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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s a good first step!
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 😕
‘Trump retweets British far-right leader’s anti-Muslim videos’…
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.
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:
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!
PM sent.
It’s doesn’t have quite the same quality as Moore’s “Who Would Jesus Molest?” defenders, but I do see a lot of liberals playing Change the Subject awfully damn hard with regard to Franken. There’s about a bazillion discussions going on in liberal circles about Roger Stone and the Russian bots knowing about the allegations before they became public. Sure, it’s a politically motivated hit job. I don’t ever think that was ever in any serious doubt. But the thing is, this political hit job seems to have an actual basis in fact, making it very much different from the things thrown at Clinton by the same actors.
For crying out loud, Franken is not contesting the accusation. He’s referred himself to the ethics panel. Is that enough? No, actually it’s definitely not enough in the end, but it should be enough for his supporters to stop trying to defend him by calling the accusation “fishy”. Fishiness isn’t nearly as important as truth.
Exactly zero liberals are saying Franken groped this woman just the same way John the Baptist groped Elijah so it’s okay. But this is only because liberals and conservatives think differently. But they both have the same defend my team instinct, and sadly very little respect for the seriousness of the issue of sexual harassment.
Sexual harassment (should be) a non-partisan issue, and it’s rampant in places without oversight, such as Congress. There are absolutely more Democratic congresspeople who engaged in similar and worse behavior. And more Republicans too. And I’m not particularly sad about the prospect of dirt being dug up on the lot of them.
This is a very promising development, assuming your last name isn’t Flynn.
Keep the mouse droppings and the cranberries in separate work areas.
PM sent.
Why would you transfer despecialized to vhs lmao if you want star wars on VHS there are a multitude of official options available
The Star Wars 1977 video with 1977 audio has never been released on any home video format, ever. Not to mention the quality of a VHS transfer of DeEd would be better than the equivalent official versions.
Also, around that time, one of our forum members (none, I believe) was hypothesizing that you could theoretically do anamorphic VHS tapes these days with fairly broad device support, since modern displays can be (and often are) configured to stretch 4:3 images to fill a 16:9 frame. So you could (ab)use this (mis)feature to make an effective 16:9 VHS instead of your typical double-letterboxed situation.
This is slightly off topic but hopefully not too much.
If stores like Blockbuster Video were still a thing.
would anybody be tempted to rent out their copy of the
original trilogy Blu-rays. and replace the discs with a set of Harmy’s?
So that more people could see the originals?
No, but I’ve been tempted to do something similar. There’s a farmhouse we vacation in sometimes, and the owners have just a handful of VHS tapes available there, and the 97SE’s are among them. Not much risk of people seeing them, though. They’re VHS. And there’s no VCR there. And there’s no TV there either. Nevertheless, a VHS transfer of Despecialized would be so much nicer, just knowing it was there, even if nobody could watch it.
It’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Who could it be? It’s the unbreakable encryption of usernames.
