CatBus

Back to the Bacta tank for a second, I just noticed that in subsequent scenes, the Bacta tank shows up in the background a couple times, and it looks like it’s full of red Kool-Aid (or maybe Luke was just bleeding…a lot). I never noticed the incongruity before. I suspect with all the other light sources turned off, that tank would definitely cast a red glow over the surrounding area.

Jeebus said:

This is hilarious.

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/06/645177784/jury-fines-man-1-for-punching-charlottesville-rally-organizer

The guy could start a GoFundMe page to cover his fine one night, and wake up a millionaire.

You can also just give the translations straight to me without any timing, or just arbitrary timing. The translation is the hard part. Timing is adjustable.

The “template” Project Threepio timing is a little on the slow side by English standards, which makes it suitable for younger viewers in English, but can also accommodate slightly wordier languages (for example, IIRC LexX’s Finnish timing was slower than the template on a few lines, but was actually faster on most). Which means it is probably painfully slow for CJK languages, and still too fast for Malayalam (short story on this language: I gave up). Right now I’m working on an “even slower” standard which can better accommodate languages like Vietnamese, and I’m hoping this will also get Urdu workable. We’ll see.

chyron8472 said:

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

NeverarGreat said:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html

Even for the Trumpster fire, this is big.

I actually find this a bit disturbing. Trump won the election, and with the help of these people. Seems like they want their cake and eat it too. Also, it’s the Trump supporters always claiming that there is some sort of Democrat-led “deep state”, when actually if this article is to be believed, there really IS a deep state and it is entirely Republican. If they were truly patriots, they would come out in the open and say what’s right, not quietly benefit from something they know is sick.

Trump just called it “gutless”. He’s right.

Hard disagree. The person who wrote it is just letting America know that “there are adults in the room”, which while small comfort, is still a comfort that Trump isn’t allowed to completely ruin the executive branch of government. And the press is constitutionally given the right to not tell Trump who wrote it, despite Trumps protestations.

Not on the politics of the matter, but on the constitutionality of the matter, there are problems with whoever this guy is that go beyond Puggo’s criticism.

He says he didn’t want to invoke the 25th for fear of precipitating a Constitutional crisis, but he’s fine with a campaign of ignoring/creatively interpreting directives, misleading the President, and in one case, just snatching away a document before he can sign it and trigger a major and completely dumb-ass diplomatic incident.

The thing is: invoking the 25th Amendment is constitutional. There is no alternate interpretation. The cabinet acts, the President is relieved of his duties, and it’s done. Yes, it’s a crisis (or, rather, it marks the resolution of a crisis, depending on how you view it), but it’s no Constitutional crisis. It’s literally spelled out in the Constitution that this is how it should be done.

This other thing? The handy-wavey, “keep the buffoon entertained and try to shield the world from the damage he’s doing” thing? THAT’S the Constitutional crisis.

You have one job. I’m sorry it’s sometimes a hard job, and just being duplicitous is way easier, but you still have to do it.

My take is the letter-writer never seriously considered invoking the 25th, and all this hand-wringing over a Constitutional crisis is just a way to explain it away. This is all about making it appear like there’s someone sane in charge who’s not the President (flashbacks of Al Haig). Because there are midterms coming up, Republicans in Congress have spent the last two years covering for Trump, and making it look like there’s a secret Republican opposition to Trump is better than nothing, easier than actual opposition, and a pretty easy sell in the era of Pizzagate conspiracy theories.

PM sent.

“Diplomatic mission to Alderaan” is how Leia describes it a few minutes later. The choked rebel only ever says “diplomatic mission”, and AFAIK, that line has never been any different.

PM sent.

So, for guidelines, I started out by following the BBC guidelines (which are similar), but adjusted them to have a strong emphasis on readability for younger viewers. This means that, when given a choice, my subtitles opt to show lots of text for a longer duration instead of several briefer displays of short text.

