CatBus

Sure, I’d be interested to see those.

I’ve also got a pretty good workaround brewing. The next Project Threepio will at the very least include instructions for how to create 2160p SUP files from the existing 1080p subtitles. They will still be upscaled of course (not as sharp, but for subtitles that’s not as relevant), but then they’ll be native 4K and less likely to have player compatibility issues.

Eventually the plan will be to have native 4K subtitles with everything derived from them, rather than everything being derived from 1080p, as it is now. Honestly I think Project Threepio went through a transition like this before when it was originally 720p-native and the 1080p subs were just upscales.

Another wrinkle in this plan is the 35mm English “alien” subs, which are graphical subs of the Greedo/Jabba lines, literally Photoshopped out of a 35mm scan. As they stand right now, they are 1080p-native. Before Project Threepio could be truly 4K-native, I would really need those in 4K too. We’d need both a completed 4K Star Wars and Jedi 35mm scan for that.

ChainsawAsh said:

Well, it’ll be a while before a 4K BR disc is feasible, but a 4K MKV is very doable right now. But I’m sure regular SRT subs will be sufficient for that.

SRT files are never sufficient IMO, but I believe 1080p graphical SUP subs would work in that scenario. It’s a little player-dependent, though, so I’m hesitant to make a blanket statement that this will definitely work.

If people start reporting problems with 1080p subtitles with 4k video, I may accelerate this conversion process.

Actually anyone can generate graphical subs right now – Project Threepio is more than just the subs, it’s the whole subtitling toolkit I use to create them. Creating the graphical subs does require some technical expertise, computing power, and patience, however. So I do a basic batch that should cover most needs. But there’s utilities in there to re-time them to Puggo and do all kinds of crazy extra things that aren’t provided out of the box. Check out the README, it’s actually pretty comprehensive.

As for speed, well, graphical subtitles are just images, so compare rendering them to rendering a movie (as in rendering images from scratch like Pixar, not processing existing images like applying color correction to an existing image). So a full set of subtitles for all films in all languages is approximately 150,000 images, and right now I render them at 1080p. That’s approximately rendering a full feature-length film of 1080p images, albeit simple ones and not taking up the whole frame. But there’s more to it than that. The software I use to render the text has some quirks I need to work around (I chose it because other software had quirks I could not work around). To avoid aliasing, I actually render the text at 4K, then resize it to 1080p (which means for 4K, I’d render at 8K… yeesh!). Then it attempts this subpixel antialiasing thing which results in a colorful fringe around all the letters (would be good if it aligned to actual subpixels, but it doesn’t), so I convert everything to grayscale and back to erase that. Then there’s the more obvious post-processing – drop shadows and such. And some weird stuff I do for custom line spacing and text justification, and so on. The code is… convoluted. Anyway, it all adds up, and also I’m fully willing to believe I didn’t write the world’s most efficient code. And that maybe my computer is also not a technical marvel of modern computing power. But it’s actually a pretty complicated process.

And compared to how things used to be, it’s great. I used to have to click through every subtitle file in a piece of software, render it, and move on to the next one (I didn’t do as many languages back then). When I slept, nothing got rendered until I woke up again and started clicking through it. Now, I just kick off the process one day, leave the computer alone for eight days, come back, and it’s done. If you just want to render one language instead of all of them, as most people would, it’s actually not bad at all.

But as for 4K, I’m glad to hear we can afford to wait a while at least. I’ll get ready for it, but I can’t say I’m really looking forward to it. 😕

Most of these translations started as direct OCR’s of official foreign DVD or Blu-ray releases, but many of them have gotten corrections since then and are now significantly different. Some started off as custom translations, like Indonesian and Vietnamese (there never was an official translation in some markets), and some started off as an official translation, but that was completely thrown out and re-done from scratch, like Finnish. But I’d say most are still some mix of official and custom translation.

