CatBus

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.

Antcufaalb covered this nicely at some point. If you had, say, a diff file that, when applied to the legal retail product, produced the fanedit product, could you distribute the diff file instead of the fanedit?

The answer is no. His example was John Cage’s 4’33", which is 4 minutes and 33 seconds of dead silence. If you distribute a track that’s 2 minutes of dead silence, is that copyright infringement? Legally, it depends. If it was 2 minutes of your own silence, you’re good. If it was 2 minutes recorded from John Cage’s 4’33", then you’re not. Exact same files, bit-for-bit identical, but one is clear and one is not. The difference, legally, is that one was derived from copyrighted bits. Back to the original example, since the diff tool was created directly or indirectly from the copyrighted work, it too can be considered covered by the copyright.

My problem with this story is precisely that it was Franken’s decision to make in the first place.

Sexual harassment has been a serious problem within Congress since at least forever. And yet they don’t have any sort of procedure for dealing with it. Every single time it happens, everyone runs around and spends a couple weeks inventing their own “this is what we ought to do” procedures from scratch, and then they are immediately forgotten. The next time it happens (later that day), everyone runs around and spends a couple weeks inventing their own “this is what we ought to do” procedures from scratch. Because every time it happens it’s a one-of-a-kind-nothing-like-this-has-ever-happened-before scenario. Just like what we do every time there’s a massacre where someone who shouldn’t have any guns at all gets access to guns so dangerous that nobody actually needs them.

This is how people react to problems they don’t actually want to solve. Do people invent new legal arguments and distinctions every time someone shoplifts? No. We don’t want shoplifting, that’s why.

Admittedly there’s a difficulty with elected officials not being able to be fired, and the possibility of whatever administrative investigations/sanctions are constitutionally permitted being abused as a political device. But come on. There’s a proper response for the person who says their case is somehow special and unique and not warranting the same legal consequences as everyone else: tell it to the judge.

Frank your Majesty said:

As I understand it, even making the edit is violating the copyright. You cannot create a derivative work without permission of the copyright holder. However, making a fan-edit only for yourself would be considered fair-use. But fair-use only means that a copyright violation isn’t prosecuted, not that the violation is nullified.

So, in essence, creating the edit isn’t entirely legal, but also not really illegal. I could have worded that better.

I think fair use is best described as “a legal copyright violation”.

Frank your Majesty said:

The question was never wether fan-edits were legal. They are not. So any way of distributing fan-edits, no matter if paid or for free, is technically a copyright infringement.

Technicality–making a fan edit is legal, distributing it without a license from the copyright holder is not. Thus, the stipulation at OT.com that you own the fan-edit’s primary source material also kinda-sorta means that if we were all Harmys, we would all be able to simply make our own Despecialized Editions, and they would all look alike because we’re all converging on the same reference point. So there’s no way to prove which is the original and which is the copy, or if they’re all originals and just coincidentally identical. The Spartacus defense 😉

The community came up with a way to at least morally justify what they are doing.

That’s very true. The above point is just helpfully muddies the waters around simply having the fan-edit versus the act of distributing it. But of course making a fan edit involves breaking DRM, so you have to have been at least during this time in a country where that was legal for this purpose, in order to be truly in the clear as a fan-edit creator.

moviefreakedmind said:

Not to mention that a man defending himself against a woman would likely get him arrested.

I know a male victim of domestic violence who was terrified of defending himself and getting arrested. Maybe his was the exception, but when the cops in his case arrived, they were pretty good at reading the scene. His wife was arrested and they never even seemed to consider the possibility that she was the victim.

The downside of course is the lipservice post-arrest support. They handed him a domestic violence pamphlet and were off (not like they were trained to do more, but still). They did helpfully add that wherever the pamphlet said “woman”, he could substitute the word “man” and I’m sure that was a whole heap of help for him in that moment.

So far I seem to disagree with everyone, if that helps matters.

All input is appreciated. I’ll get lots of feedback and run lots of tests before I settle on something final. Just because I’m sold on something today doesn’t mean I’m beyond convincing. Noto has lots of advantages over Arial that I could still get even if I ditch SemiCondensed. I’d also suggest trying to look at the font not side-by-side with Arial, though – while it’s a great way to see all the differences, Arial is a pretty wide font, so it may make a narrow font seem even narrower in contrast. Instead of the little side-by-side images, click through to one of the larger images and let it be the only one you can see, wait a bit, then see if it still seems too condensed when it’s not right next to Arial.

EDIT: There are complicating factors with ditching SemiCondensed, though. I believe the standard-width Noto font has what I’d consider an inconsistency between the capital and lowercase letters – the capitals seem more condensed than the lowercase. It’s not a huge issue but I kinda don’t like it (I’ll also double-check, it may have been some other variant that had this issue, like just the Medium weight or some such thing). More definitely, regular Noto is sometimes even wider than Arial, especially once you start adding weight to it, and I’m fairly set in my opinion that Arial is too wide for the job. SemiCondensed doesn’t have either problem – everything is the same amount of condensed, and it’s narrower than Arial even at a higher weight. So if we’re staying with Noto at all, SemiCondensed has an inherent advantage there. Also the fact that the proportions are very similar to the burnt-in alien subtitles in Star Wars and Jedi gives it a certain stylistic/thematic advantage in my mind. So if I ditch SemiCondensed, it’ll probably be for a different font entirely, and that will take some doing.

Another option is to just stretch the fonts horizontally. However, that will have a distorting effect as at some point in the stretching, the vertical strokes will start to seem thicker than the horizontal strokes. I could also start with a wider font and condense it, which has the opposite problem (and possibly also the inconsistency problem). I don’t like to stretch fonts as a general rule, but small adjustments might be doable if there’s a worthwhile improvement – I actually already do this for very long subtitles lines that go outside the display’s title-safe area (which is an issue for a handful of Greek and Russian subs), but never condense more than around 5%.

Also in 2014, the “Person of the Year” was the people fighting Ebola. In 2005 is was “Good Samaritans” (humanitarian philanthropists). In 2002, whistleblowers. And that’s not including the times when they chose a generic such as “The Protester” (2011) or “The American Soldier” (2003) which was grammatically singular but still referring to multiple people. They have a plural “Person of the Year” pretty often.

Just following the pattern of the previous posts, here are the changes for the other example shots for Empire in the first post, for Spanish and 50% scaled Czech. Top is current, bottom is new.

I’ve asked Harmy to confirm the 50% scaled down subtitles still look right on his personal home theatre setup, because that’s honestly what they’re designed for.