One of the big uses of Aegisub that I remember from many years ago is anime fansubbing, which also drove the specification for the subtitle format it uses, ASS (Advanced Substation Alpha), which continues to see huge use today and is much more flexible than other formats used by DVD and Blu-Ray for example.
In the hayday of anime fansubs, there was often an arms race between different groups to see who could program the flashiest effects and karaoke subtitle styles into their releases. Even then I found them gaudy as all hell, but the craft was certainly respected!
Also, for those who aren't familiar with anime fansubbing, I can't emphasize enough how optimized it was. Shows would be released online within 1-2 days of the original airing on Japanese TV, with fan-translated, high-quality, QC'd subtitles. The community had high standards, and they'd normally beat the official English-language release at accuracy and readability. Aegisub was a big part of that and it's one of my favourite FOSS programs to use.
Indeed. I think it was Commie's release of Steins;Gate that had karaoke fx for the opening theme that literally blue-screen people's computers, because of the font they used triggering something in Windows GDI, so they had to rerelease a toned-down version.
unanimated's typesetting guide is still up, if anyone wants to see the insane amount of :effort: bored college kids used to put into subtitles: https://unanimated.github.io/ts/index.htm
Yeah, one of my favourite examples from Commie is the treatment they gave to the opening for Lovestory (Koimonogatari) from the Monogatari series.
The visuals of the opening itself flit and transition between old 80s style shoujo animation and a more modern style, so they take the opportunity to also dynamically change the style of the subtitles between the old black-bordered piss-yellow ones of old DVDs and the sharper style of today.
I can't see anything here that's notably different from Radio Garden.
Radio Garden got so popular that they were forced to stop streaming stations from outside the UK to listeners inside the UK. [1] This is thanks to a lawsuit involving TuneIn Radio that suggested this might break copyright / licensing restrictions.
I've had to listen to Radio Garden through a simple SOCKS proxy on a Fly.io server outside the UK ever since.
I imagine this will catch up with this site in due course as well.
As an aside, if you need to play with datetime objects in Ruby, you almost certainly want to be using the Time library instead of the DateTime library, even though one of them sounds like it fits better.
At the top of the DateTime docs [1]:
> DateTime class is considered deprecated. Use Time class.
The same doc explains when you should use DateTime by using an anecdote about William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes dying on the same day - except they didn't because England and Italy used different calendars at the time. [2]
DateTime is great at dealing with historical pre-1970 dates, otherwise just use Time.
Seeing a comment on there from the CEO of TiPJAR, which is a private company that provides a "tronc" service to allow allocation of tips at arms-length from the employer, services which are specifically called out in the statutory guidance, left a slightly bitter taste.
I wonder if anyone knows if the mobile apps can cache music for offline listening? It's the only feature that's keeping me using YouTube Music's Uploads (formerly Google Play Music).
Symfonium [0] (which supports pretty much anything but koel) is a commercial android app, can cache & export, have rules for doing so automatically, supports a rolling cache, can decide via wifi connection if the cached or online version should be used. You can also choose if you want original files or transcoded ones.
By most accounts the Elizabeth line in its operational phase has been a great success.
According to the ORR's (Office of Road and Rail) first annual report after opening the central section of the Elizabeth line, passenger numbers have exceeded their "post-pandemic optimistic scenario" and the line is on course to be revenue-positive within a few years.
Not passing judgement on this at all, but just giving you another data point.
Every so often, Hololive, a famous Virtual YouTuber agency, debuts a new set of talents by introducing their biographies and Twitter accounts. Because they're so popular, they get an influx of hundreds of thousands of new followers over the course of a day or two after only tweeting once. A large number of these new accounts get restricted because of automated systems assuming it's a bot, when actually it's legitimate excitement and/or network effects.
This reminded me of the Hidden London tours, which allow guided access to staff-only disused and abandoned parts of the London Underground. There's a real excitement in taking a peek behind one of these dusty, abandoned-looking doors you walk past every day.
> taking a peek behind one of these dusty, abandoned-looking doors
back in middle-school in USSR exploring with friends abandoned underground fortifications one of the doors that we broke through happened to let us into an actually used military hardware storage (unfortunately not munitions nor weapons) which had its official office and gates with guards/etc. from the other side of that hill.
More intentionally though we back then several times visited using ventilation pass the large underground military fuel depot each time carrying away buckets of fuel for various fun childhood fire activities.
