So, now, I present to you the fruits of my labors. Tools in several different forms for downloading YouTube (and apparently sometimes Google Video) subtitles in SRT format, ready to use or convert to another form:

• YouTube closed-captions ripper (Web-based tool. Good for one-off use. Also gives links to the video files.)
• Download YouTube Captions (Greasemonkey script. Good for long-term use in concert with YousableTubeFix or Video DownloadHelper.)
• Google2SRT (Standalone open-source downloader/converter written in Java.)

What I just realized is that many of the things we remember from our childhood were actually from a single source, rather than a mish-mash of one-hit wonders like The Swan Princess, Ferngully, and The Nutcracker Prince. (Or the ones like Quest for Camelot which just didn’t shout out that Warner Brothers made them.)

The more aware of you might be thinking I’m going to be talking about Don Bluth, who brought us cartoons like The Land Before Time, An American Tail, The Secret of NIMH, Thumbelina, and Anastasia (among many other less classic ones), but this isn’t about him.

This is about a little company named Rankin/Bass Productions which sometimes published through Warner Brothers, but was quite visibly not them.

Do you remember those old stop-motion holiday films like Rudolph or Here Comes Peter Cottontail? Early Rankin/Bass Productions.

How about the animated version of The Hobbit or things like Flight of Dragons and The Last Unicorn, which, as an adult, I now find deeper than their better-drawn Disney contemporaries in some ways? You guessed it. Rankin/Bass again.

Incidentally, they contracted a Japanese studio named Topcraft to do the animation. The core members of Topcraft would later found Studio Ghibli, (And The Snow Queen was one of Hayao Miyazaki‘s big inspirations, but that’s as far off-track as I’ll let myself go.)

So, is there a point to this ramble? I suppose, if anything, it’s that, nostalgia and re-examining old favorites aside, learning details like these can help to see your past in a new light. I don’t know about you, but I love that feeling of understanding that comes when a new detail finally “clicks”.

For example, If you’ve watched any significant number of Miyazaki films, take a look at The Snow Queen. It’s fascinating to see what thematic and stylistic elements of it he chose to borrow and refine. Sailor Moon wasn’t on the TV channels I got as a kid but, if you watched it, you probably weren’t aware that it basically introduced the idea of magical girls working in a group to fight off large-scale villains. (Up until that point, that was the domain of Super Sentai. Stuff like Voltron and Power Rangers which I also didn’t watch.)

As for comments, what do you find most memorable about these second-tier classics? The song, This Is My Idea, from The Swan Princess? Amalthea’s words from the end of The Last Unicorn? The intro? James Horner’s soundtrack for the original The Land Before Time? Share it.

Of all the things we have to deal with in our daily lives, politics is (often, by design) probably one of the most frustrating, misunderstood aspects of modern daily life. Campaigns are annoying and time-consuming, politicians are infamously bad at keeping promises, and the one thing everyone can seem to agree on is that nobody is satisfied.

What most people don’t understand is that, in many countries, this isn’t our fault as citizens. Voting systems like First Past The Post (A.K.A. Winner Takes All, as used in countries like Canada), Electoral College (as used in the United States), and Alternative Vote (as used in countries like Australia) have deep, proven flaws which are only made worse by common solutions.

The sad thing is that most people don’t even know this, or just dismiss it as “politics” when, if offered, it actually falls under a different branch of the public education curriculum. As someone who grew up in Ontario, Canada, my high school required me to spend half a semester on this sort of thing in a course simply called “Civics“. However, in retrospect, it didn’t really sink in very well, despite my finding the topic somewhat fascinating.

I suppose my point here is that, if we’re ever to enact meaningful, long-lasting political change, we need to do a better job of educating ourselves and others about the less obvious flaws that in our political systems. Otherwise, when we ask for change, we’ll just end up asking for band-aid solutions that can be easily eroded away later.

For that reason, I strongly recommend checking out these great videos by C.G.P. Grey:  (For any given video, the videos below it on the list will also be relevant concerns)

• How the Electoral College Works (Including the now obsolete reason it exists)
• The Trouble with the Electoral College
• The Problems with First Past the Post Voting Explained
• The Alternative Vote Explained
• Gerrymandering Explained (Extras: Multiple Party Gerrymandering, The Shortest-Splitline Algorithm)
• Mixed-Member Proportional Representation Explained

Don’t forget to check out his other stuff too. He’s got some great stuff on things like what continents are, the origins and effects of Daylight Savings Time, and the story of how Scotland joined Great Britain.

