CatBus

I think song names – at least in these films – require the sort of deep background knowledge I’m trying not to require. i.e. I’m trying to avoid even using uncommon character names in the SDH cues. i.e. instead of “Jerjerrod” I’d say “Commander”.

Certainly whether it’s live music vs tracked music is relevant, and things like loud, soft, and some sort of adjective. I guess the test is – if you don’t know anything at all about Star Wars, how would you describe the music in a way that helps add to the film what the music adds, but without actually being able to hear the music.

It turns out it’s a less critical problem than I thought, since so much of the music is talked over and therefore loses any opportunity to subtitle without getting really crowded.

boba feta said:

What’s Puggo’s next project?

I hope it involves a 16mm camera, a couple dozen friendly but non-hygienic mice, and a copy of The Phantom Menace.

Actually, skip the camera part.

SilverWook said:

And another one bites the dust.

I feel like we just ate Sir Robin’s minstrels.

Warbler said:

*sigh*

SilverWook said:

Control the weather? Did Cobra build another Weather Dominator? And does that make Obama Cobra Commander? 😉

I’m afraid it’s a real conspiracy theory, although it probably did crib heavily from GI Joe. Luckily you can’t tie everything to GI Joe. Just try to link GI Joe to the news that Trump isn’t showing any concern at all about the Russian military vandalizing the tombs of Napoleon, Caesar, Hannibal, and Attila the Hun. Can’t be done.

SilverWook said:

There didn’t seem to be any crazy Federal Govt. is going to take over Texas! talk with all the disaster relief and troops pouring in.

To some degree, sure. You don’t hear so much rumbling anymore from the people who were always on about Obama using HAARP to control the weather, either.

But I absolutely believe you’ll see this in the 2018 election: “Look at that out-of-control unresponsive federal government full of incompetent, corrupt politicians – that’s why you should vote Republican in 2018! Benghazi!”

Just looked him up. Yikes, forgot he had that alt-right tattoo on his face. Looks like he’s a contender for Special Counsel after Mueller gets fired.

We’ve had lots of mini-Trumps running all over the country for years and nobody paid them much attention because they were such obvious incompetent, sociopathic nutcases. Now we’ve got one in the Senate as well as the White House (not to mention governor of Maine). What’s Charlie Manson up to these days?

DuracellEnergizer said:

Not for me, nope. I don’t believe I’ve listened to a band/artist yet with an oeuvre I love wholly and completely.

I dunno. I half-expected this thread to turn top-heavy with one-hit wonders. You get the single to Taco’s Puttin’ on the Ritz and Right Said Fred’s I’m Too Sexy and that’s two complete sets right there, and you haven’t even spent a whole dollar yet. Okay, maybe they technically have other songs, but really who’d know?

TV’s Frink said:

Also, including “the” as part of the sorting?

TV’s Frink said:

you are a monster.

Agreed. I’m not sure if that’s the worst thing ever, but it’s in the running.

America’s pledges of allegiance and various showings of national spirit are pretty extreme on a world scale as far as I can tell – several Germans I know were visibly shaken and alarmed at what they saw going on in grade-school American classrooms.

Also, over-the-top patriotism knows no irony. Your typical guy pledging allegiance to the American flag while wearing a Confederate flag is completely unaware that they are mutually exclusive.

yhwx said:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-nfl-protests-may-be-unpopular-now-but-that-doesnt-mean-theyll-end-that-way/

We don’t have any polling specifically about Trump’s recent NFL comments, but a Quinnipiac University poll from 2016 found that only 38 percent of those surveyed approved of players choosing not to stand during the anthem. But while these NFL protests may be unpopular right now, particularly with white people, similar protests in the past — involving race, civil rights and varying definitions of patriotism — came to be viewed much more positively after the fact.

Marches for civil rights during the 1960s were generally seen negatively at the time. As the Washington Post noted last year, most Americans didn’t approve of the Freedom Riders, the March on Washington in 1963 or other similar protests. In fact, many Americans thought that these protests would hurt the advancement of civil rights. In addition, but many Americans held mixed-to-negative views of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. In a 1966 Gallup survey, 63 percent of Americans gave King a negative score on a scale from -5 to +5. Now, the civil rights marches are viewed as major successes, and just 4 percent of Americans rated King negatively on that same scale in a 2011 Gallup poll.

