After watching 15 episodes in, Designated Survivor is feeling like the comic repetition of the Trump administration. In some parts, there are parallel connections, and in some others, if we were to get inside Trump supporters’ minds, this is how they would imagine themselves – fighting the good fight to protect an embattled, post-apocalyptic America.
Plot spoilers ahead
Three months ago, when Trump celebrated MLK day by picking up a fight with civil rights leader John Lewis and giving his employee of the month award to Frederick Douglass, this is what Colbert predicted Trump would do on Easter:
Well, this is what Trump actually did on Easter:
I tinkered a bit with making almost fully automated Korean translation & caption syncincg for the Eyes on the Prize documentary for today’s staff meeting (which apparently was cancelled) but the results are not very good. Ath the same time though, it’s not too much text – only 1,000 lines (not sentences) in Episode 3
Steps:
1. extract english captions from youtube
2. parse text out of the caption file timecode syntax
3. if the line is shorter than the median, assume there is a paragraph break at the end of that line. (captions include no punctuation)
4. Merge the paragraph lines into single paragraphs. (I used MediaWiki’s behavior of merging lines into one to do this)
5. Review the paragraphed text to ensure the punctation and paragraph separation makes sense. I noticed even though there is no punctuation, catpions include periods in middle name initiials and things like “Mr.”
6. Run the text through Google translate. It can only handle around one page of letter size page at a time.
7. removed all punctation from the korean, merged all the paragraphs.
8. Now to time sync the Korean.. I divided the total runtime (1 hour) by the time length between each caption point, then multiplied it by the total character length of the korean caption. since each catpion gets way too close to zero, I buffed them up a bit by giving them 40% more than what they are supposed to get (so they gain extra characters)
9. Create the caption file and run. Results were pretty disappointing. Because captioning density throughout the film is extremely irregular, the Korean caption was almost never on time with the English lines being said at the time.
Another approach could be doing the korean lines proportional to the length of the english captions, instead of the lenght of time. Yeah.. actually that may not be too bad.
This vid was so funny that I watched it twice from start to finish and laughed both times with the Texas jokes
Donald Trump: A Bigly Winning President
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CQYs_yRtUY
I started watching Westworld yesterday after coming across this review and finished Season 1 today. I wasn’t paying much attention though, watched it while playing World of Tanks. Spoilers ahead..
Yesterday I washed a stir fry pan(?) that I had left unattended for 4+ years,, used mostly to drip oil from the panhandle.. thingy after making eggs.
There was almost half a centimeter of gooey semi solid oil resin covering the entire base. I used four sponges before they became sticky, my hands became sticky, put boiling water in it for half an hour and after noticing that the ceramic cover may have peeled off, I started thinking maybe should have just gotten a new one..
this whole “it’s because of [behavior x] like yours that Trump won” rhetoric actually goes back a little. It follows a pattern of other similar conservative rhetoric. The most recent in my memory happened mid-campaign cycle, maybe early October? It went like this:
A: Well this recent incident is very shameful because it’s not a democratic procedure.. blabla..
B: America is not a Democracy!
A: What?
B: America is not a Democracy, dumbass. It’s a republic.
The funny thing is that stating that the U.S. is a representative republic doesn’t refute the original argument being made. It does go just a tiny bit further into detail about government types and is a splashy way of appearing to break your opponent’s argument, (because “the U.S. state is a democracy” is easy to sell rhetoric) when in reality there’s no substance beyond the initial shock factor.
I think there’s some similitude – maybe a simplified version? To the now classic conservative framework of first refuting the point by choosing words that anger progressives so much that leave them stupefied, but that at the same time energize the base, then moving to frame the issue as originally planned.
every time a scheduled event is near:
Ideally the phone would know that I am nearby, make the beeping noise, and alert the desktop applications to not show further alerts.
while making the next dream show vid, I was checking the URLs in the NILC fact sheet, and found a URL that was not working:
http://justice.gov/eoir/list‐pro‐bono‐legal‐service‐providers‐map
after some googling, I found the correct link:
http://justice.gov/eoir/list-pro-bono-legal-service-providers-map
what? they are exactly the same. What’s the difference?
Putting them side by side on Notepad, I noticed the wrong URL was slightly longer, even though every character was the same.
The difference in length started around “bono” – the dash was slightly longer.
I think either MS Word or Acrobat converted the dash to a “better looking” longer special character dash, and the URL was no longer valid using that special dash character.
Very nice.
Thanks, Drumpf.
So when actually taking time to analyze the KRC phone logs in the future:
I was re-watching Game of Thrones Season 1 and was blown away at how every line actually threads further into the plot, and every character referenced in passing actually have some purpose in being mentioned, or appear later. And it is all woven together gracefully – like when Arya starts practicing swordfight with Syrio Forell and Ned sees them and looks worried, and slowly fading in is the sound of battles, and he doesn’t have to say anything but it gives enough backdrop for the bloodspills to come.
Or like the screenshot above, where I just now found out that the two people speaking at the bottom of the dungeon plotting to kill Ned (which somehow I didn’t notice in my first two passes of Season 1) are actually Illyrio and Varys! Didn’t Varys just go to Ned telling him that he trusted him and wanted to help? Ugh and now in Season 6 he’s helping Daenerys? Did Varys change his stance or did the balance of things change enough for Varys to think that assisting Daenerys was now the better choice?