UPDATE: Canadians will also want to watch Rick Mercer’s Canada Explained for an explanation of what votes of no confidence are and how they fit into things. (Proroguing is a feature of the Canadian parliament which, when used properly, lets members of parliament agree that there’s nothing left to do and go on vacation early.)

UPDATE: And now U.S. Primary Elections explained.

Here’s a 1972 horror film… about giant, killer bunny rabbits. The screenplay is based on a butchered version of an Australian novel that’s apparently at least decent and the movie isn’t even as disturbing as what we did to them in 1950.

Throughout the production process, there were likely countless people who recognized ways to, at the very least, make it not as horrible, but because of the nature of the process, what we got was a movie so bad that I’ve yet to see a more misleading trailer.

I’d go into more detail, but aside from not going big enough when he covered it on The Big Picture in order to keep things on topic, MovieBob’s done a much better job on this point than I probably could.

The Devil’s Kettle

Located in Judge C. R. Magney State Park in Minnesota, U.S.A., this unique waterfall sends half the flow of the Brule river underground. Nobody knows where the water ends up and scientists have no idea how a tunnel capable of carrying that much water could have formed in that kind of rock.

Metro-2

Supposedly, Moscow is home to a secret subway, begun in Stalin’s time and buried deep underground, which interconnects politically important buildings like the Kremlin and the Government Airport and links them to a secret bunker described as an “underground city”. Various current and former members of the government have given various (sometimes conflicting) bits of information but there is nothing reliable on what really does exist and what is exaggeration.

…and since the list is so dissatisfyingly short, I’ll also throw in some…

“Merely” Fascinating Places

Karst Towers

If you’ve ever looked at a traditional Chinese painting (or Super Mario World) and wondered where they got the idea for their exaggerated (sometimes almost phallic) hills, look no further. Essentially nonexistant in North America and Europe, these steep, rocky spires dominate the landscape in various locations in Southeast Asia, most distinctively around the Li River in China, but also in less striking forms in Vietnam.

Hashima, Japan (A.K.A. Gunkanjima)

From 1887 to 1974, this island provided coal for Japan’s industrial needs. At its peak in 1959, it had a hellish population density nearly five times that of Macau, and ten times that of Singapore or Hong Kong. Today, this tiny island is a crumbling concrete ghost town, known mostly to enthusiasts, tourists, and fanfiction authors.

Neft Daşları

Around the end of the 1940s, the Soviet Union was running out of easily-accessible oil, so they decided to drill for it in the Caspian sea… but this was the ’50s and this was the Soviet Union. Rather than build a compact little platform like we do now, they picked a spot with shallow water and Oil, built islets, connected them with causeways, and built a full-blown city on the site. Now part of Azerbaijan, it still produces oil and natural gas.

Unit 731

Everyone knows of the Nazi death camps, but what most people don’t know is that, in World War 2, the Japanese had a branch of the Imperial Army which went even further. Officially known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army, Unit 731 was tasked with kidnapping members of the local Chinese population and performing sickeningly cruel experiments on them and on captured prisoners of war to test weapons and to study the progress of various diseases.

Perhaps equally surprising is that we might not have known about this if not for two notable details: First, when the Russian army forced them to abandon their work, participants were ordered to destroy the facilities and commit suicide but it turned out that they’d been constructed too well for the former. Second, while everyone working on the project had been ordered to take the secret to their grave and prohibited from returning to civilian life in Japan, General MacArthur secretly offered immunity to the medical personnel in exchange for granting America exclusive access to their biological weapons research… an offer which they accepted.

Ilha de Queimada Grande (A.K.A. Snake Island)

A small island off the coast of Brazil so densely populated with venomous snakes that, aside from the odd scientist with a waiver, the Brazilian navy forbids civilian visitors. Thanks to Cracked.com for cluing me onto this one.

Got any more real mysteries or little-known fascinating places? Leave a comment and I may amend this list.

Today, I finally found the probable business case. It seems Google Chrome Frame now comes free (disabled, but in quick-enable mode) with every copy of Chrome and doesn’t require elevated privileges to install. (If you haven’t heard of it, it’s an Internet Explorer plugin which plugs the guts of Chrome into Internet Explorer so websites can opt out of Microsoft’s rendering engine… sort of like IE Tab in reverse)

That means that, every time Adobe tricks someone into installing Chrome, that’s one more copy of Internet Explorer that will use offer Webkit/V8 as an alternative to Trident/JScript when it encounters this variant of Microsoft’s X-UA-Compatible:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1">

Apparently IE7 users have already joined their IE6-using neighbors in being asked to either upgrade or install Chrome Frame when they open up GMail.

