CatBus

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I dunno. I always thought that had Dan White murdered only Mayor Moscone, he’d have gotten the death penalty. But since he also murdered Milk, he got seven, reduced to five. Sometimes an extra murder makes the law more lenient than it would be for just the one.

SilverWook said:

https://thinkprogress.org/new-pro-trump-ad-features-little-girl-thanking-trump-for-letting-us-say-merry-christmas-again-11131bee0a79/
They’re spending One Million dollars on this ad campaign. Maybe they could have donated to a charity or something? And here I was feeling guilty for buying myself a Christmas present!
I’m sure the little girl was coached. Say the line, and we’ll give you a puppy! 😛

The cult of imaginary victimhood got him elected. He may as well run a “President Clinton’s ATF thugs are going to lock all white people in FEMA trailers and make them inhale chemtrails until they become gay” ad, but I guess this is more seasonally appropriate.

FWIW, I took a look through many fonts that are naturally narrower than Arial in an attempt to address Bluto’s concerns about Noto Sans SemiCondensed. I was very sorely tempted by Myriad Pro, which at the same height and weight was only slightly wider than Noto SemiCondensed and was a stylistic close match as well, but at least for now I’ve decided to stick with Noto Sans. Also, I learned some stuff. At least for Noto, Condensed is 20% narrower than Regular, SemiCondensed is 10% narrower.

So if this whole thing blows up on me, Myriad Pro may be my Plan B. But that plan looks a lot like an iPod commercial 😉

And here’s a good example of why courts are so critical to a functional democracy:

The DOJ recently charged peaceful protesters with rioting and destruction of property, because other people at the same protest rioted and destroyed property. The first six defendants have been found not guilty on all charges. Because even the prosecution stated they didn’t actually do any of the things they’re being charged with. But they were protesting Trump, so were charged anyway.

We’re not Poland yet.

ChainsawAsh said:

Jedi Master Skywalker said:

Just release all films sepperatly on each of their 40th anniversary

A little late for that…

Yeah, but I’ve got dibs on all speculation regarding the 50th anniversary. 60th is still available though.

yhwx said:

I don’t buy the assumption that Virginia is “bluer than California.”

Depends what you mean by blue. California Republicans have won statewide offices and have recently run a legislative body with clear popular mandates. Virginia Republicans have been losing handily for a while now, with the gerrymander covering up for their unpopularity. At the national level, you’re right – California is bluer. But at the statewide level, I think California is still pretty purplish. Probably because your so-called “sane” Republicans like Schwarzenegger still hold some leverage in California, if not nationally, and your California Democrats like Gray Davis could easily be confused with a Republican elsewhere in the country.

IMO, the odds of Mueller making it through January are hovering around 20 to 1 against. The odds of Congress not doing anything meaningful to stop it are dead certain. How good’s the Schneiderman backup plan? I suspect we’ll find out soon.

In related news, we’re seeing that even though the pawns Putin’s put into place in Poland and Hungary are clownish idiots, the overall plan is working. The EU waited too long to sanction either nation for undermining basic democratic institutions, and neither can be stripped of EU voting privileges without unanimous agreement among all other nations. Which means by turning two members initially, Putin can take his time in slowly spreading fascism throughout the rest of Europe and adding to his growing stable of new vassal states.

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Whoah. A recount in the Virginia General Assembly has flipped another seat to the Democrats, making it a 50-50 split, with the Democratic Lieutenant Governor breaking ties.

This is huge for so many reasons. There’s already a legal challenge to the existing gerrymander, so the legislature is likely to be ordered by the courts to redraw district boundaries. And even if they don’t, the Supreme Court has already ruled that off-year redistricting is perfectly okay for no reason at all, as long as you don’t violate the normal rules around district lines. So I suspect Virginia will have new districts drawn before the next election, regardless of how the court case goes.

Why does this matter? Virginia is a state where Democrats easily win statewide offices, and Republicans easily dominate the Legislature (usually hovering around a veto-proof margin). Even in general assembly races, Democrats regularly outpoll Republicans there by a large and growing margin, with only the gerrymander keeping them out of power. Basically, with an unbiased map, Virginia would be “bluer” than California. And I hope the Democrats don’t just turn the tables and gerrymander themselves into safety–they’re already safe with no gerrymander.

The Republicans are likely going to have to win back their majority by actually getting more votes than Democrats. In Virginia. Good luck with that.

EDIT: Argh. R’s still control the Senate there. Nevertheless, if the court orders a redrawn map, the House can now hold out for an unbiased map, and if they don’t get it, they can happily let the courts draw the lines.

PM sent, and thanks!

PM Sent. Forced subtitles in this project are now called “titles”, to better indicate what’s covered (onscreen text).

Agreed, you can’t even see the marionette strings on the fake one.

