Also, looking further back, we can largely thank Orrin Hatch for CHIP, and George H. W. Bush for the ADA.
To avoid muddying the waters too much, I’m only considering ideas from conservative Republicans. So Nixon and Clinton are both out, for not clearly being one or the other.
conservatism has done a lot of good for the country.
I’m not attacking you for saying this, but from my perspective conservatism has many misguided ideas like using supply-side economics (which historically doesn’t work), or removing regulations that protect businesses from hurting or taking advantage of people (a recent example of which is Net Neutrality).
I am genuinely interested in having examples of how conservatism has helped this country, and as a Democrat I’d like to hear it from someone who isn’t full of Fox News talking points. (Also I’m not saying that liberalism is somehow superior.)
Obamacare. Its conservative pedigree is indisputable: created by the Heritage Foundation, championed by Newt Gingrich, implemented by Mitt Romney. Beyond its credentials, it’s based on solidly conservative ideas – i.e. letting the marketplace meet consumer needs with the absolute bare minimum government regulation required for that to happen.
I was certainly among those on the Left who rolled their ideas at the idea that Obamacare could do anything to slow the increase in healthcare costs, but it’s demonstrated it can do just that. It’s certainly not perfect, but it works surprisingly well given it was partially disemboweled by making Medicaid expansion optional, and now by removing Gingrich’s darling individual mandate (the very one that he claimed would save conservatism). Is it superior to a single payer system? Probably not, but that fact that it works reasonably well even when hamstrung, combined with the fact that it actually got passed into law, cannot be dismissed.
Is it the Last Great Conservative Idea? Possibly. But credit where credit is due: the Heritage Foundation got one right.
I have often used the terms interchangeably. I was not trying to tie American Democrats to any Turkish parties. However, I have edited the original post for accuracy.
That’s fine, thanks. That misnomer began as a communications edict from the Republican National Committee, I think in the nineties. It used to be you could identify Republican operatives or heavy partisans by the use of this shibboleth, but it’s been so wildly successful that’s not even necessarily true anymore. The level of discourse is forever lowered.
Democrat Party
You can do better.
I’d like to know what you are taking issue with
Calling people by their preferred names is a sign of the most basic level of respect, and bothering to learn their preferred name is part of that. You don’t have to call Republicans “Rethuglicans” to be disrespectful. In Sci-Fi terms, When Doctor Who insists on calling Mickey “Ricky”, it’s a sign of disrespect, even if there’s nothing insulting about the name “Ricky” per se and it could have been an honest mistake the first time.
Forgive my obliviousness to what you’re referring to, but do members of the Democrat Party not prefer to have their party referred to as the Democrat Party?
Again, perhaps the offending context would be clarifying. You’ve removed the rest of the sentence.
JEDIT: Rereading my post, I only say Democrat Party once, and I don’t know how I misused it.
Well, the Democrat Party was a Turkish political party from the early 20th Century. I believe it’s defunct, but if it still has any members, they probably do prefer their party to be referred to as the Democrat Party.
However, I believe you were referring instead to the Democratic Party in the United States. Two letters does make a difference.
Democrat Party
You can do better.
I’d like to know what you are taking issue with
Calling people by their preferred names is a sign of the most basic level of respect, and bothering to learn their preferred name is part of that. You don’t have to call Republicans “Rethuglicans” to be disrespectful. In Sci-Fi terms, When Doctor Who insists on calling Mickey “Ricky”, it’s a sign of disrespect, even if there’s nothing insulting about the name “Ricky” per se and it could have been an honest mistake the first time.
Democrat Party
You can do better.
Hey Harmy, any chance you would (could) restore the very first / opening day or whatever we call it version of Star Wars in 720p? The one which has the differently composited 3 optical shots and closing credits? If it’s actually possible, since the only source is probably the laserdiscs
Could you go into more detail about this? I’m mildly startled that I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. 😃
There were print variations in the '77 release, due to last-minute changes and poor version control. The easiest-to-spot difference is the spacing in the credits around John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra. But there’s a different composite of the red planet in the sky over Yavin 4 (with/without clouds), etc. I’m not sure one is necessarily “first” and the others “second”, just a big mess of very slight differences.
The main problem with preserving these is quality–AFAIK there are no HD sources for the variants.
There is no variant with a second grappling hook throw or Luke meeting Biggs in the hangar, though 😉 Just little things.
Hey, I get it, and it’s all good. I’d rather be your collateral damage than a lot of other people. And no, I’m not hitting on you.
I was actually trying to be nonpartisan just then, but sometimes when a wacky lefty does an impersonation of a neutral observer, they just come off sounding like a wacky lefty wearing a clip-on tie to their pot brownie rights rally. I fully acknowledge it may have sounded forced.
Elected officials count the votes (the job of the Majority Whip) before they’re cast. Bills are assured passage before they go to the floor. There are only two reasons bills ever fail on the floor like this:
- The majority whip really screwed up, and somebody’s going to pay
- This is a vote only for show, so that people can make pre-written speeches to reprint on their campaign materials during the next election, to rally their base
Take a wild guess which one this was.
