CatBus

I edited the SDH mockup above with a transparency level I prefer (slightly more opaque).

BobbyDigital said:

Are there Star Wars Despecialized T-shirts? I’d love to have one. Imagine a bunch of people all over the world walking around wearing Despecialized T-shirts, helping to spread the word of the original versions!

Not to toot my own horn, but there are preservation-themed hi-res images (see first post for examples) in Project Threepio designed pretty much with T-shirts in mind. They’re designed as famous album covers/Star Wars mashups. I’ve made a Despecialized T-shirt for myself and my oldest son. It would help if you were a Police fan and understand the Ghost in the Machine reference, though – otherwise it’s a bit abstruse.

NBC is reporting that it’s official: Schneiderman is Mueller’s Plan B for after the Saturday Night Massacre.

Not only will Flynn cooperate with the federal investigators, and testify in federal court if necessary, but he also agreed to cooperate with applicable state and local authorities, as well as testifying in state court cases if necessary.

The federal deals stipulate cooperation with state authorities. Should the federal investigation disappear entirely, the witnesses will need to either cooperate with the state authorities, or else the state authorities will charge the witness with every state charge the feds had threatened them/bargained with in the first place.

So Trump fires Mueller, Flynn is still over a barrel and still cooperates with Schneiderman, who seamlessly picks up where Mueller left off, since many (but not all) of the serious charges exist at a state level (money laundering, kidnapping, conspiracy, obstruction).

The idea being that firing Mueller accomplishes nothing except making Trump look really guilty, and might even pick up an extra obstruction charge in the very unlikely case the House or Senate decide get their own investigations out of neutral. IMO it’s still a matter of when, not if, he’s fired, though. Since when has Trump shied away from doing things that accomplish nothing except making him look really guilty?

That’s good to hear. And see? Three years later or whatever, I do listen 😉

Possessed said:

clashradio said:

JawsTDS said:

I did my scaling in VirtualDub paired with AviSynth, personally. But I’m sure there are other ways to do it.

I keep reading about Harmy’s version that used the 06 GOUT upscaled and was wondering what method? I’d like to upsale to the quality of Harmy and then re-sync the audio with one of my laserdiscs which has the 77 stereo track, then output to BD.

Silly question but why don’t you just use harmys? It should already be synced to whatever track you want to use. Hell it probably already has the track as an option.

Not only that, but Harmy’s versions are increasingly GOUT-free. ROTJ only has part of one scene from GOUT. If you want pure GOUT source, you probably want to look at Team Blu’s upscales – which you should be aware do not look as good as Harmy’s, given the source material.

Also, the 77 stereo Laserdisc track already on Harmy’s latest preservation is definitely better than what you’re trying to use. It’s from the only release of the 1977 stereo track in digital audio on Laserdisc (a Japanese pan & scan release, but the audio was great). It was then synced up to the GOUT and patched over wherever there were dropouts and warbles with the next-best analogue Laserdisc audio by some of our local audio luminaries with access to and experience with ridiculously expensive software. I don’t want to discourage the effort, if you’re just trying to learn how to do things and all, but it’s already been done, and really well.

Well, I’ve been messing with this so long I can’t tell if this is a nice compromise or if I split the proverbial baby. Oh well, here’s a mockup of the new SDH look, current on top, new on bottom:

There’s no doubt I like the new font. In fact, the more I see the new font, the crappier and more amateurish the Arial font looks IMO. Dang.

Something more than the normal contrast seems likely helpful for SDH. If you’re deaf and can’t read every single subtitle quickly and easily, that’s pretty bad, so I want to avoid that. You’ll see that in addition to the semitransparent block, there’s still a thin opaque black border around the text which is useful against very bright backgrounds. I think it’s an improvement. Does it meet high readability standards? Is it overkill? At least I’ve seen subtitles that look like this before, so I know I’m not the only one. I’m inclined to think it’s a little too transparent right now, but that may be only because I’ve been staring at it too long.

DVD downscales will have to use solid black, however, as DVD subtitles have 1-bit transparency.

EDIT: They’re clickable images now so you can see more detail. And yes, the new subtitles are technically dimmer than the originals in terms of RGB values – same as the Arabic example above. That shows how much letter thickness enters into perceived brightness.

Another helpful hint for the day: When one of the terms of the agreement that would bail you out of house arrest is to avoid contacting Russian intelligence agents, don’t run out and immediately make contact with Russian intelligence agents.