Basically, if you’re making a new translation and want to stay within the project’s style recommendations, just use the project’s template files and that will take care of almost everything about timing, grouping, etc. The README covers a few other style issues. (existing Swedish subtitles do not entirely follow these guidelines because they’re pretty much straight from the GOUT DVD with only minor modifications)

As for the the NJVC Blu-rays, I actually do not specifically coordinate with that project. I just make subtitles that sync to the GOUT, and then they automatically “just work” with all sort of other projects, such as NJVC. By 11.0, this project will have well over 40 languages to choose from, and how to restrict that to keep within a 32-subtitle limit is up to the project owner. I will, however, be making a more useful guide for making such decisions in the README for those project owners. Basically it’ll be a little Javascript-powered table lookup thingee, where you say “I want to make a Blu-ray for Region A”, and poof, it lists the languages you’ll want to include for that audience. The trick is that Region B languages will exceed 32 on their own, so that region is further subdivided. Region-locking is a horrible thing and I wish it never existed, but it’s a concept that happens to be helpful here. So the NJVC disc author could decide if they’re going to target Region A, or Region B/Western Europe, or what. Once they make that decision, then they’ll have a consistent set of subtitles.

SilverWook said:

Some of those make it look like lost scenes from the movie! Not sure I can handle a hi-res shot of Itchy though. 😉

Curious there are no shots of Harrison Ford.

You had me at hi-res Itchy. Wasn’t going to look before, now I have to.

Yep, lots of good ones here too. I’m sure there’s some natural variability from place to place, but there’s also the matter of who left the biggest impression, i.e. aside from that one molester, how were your teachers? I can see how one or even a few particularly bad ones can make the whole lot look worse, and vice-versa.

You certainly don’t become a public school teacher because you avoid hard work, or just like the prestige and big paychecks. You may, however, not be very competent at it.

Oh, and for anyone making suggestions for improvements – if the number of changes is small, you can just mail in the lines to be changed. Our PM system here handles Unicode just fine now. Otherwise links to modified SRT files will work.

Next version is a big one. There’s a lot already done (added six new languages already!), but I’m still looking at potentially adding two additional languages, and improving eight.

Make that nine 😉 There’s plenty of time to send in some edits.

PM sent.

FWIW, this appears to be a working value for the resync script, to synchronize Project Threepio subtitles against the new and awesome Return of the Pug 16mm preservation:

Adjustments["PUGGO-ROTJ"]="0=-1.1#32:00=-0.1#37:00=+1.9#39:00=-0.2#44:00=+0.2#56:00=-1.2#1:02:00=+0.1#1:17:28=-1.2#1:25:00=+4.5#1:30:00=-0.1#1:32:34=+0.2#1:59:00=-1.0#2:02:00=+0.2"

As usual, this is for syncing against all the reels merged into one big movie.

There is a bug in the released version of the script for syncing SRT files, so I’d recommend either syncing graphical subtitles, or doing one more code edit, replacing this line:

Line=Line.replace(InTimecode,NewIn).replace(OutTimecode,NewOut)

…with these lines:

Line=Line.replace(OutTimecode,"XXXXXX")
Line=Line.replace(InTimecode,NewIn).replace("XXXXXX",NewOut)

If you don’t want to edit code, you’ll need to wait for 11.0.

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

I didn’t GOUT-sync the mono track.

It’s been so long, I can’t even remember… is the 16mm mono actually a different mix? Or just a fold-down of the stereo? I suppose the answer is somewhere back through the previous pages.

If anyone wants to GOUT-sync the mono, they should probably get the uncompressed .WAV files from me, rather than grabbing them off the DVD.

I’m definitely interested, and may have time to do the sync… just not right away. I believe it’s a different mix. Not a huge difference, but the “clinking chains” sound effect is completely missing from Jabba’s palace. So basically it’s the regular 83 mix, but with mistakes 😉

EDIT: I’ve sent a PM to Mavimao, since he handled the PSB mix so well, and showed an interest in this one earlier.

Right, but the 16mm mono track isn’t GOUT-synced, is it?

SilverWook said:

The Laserdisc audio isn’t good enough?

Not if you want the mono mix.

