I always assumed licensed, translated Japanese comics were made by acquiring the digital masters from the Japanese publishing companies and using staff translators, maybe even in collaboration with the original author. I was very wrong.
Tokyopop, a large importer of Japanese comics, has a video explaining their technique. They have a contact in Japan purchase off-the-self tankobon (compiled volumes) and ship them to the states, where they microwave them to loosen the binding, and scan them in. Then they outsource the airbrushing out the text bubbles and the translation to generic hourly translators, and sell them on US bookshelves for whatever outrageous price they get. I literally thought it was a joke. It's hard to believe a company could have the gall to sell such a product as new. The image quality difference between licensed manga and the very same volume that I have directly imported from Japan is glaringly obvious and they use cheap shit paper too.
Moral? Download fan scanslations. Like most pirated goods, not only are they free, they are better.
I have no idea why movies; games are going after lameass 3D and ignoring head-tracking. They also ignore binaural sound as if it wasn't the fucking coolest thing in the universe.
It's a treadmill that the movie theaters can't get ahead on. Instead of trying to stay on the digital advancement treadmill, they should be marketing their tradition and atmosphere etc. I think it's funny that theaters are going to digital projection and touting this as if they were upgrading...even charging more, in Dallas theaters. They should be charging more for the film! It's their only niche. I think it's an obvious opportunity to market something different..."watch a 'real' film" etc...I mean if the movies come on hard drives and are played on digital projectors, then it's basically a badass home theater, with a lot annoying people. With your blu-ray and bigscreen and surround sound, why go to the theater? They tried to invent 3D to distinguish themselves, but now 3D is coming to home theater. Still, basically nobody has cans of film and a 35mm projector in their home theater.
Nothing wrong with 2D. Our brain fills in the depth. Been doing it for eons with other types of pictures.
There is an entire art of photographic/cinematographic composition that relates to how lines, shapes and form relate to the frame. What does that mean where the 'frame' is all fucked up on the edges from the lameass "3D" effect? Better just put everything in the middle. OOh, that shark looked like he was coming right at me!!!1111
What people really want is honest-to-god VR. The full immersion kind with goggles with eye-tracking and head tracking, soundstage-shifting binaural sound. Come up with something like that and I'll take interest, but the 3D fad is just stupid, stop it please.
The way I see it, you can't win with voice acting--I stopped playing FFX solely because of the unskippable voice acting--so I don't understand why more games don't just use text for most, at least minor dialog. It's faster to read, you get to use your imagination, and it's easier to translate. Games as late as FFVII had absolutely no character voices anywhere, yet told very character-centric stories. Some games like Kindgom hearts had voiced minor dialog, plus text bubbles, but you could instantly stop the talking and skip straight through to the text bubbles. Odin Sphere had the option to choose any combination of original Japanese acting, comically bad English redub, and japanese or english text bubbles. I put on Japanese dialog with english text bubbles because lets face it, when it comes to imported games it's a cheap localization issue for the most part.
In an era where dvds all come with multiple languages and at LEAST the native one, I don't understand why all japanese videogames don't include the original voice tracks, for those who don't want to listen to the $3/hour redub.
If there can be a religious exception for a rule, then the rule should be done away with completely.
That is, anyone claiming they can't obey the rules because of their religion should have the same standing as I would if I claimed I can't obey the rules because I don't feel like it. If Sikh's get to wear knives to school because their religion requires it, then I should be able to wear knives to school because my culture/fashion sense/needs require it, or in otherwords, anyone should be allowed to. If it's unimportant a rule enough that it can be allowed for some, it should be allowed for everyone. Making rules and then excepting religions (or other special interest groups) from them is obviously favoritism.
I totally understand THAT line of reasoning. I'm pointing out the persistent concept, exposed casually in TFS, that things done by humans are "unnatural" and that "natural" means "untouched/caused by humans". Why are humans considered unnatural and not part of nature? Why do we think we are different and exist outside of and separate from nature? When the human race does something to the environment, why is that seen as less natural than when a termite mound is built?