TV’s Frink said:

http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/18/politics/trump-russia-investigation/index.html

Trump is boasting to friends and advisers that he expects Mueller to clear him of wrongdoing in the coming weeks, according to sources familiar with the conversations. The President seems so convinced of his impending exoneration that he is telling associates Mueller will soon write a letter clearing him that Trump can brandish to Washington and the world in a bid to finally emerge from the cloud of suspicion that has loomed over the first chapter of his presidency, the sources said.

Interesting theory.

Could be pre-spinning like they did for the IRS “scandal”. It goes like this: After Citizens United, the IRS came up with a fairly hokey and unprofessional way to filter the new flood of nonprofit applications that effectively targeted liberal groups slightly more than conservative groups. Congresspeople write a letter asking specifically for details about the conservative groups that were targeted. The IRS responds to this strangely specific request, and their response is used to create a media narrative that conservative groups were targeted more than liberal ones, even though the opposite was actually true. To this day, people still believe it.

So Mueller clearly suspects Trump of wrongdoing. Someone with authority to do so submits a formal request to Mueller for information that is equally specific. Such as “do you have direct evidence corroborated by three witnesses that Trump committed this particular felony?”, or “do you have any suspicion that Trump engaged in tiger poaching or driving a forklift without a valid license while in Russia?” When Mueller writes back a formal statement, that’s all the exoneration FOX needs to blanket the airwaves with it for the next six years: “Mueller exonerates Trump in Russia probe”

Also, then when he fires Mueller the next week, it’s not obstruction, because he’s not under investigation. If it convinces enough Congresspeople to keep sitting on their hands doing nothing, it doesn’t matter if it’s implausible.

FWIW, I’ve always treated DeEd as “what a respectful Blu-ray transfer would have looked like”, and the various film transfers as “what it actually looked like in theatres” – although obviously a just-struck print would look much cleaner than the prints we’ve been able to find and use. For whatever reason, I still prefer DeEd in the end.

TV’s Frink said:

Marco Rubio found a bit of backbone? Whaaaaaa?

Is the Republican party finally starting to wake up?

…

Hahahahahaha. Sorry.

I think they’re seeing that the press gives them a lot more favorable coverage for their announcement of a principled stand than critical coverage for their abandonment of those principles a week later. The McCain doctrine.

Just nailed down the final options affecting appearance – I just thinned the black border around the letters, which was designed more for DVD’s/showing up on an SD CRT. New border will be thinner by default, but will be thickened on DVD downscales. Some of the previous mockups are down, but you can see the old thick black border pretty well on the shot of Vader from ESB with Spanish subs.

It’s hard to be mysterious in a toga, and yet Jay pulls it off.

Huh. That sentence had more entendres than planned.

yoda-sama said:

Oh, but if Frink said it, you’d take it more seriously?

It’s the all caps that always convinces me.

Yeah, I admit I have uncharitable thoughts about Alabama from time to time. But they have had to suffer this creep a lot longer than we have, and they delivered. And I’m hoping the 30-point swing in the polls between Trump and Moore wasn’t entirely due to the difference in age of their victims.

EDIT:

That’s fairly amazing. So when looking who to thank for tonight, I guess we should thank Black Alabamans for continuing to do what’s right in the face of impossible odds, and thank white Alabamans for staying home.

To Mr. Moore I say: …and the horse you rode in on.

PM sent.

Well, tomorrow the big question gets answered: will Republican voters abandon all pretense of even the smallest shred of morality in their quest for political power? Or, more cynically, if you’re a Republican politician, can being really racist make up for being a child molester?

I’m leaning “Yes” on both. Alabama already voted overwhelmingly for a Putin-backed racist idiot who repeatedly assaulted adult women – Moore has a big margin he can afford to lose due to the age of his victims and still win the election. Prove me wrong, Alabama. Please.

I thought this was cute.

After some feedback, it looks like our attempt to make Thai and Arabic use more modern fonts will be reverted back. The traditional style is commonly used for subtitling and it just looks weird to do something else. So Noto Sans is out for these two. I’ll definitely just switch to Noto Serif for Thai, and I’ll try to use Noto Naskh for Arabic – and if that doesn’t work, it’s back to Arial for Arabic.

Okay, that’s fine then 😉

IIRC, the Team Blu upscale, which is where the Despecialized GOUT sources come from, was a mix of custom Avisynth scripts and good old fashioned hand-editing. There were a lot of steps (not necessarily in this order): inverse telecine (which involved manual work, because there were frames that didn’t IVTC cleanly), stabilization, upscaling, cleanup (glue marks and other damage, again by hand), and color correction.

The upscaling itself was done with a “secret sauce” avisynth script, but there are people here with a pretty good idea of how to get results approximately as good. nnedi2_rpow2(rfactor=2, cshift=“spline64resize”, fwidth=1280, fheight=720) gives pretty good results AFAICT, but AviSynth is not really my area of expertise.