ses4j

Merlin is the most widely-used audio recognition app. It's amazing, try it out. BirdNET is another project (also affiliated with Cornell) that works in a similar way. This project is about locally installing BirdNET.

eBird is a great resource for the casual birder looking to learn more. When I started, I used it to find out where to go to look for birds and what birds to expect once I got there. It also is an excellent listing tool, and listing in eBird helps you identify by knowing what's likely to be seen. As you get more into it, you'll be really glad you kept early lists in eBird. Push past the registration, it's worth it!

I do. You will.

Cities tend to have a concentration effect on birds, especially during migrations. Central Park in NYC, for instance, is one of the best places in the world for birdwatching in spring and fall. Birds migrate at night, and at first light, gravitate to the first tree they can find. Since NYC is concrete for miles and miles, a very wide area's worth of birds all funnel into Central Park (and other parks, of course) and you get amazing quantities and varieties. The same is true for parks in other cities.

And to loop it back around to a video game if that's more in your comfort zone, there is Fantasy Birding where you pick a virtual location every day and are credited with seeing whatever real people really reported in that location that day.

Only the truly intrepid fantasy-bird themselves.

eBird. It is the defacto site worldwide for logging bird sightings. It is free, the app is simple and powerful, and you are contributing to science every time you use it. (It is a product of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and they and other scientists around the world use the data heavily for many purposes). Also, it has lots of tools that help you learn the birds (and birders) in your area - localized histograms of sighting frequency, custom lists of birds you haven't reported yet, lists of nearby hotspots...

As far as identifying, get a field guide (Petersen's, Sibley's are good in the US). There are good forums with talented people helping if you submit pictures on reddit.com/r/whatsthisbird or on Facebook "What's this Bird?" group.

It was better than everything that came before it for it's purpose, so people were happy with the improvement.

But then every time they change something, unless it is just 100% obviously better for everyone, like a speedup, it's gonna annoy some people.

Well said.

From a personal/financial perspective, you're probably best just walking away: hiring lawyers is expensive. But walking away silently enables them up to repeat their crimes. Reporting them criminally and giving them a record will make it harder for them to victimize more people.