You prove my point in asserting that the quality "natural" means in part, "not human-caused". The point is though, why are humans themselves not "natural"? Many religions say that we were "created in god's image" or otherwise special and different from animals, but current scientific opinion is that we evolved on this planet just like any other life-form. And yet, everyone still considers everything we do as extra-natural, as your post proves--you say that cow herds are not natural because they are expressly bred and raised by humans. But humans themselves are a wild animal, and their relationship to cows just symbiosis, like we see many other places in nature. Except nobody thinks like that. Why? Why are the byproducts of human civilization not "natural"? Why is human civilization itself not considered "natural"? And where does this conceptual framework of human unnaturalness come from if we accept scientific, secular humanism and don't appeal to some religious magical thinking about the separated, part-divine nature of humanity?
I wonder what exactly "natural" methane is. When it comes from decomposing matter in permafrost, it's "natural" methane, when it comes from the digestion process of human-bred ungulates it's "unnatural" methane? I find it interesting how nothing humans do is considered "natural" despite that we are born here, eat here, shit here, and die here. I wonder just what is so "unnatural" about the human race, especially considering that we now supposedly reject magical thinking that he is divinely created and now believe he is an advanced ape. Yet his impact on his environment is always "unnatural" and impure and somehow different than that of any other species.
All taxes are protection money and/or bribes. We only have a special name for them as a coping mechanism. There is a giant terminological double-standard, just like how we say "the Obama administration" but we always say "the $unpopularleader regime" It's way to hide the true nature of the acts, as well as make everyone feel better.
When we bribe the government, we call it a tax.
When we pay rent to the government, we call it a tax.
When the government runs a pyramid scheme, we call it social security.
He just brushed away the two very important issues of the Kubuntu Desktop and sound. Now, what he was doing there is is meeting a "your distro sucks" accusation with a "does not!" reply which is to some degree fair. However that doesn't change the apparently common opinion that the Kubuntu desktop is crap, and sound is just flat out broken. I like KDE because it has more features and looks better, but it's just too damn buggy so I had to switch back to gnome just so me and my wife could use the computer. And I have NEVER had sound work properly out of the Ubuntu box. It is downright embarassing. I don't know to what extent these problems are the fault of Ubuntu as opposed to KDE, or the fault of the Linux kernel using Pulse or what. I just know that the Kubuntu desktop is highly unpolished and the sound situation is dire. These things were addressed in the Q&A because they are important and the only answer we got is "It works fine for me".
You mean "preventing others from even getting a chance to buy a ticket at deflated values".
If the connections are flooded with scalpers that only proves my point that there is a margin to me made between the price the ticket vendor is setting and what people are willing to pay for the tickets. There would be no such flood of scalpers if the tickets were not underpriced.
One is not free to invent any business model he chooses and then gripe about how his competition is not "allowed under his business model". That's called having a bad business model.
If it's possible to make money by scalping tickets, then clearly the tickets are underpriced. The scalpers in that case are providing a valuable service of holding back inventory for those that are willing to pay a little extra for the opportunity to purchase a ticket closer to the event date.
When it comes to art photography, I for one would rather have an original film copy that I can choose to scan or optically print rather than only a digital image, raw or otherwise.
Agreed, especially since, as mentioned above, fixing the electrical grid and winding the millions of transformers required to do so would be effectively stalled, ironically, due to the failure of the power grid. Transformer factories use electricity too.
nobody is going to be rewinding transformers like macgyver. that's a serious buttload of skilled work, with equipment and supplies that is not easily at hand
Keep in mind also that the transformer-winding factories will themselves be out of power. I'm sure transformers aren't made in caves using elves and magical power. It's kind of a chicken-and-egg scenario but I imagine that making transformers also requires electricity. So whatever the transformer-production capacity is now, consider that the production capacity after a transformer-pwning solar storm would be much, much lower. Which means it take much, much longer to re-transformer our whole power grid than you might think at first.