Knowing is half the battle.

Hint for the day: Never deny you’ve ever met someone who says you had a relationship with them after you’ve given them material that can be matched to their timeline and includes a handwritten personal message on it, with your signature. Bonus hint: if you do get caught not only preying on teen girls, but also bearing false witness about them, just Jesus yourself up, say something outrageously racist, and run for the Senate in Alabama and you’ll probably do fine.

The groundwork for the upcoming Saturday Night Massacre Reprise is already being laid.

Strangely, it involves Devin Nunes taking back his leadership role on this issue, which he said he was stepping back from about 326 scandals ago. Nunes, Nunes, now where else have I seen that name recently? Oh yeah.

Yeah, no conflicts or suspicious timing there at all.

So far, I haven’t tried Inkscape. Should ImageMagick+Pango hit a limit, I just may.

Another mockup of the plans for the new fonts, a little closer to the final product:

TOP: Current.
BOTTOM: New (in progress)

A couple things to notice here. The new font is definitely your more modern style of Arabic text, Arial had a very calligraphic appearance. Because that traditional font looked harder to read (IMO, but what do I know about reading Arabic?), I also made it bigger. The new subtitles will be more-or-less the same size for all languages, so some languages (particularly Arabic) will see noticeably smaller subs. English will stay about the same height as before, just a little narrower.

Also look at the color. Pure white subtitles can be blinding when letters are thick enough. If you really look at the subtitles in the top frame, they really seem to glow. In the bottom frame, I took the brightness down a touch. It’s still effectively white, just without that intensity of pure 0xFFFFFF. The new subtitles will actually be a little less bright across the board.

SilverWook said:

Live by the tweet, incriminate yourself by the tweet. Is he that dense he doesn’t think all these brain farts aren’t going to be used against him?

It depends. He can (effectively) fire Mueller any time he wants, the Senate and House leadership would do anything to avoid criticizing him, it’s pretty reasonable to think Putin’s got his back in future elections*, and he’s only two justices away from a completely neutered rubber-stamp Supreme Court. Certainly dense is one explanation for his behavior. Impunity is another – maybe he has no reason to feel so confident, but maybe he does.

Mobutu Sese Seko did several illegal things right out in the open for everyone to see, and I don’t believe he cared one bit if they would ever be used against him. In fact, doing them right out in the open was a signal to the public that he could truly do whatever he wanted without repercussions.

* TBH I think this is the weak link in the logic. I think Putin gets a lot more from extended chaos in the US than from owning any particular leaders. Putin wins whether Trump stands or falls, and popcorn costs a lot less than propaganda.

The headlines/media discussions seem to be about the first sentence in the Flynn story:

Flynn said he called a senior transition team official at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort for guidance, before asking Kislyak to moderate Russia’s response, which Russia ultimately did.

But the second sentence is pretty intriguing too.

Then, he told the court, he called transition team members to tell them what had transpired.

Who could those transition team members have been? By use of the plural form, more than one of the following:

Mike Pence, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Jeff Sessions, K. T. McFarland, Gov. Mary Fallin, Sen. Tim Scott, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Rep. Tom Reed, Rep. Cynthia Lummis, Steve Bannon, Rep. Lou Barletta, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, Rep. Chris Collins, Rep. Tom Marino, Rebekah Mercer, Steven Mnuchin, Rep. Devin Nunes, Reince Priebus, Anthony Scaramucci, Peter Thiel, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Rep. Sean Duffy, Rep. Trey Gowdy, Rep. Dennis Ross, Pastor Darrell C. Scott, Kiron Skinner

That’s a whole lot of people who might have knowledge of the event, Mr. Mueller. And a lot of people to try to successfully get their stories straight, too.

Warbler said:

CatBus said:

Warbler said:

As far as I know, this guy hasn’t killed anyone or committed any acts of violence. Until he breaks some law, he has as much right to be a nazi someone does to be a member of BLM. That is the way America works.

You can absolutely be fired for your political beliefs in America – that’s how America has worked every day since its inception. Whether that’s a good or bad thing, and whether we should change the way America works so that you can’t do this, is open for discussion.

Again, being a Nazi isn’t equivalent to being a member of BLM, in the same sense that being a cannibal is not equivalent to being a vegetarian.

The way America works is if you can be fired by being a Nazi, you can also be fired for being a member of BLM.

