Microblogging Journal through 6/24/2024

Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Tuesday 06/18

• 22:07 # It’s too hot this evening for normal brain function so I watched a movie. By fortunate coincidence, Oppenheimer arrived on Amazon Prime. My perception is that it was good, but a bit overrated. It didn’t really seem to have anything new or interesting to say about the subject matter. And I wasn’t ever really sure what story I was being told. The story of the bomb? Oppenheimer’s biography? A spy thriller? A political mystery? A biting social commentary? Somebody couldn’t make up their mind.

Wednesday 06/19

• 08:50 # Local weather has high temperatures about 90, which is a fairly normal summer temperature where I live. However it says it will get up to 100 by the weekend, which is a bit more rare, though not unheard of, where I live. Anyway, it’s a bad time for my heat pump to be underperforming.

• 09:11 # It amazes me how many professional creators on professional podcasts haven’t worked out how to frickin mute their microphone when they cough. I mean they buy the good microphone and setup the room so it doesn’t echo and they work out how to record local audio tracks and synchronize and mix them in post, but they always forget a simple mute switch.

Thursday 06/20

• 08:35 # Yesterday I called in the heat pump people to try to figure out… yet again… why my heat pump doesn’t cool very much in hot weather. In previous episodes, there was a leak, then there was a broken part that needed to be replaced. Now it turns out there was another minor leak and they added more refrigerant. These new-fangled modern efficient heat pumps sure do break a lot. Anyway, it’s working much better today. The remainder of the much-talked- about First Big Heat Wave Of The It’s-Not-Even-Summer-Yet will now hopefully be a non-issue for me.

Friday 06/21

• 09:56 # That heat wave everyone’s talking about is starting for me today. Yesterday the high temp was 86F (30C). Today the high temp is supposed to be 94F (34C), and over the weekend it’s supposed to reach 100F (38C). Luckily I got my heat pump fixed. 100 is somewhat rare here but it usually happens once or twice a year. It’s just that it’s supposed to be in July or August.

• 22:33 # Got the Elden Ring DLC. I haven’t played games in so long I’m struggling not to get sick from all the motion. Anyway glad I never went into NG+ with my original character because it’s super OP now hehe.

Saturday 06/22

• 15:15 # By the way, I didn’t win the Official Quiz of Elden Ring on the first try, in case you were wondering.

• 15:18 # I see in Elden Ring patch notes for 1.12: “Added new feature to summon spectral steed during the Elden Beast boss battle.” Oh man I wish that had been there when I was fighting that boss battle. Yeesh.

• 18:02 # Watched the first two episodes of Three-Body, the Chinese television series based on the book. It’s kind of mesmerizing. The pacing is so very different from Western media, it’s almost a throwback to the 1970s. The tone is sort of an odd emo mixture of music video and soap opera. Anyway it follows the book a lot better than the Netflix show. Except where they keep talking about faxes.

  • 22:09 # There are 30 episodes in the first season of Three-Body… this is a rare case where the adaptation of a book is actually longer than the book. 30 episodes of 45 minutes is considerably longer than the audiobook for Three Body Problem was. Meanwhile Netflix’s 3 Body Problem was eight 1-hour episodes and covered a book and a half.

Sunday 06/23

• 09:36 # So I recorded two episodes of Elden Ring DLC play. The good news is that the OBS closed captioning plugin does indeed capture a serviceable .srt subtitle track for each recording. The bad news is that it doesn’t quite meet my high personal standards, so I still need to edit the file in order to elevate the subtitles above what YouTube does automatically. Said editing currently means roughly two or more hours of work for every one hour of recorded video. That’s definitely not a sustainable workflow for something I don’t get paid a full- time salary for. Perhaps there is an application out there somewhere specifically for editing subtitle tracks and visually lining them up with videos. Something that is somewhat easier than editing a plain text file.

  • 10:11 # There’s an open source program creatively titled Subtitle Edit which is pretty much what I wanted. It allows me to fine-tune the subtitles to the level of quality that you might see in a professional video production. However, while it does significantly reduce the amount of time it might take to do such a task, it’s still a very significant time sink per video, and not something I’d want to do very often.

  • 10:23 # To get a sense of the amount of work, there are 313 subtitles in this first 40 minute game video, and each one needs to be edited, and many of them need to be split into shorter subtitles. So even if that’s one minute of editing per subtitle, that’s already like 4 hours of work right there. It might actually be easier to start from scratch and transcribe everything myself, rather than editing what the closed caption plugin did.

• 19:04 # I haven’t consumed a Kindle book in a while (having almost exclusively listened to audiobooks in recent years) but they still have a fundamental technical problem that has yet to be addressed: Glossaries and footnotes. I clicked a footnote link in the early part of a book and it happily jumped right to the end of the book to show me the footnote and immediately my “furthest read position” was moved to the end of the book. Not only that, but I can find no button to click to go back to where I started. Super smart. Maybe fix that? Within our lifetimes? I remember complaining about that what must have been ten full years ago.

• 21:59 # Yeesh it’s taken me pretty much all day (off and on), but I’ve completed editing subtitles for one 40-minute game video. As much fun as it is to add inside jokes into the subtitles, this is not something I’ll be doing on a regular basis.