The album structure itself kind of evolved around vinyl. The length--about 35 min--is just long enough to fit on a record, and generally both the front and back sides have a "beginner" and an "ender". The front side will end with an appropriately strong but unresolving song and the first song of the 2nd side will be something of a 'kicker' to reward you for getting off your ass and flipping it over (think of "Money" from DSOTM). This is something of a pattern in album arrangement which is sometimes noticeable on modern vinyl albums which do not observe it and thus end up beginning or ending sides on a weak or wandering song which was intended for the middle of the CD release. There's also those albums which are just barely too long to fit on an LP so must be split across two discs.
This country has a long and glorious tradition of rich, middle-and-merchant class citizens fighting the powers that attempt to dip into their productivity. The American Revolution was started in part by outrage over taxes which by today's standards are absolutely minuscule. Tiny! The American revolution wasn't a revolution of the lower classes or working peasants. It was fought by people who were rich enough to organize, supply and arm them. People who owned shipping companies and were rich enough to have private battleships. So this middle-class programmer guy with a house and airplane protesting The State's encroachments on his attempts at the American Dream is actually very typical of american strife. Your "to each according to his need" class-jealousy is a reinterpretation of it using the modern justifications of "when the government gives out money, it's ok as long is it's to me, an when it takes money, it's ok as long as it's not from me".
You are correct. It's a good thing to advance people based on merit, but there are tons of adult-world elements that are not based on merit, but instead based on "putting in your time". Lots of things like upper level academia (try getting your phD in less than two-three years by testing out of it...instead it's often based on when they feel you have worked long enough), promotions which seem to never come unless you have worked at the company for a long enough time, etc. Can I take the bar exam without going to law school? Why not? I have to "put my time in" at law school even if I can pass the test.
Slashdot Mirror
I always assumed licensed, translated Japanese comics were made by acquiring the digital masters from the Japanese publishing companies and using staff translators, maybe even in collaboration with the original author. I was very wrong.
Tokyopop, a large importer of Japanese comics, has a video explaining their technique. They have a contact in Japan purchase off-the-self tankobon (compiled volumes) and ship them to the states, where they microwave them to loosen the binding, and scan them in. Then they outsource the airbrushing out the text bubbles and the translation to generic hourly translators, and sell them on US bookshelves for whatever outrageous price they get. I literally thought it was a joke. It's hard to believe a company could have the gall to sell such a product as new. The image quality difference between licensed manga and the very same volume that I have directly imported from Japan is glaringly obvious and they use cheap shit paper too.
Moral? Download fan scanslations. Like most pirated goods, not only are they free, they are better.
Superman did it once too, in one of the movies or TV episodes.
your script might be very simple if you use pdftk. It's a very powerful pdf merging and exploding program.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw
I have no idea why movies; games are going after lameass 3D and ignoring head-tracking. They also ignore binaural sound as if it wasn't the fucking coolest thing in the universe.
It's a treadmill that the movie theaters can't get ahead on. Instead of trying to stay on the digital advancement treadmill, they should be marketing their tradition and atmosphere etc. I think it's funny that theaters are going to digital projection and touting this as if they were upgrading...even charging more, in Dallas theaters. They should be charging more for the film! It's their only niche. I think it's an obvious opportunity to market something different..."watch a 'real' film" etc...I mean if the movies come on hard drives and are played on digital projectors, then it's basically a badass home theater, with a lot annoying people. With your blu-ray and bigscreen and surround sound, why go to the theater? They tried to invent 3D to distinguish themselves, but now 3D is coming to home theater. Still, basically nobody has cans of film and a 35mm projector in their home theater.
Nothing wrong with 2D. Our brain fills in the depth. Been doing it for eons with other types of pictures.