So the Nazi getting fired is a “Yay America!” moment now? I’m fine with that.

Warbler said:

As far as I know, this guy hasn’t killed anyone or committed any acts of violence. Until he breaks some law, he has as much right to be a nazi someone does to be a member of BLM. That is the way America works.

You can absolutely be fired for your political beliefs in America – that’s how America has worked every day since its inception. Whether that’s a good or bad thing, and whether we should change the way America works so that you can’t do this, is open for discussion.

Again, being a Nazi isn’t equivalent to being a member of BLM, in the same sense that being a cannibal is not equivalent to being a vegetarian.

Warbler said:

SilverWook said:

It’s arguable that this is self inflicted as the guy agreed to be interviewed. Being a closet Nazi isn’t a political position or an opinion, it’s being supportive of some of the most horrible crimes committed in human history.

I don’t know. I don’t like the idea of my boss firing me because he doesn’t like my beliefs of whatever group I belong to.

Nazism is just another belief system in the same sense that cannibalism is just another dietary regimen.

I’d fire someone for either. Even if I knew I’d get sued or fined or jailed for doing it. And libertarians and vegetarians would have nothing to fear from some sort of slippery slope analogy. It’s just not comparable.

TV’s Frink said:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/11/30/nazi-next-door-says-new-york-times-profile-cost-him-job-home/908317001/

That’s a good first step!

suspiciouscoffee said:

Often, when Sanders is in the news, my mother will bring up the fact that she briefly lived in my hometown, as if that’s something to be proud of. I hate it so much because I want to say that Sanders is a piece of crap, but I can’t because then she’d realize that my political views don’t align exactly with hers/dad’s and I’d be in major trouble.

Any display of honesty would be a clear indication you’re pretty far removed from Sanders 😕

oojason said:

TM2YC said:

oojason said:

‘Trump retweets British far-right leader’s anti-Muslim videos’…

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/29/trump-account-retweets-anti-muslim-videos-of-british-far-right-leader

Even after all he has said and done. The US President supporting a fascist group, who had a member that assassinated one of my countries’ (UK) politicians is a new low. If Trump wants to support Nazis in his own country, that’s his right I suppose but don’t bring aid and comfort to enemies of my country please, if you still want to claim to be our ally.

Aye, Trump may well be a moron - though surprising that no-one is reigning him on his tweets (or activities in general) in at all.

WTF is he doing following - let alone endorsing - that particular group in the first place?

Nazi propaganda kept showing up again and again during his campaign, but they kept deleting/revising the Nazi images as soon as they were found out. The media response was generally that it was an accident, that he clearly didn’t intend it, but why was his campaign going through Nazi propaganda sites in the first place? Then the next time, that it was an accident, that he clearly didn’t intend it, but why was his campaign going through Nazi propaganda sites in the first place? Then the next time, that it was an accident, that he clearly didn’t intend it, but why was his campaign going through Nazi propaganda sites in the first place?

That’s pretty much verbatim what Politifact kept saying again, and again, and again:

Based on the evidence available, it seems unlikely that the Trump campaign intended to put out a Star of David image. In fact, the campaign moved to replace the star with a circle when the image gained attention.

Having said that, this seems to be yet another a case of Trump using social media to broadcast material that comes from sources with a history of spreading racism, anti-Semitism or white supremacy. It is unusual to see a presidential campaign operate with such a lack of message discipline.

Eventually this “oopsie my silly browser cache did it, not me” excuse will wear thin. But not today.

TV’s Frink said:

TM2YC said:

However, even if it’s as bad as Arnold is suggesting, are we sure Trump won’t just get away with it, like he has with everything else?

He just says “nope, wasn’t me” and his terrible supporters will either believe him over their eyes and ears, or they’ll ignore it because hey Supreme Court judges.

Yeah, we’ll just tolerate a little sexual harassment because it will go away if we ignore it and we could get another Clarence Thomas… oops.

A little more info on the font issue:

One of the things I’d been thinking about going into this was how in one of my many PM discussions over the years, someone said they preferred to use Project Threepio’s “matching” English subtitles. That’s fine and all, but the reason they preferred them was that they felt they were easier to read–they weren’t really that interested in the matching aspect. And he was right–the matching subs were both larger and thicker than the standard English subs.

With that in mind, looking up at the bottom of the three examples in the image I just posted, that font starts looking… familiar. Sure, it’s not an exact match, but proportion-wise, wow, I pretty much just picked a close match for the Greedo font, didn’t I? Of course I did just ditch the square periods for round ones, but nobody’s perfect.

