CatBus

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!

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.

Possessed said:

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.

red5-626 said:

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.

team_negative1

It’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Who could it be? It’s the unbreakable encryption of usernames.

This joke chart has been making its way around Twitter, except… it’s not a joke. It’s an actual chart presented at today’s House Judiciary Committee oversight committee (by Rep. Gohmert, where all the crazy that isn’t coming from Trump originates)

Look carefully at this thing. What links James Clapper, Susan Rice, David Petraeus, Eric Holder, and the Obama State Department together in this insidious Russia/UraniumOne web? You guessed it – Benghazi! Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein even warrant their own crazy bubbles on this Russia/UraniumOne chart, cause Rosenstein’s job description is all about the Uranium, and he was US Attorney in Maryland until Trump put him to his current position, so that’s awkward. In fact, Mueller’s on there twice for good measure. So’s Comey. And Obama. And Susan Rice. Because doubling the crazy bubbles makes it seem doubly nefarious.

The Moore Senate campaign response just keeps getting lower and lower.

That’s right. They aren’t saying the Washington Post is paying women thousands of dollars to lie about Moore, they’re just saying the Washington Post is paying women thousands of dollars to lie about Moore through an anonymous intermediary, which is a totally different thing, because you can deny you said it. Because normal people unconnected to the Moore campaign make that kind of statement all the time in their normal everyday robocalls to Alabama voters, so it might be one of them.

Oh goody, sounds like Sessions is planning to resurrect the Clinton show investigations. So we get to hear all about the DOJ investigating Clinton e-mailing uranium to Vince Foster in her Benghazi pizza dungeon for another three years like that’s going to paper over Russia.

This is where we must have state-level charges. He’ll only be coy about pardoning people for so long. If this hits his family, the pardons begin. But if his family gets hit with pardon-proof charges, he may be so fixated on those charges that he lets the other perps continue to dangle on federal charges, which would be lovely.

RayRogers said:

Might as well go for it since it’s natively 4K resolution.

Nah, I’ll be recording it to VHS anyway. Just kidding… maybe.

He’s JKRACH! I knew it!

The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!

They appear to be testing a maneuver that sucks the orange pigment out of their bodies, allowing them to more easily pass for humans.