As an adjunct to this, the UK, which might have joined this scheme if it was still part of the EU, is now developing its own system called the ETA (Electronic Travel Authorisation) [1]. It'll cost £10 for two years. Currently only in use for a couple of middle eastern countries, but will be rolled out more widely in the future.
Note that this article shouldn't necessarily be used as a way to find new things to watch; there are some clangers in there to avoid.
I also need to call out Takayama in Gifu prefecture, which is the basis for the fictional Kamiyama from Hyouka, an absolutely wonderful school-life-cum-mystery series from Kyoto Animation.
It would also be remiss of me not to mention Zombieland Saga, where a mad idol producer resurrects dead entertainment stars as zombies to form an idol group to revitalise Saga prefecture.
Hyouka and Zombieland Saga are both really good shows. I especially loved Karatsu in Saga prefecture when I visited it back in 2019.
Apart from Yuri no Ice, Karatsu is also very aware of Zombieland Saga. I walked up to the tourist information desk at Karatsu station and asked if they had a map with spots for Zombieland Saga, and the guy not only got me one, but also marked a few additional spots while guiding me like "You know that scene in episode 1 where the girl was walking in the rain? That's this bridge right here", and lots more which even I didn't remember! I was really impressed how much knowledgeable he was.
> Note that this article shouldn't necessarily be used as a way to find new things to watch; there are some clangers in there to avoid.
Are there any “much watchers” in the list? For someone who is visiting Japan later this month, has been a couple of times before, and has some (very!) basic language?
Well, taste is subjective and all that but out of that list, I'd say these are fairly objectively successful and popular if you're willing to take that as a rough proxy for "good": Haikyuu, Yuru Camp, Summer Wars, Wolf Children, Girls und Panzer, K-On, Haruhi, and the Shinkai films
I personally also quite like Hanasaku Iroha, Barakamon, Natsume Yuujinchou, Night is Short and Summer Time Rendering
Kinda depends on what you're looking for, e.g. Haikyuu is very much a sports anime and does a lot with the tropes of that genre. If you just want to watch a single good thing that has a bearing on a locality in Japan and isn't a project in and of itself (cough Haruhi cough) or otherwise cult, I'd say just watch Wolf Children.
FYI for "The Shinkai films" it's Your Name and 5 Centimeters Per Second.
The first is the second largest domestic box office ever for Japan (after Spirited Away) while also being critically acclaimed.
The latter is quite well received critically, but was less popular (without spoiling anything, the ending is somewhat divisive). Still at a 63 minute runtime it's well worth watching, IMO.
Also, I'll second the Wolf Children recommendation. Everybody in my family liked it, and that's rather rare for a film.
Also note that anime is not even remotely a realistic portrayal of Japan and should not be used as such like the article is proposing.
It used to be a common phenomenon for western "otaku" to think anime represents life in Japan, then travel there and come to find out that it's deeply racist and xenophobic, has an extremely repressive criminal justice system, a strong "we did nothing wrong in WW2" attitude, and so on.
Having lived in Japan for multiple years in the past and knowing other foreigners who've lived there for a decade+, I'll say that while it's true it's no anime dreamland and skews insular, one's experiences there will vary a lot depending on approach.
For example if you're running with a younger crowd in Tokyo and have become reasonably adept at speaking the language you'll run into a lot less of that kind of thing — a lot of the time people there just aren't comfortable with dealing with those who don't speak Japanese well, and older individuals and more out of the way cities might be less accommodating of outsiders. Often when I see writings online about having a bad time, it's from jaded Eikawa teachers who've made no effort to learn Japanese or branch beyond their friend group of other foreigners despite having lived there for many years.
That said young people aren't running the government there due to being solidly outnumbered, so national policies are naturally going to be more reflective of its older population.
The one that jumped out was Magical Girl Raising Project, which a younger me might have described as dark and edgy, but me today would call misery porn (it's not actually porn, just to be clear).
Now that I browse again, most are really good, but some are just a bit dull while being great examples of being from a certain place. Not to call it out in particular, but I ended up dropping Robotics;Notes for being kinda dull, despite it being part of the 5bp semicolon extended universe (Steins;Gate et al).
In the hayday of anime fansubs, there was often an arms race between different groups to see who could program the flashiest effects and karaoke subtitle styles into their releases. Even then I found them gaudy as all hell, but the craft was certainly respected!