And GOUT-synced audio, now that all the mouse droppings are perfectly arranged. Who was doing that? Was it Mavimao?

I also don’t have a lot of time right now, but I do have enough time to say congratulations!

If you don’t get any other offers, my plate might clear up in a month or so, and I have some experience with answering PM link requests. But I’d hope we find someone who can do it earlier.

Mrebo said:

If I were the proverbial person from Mars and you wanted to convince me that Naziism/white supremacy is gaining a foothold in US society and politics, these aren’t convincing examples.

1. A guy in Illinois with no chance of winning who was completely disavowed by the GOP

2. 20 people holding signs.

3. Steve King who has been in Congress 15 years. During that time he’s said ignorant and racist things but he’s not an insurgent Nazi.

Probably a good choice to start with three mild examples. You don’t want to freak out the Martian with Stephen Miller and his ilk, since we don’t know how they’d react to a serious concern. But seriously, numbers have nothing to do with it. If there are only 40 Nazis in the whole country and they’re all in the White House, does that make it less scary? Frankly I’d say it’s the opposite.

Now, I get what you’re saying about abusing the meanings of words (such as Nazism), but holding too tightly to the definition is equally unhelpful. The core defining belief of Nazism is white supremacy, and someone who agrees strongly with the Nazis on that core principle, but doesn’t agree with their view on railway pensions can, in my opinion, still be called a Nazi, even if they’re not actually a member of a 30’s German worker’s party. We’re just going to need to differ on that score.

It should go without saying you can find people with loathesome views. You can find violent racists. What I see totally lacking is a popular appeal that would give Nazis/white supremacists power. The pathetic turnout for the recent “rally” supports my view.

And yet Stephen Miller gained power without popular appeal. It’s almost as if Nazis care more about power than popularity, and that there are avenues to power that bypass popularity altogether.

In these discussions I see the definitions blurred so that Nazi becomes a general slur against positions that may be objectionable but don’t belong to Nazis/white supremacists, like nativist/anti-immigrant positions. Those ideas have had some sway throughout our history. I don’t like those views either.

Nativism and anti-immigrant positions are almost always racially tinged. i.e. there was a Chinese Exclusion Act, but no consideration of an accompanying English Exclusion Act. It wasn’t about immigrants, it was never about immigrants, it was about those immigrants. And today, our government compares Norway favorably to “shithole countries” when discussing immigration. Modern anti-immigrant sentiment is almost always very poorly masked racism. Poorly masked only because people are masking a lot less than they used to in the recent past. I’m sure you can find one anti-immigrant crusader who wants to shut down Portuguese immigration just as much as Vietnamese immigration, but that is not representative of the whole. Is racism the same as white supremacy? No, not in my book. There are far more simple racists in the world than outright Nazis. But with regards to Steve King, you can only promote neo-Nazis and recommend neo-Nazi books so many times before, hey, maybe this “aww shucks I’m just an ignorant bigot that likes to read Nazi stuff, I’m not a Nazi myself” excuse wears pretty thin, to the point of unbelievability.

The idea that civil society is done and there’s a whole bunch of Hitlerites running around that need punching is not supported by the facts.

We survived our last major Republic-threatening bout with white supremacists and ended up better for it. We could certainly survive this one as well, hopefully with a lower body count.

The need to punch Nazis is not related to civil society or the lack thereof. Nazism has a long and sordid history of enforcing the rules of civil society when it suited them, and ignoring them completely when it didn’t. They operate outside civil society, waiting for an opportunity to take over. Today they don’t have a huge popular following, I agree, but they do have unprecedented funding and connections, and a recent track record of turning functional pluralist democracies like Poland into minority rule Nazi states in a very short timeframe. I posit they’re seeing the present situation as their opportunity.

To be fair, prior to 2016, I also had an image of Nazis that was more out of Hogan’s Heroes than historical reality. Sure, we had a few of our own, even some in government. But Steve King was never going to amount to anything more than a punchline, right? Grounded in such a ridiculous ideology, how could you not just laugh dismissively at them? But once they start running the show, even though they don’t give you any fewer reasons to laugh dismissively at them, you do so at your peril. They are deadly serious. Oh, they might not fare so well in the next elections, that is certainly true. But there are other ways to take power, and they’re open to all of them, all the time.

