I’ve been buying all the usual nonsense this month, but I’ve particularly been delving into the output of Broklyn Beats (yes, one O), a label that was active in the early noughts. They concentrated on what some people at the time called “brokebeat”: Harsh, annoying music you can’t dance to. For instance, here’s Toecutter:
Man, that album is the most annoying thing I’ve heard ever! And I’ve heard all the annoying albums! I challenge anybody to program while listening to this album! Kudos!
But I didn’t know that Broklyn Beats also did this charming packaging stuff:
See? It’s a mesh thing stapled into a kind of sleeve.
And inside, there is what looks like a hand-screen-printed paper sleeve. (And a CD-R.)
Yesterday I was delving into the wonderful world of crowd-sourced subtitles, and I was wondering whether TV translations are easy to do.
I downloaded the Emacs/mpv-based subed mode and got started.
And then stopped immediately, because the mode is really geared towards editing srt files, not writing brand-new ones. You can write new ones, but there’s really no workflow offered by that mode that makes it pleasant.
However! While Youtube doesn’t offer to auto-subtitle Swedish programmes, it does offer to mark out sections of the programme that has speech in it. (I guess they do it with elves. Or AI.) So I went to one of the Bergman things, Trädmålning (which is basically a quite different take on the same material that went into making The Seventh Seal), said “I want to subtitle this”, and it made an empty scaffolding, marking out all parts that have dialogue.
And then I went to a service that offers to download .srt files from Youtube (because it doesn’t seem like Google offers this capability itself), and then I had an empty .srt file!
Simple! Modern! Efficient!
(We got this instead of flying cars. People in the 50s would have been so disappointed in this stupid future timeline.)
So then I could start subtitling in Emacs.
Here’s what it looks like:
It’s kinda nifty. When you move around in the Emacs buffer, mpv automatically synchronises to the place where you are, and plays that bit in a loop.
However, it’s really grating to listen to the same thing in a loop, even if it pauses the loop while you’re typing. So there’s a lot of hitting the `M-SPC’ key to auto un/pause involved. And the mode lacks some commands (for smashing consecutive too-fast titles together into one, slower, longer ones) that I was writing while doing this, so doing this one 50 minute play took me… what… five hours?
I’m exhausted.
It’s strange how tiresome it is to do translations. My mind just isn’t up to it: I’ll be looking for even the simplest words for the longest time. “Oh, what’s the word for the thing on a branch… a thin branch… er… uhm… Twig! That’s it! Twig!” Repeat for all the words. Writing in a specific language is one thing, but listening to one and writing in another makes mah branes hurt. So there’s a huge number of er awkward word choices in the translation.
I put the .srt file up at Microsoft Github, and if you want to correct anything, use the Youtube interface. Or send a pull request.
The result is on Youtube. It’s a pretty good play! Very Bergman: Funny and emotionally draining at the same time.
Trigger warning: Some religious stuff may be encountered during the watching of this play.
I was wondering how much work it is to do subtitles for some of the Bergman rarities I uploaded yesterday: Somebody has written a subtitling mode for Emacs, so I wondered whether that was going to be my new hobby.
But then it occurred to me that there’s a gazillion of busy bees out there: Perhaps somebody had already done so?
Indeed! On Subscene I found subtitles for half a dozen of the things, so I’ve now uploaded them as well to Youtube. Here’s A Dream Play, for instance.
Hit the “CC” button to get the English translation.
I’m still tempted to have a go at one of the shorter items myself, just to see how it works…
Some years back, I watched a whole bunch of things Ingmar Bergman had done. Most of his movies “proper” are available through conventional means, but a surprising number of things weren’t. (We’re talking plays like The Ghost Sonata (on one end of the video quality scale) to The School for Wives (on the other end), not his … movie movies.)
Fortunately, there was a guy selling bootleg DVDs of these things, and I bought them all.
It’s been brought to my attention that those DVDs are no longer available, so I thought it my civic duty to upload this stuff (along with some other bits and bobs I got from torrenting) to Youtube.
Here’s the channel. Download the videos before they disappear, I guess? I mean, there’ll be a bunch of copyright strikes, I’m assuming.
And, yes, most of these do not have subtitles, and the vast majority are in Swedish, so this’ll only be useful to the 8M Swedes and the 10K Norwegians and Danes that admit to being able to understand Swedish.
(And some Finns.)
Hm… doesn’t Youtube have some kind of crowd-sourced subtitling thing? *roots around* Yes, indeed. I’ve now switched that on, so if you want to provide English subtitles, be my guest.
All Emacs users, at one point or another, feel like they need a pedal to get all the keystrokes in. But now I could actually use one: I’ve got a blogging project that requires using a scanner, and triggering that with a foot would mean less bending to reach the keyboard.
So I got an iKKEGOL USB Foot Control Action Switch Pedal and was excited to see just what obscure HID keycode it’s generating. (These things usually pretend to be keyboards, which makes for easy integration without any drivers and stuff.)
So I connect the pedal and start up xev and:
“b”? It sends “b”!?! “b”!!!
OK, I can work with that for the scanning thing, but “b”!?!?
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%3A+Daydreaming)
%3A+Angel)
%3A+Inertia+Creeps)
%3A+Unfinished+Sympathy)
%3A+Safe+From+Harm)
%3A+Hymn+of+the+Big+Wheel)
%3A+Sly)
%3A+Protection)
%3A+Karmacoma)
%3A+Risingson)
%3A+Teardrop)
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