There is an entire art of photographic/cinematographic composition that relates to how lines, shapes and form relate to the frame. What does that mean where the 'frame' is all fucked up on the edges from the lameass "3D" effect? Better just put everything in the middle. OOh, that shark looked like he was coming right at me!!!1111
What people really want is honest-to-god VR. The full immersion kind with goggles with eye-tracking and head tracking, soundstage-shifting binaural sound. Come up with something like that and I'll take interest, but the 3D fad is just stupid, stop it please.
The way I see it, you can't win with voice acting--I stopped playing FFX solely because of the unskippable voice acting--so I don't understand why more games don't just use text for most, at least minor dialog. It's faster to read, you get to use your imagination, and it's easier to translate. Games as late as FFVII had absolutely no character voices anywhere, yet told very character-centric stories. Some games like Kindgom hearts had voiced minor dialog, plus text bubbles, but you could instantly stop the talking and skip straight through to the text bubbles.
Odin Sphere had the option to choose any combination of original Japanese acting, comically bad English redub, and japanese or english text bubbles. I put on Japanese dialog with english text bubbles because lets face it, when it comes to imported games it's a cheap localization issue for the most part.
In an era where dvds all come with multiple languages and at LEAST the native one, I don't understand why all japanese videogames don't include the original voice tracks, for those who don't want to listen to the $3/hour redub.
If there can be a religious exception for a rule, then the rule should be done away with completely.
That is, anyone claiming they can't obey the rules because of their religion should have the same standing as I would if I claimed I can't obey the rules because I don't feel like it. If Sikh's get to wear knives to school because their religion requires it, then I should be able to wear knives to school because my culture/fashion sense/needs require it, or in otherwords, anyone should be allowed to. If it's unimportant a rule enough that it can be allowed for some, it should be allowed for everyone. Making rules and then excepting religions (or other special interest groups) from them is obviously favoritism.
I'm not the only one that PGP encrypts my postcards, surely? The mail delay on vacations is pretty inconvenient, but hey.
Surely you wouldn't steal a car?
I totally understand THAT line of reasoning. I'm pointing out the persistent concept, exposed casually in TFS, that things done by humans are "unnatural" and that "natural" means "untouched/caused by humans". Why are humans considered unnatural and not part of nature? Why do we think we are different and exist outside of and separate from nature? When the human race does something to the environment, why is that seen as less natural than when a termite mound is built?
You prove my point in asserting that the quality "natural" means in part, "not human-caused". The point is though, why are humans themselves not "natural"? Many religions say that we were "created in god's image" or otherwise special and different from animals, but current scientific opinion is that we evolved on this planet just like any other life-form. And yet, everyone still considers everything we do as extra-natural, as your post proves--you say that cow herds are not natural because they are expressly bred and raised by humans. But humans themselves are a wild animal, and their relationship to cows just symbiosis, like we see many other places in nature. Except nobody thinks like that. Why? Why are the byproducts of human civilization not "natural"? Why is human civilization itself not considered "natural"? And where does this conceptual framework of human unnaturalness come from if we accept scientific, secular humanism and don't appeal to some religious magical thinking about the separated, part-divine nature of humanity?
I wonder what exactly "natural" methane is. When it comes from decomposing matter in permafrost, it's "natural" methane, when it comes from the digestion process of human-bred ungulates it's "unnatural" methane? I find it interesting how nothing humans do is considered "natural" despite that we are born here, eat here, shit here, and die here. I wonder just what is so "unnatural" about the human race, especially considering that we now supposedly reject magical thinking that he is divinely created and now believe he is an advanced ape. Yet his impact on his environment is always "unnatural" and impure and somehow different than that of any other species.
Just make sure you have something equivalent to exchange, or it might end up costing you an arm and a leg.
All taxes are protection money and/or bribes. We only have a special name for them as a coping mechanism. There is a giant terminological double-standard, just like how we say "the Obama administration" but we always say "the $unpopularleader regime" It's way to hide the true nature of the acts, as well as make everyone feel better.
When we bribe the government, we call it a tax.
When we pay rent to the government, we call it a tax.
When the government runs a pyramid scheme, we call it social security.
etc.