All the translation work is outsourced to unpaid volunteers, and I pass on the savings to you! I’d say the point where we went over the line into crazyville was Operation Eyestrain (the descent into madness starts right about here). I’m not sure poor Feallan will ever recover. Next to that, it’s really just been incremental changes and an exercise in patience. The first release – six years ago! – was honestly pretty crappy in hindsight, but lots of little changes over time make a big difference.

So just another seeking feedback thing: we’ve got preservations going on at all sorts of resolutions. Puggo’s doing NTSC DVDs, Harmy’s doing 720p with 1080p on the horizon, and definitely-not-negative1 is doing 4k with likely 1080p downscales.

I really prefer graphical subs and will always pre-render them and include them, but they do inflate the size of the project files. So… which resolutions? I’ve been doing 1080p native, with 720p and NTSC downscales, and that’s gone okay. But the second I start even thinking about 4k, you know what that’s going to do. Not to mention the render times – 1080p takes my poor computer over a week to render all the subtitles.

At the moment, here are my thoughts: eventually 4k native subtitles make sense. You can downscale to any resolution you like from there. At that point in the future, I’d probably do 4k native with 1080p downscales and finally say goodbye to 720p and NTSC. But right now, there are too many projects at those lower resolutions. So I’m thinking once the full DeEd trilogy hits 1080p, I’ll make the switch. In the meantime, I’m pretty sure upscaling 2k subtitles to 4k should look and work just fine*, at least on software players. However, if people are burning UHD discs, they might have to have matching resolutions.

I am currently retooling all my scripts so that they will work with 4k. I just don’t see any particular need to render at that resolution just yet.

* Apparently there are lots of issues with using soft-subtitles on 4k media, due to HDR, where they come out too bright. I don’t believe any of this is related to that.

This story kinda naturally leaps to conspiracies and coverups, but I’ll humbly submit that there must be a mechanism where law enforcement (likely Mueller, but could “just” be FBI financial crimes unit) can remove/hide extraordinarily sensitive data. Things that could reveal details of an ongoing investigation, expose informants, damage international relations, or all three.

Because no matter how much blatantly illegal activity has already happened with impunity at this point, I really strongly doubt all traces of these financial records have been wiped from all backups and transaction logs. Banks have a thing about data integrity. So if someone did try to cover this up, that was the most boneheaded move to date, and that’s really saying something after what we’ve seen this last year.

Nevertheless, regardless of how you choose to interpret the story, there doesn’t appear to be a way to interpret it in a way that doesn’t indicate something very unusual and illegal happened that someone (either the criminals or law enforcement) felt justified the unprecedented removal of data from the FinCEN database.

I am kind of surprised. They usually require a few billion dollars in bribes and materials every decade or so in exchange for good behavior. They were due for a good round of diplomacy payoffs.

But then I guess if you refuse to pay $30,000 to a painter even after a judge orders you to do it, how can you be reasonably expected to scrape together a few billion to pay a guy to stop doing anything?

Then again, maybe the proffered bribe wasn’t big enough, in which case this is all just nuclear-age haggling. And the bribe not being big enough does fit these observations…

I realize my first paragraph is a little vague. “They” refers to the North Korean regime, not ours. I apologize for any confusion.

I’m pretty sure the term “un-American” is un-American. But I just said it! Ni!

Trident said:

I want you to be right. Because I so much like reading your reasoning to things?

But I’ve got a hard time thinking that’s it either.

Ha! That’s nice, but I agree I’m probably wrong. It’s all speculation anyway. The point about the population thing didn’t really come straight across either. I’ve never been to a place where 50% of the population was kids (of 230 countries, Gaza ranks an exceptional 225 for median age), but I’ve been places with a lot closer to that than we have in the States. Things are different. A lot different. There are unattended packs of kids everywhere. Like, everywhere, everywhere. Places where kids simply do not belong – yup, it’s their favorite hangout. That’s right, the place with all the broken glass and tetanus nails. And they’re not neglected AFAICT – they’ve all got parents and can find their ways home for dinner and such, and seem happy and well-adjusted. But parents have jobs and school isn’t all day even when it’s in session, and the kids just roam. It’s not logistically possible for a society to directly oversee that many kids with that few adults and still have all the other things going on that a society does. Pack of kids in the middle of a potentially explosive protest? I could see it.