I don’t plan on changing the height of the fonts very much from what they’ve been. I tested that original size on various real-world (read: small, crappy) TV setups, and it worked, and it also seems to roughly match what you see on commercial disks. As for nice wall-sized home theatre setups, that’s what the scale_subs script is for. The newer font is narrower, so the letters seem smaller at approximately the same height, but it’s also thicker, so I’d call it a wash (other opinions welcome).

As for things I’m still wrestling with, there’s the CJK fonts. Those are not condensed fonts, so they’ll look wider, and you’ll see that especially with Cantonese, where there are lots of Latin characters mixed in. The sans-serif fonts are also not currently available in semibold, so I’ve opted for medium – semibold was about as thick as I was willing to go. And for some crazy reason, Pango isn’t able to render any of these CJK fonts on Windows. Which is fine – for the first few years, I couldn’t render subtitles on anything but Windows, so I guess it’s only fair for Linux to get an exclusive feature. Unless I figure out how to fix it.

Then there’s SDH. If I make the text easier to read, does that obviate the need for the black background? Very few commercial disks use it. But I don’t want to do anything to compromise intelligibility for our deaf viewers, so maybe not.

I think that’s it. I’m increasingly sold on the concept of using Noto Sans for every single subtitle. Medium for CJK, SemiCondensed SemiBold for everything else.

On the font front, this has taken a bit of a left turn. I’d originally been looking at the Noto Sans family of fonts as a means of creating some sort of single universal/fallback font. Well, that plan is dead. The font editing software I have (FontForge) can’t output the result of merged fonts without losing multiple anchor points (which destroys Thai and Hindi and makes me very nervous about the rest), so these separate Noto fonts need to stay separate in order to be usable.

Nevertheless I’m really growing to like these fonts – particularly the variant called “Noto Sans SemiCondensed SemiBold”, which really seems to have ideal proportions for subtitling IMO. Here is a very quick and dirty mockup showing Arial (current) on top, Noto Sans SemiCondensed Medium in the middle, and Noto Sans SemiCondensed SemiBold on the bottom. And no, that’s not even a real subtitle for what Han’s saying. You can click the image for a larger image.

The main differences are:

• Stroke thickness. I find thicker subtitles (within reason) to be more readable, but it can have side-effects, such as seeming bigger and brighter at the same point size.
• Letter width. Arial is a little wider than Noto SemiCondensed. I’m not sure it makes a difference readability-wise.
• Color. To counteract the fact that thicker fonts appear brighter – sometimes too bright – at the same color as a thinner font, I’ve chosen to make the new fonts slightly dimmer (still effectively white unless you break out the Photoshop, we’re not talking about going back to the days of yellow DVD subs). You’ll see that the middle Noto font seems approximately the same brightness as the top, but the bottom seems much brighter. In fact, the bottom two are the same brightness, both slightly dimmer than the top.
• Consistency between scripts. Right now we use a modernish utilitarian style for Latin/Cyrillic/Greek, but a more traditional style for Arabic and Thai. If we went all-in on Noto Sans, everything would be more stylistically similar.

Things to look for: the new subs might seem bigger and brighter–but I don’t want them to seem too big or bright. i.e. Would we need to back off the boldness and go back to medium weight? Reduce the brightness a bit more? Something else? Is there a better type of mockup which would be more useful?

PM sent.

Any font geeks care to comment? I’m considering moving some subtitles to using Noto Sans Medium. At least on the Latin/Greek/Cyrillic side of things, two things that have always bugged me about Arial are that it’s a little on the thin side (but Bold is too bold, and the demibold variants I’ve found don’t have all the needed characters), and the damned square periods and dots on the I’s and J’s. But thicker letters and rounded dots may run up against some sort of more serious kerning issue, which is something I’ve always been pretty satisfied with on the Arial side. I’m also fine with the “even blander than Helvetica if that’s even possible” criticism of Arial, and Noto Sans is similar. I favor utilitarian subtitles that don’t draw attention to themselves in any way at all.

I may even use Noto Sans as a “one font to rule them all” option, but that’s unlikely at this point. I’d have to validate every script looks as good or better before switching. On the downside, Noto Sans isn’t available at medium weight in all scripts, and its normal weight is even thinner than Arial.

PM sent!