The two main upsides to this idea are:

1. You can work with the bug database while disconnected, just like git/hg/bzr/etc. allow you to do with your other project resources.
2. The status of a bug (open, fixed, wontfix, etc.) can be automatically kept on a per-branch basis, so you never need to worry about keeping track of which version of the code has which status for each bug.

However, there is a fairly large downside: It’s much more difficult to handle things that should be global, like discussion and keeping track of whether a given person has claimed a bug.

Personally, given that many similar arguments were made for staying with centralized version control software like Subversion, I think the idea has more potential than it might seem, but like any decentralized system, it’ll take a lot of time, effort, and PR work before it will be ready for prime-time.

Here are a few links if you’d like to start learning more:

• Distributed bug tracking (LWN, May 2008) (A general overview of the topic)
• Distributed Bug Tracking – Again (Erlangish, June 2007) (Thoughts on how to solve some of the potential problems I didn’t mention)
• Distributed Issue Tracking with Git (David Bremner, October 2010) (List of git-compatible implementations of the concept)
• Ditz (One such implementation that actually has screenshots on the homepage)

First, think long and hard before writing stories about lost technology or an Advanced Ancient Acropolis. It’s far too easy to get caught up in the excitement of writing them and misjudge your ability to do them well. (And, more subjectively, I’m getting tired of reading about them too)

Second, please please please don’t write a You Go Too Far! story. Science Is Bad stories are far too common and, given how you probably wouldn’t have time to write without its fruits, it’s, at best, frustratingly hypocritical and ungrateful to add to the pile of fiction implying that all progress is bad. I see your Frankenstein and raise you Plato’s Cave.

Finally, if you’re going to build your story on unsolved mysteries, vive le difference. Open up Wikipedia’s Open problems category and drill down to something like Undeciphered writing systems or Uncracked codes and ciphers or List of unexplained sounds. The more little-known, the better. A good story is fascinating because it’s not too familiar and a good mystery even more so.

If you must go to something like Category:Mysteries which has a high incidence of entries covering likely hoaxes, paranormal events of low credibility, and so on, please try to either stick to the sub-categories that are less hokey (like Lost works and Missing ships) or proceed with extra caution.

I have nothing against a good contemporary sci-fi or fantasy story… but I’m getting really tired of stories where the author has an engaging writing style or captivating characters, but the plot depends on me seriously considering the real-world existence of fairies or unicorns or the big bad wolf. Magical thinking has its place, but don’t over-do it. (I love The Dresden Files, but ridiculously improbable things like Bigfoot bore me when it’s implied that the author believes they’re probably real and expects me to believe likewise.)

As for general writing advice, pick something you’ve never seen used before (or if you don’t, resolve to do whatever you pick better than what you’ve seen) and, as Mark Twain said, “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”

My answer to them is that Steam violates what I refer to as my “8 PCs in a Bunker” policy but, more fundamentally, it’s a matter of ownership, respect, and principles.

Until games started to use phone-home systems like Steam for their DRM, you effectively owned any game you bought. Yes, there was that nasty little stub of code which meant that, if you broke the disc and you hadn’t made a copy and grabbed a crack, you were screwed but, aside from attacking people reselling used copies on eBay like AutoDesk does with AutoCAD, your intuitive expectations for buying something were upheld and agreeing to the EULA was, for home users, effectively a meaningless formality.

Then, along comes Steam with its addictive sales, ultra-convenient game manager, and integrated social framework… pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. What they don’t want you to stop and think about is that, by buying games with phone-home DRM, you’re not actually buying them anymore. Steam and similar systems give the publisher the power to enforce that license agreement we’ve all grown so used to ignoring. You didn’t buy anything; you just paid a one-time subscription fee… and legal departments always make sure that subscriptions can be revoked at the service-provider’s discretion.

Suddenly, Valve is in a position where they have all the power and I just have to trust that they won’t abuse it. Suppose Steam loses out to a competitor someday and closes up shop, I have to have faith that Valve or the game’s developer will release an update to remove the game’s dependence on it. If they’re killing off the brand anyway and the games are a decade old, do you really think they’ll see a worthwhile investment in that?