Many Americans also viewed gay rights marchers during the AIDS epidemic negatively. According to Business Insider, the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation in April 1993 drew more than 800,000 people fighting against discrimination and seeking more funding for AIDS research. But in a Newsweek survey conducted at the time, only 23 percent of Americans thought that the demonstration did more good than harm in the fight for gay rights. Today, gay rights organizations celebrate the march, same-sex marriage is legal and much of the platform demanded by protesters seems mainstream.

Nothing succeeds like success. And King was such a huge success that, after enough time passed, the very people who opposed the principles he stood for held him up as an unassailable moral standard for their own cause – and as long as nobody actually bothered to find out what King thought about these matters, it worked.

Can you see it in 2047? Senator Donald Beauregard Bannon of the InfoWars Party claims that if the sainted Colin Kaepernick were alive today, he would certainly be aghast at liberal Republican-appointed justices like Sam Alito, who say police may have some sort of obligation to provide medical assistance to the people they shoot.

I’ve done an initial run of cleaning up and filling out the SDH subtitles for Star Wars. I was surprised to find that I added or changed about 100 subtitles. I’m honestly still not sure how well subtitling music works in general, but it at least solves the problem of “there are so many scenes where nobody says anything and they’re not even doing anything, just looking at the sunset or getting medals put on their necks”. At least with these revised subtitles, you’ll be aware that music is a major component of the film, which is something. And in just as many cases, I can’t subtitle the music due to subtitles for dialogue/other audio taking priority, so it’s not omnipresent – mostly for music-only scenes.

Warb’s jumped to extreme conclusions before, but we’ve always brought him back from the brink. His posts were hardly the most inflammatory ones in that discussion IMO, they were just the most outrageous posts that people bothered to read. I hope he returns.

Is it tax time already?

Tyrphanax said:

McCain is one of those guys who I respect a lot because of what he’s done and what he’s been through, but who I also disagree with vehemently on a lot of things.

Unfortunately he has a long tradition of saying how awful something is, voting for it, and then continuing to say how awful it is, without skipping a beat. Pay no attention to the maverick mouth, just watch the votes.

ml80 said:

And lastly, wow, watching A New Hope tonight was like being reunited with a long lost loved one. Ha! Seriously I never once had that moment of being pulled out of it when I saw one of Lucas’ stupid add ins. And the colors and clarity are unreal. Can’t wait to watch Empire and dl Jedi.

Heh, as far as Despecialized goes, Star Wars is currently the warty stepsister of the three films. I have a feeling you’ll like what he’s done with the others!

Not sure where you got 2.7, but lots of software players don’t handle the lossless DTS-MA tracks very well. A lossy AC3/Dolby Digital track is pretty universally playable. In my experience, VLC has no problems with multiple audio tracks, but that’s not on a Mac. You should simply be able to select one of the alternate AC3 tracks to see if it plays back without distortion. I suspect you got a remux – i.e. not the original files, probably extra compressed and put on a public torrent. Those are pretty common, because the real deal involves huge files that people generally don’t have the patience to download.

Asset forfeiture laws can be pretty heinous. Not only are they “guilty until proven innocent”, they are also frequently “guilty even after being proven innocent”. i.e. you don’t necessarily get your stuff back just because you don’t get convicted. You don’t even have to be charged with a crime at all.

Okay, so I’m a little surprised that Russia organized at least 17 pro-Trump rallies in Florida during the 2016 Presidential campaign.

Not that they did it, but that it worked. Russia obviously wanted Trump elected and worked hard to achieve that goal – that’s never really been in question. But I was expecting the wave of Russian intelligence services-sponsored Facebook rallies to come crashing against the land-line demographic* of Trump supporters, like it did with the sparsely-attended event Russia organized in Idaho.

* I’m one of that demographic, BTW.

The Murkowski kickback has been found.

The Zombie TrumpCare 3.0 bill has section-by-section summaries describing what it does. However, none of the summaries mention this, which can only be found by reading the full bill text.