He just brushed away the two very important issues of the Kubuntu Desktop and sound. Now, what he was doing there is is meeting a "your distro sucks" accusation with a "does not!" reply which is to some degree fair. However that doesn't change the apparently common opinion that the Kubuntu desktop is crap, and sound is just flat out broken. I like KDE because it has more features and looks better, but it's just too damn buggy so I had to switch back to gnome just so me and my wife could use the computer. And I have NEVER had sound work properly out of the Ubuntu box. It is downright embarassing. I don't know to what extent these problems are the fault of Ubuntu as opposed to KDE, or the fault of the Linux kernel using Pulse or what. I just know that the Kubuntu desktop is highly unpolished and the sound situation is dire. These things were addressed in the Q&A because they are important and the only answer we got is "It works fine for me".
You mean "preventing others from even getting a chance to buy a ticket at deflated values".
If the connections are flooded with scalpers that only proves my point that there is a margin to me made between the price the ticket vendor is setting and what people are willing to pay for the tickets. There would be no such flood of scalpers if the tickets were not underpriced.
One is not free to invent any business model he chooses and then gripe about how his competition is not "allowed under his business model". That's called having a bad business model.
If it's possible to make money by scalping tickets, then clearly the tickets are underpriced. The scalpers in that case are providing a valuable service of holding back inventory for those that are willing to pay a little extra for the opportunity to purchase a ticket closer to the event date.
When it comes to art photography, I for one would rather have an original film copy that I can choose to scan or optically print rather than only a digital image, raw or otherwise.
Agreed, especially since, as mentioned above, fixing the electrical grid and winding the millions of transformers required to do so would be effectively stalled, ironically, due to the failure of the power grid. Transformer factories use electricity too.
nobody is going to be rewinding transformers like macgyver. that's a serious buttload of skilled work, with equipment and supplies that is not easily at hand
Keep in mind also that the transformer-winding factories will themselves be out of power. I'm sure transformers aren't made in caves using elves and magical power. It's kind of a chicken-and-egg scenario but I imagine that making transformers also requires electricity. So whatever the transformer-production capacity is now, consider that the production capacity after a transformer-pwning solar storm would be much, much lower. Which means it take much, much longer to re-transformer our whole power grid than you might think at first.
The album structure itself kind of evolved around vinyl. The length--about 35 min--is just long enough to fit on a record, and generally both the front and back sides have a "beginner" and an "ender". The front side will end with an appropriately strong but unresolving song and the first song of the 2nd side will be something of a 'kicker' to reward you for getting off your ass and flipping it over (think of "Money" from DSOTM). This is something of a pattern in album arrangement which is sometimes noticeable on modern vinyl albums which do not observe it and thus end up beginning or ending sides on a weak or wandering song which was intended for the middle of the CD release. There's also those albums which are just barely too long to fit on an LP so must be split across two discs.
This country has a long and glorious tradition of rich, middle-and-merchant class citizens fighting the powers that attempt to dip into their productivity. The American Revolution was started in part by outrage over taxes which by today's standards are absolutely minuscule. Tiny! The American revolution wasn't a revolution of the lower classes or working peasants. It was fought by people who were rich enough to organize, supply and arm them. People who owned shipping companies and were rich enough to have private battleships. So this middle-class programmer guy with a house and airplane protesting The State's encroachments on his attempts at the American Dream is actually very typical of american strife. Your "to each according to his need" class-jealousy is a reinterpretation of it using the modern justifications of "when the government gives out money, it's ok as long is it's to me, an when it takes money, it's ok as long as it's not from me".
You are correct. It's a good thing to advance people based on merit, but there are tons of adult-world elements that are not based on merit, but instead based on "putting in your time". Lots of things like upper level academia (try getting your phD in less than two-three years by testing out of it...instead it's often based on when they feel you have worked long enough), promotions which seem to never come unless you have worked at the company for a long enough time, etc. Can I take the bar exam without going to law school? Why not? I have to "put my time in" at law school even if I can pass the test.