first in 2010, and the second ran yesterday.  Yet the references to the "GPS Lady" seems like they could be part of the same story arc, where the GPS has achieved sentience and isn't terribly thrilled with the strip's main characters.. 

Is she attempting murder/suicide here?

Compu-Toon two-fer

I want you to have a look at this first example from Charles Boyce's Compu-Toon single-frame daily

August 2012

 .... and then click on this link to the one I posted last April (it actually ran September of 2007). Notice everything similar?:

September 2007

I don't mean to criticize this technique of cartoonists' liberal use of the copy-paste function in their art... heck, Dinosaur Comics is actually built around using the exact same artwork every single week for almost 10 years now and that webcomic is fairly successful.  I'm merely pointing it out here.  Some of the longer-running newspaper comics re-use art, text, punchlines, or even entire strips frequently enough, though at times the material comes off as quite dated.  There can even be a rather fine line between recycling art and establishing a running gag in a strip.  Billy's "pun-island" Sunday strips from Family Circus come to mind.

I will say, however, for a comic titled "Compu-toon", an awful lot of the equipment depicted in the strip is quite significantly out of date. Most of the cell phones shown in the strips are in the old clam shell style with the traditional keypad buttons. Many even sport antennas. And unless it's a joke specifically about oversized flat-screen TVs, pretty much all the monitors are the old, bulky CRT models. I should think that at the very least the newer flat monitors would be easier to draw.  He's even got jokes about texting where the characters are using laptops.  And why so very many "desert island"-themed comics which almost never have anything to do with computers?

It's not like this particular store setting is part of some running gag, though.  He's drawn other retail-establishment settings for other gags:

Maybe he's got one scene for phone stores and another for GPS counters n electronics outlets?

Sesame Street GPS

Another example of the webcomic Basketcasecomix by Kelly Ferguson.

Following the GPS too closely

I've heard of several stories (mostly about Germans) following their GPS units too closely. And there was that episode of The Office where Michael Scott follows the GPS directions into a lake:


Here's a news report of somebody actually doing the same:

The New Yorker: GPS two-fer

Here are 3 GPS-themed cartoons from The New Yorker:

Dean Vietor from August 2001

Roz Chast with 3 cards for GPS devices:

#1: When I'm driving in my car
You always know just where we are
You're never mean, you're always nice
My darling GPS device
How did I live without you?

#2 You and I are quite a pair
Together we drive everywhere!
Up to Alaska, down to Peru
Just like other people do!
Let's never be apart

#3 Roses are red, turtles are slow,
I'll go however you want me to go.
I trust your judgement implicitly.

William Haefeli from May 2000

Mapping Summer Solstice

I know we're a day early for a First Day of Summer post, but this pair from Jim Meddick's Monty. works better for a Tuesday Two-fer. The second one is deeply geeky with projections:

Backseat Driver GPS

I can't believe that it has been so long since I've posted and episode of the webcomic Basketcasecomix by Kelly Ferguson. GPS fun for everyone.

GPS Wallet

Compu-Toon by Charles Boyce.  I've got a few more of these Compu-Toons in the hopper ready for posting, and I'll get to them eventually.  But most of them seem to be of this almost-funny variety.

I think that I did see mention somewhere that sales figures for commercial-grade GPS devices were waning because so many smart phones now have this capability.

Socks GPS

Here's Over the Hedge by Michael Fry & T. Lewis gets looking for a sock with GPS.

Sponsored GPS

From Betty by Gary Delainey and Gerry Rasmussen. This has got to have already happened to one of you, yes?

It very much reminds me of a time a few years ago when I was driving in the car with my son and the conversation maneuvered itself into a place where he was explaining to me the directions of how to get to some place we had been talking about.  All of his directions were in reference to restaurants..  Things like "2 blocks past the Burger King" and "Turn left at the McDonald's"... only he wasn't only referencing fast food joints, he was also mentioning the smaller local joints... places I never noticed and often I had no idea which places he was even describing.  What's more, we had never, ever been to any of them.  We'd been to Taco Bell... a local burrito chain... and a food cart.... and that's it. We don't watch TV either, so he couldn't have learned of those places that way. But he was giving me all these directions using all these restaurants as if we knew all these establishments intimately.  I was a little spooked, and very amused.

Nagging GPS

A GPS option that you may not have heard about yet from Andy Singer's "No Exit" :

Ice cream tracking

In the news lately has been stories about consumers being tracked by marketers through mobile devices, online activity, etc., etc., etc. In this episode of Bleeker: The Rechargeable Dog by Jonathan Mahood we have a similar kind of concept going on.

Jesus GPS

In keeping with this week's earlier religion-themed post, here's another:

Liahona GPS

This may require a bit of an explanation.  The Book of Mormon begins with the story of a family living in Jerusalem around 600 B.C. The patriarch of the family (Lehi, the guy holding the round ball thing there) is told in a vision to leave Jerusalem with his family and a few others before Jerusalem gets destroyed.  So they're all out there in the wilderness and one morning Lehi comes out of his tent to find a round brass ball thing "of curious workmanship" that they call a "Liahona" and it's got little arrows in it and gives them messages about where to go and what to do.  This particular painting is fairly well known amongst Mormons as it's the standard image used in Sunday School to illustrate Lehi and his family finding the Liahona.  In recent years more than a few people have (half-)jokingly commented about how the Liahona might have been a time-travelling GPS unit.