So weird when politicians do those, you know, political things.
Thank goodness it’s just limited to Republicans or the country would really be in trouble.
Snark acknowledged. Perhaps trying to inject a politically neutral observation into a heated topic wasn’t a good move.
Elected officials count the votes (the job of the Majority Whip) before they’re cast. Bills are assured passage before they go to the floor. There are only two reasons bills ever fail on the floor like this:
Take a wild guess which one this was.
Yes, I was talking about not having hard subs in English.
Oh yeah, definitely that. But for other languages, there’s a very good case to be made that we should use burnt-in subs in those languages for those language options, to faithfully reproduce the prints of the time (as with the translated crawl and credits). i.e. why should English be the only language with a theatrically accurate version? Which is how it all gets pretty convoluted, pretty fast.
EDIT: I’m absolutely not saying we should do this, just that we should take this into consideration. After all, we’re going to extraordinary lengths to make the definitive theatrical preservation. Why not go big?
Coming from a non-English speaking country I’m all in for the soft subs. My dad watched Star Wars in Italy in 1977 and later at some point in the 1980’s in Brazil, with my mom, and according to him there were no hard subs.
The Italian prints we’ve seen do have hard subs (in Italian, for both Star Wars and Jedi). They’d have to, because the Italian dub doesn’t translate those lines. I can’t say there weren’t subtitle-free prints anywhere, but there are a lot of prints out there, and all of them we’ve seen have hard subs in either English or another language.
Thanks. Let me know early if you want to go with soft-subs for 3.0. I want to start conversations with our German/French/Italian preservation teams to see which way they want to go regarding “theatrical appearance” subtitles in those languages. I suspect most will not want them as a default option.
PM sent.
“Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.”
Trump: No, I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist.
That pretty much covers it.
The ESB 2.0 credits also need serious reworking, those were a reconstruction and have typos. Do we have a clean 35mm source for this?
This is not the right thread for English audio.
Haven’t those poor mice pooped enough?
What is meant by “branching opening crawls?”
I cannot STAND soft subtitles. But it’s your decision obviously on which you want to use. But consider this, TFA has burned-in subtitles not soft subtitles. So it IS something an official Bluray would do, is it not?
I think an official blu-ray may or may not have burnt in subtitles. But they wouldn’t have the gate weave, slight blurring, etc.
TFA’s seem slightly blurry. In fact they resemble the OT burned in subs pretty closely. Font, blur and all.
Yeah, DVD soft subtitles were crap, but Blu-rays can look pretty good if anyone bothers to make them look that way. Not theatrical, but good. Blur is very doable, but gate weave, grain, dirt, and any sort of temporal appearance change would not.
Wow, late to the news but Blade Runner 2049??!! Harmy that’s amazing!
I had no idea he looked so much like Ryan Gosling!
One more thing: if Despecialized went all soft-sub, that would require changes to most subs. Not just foreign subs where translations of alien dialogue would shift back down to the bottom of the frame, but also English subs, which currently skip over the alien dialogue entirely. English subs in particular would need the most work, since you’d need to merge the standard-appearance subtitles for the rest of the film with the theatrical-appearance subtitles for Greedo’s dialogue. We’d also need to consider if we want to use theatrical-appearance alien subs in the other languages where we have them (Italian, French, German). It’s all doable, but it’s significant.
V3.0, if anything warrants a fresh take on subtitles, this would be it. Finally fully Despecialized in “Full HD”, might as well give all the subtitles some extra touch up while at it… and it’ll take Harmy a while to produce v3.0 anyway, so it isn’t like there’s an imminent time crunch to worry about.
You underestimate the ability of Internet arguments to fail to resolve 😉
Let’s say I go to the Italian preservation thread with this, and it goes like this:
- Those theatrical Italian subs use a weird font and the translation is bad. Don’t use them, the new translations are much better.
- Those theatrical subtitles are just like I remember from my childhood. There’s even a typo. Use them!
- What? You’ve GOT to fix the typo. I was just assuming you’d naturally fix the typo.
- What are we doing, making a new SE? Leave the typo alone.
And so on. Now repeat for each language. It could take a while 😉
One more thing: if Despecialized went all soft-sub, that would require changes to most subs. Not just foreign subs where translations of alien dialogue would shift back down to the bottom of the frame, but also English subs, which currently skip over the alien dialogue entirely. English subs in particular would need the most work, since you’d need to merge the standard-appearance subtitles for the rest of the film with the theatrical-appearance subtitles for Greedo’s dialogue. We’d also need to consider if we want to use theatrical-appearance alien subs in the other languages where we have them (Italian, French, German). It’s all doable, but it’s significant.
if I cut the subs directly from one frame of a 35mm scan, could that be turned into a soft sub?
I’ve already done this for Jedi, using 1080p image files you sent me as a source, remember? 😉 For Star Wars, I had to hack together something on my own from another source, and it’s not quite as nice. Both of these soft subs are already created and in the current version of Project Threepio. The filenames are ROTJ-eng-alien-35mm.sup and SW-eng-alien-35mm.sup – feel free to try them out.