In 2026, every state would get almost exactly $4,400 per eligible person, except Alaska, which would get $6,500.

So the question is, does Murkowski think she can convince Alaskans that screwing them less than the rest of the country is a good thing? I guess that depends on if she had any input in this matter, or if this was added by leadership as a sweetener to try to win her vote. We’d only know the answer to that if she votes no.

TrumpCare iterations, by the numbers:

TrumpCare: 23 million lose coverage
Zombie TrumpCare: I forget, but not much different than original TrumpCare
Zombie TrumpCare 2.0: 16 million lose coverage
Zombie TrumpCare 3.0: 32 million lose coverage

Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

Maybe he’ll bankrupt the GOP too.

This is an older story but an interesting one.

Another question is who will pay the legal fees for the president and administration officials involved in the Russia inquiries. Some in Trump’s orbit are pushing the Republican National Committee to bear the costs, said three people with knowledge of the situation, including one who euphemistically described the debate as a “robust discussion.”

Not sure if this was ever resolved, but he was at least trying to shift the costs to the RNC. Trump has left a trail of bankrupt organizations in his wake. What’s one more?

Ryan McAvoy said:

TV’s Frink said:

Russia and Israel are obvious but I forget… is there a specific reason the Philippines seems to distrust Trump to a lesser degree that most countries? (of course they started at a higher level of approval)

The Philippines and Poland both have their own local Trump administrations, which are both managing more local support than our own Trump in spite of autocratic red flags all over the field. So when people in the Philippines hear bellicose dick-waving and absurd levels of disrespect for the basic foundations of democracy coming from the US, at least some of them announce they’ve already got one of those, and it’s very nice. Not listed: Turkey and Hungary, with the same issue.

I’m assuming Poland is a little more wary of Trump than the Philippines due to the Russia connection – not that their own government isn’t ironically even deeper into that business than our own. Also, Trump’s anti-China blather must be playing a lot better in the Philippines than his actual China performance, and I hate to say that his anti-Muslim blather probably helps him there a lot as well.

The Trump admin can’t even cook up its own biased studies properly. Even when they specifically asked HHS for a study showing how refugees harm America, HHS comes back with a study showing that they don’t.

Have they learned nothing from Nixon and Cheney? You need a Team B! Competitive studies from different groups! The team producing the results the administration likes best gets to keep their jobs! Let the invisible hand of the marketplace make the best science rise to the top!

suspiciouscoffee said:

Okay, a lot’s happened in the last week, so long story ahead.

Last sunday night I was going on one of my signature late-night, self-loathing, homophobic, text rants, but this one was to a friend who I hadn’t really talked to in years so he didn’t know how bad I was. He contacted my parents and told them about my self-image issues and my crippling fear of college, the future, and the suicidal thoughts that accompanied (I assume he didn’t mention my bisexuality because I haven’t been stoned to death yet). So they talked to me for a few hours on monday night, took me to the doctor wednesday morning, and now I’m on various medication (Prozac, a sleeping pill, and some other anxiety thing). I haven’t noticed much change yet, but now I’m worried about it because if I do start to hate myself less, then end up outing myself/end up living my life as a proud march into hell, then I’m worse off than I was before, if any of that makes sense (it does in my screwed up head, anyway).

Anyway, that’s the (short version of) the story of the last week or so.

IMO if you were even half-serious about suicidal thoughts, your friend made the right call. And if he didn’t out you to your parents, he made two difficult right calls in a row.

Keep this friend.

As for the medication, assuming your doctor knows what they’re doing; it’s honestly probably a good thing. Anxiety and depression can be crippling, and a little medication doesn’t solve your problems or change your personality so much as lift a little of the weight and let you start moving forward again. I wouldn’t worry about accidentally outing yourself on some happy pill overdose. Being in the closet is frequently not about self-loathing. It’s about self-preservation. You obviously value yourself enough already to know how to avoid a stoning, and I think valuing yourself more isn’t going to make you suddenly risk it.

And self-loathing ain’t such a bad gig. If you seem a decent fellow, the rest of the world will see your self-loathing as humility, and will infuriatingly love you more for it. And you seem a decent fellow.