And I’m sure every now and then bad things happen to the kids. I met a girl named Deanna who was absolutely the most whip-smart and endearing girl, maybe about eight or so, traveling in a pack like this. Could have run the world at the rate she was going. She died of pneumonia.

It’s also possible the kids and/or parents took the danger there into account, compared it against the perceived danger of staying home, and decided it was either a wash or an improvement. Part of the reason it’s so easy to recruit suicide bombers is that there’s a rampant (incorrect) perception that you’re going to get killed, jailed, maimed, or tortured anyway, just by living a normal daily life. But if you truly believe avoiding trouble gains you no safety whatsoever, could that change your decisions?

Risk assessments are often very wrong, based on social factors, politics, and stories people like to tell themselves. People still buy guns for self-defense in the US all the time, endangering their families due to skewed risk perception. Same with rallies, I suppose.

Depending on demographics, bringing kids is pretty much synonymous with bringing people.

The median age in Gaza is 18, way under the global average. Almost exactly half of the population is kids.

Well if you’re a zillionaire there’s another option. Let’s say hypothetically Amazon had chosen to put its HQ2 in Oklahoma City or thereabouts. Assuming it’s on par with HQ1, you’d get about 40,000 people at Amazon itself, with 1,100 people moving to the area per week (the current rate in Seattle) to make money supporting that tech boom.

There are 136,911 more registered Republicans than Democrats in Oklahoma*. I realize that’s throwing out independents and libertarians, and assuming no RINOs or DINOs, but we have to start somewhere. You also can’t know the makeup of these tech workers, but I think it’s safe to assume they skew way more liberal than Oklahoma on average. So at least theoretically, you could have Democrats outnumbering Republicans within two years. That’s what happens when your electoral dominance hinges on support in less-populated states. Get enough California retirees flowing into Missoula, and Montana starts looking pretty purple (this is actually happening too, but it’s slower than the HQ2 scenario).

* Voter registration numbers are always closer than you’d think in “deep red” or “deep blue” states, because once the margins are beyond a certain value, the minority party’s voters don’t bother to show up, and the size of the margin is exaggerated in vote totals.

Third parties have little hope if we must insist they can’t win

Third parties have no hope whether or not we observe that they can’t win, until we change the political system to permit them to win. And voting for them really doesn’t qualify as changing the political system, it’s just easier.

Trident said:

moviefreakedmind said:

suspiciouscoffee said:

It’s not really about mfm himself not voting, but him being a part of a massive group (perhaps majority) of non-voters who could together make real change if individually could be convinced to vote.

This is a bad line of reasoning. First of all, I hated our candidates. Yes, Hillary would’ve been infinitely better than Trump but I hate a lot of what she stands for and plus she and her DNC cronies cheated at every turn. Voting for her would’ve been selling out and degrading and disgusting to me. Also, I don’t like the idea that we just need more people to vote. Most people shouldn’t be voting. Most people are really dumb. What if someone who isn’t voting would vote for a really horrible candidate like Trump? I definitely don’t want them to vote. Basically, if you don’t vote, you’re a problem. If you vote your conscience and vote for a third party, you’re a problem too. You can’t win in people like Frink’s eyes unless you lower yourself to voting for the lesser of two evils. Staying inside and relaxing after another long and shitty day at a shitty job is more appealing to me than pointlessly participating in whatever passes for democracy in this country.

Yeah. I sort of agree with you on this score.

I agree with the sentiment, but not the reasoning. A choice between two equally bad options is a choice anyone would avoid. A choice between one tolerable and one bad option isn’t really a choice either – it’s a Hobson’s Choice where you’re railroaded toward a conclusion someone else pre-ordained. A choice between two good options with differing qualities is the sort of choice that makes you believe in free will again. A choice between more than two options means you live in Europe.