If you have new image files for Star Wars, they could be turned into soft subs in fairly short order. I’d certainly prefer to use your image files as a starting point for both films.
The problems with soft subs are minor, but on a theatrical fidelity scale, they might be big enough. Soft subs have no gate weave, moving grain/dirt, etc, and attempting to simulate this through an animated sequence of subtitle images is very badly supported by players. The BD-SUP subtitle format uses a strange timestamp-at-the-wrong-framerate+framecount time specification method, which means it’s possible that soft subs will not appear and disappear on exactly the right frame. But for most purposes, they would be indistinguishable from burnt-in subs to even fairly picky viewers.
To be honest, though, I still prefer burnt-in for these particular films.
EDIT: Oh, and if you’re making new image files for Star Wars, try not to lose the positioning info. i.e. the best way to get them is to get the subtitles floating at the right location in a transparent 1920x1080 image.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/us/politics/trump-mueller-special-counsel-russia.html
President Trump ordered the firing last June of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation, according to four people told of the matter, but ultimately backed down after the White House counsel threatened to resign rather than carry out the directive.
The West Wing confrontation marks the first time Mr. Trump is known to have tried to fire the special counsel. Mr. Mueller learned about the episode in recent months as his investigators interviewed current and former senior White House officials in his inquiry into whether the president obstructed justice.
Amid the first wave of news media reports that Mr. Mueller was examining a possible obstruction case, the president began to argue that Mr. Mueller had three conflicts of interest that disqualified him from overseeing the investigation, two of the people said.
First, he claimed that a dispute years ago over fees at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., had prompted Mr. Mueller, the F.B.I. director at the time, to resign his membership. The president also said Mr. Mueller could not be impartial because he had most recently worked for the law firm that previously represented the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Finally, the president said, Mr. Mueller had been interviewed to return as the F.B.I. director the day before he was appointed special counsel in May.
Oh that wacky wayback machine:
http://therightscoop.com/nobody-at-the-white-house-is-talking-about-firing-mueller-marc-short/
So when they said “You crazy conspiracy-minded liberals, nobody’s even thinking of firing Mueller”, they just left off some words at the end. “…anymore.” would work well to make it not a lie anymore, but “…this week.” would probably make it actually truthful.
Oh, and this whole article now rings pretty much false as crap:
http://www.businessinsider.com/mcconnell-congress-mueller-trump-russia-2017-11
Graham, who co-sponsored one of the bills aimed at protecting Mueller’s independence, said after the indictments that he did not “feel an urgent need to pass that law until you show me a reason Mr. Mueller is in jeopardy.”
Wonder if they’ll reconsider that determination now. No, I didn’t think so either. After all, they talked him down once. What are the chances Trump will try to do a crazy self-incriminating thing against the advise of his staff more than once? Oh.
I think a Despecialized Edition without subtitles for the alien speech would go against the purpose of the Despecialized Edition’s mission.
Indeed. I completely understand the desire to have it look right in one’s native language. But a good amount of work went into the making and rendering of the text by (at least) Harmy, Catbus, and me. And it can’t be pulled off as effectively with a subtitle stream alone.
Maybe Catbus can answer: Are there packs of subtitles available for just the Greedo text (presumably rendered in the top portion of the screen) that people could mux in with their dub of choice?
Actually, most dubs just dub over the Greedo and Jabba lines, so no subtitles are needed in those languages. For a few languages, though, they do not dub over those lines, so those lines would need to be subtitled.
Project Threepio includes “titles only” subtitles in these languages, which subtitle only the Jabba/Greedo lines, and/or the crawl and other onscreen text like the tractor beam controls. They are designed to go with the English video and the dub. To work around conflicts with onscreen text, the subtitles are shifted to the top of the frame (so for Greedo/Jabba, you’d have two sets of subtitles, with the one in your language at the top of the screen). It’s not ideal, but it works to provide subtitles without compromising the theatrical fidelity of the Despecialized Editions. As far as I know, these movies were never shown theatrically without some sort of burnt-in subtitles during the Greedo/Jabba scenes.
Utilities are included with Project Threepio to shift these subtitles back down to the bottom of the frame, to accompany subtitle-free video, but you’d have to get the subtitle-free video elsewhere. Also, for a few lucky languages, we have subtitles designed to match the font, size, and placement and exact original text of the subtitles that ran theatrically in those countries, wherever we have a reference. But again, you have to provide the subtitle-free video to overlay them onto (or just get the German/French/Italian versions of the trilogy when they’re available).
If you’re curious, download the complete Project Threepio. It’s a lot more than just a bunch of SRT files. Follow the link in my signature for the project discussion thread.
EDIT: yoda-sama is right. Seamless branching is the only technically correct way to address this problem, allowing theatrically faithful burnt-in subtitles for some viewers and not others. But it’s very hard to do right, and we have plenty of projects that simply do alternate video altogether to achieve the same thing.