Suppose Valve goes public (If a U.S. company grows big enough, staying privately owned becomes more hassle than it’s worth. That’s what happened to Google.), suddenly they’re beholden to shareholders who, I guarantee, won’t put principles above profit. Once again, mandatory auto-update + Steam required + subscription-style licensing = “We think you’re a pirate/cheater/pedophile/communist and we’re revoking your account.”

We’ve already seen how little the promise of a DRM-locked eStore is worth when certain online music stores closed up shop and, at best, left it up to you to jump through hoops to preserve your collection. They’ve already got your money. Why should they care about tarnishing a brand that’s being end-of-lifed anyway?

Paying to be distrusted and quietly disrespected just isn’t the kind of relationship I want to have and I don’t like the “guilty until proven innocent” culture it fosters. Besides, if you can suppress the instinctive “Ooh! Shiny!” reaction that Steam sales are so finely tuned to trigger, it becomes very easy to find ways to spend your time that don’t force you to choose between pleasure and principles.

My favorite ways to have fun without feeling dirty include:

• Playing games released as open-source, freeware, or via offerings like GOG.com and the Humble Indie Bundles which are willing to stake their reputation on being DRM-free.
• Reading novels and short stories (New, used, at the library, on Baen’s Free Library, and on Project Gutenberg)
• Enjoying media produced for the fun of it, rather than the profit (fanfiction, online amateur sci-fi, hobby music, etc.)
• Writing programs and learning new programing languages
• Writing non-fiction and learning how to write fiction (No public URL yet)
• Taking a walk or sitting under a tree while I listen to a podcast (Not so much lately, but that’s mainly because I’ve been doing a lot of programming)

Aside from the pleasure of not feeling like I’m whoring myself out to the corporations (to put it bluntly), there’s a certain degree of satisfaction in being able to save my money, spend most of my time entertaining myself for free, and often have something to show for it when I’m done.

Now, some people might argue that, if you “pirate” games, It will also satisfy many of those goals and prevent them from revoking your access to the game, but part of having principles is doing it right, so you can feel good about yourself for not giving into the temptation to weasel your way around them.

I’d much rather feel good about entertaining myself than validate a publisher’s sense of entitlement and give implicit approval (and possibly word-of-mouth advertising) to a game developer who is unwilling to have principles of their own. It also helps that, when I do refuse to buy a game, I can harmlessly indulge baser instinct (some might call it a guilty pleasure) by reveling in doing my part to consign them to obscurity.

So, with all this philosophical posturing, what exactly is an “8 PCs in a Bunker” policy? It’s something I cooked up in the mid-’90s when I was a poor kid with a lot of smarts and a risk-averse personality to match.

In short, suppose a nuclear war were to break out tomorrow and I was left with only 8 PCs in a bunker, blank hard drives, and a bunch of DVD+R backups. Could I still enjoy what I’d bought to a reasonable degree?

Think about that for a moment:

• Blank hard drives, so you have to be able to install from scratch.
• No Steam servers, so you have to be able to back up the installer to DVD and “phone home at least once to verify ownership” won’t work.
• No phones and no call center, so “phone this number for a manual activation code” won’t work
• No access to a central matchmaking service or an MMORPG server farm, so you’d better hope that, if they’re needed, the server software was available for download too.
• Burned DVD+Rs, so if you’ve got old-style “lock it to the installation media” DRM, you’d better already have a crack too.

There are probably other things I took into account when I first designed the policy, but I think you get the idea. It’s an imaginative way to ask myself “Do I own this? Do they seem to trust me?” that covers pretty much any eventuality the publisher is likely to consider worthwhile.

I actually go further with non-games (insisting on open-source software so I don’t have to “take it to a manufacturer-owned service center” when it breaks) but that’s another story.

Then, as it tends to happen, while on a completely different topic, I ran across an entry in the Aquaria development mailing list which explained it simply and clearly.

Config files and data files are separated because config files are, in some ways, like cache files. If you lose them, it’ll be annoying, but they’re not too difficult to replace. On the other hand, I know I’d be pissed as hell if I lost a saved game that took me hours or days to build up.

It’s not as clear a distinction as something like “roaming vs. non-roaming” but given that config files are also more likely to be system-specific, that can play a part in it too.

Update: In my opinion, this blog post explains it even more effectively.