But in that sense it’s academic whether you thought Clinton was as bad as Trump or not. The very fact that The Howling Abyss was one of the options on the ballot meant that, at best, this time around people got a Hobson’s Choice. If you chafe at such a thing, that’s a big problem.

But to misquote Donald Rumsfeld, you vote in the election you have, not in the election you wish you had. If you find yourself frequently wishing for different elections, or bemoaning “whatever passes for democracy in this country”, there are things you can do – some of them are hard work and will accomplish very little, some of them are not much work and accomplish nothing, such are your bad choices when you want to change an entrenched system. If you want better political parties, change the system so that different political parties or candidates can be relevant. Campaign finance reform, open primary systems, public financing, redistricting reform, national popular vote, proportional representation, and so on. Heck, think big and go full parliamentary system. Usually these things start local at the city level and filter up, and it can take decades. You might not feel good about your voting options until you’re 90, or your kids are 90, but that’s still better than never. I’m not necessarily advocating for these things myself, but if improving the quality of the two parties is a big deal to you, or making third parties relevant is a big deal to you, these are all worth considering. Voting for third parties in a system in which they are irrelevant, however, truly is equivalent to staying home.

Great, but how does this change the math of being just one voter in a sea full of voters who are dead-set on doing the craziest and most irresponsible thing possible (i.e. living in Oklahoma)? It doesn’t. But ask Doug Jones how that math sometimes can still work out when conditions are right.

If there weren’t any other people there, how could you enjoy watching a tiger suddenly deciding to pee on them?

Um. Asking for a friend.

Well, today’s Avenatti news was he’s started leaking who was receiving payments from Cohen’s shell company. First leak? Demeter Direct Inc. What do they do? That’s not really clear – it’s basically yet another shell company, but the owner is Mark Ko, who says he worked with Cohen on that Korean Aerospace deal, so there’s the link between the inbound and outbound money. But what is it exactly that Mr. Ko does?

Well, that’s not really clear either, just some flowery words about “assisting companies in the United States and Asia in entering or expanding into global markets”. But what is clear is there’s this property he owns on Wilshire (not giving the address because it’s the Internet, but it’s everywhere now so you can find it if you really want) with a really weird sales history. On July 13th, 2016, it sold for $600,000. Later, it sold for $2.4 million. That crazy California real estate market. You sit on a property for only a couple years and someone nets almost 2 million! So… how much time had elapsed between these sales?

Less than 24 hours had elapsed. The two sales for wildly different prices happened on the exact same day. For it to be registered like that it would really have had to have been within less than 8 hours, and probably a lot less than 8. The only question in my mind is if he did this in one sitting or took a bathroom break in between.

So… he’s into flipping real estate then. You know how people dig upgrades. Updated kitchen, bath, …laundry…

ZigZig said:

CatBus said:

How would people describe Hell if they’d never been told anything about it by someone else?

Sure. How would people describe Hogwarts/Middel-Erde/Westeros/Tatooine/whatever if they’d never been told anything about it by someone else?

Well, yes, that’s clear to someone who sees religion as fiction. But presumably there could be another channel for gaining insight if you didn’t see it that way. But in both cases, peoples’ thoughts about what’s possible can be constrained by what they’ve already been exposed to, so it’s no surprise people have similar ideas about Hell, and it doesn’t mean much one way or the other.

Whataboutism != negative campaigning.

I’ll pretend that’s why I voted for neither of them and for someone vastly superior.

Who did the people of your state elect on your behalf?

moviefreakedmind said:

chyron8472 said:

The “ask anybody on the street” argument doesn’t really work because people also describe heaven as having pearly gates (when that actually is the Holy City in Revelation), or God being an old man with a long white beard, or to attribute proverbs to the Bible that it doesn’t say (like “money is the root of all evil” or “God helps those who help themselves.”)