SilverWook said:

Why am I even shocked by this sort of thing anymore?

Were these people in a deep coma during the Cold War? I think I can hear Ronald Reagan spinning in his grave.

All those 50’s paranoia flicks about Russian’s infiltrating our society aren’t quite as funny anymore.

Pleasant thought for the day. Certainly the Russian infiltration/compromise/coordination/whatever you want to call it with a good chunk of the Republican Party and several conservative lobbying groups is, at this point, pretty undeniable. But let’s also consider that Russian intelligence didn’t give up on the American so-called Left just because they failed to get much traction there. Jill Stein, Dennis Kucinich, Tulsi Gabbard, maybe even Tad Devine. Small players, certainly, but they were very much used to effect, particularly with what I’d call the whipsaw effect. Trump won, and Stein immediately ran a pretty strange recount campaign. Strange in that there was pretty much never any chance at all it would uncover any significant irregularities, even if there were some to find, due to how voting happens in most of the affected states. But by actually having the recounts happen, it legitimized the win – and since this was the only conceivable outcome of a recount in those states, it wasn’t even a gamble.

The success of the Russian Right triggered a very predictable reaction from the Left, and the Russian Left, small as it was, had a game plan to make the most of their position.

Now Democrats are running new fresh faces in red districts that have never before been competitive. Who are these Democrats? Exactly how much vetting does a fresh face get, or are the Democrats happy to take anyone willing to run in Oklahoma? I truly believe that quite a few Republicans are deeply and dangerously compromised by Russian intelligence services. But not all of them are. If those that aren’t compromised get swept out of office by some newbie out of nowhere, are we actually adding one to the Russian tally? We’ve already got one Tulsi Gabbard, could a Blue Wave give us ten or fifteen?

Not that I think a Blue Wave isn’t pretty much the only thing that can lead to a good outcome. Just a cautionary note about the “Anybody is better than XXX” mentality. There’s nothing about the Democratic Party that makes them immune to Russian infiltration. Maybe it’s harder, but that’s not really the same thing at all. We’re at war. Don’t let some stranger in your HQ simply because they’re wearing an allied uniform. Check them out thoroughly.

It’s a longshot, but I’m going to take it. Anyone here know Burmese, or know someone who does? If so, send me a PM.

The reason is, we’re going to have Burmese subtitles in the next version… but the fansubber who created them left out the translation for ROTJ’s crawl. Normally I don’t even bother with fansubs that don’t translate the crawl (this is actually fairly common, and one of the reasons that, at least so far, we don’t have Urdu subtitles). But I finished the first two movies in Burmese before I hit Jedi and realized this film’s translation was different.

So either (more likely) Burmese will be a one-off language which is incomplete for one film, or (less likely) we find someone to fill the gap, and we get Burmese subtitles that are on par with other languages.

Upon reflection, if anyone knows Urdu and is willing to translate three crawls, they can send me a PM too. Our Hindi dubs would likely make the translation a pretty easy job.

EDIT: Actually for Urdu, we’d likely need translations for the whole films. I don’t think I can get the existing fansubs synced without the involvement of someone who knows the language, and I suspect the translations used by the Hindi dub may be a better starting point anyway.

For a two-frame sync issue, check Harrison Ford’s dialogue. He’s the right mix of dialogue delivered rapidly with lots of mouth movement. In contrast, Carrie Fisher moves her mouth a lot less, which masks sync issues, and Ian McDiarmid delivers so slowly it also serves to mask sync issues. SFX and score aren’t noticeably off at two frames IMO. Basically Han is more out of sync with the rest of the Star Wars universe than anyone else 😉

Agreed though that subs aren’t an issue at all, and non-voiceover dubs should be well within tolerance. Basically for a two-frame sync issue, we’re only talking about alternate English tracks (6-channel, mono, commentary, descriptive audio) and voiceover dubs as noticeably impacted.

PM sent.