That’s true, but the Bible does describe hell as the way people tend to think of it.

People used to describe their real-life encounters with space aliens in wildly different ways. Then, among UFO people, the Hill abduction in 1961 becomes a cause celebre, and the book Communion becomes a popular hit in 1987 and all people report encountering anymore are grays. How would people describe Hell if they’d never been told anything about it by someone else?

Just in case you didn’t know: whataboutism is a real thing, it just hasn’t been a signature feature of American politics until recently.

This particular brand of changing the subject is called “whataboutism” — a simple rhetorical tactic heavily used by the Soviet Union and, later, Russia. And its use in Russia helps illustrate how it could be such a useful tool now, in America. As Russian political experts told NPR, it’s an attractive tactic for populists in particular, allowing them to be vague but appear straight-talking at the same time.

The idea behind whataboutism is simple: Party A accuses Party B of doing something bad. Party B responds by changing the subject and pointing out one of Party A’s faults — “Yeah? Well what about that bad thing you did?” (Hence the name.)

It’s not exactly a complicated tactic — any grade-schooler can master the “yeah-well-you-suck-too-so-there” defense. But it came to be associated with the USSR because of the Soviet Union’s heavy reliance upon whataboutism throughout the Cold War and afterward, as Russia.

Whataboutism — particularly directed toward the U.S. — was so pervasive in the USSR that it became a joke among Soviets, often in a subversive genre called “Armenian Radio” jokes, explains one Russia analyst.

“Armenian Radio would be asked, ‘How much does a Soviet engineer get paid?’ and they’d be like, ‘I don’t know, but you [in America] lynch Negroes,’” said Vadim Nikitin, a Russia analyst and freelance writer. Eventually, that punchline came to be synonymous with the whole phenomenon of whataboutism, Nikitin said.

Translated from Armenian into English, that punchline is “But her e-mails!”

SilverWook said:

Isn’t it still an illegal operation no matter who was in the Oval Office at the time? Or is it okay in this kid’s world view because both allegedly did the same thing? He’s not thinking his put downs through.

The point of “what-aboutism” is that it changes the subject. It even worked on us.

Not entirely sure, but I think from a CD source (“Music of Star Wars” or some such thing). You can tell it’s not exactly the same source as the film because there’s tracked music in the trash compactor scene that didn’t get used in the film. At least until the THX PAL DVD releases it didn’t… 😕

Still very nice tracks, and quite useful!

darthrush said:

I guess it really all comes back to the issue of when does a life truly begin.

snooker said:

darthrush said:

suspiciouscoffee said:

I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all.

*guitar riff*

cue sad yet epic Pink Floyd tune…

Disgusting.

No, it’s okay. It’s pre-84 Floyd. Or it better be.

In other news, Avenetti is a showboat and a slippery eel (can’t say I like him one bit), but a smart slippery showboat, I’ll hand him that (and smart beyond simply knowing what makes other showboats tick, which he also does in spades). The numbers he reported on Cohen’s payments from various sources were all wrong, and much lower than the actual values. Some of the American companies stepped in to correct the numbers since the story was already out there anyway (if you think you might be headed to court, it’s a good idea to be on the record stating the truth from the get-go). I’d like to have been the AT&T or Novartis rep who said “This story is incorrect – our bribe was triple the reported value.”

There’s some speculation about why he might have done this. It gave the story some extra legs on the news cycle, a second round with increased numbers. But I think it was more likely spycraft. If you get handed a sensitive leaked document, you do not post an image of that document (bad move, Reality Winner). You carefully paraphrase everything, re-using none of the original text. And unless the numbers are publicly available elsewhere, you change all the numbers too, so long as it doesn’t change the overall thrust of the story. Any verbatim text or even close numbers could potentially point back to the source. And now some of the correct numbers are available to the public, and Avenetti wasn’t the one who put them out there. Smooth.

Now it appears there are Nazi links to the Russian payments to Trump’s lawyer. Quelle surprise.