Sunday, November 05, 2017

#autistichistorymonth "A different sort of magic which is in everyone"

Those who don't know magic will never find it - Roald Dahl. Or he said something closely similar.

Right now I am watching The princess and the goblin which was a product of a certain time.

What I remember is more important than what I forget said a woman who has limbic encephalitis. Allergic reactions and inflammations are two causes of this.

And then someone else said - Magic is easy for me. I can always find it. Or was it Enid Blyton about happiness rather than magic? Her books are often full of both, especially the first ones I read, like about Mr Pinkwhistle who is an activist and interventionist of the fairy/pixie/brownie world she often moves in when she writes her fantasies for younger children.

I spent a lot of time around Tom Shakespeare and his profiles, and also listening to Sabrina from the mid-1980s - three albums of hers this weekend.

Ah - goblins! They are such creatures. A lot of you might know them from Gringotts Bank. I had a thought about this when I was reading Independence Chick about house-elves and the way they align with disability rights and cross-disability work.

What disability advocates can learn from house-elves from Independence Chick - in short, lots!

Also I was able to set up the subtitles for Princess and the Goblin in a special way.

Apparently Public Broadcasting Service picks up the subtitles from the iPad - the closed captions. I called the format Dupont Humanite and used blue, red and yellow and shadows.

YouTube captions are slightly different. For instance; there are shadows and boxes which can be used to best advantage - reminding me of when I would work with Microsoft Word versions 5 and 5.1 in the mid-1990s. Before that I would use TeachText and/or ClarisWorks.

And now of course there is Pages which has a long-overdue update. I mainly use it to convert documents from before like Preview does and to make iBooks. And it would be good for brochures and business cards also.

I started off with the text. You can make it serif or sans-serif [and monotype/proportional - sort of the difference between Monaco; Geneva; New York; Palatino]. And then there are boxes and backgrounds which may or may not be good for the eyes.

Some people like high contrasts like yellow and blue or pink and red.

Red and pink and green should never be seen unless with a neutral colour like beige - I'm so glad subtitles and closed captions aren't beige! - or grey - shades of grey work well because they quiet and calm the eyes. They focus the mind also.

Or you may want to make your titles goblin-like or Irenie-like or grandmother-like.

The biggest problem I have had with titles is storyboarding and timing.

Some are based on audio description effects.

I first started seriously investigating these Internet effects 18 months ago when I was corresponding with the author of Disability Diaries and their cohort.

I still think subtitles are magic and I was first able to access a television with them - which had multimedia capacities I cherished for producing and consuming - in 2008. The Global Financial Crisis was good for something after all!

A few days ago I watched a show about the Cleveland Browns and their season-winning sweeping ways in 1995 and 1996. It was Football lives or that series.

There were not even capital letters like on US news shows of that calibre.

And when al-Jazeera says - This show is not captioned. I know that the YouTube and Vimeo videos from that conglomerate often are and there are transcripts, for more of life's good things such as the Press Clubs and Foreign Correspondence Clubs.

Thank you Joseph T. Graham for your copy of The Princess and the Goblin.

I still have not tried YouTube Red.

The goblins look something like the bat Bartok in Anastasia from the Don Bluth group.

And I am thinking of the time I learnt the truth about Jansen - it was made by a Hungarian in the style of a Dutch type foundry.

It is an easy font to read in, easier than Joanna which is a Penguin font.

And The monthly will be a whole different font altogether. It was designed by a Swiss group.

Dyslexie is a font I read in sometimes.

The beauty of the lilies I have just completed. A few years ago I was exploring The People's Temple and Jim Jones and Geoffrey Falk [perhaps 2013]. I remember the tuna cans were very hard to open that day, even with the grandparents' magnet opener which had been bought.

"Don't keep calling me princess - I'm human you know," says Irenie. [and so is Curdie!]

"I call it grandmother's thread".

"How did I find you now?"

They simplified this story a lot so it's about being lost and getting into trouble. Which is probably not the way George McDonald would have it. It's more like a Charles Kingsley adaptation or even Matthew Arnold.

And there was a good Sp!ked article about Matthew Arnold.

An example of an audio description effect would be almost poetic - even though you're not supposed to interpret them that way. If you had an individual person who likes poetry.

And there are endless automatic translations everything from Vietnamese to Haitian to Amharic. So I put it into Hmong for fun.

Curdie is very funny. I think there is another book that McDonald wrote which focuses on him and his adventures.

Green Knowe was written by Lucy Boston - a mid-century modern who puts us deep back into the past. And like this text, the grandmother is invisible.

And Curdie is finding it very hard to believe - to the extent of Friends don't lie to each other. I wonder if the Duffer Brothers had Eleven watch this? All the TV she seems to watch would be in sitcoms and soapies.

And there was a movie talk website which talked about The Lost Sister. I am thinking of what I saw about glow up which is like growing up though it has all these eighties and nineties connotations. This century it seems to be a very LGBTQIA thing and there was a big coming out.

"You'll find your own magic if you follow the thread", so Irenie finds her own thread and thinks for herself. Or Turnip the cat helps her.

I am going to think of Roald Dahl's very last book - Minpins - which is being released in a new generation so it will be editioned. And probably seditioned if I know the children and adolescents of the 21st century.

I remember Jon Scieszka's Politically correct fairy tales which were told from the perspective of the Wolf who was sufficiently Big and Bad to get people's attention. And my own first exposure would have been Rosen's Fairy tales and nursery crimes which is the second book ever I bought at a stall.

The first one was Aliki's How a book is made. And, yes, that probably did seal my fate and solidified my faith. I love the little kitten who has a mother who works in the publishing industry and the inside view we get. They make a sixteen-pager called Spring.

How a book is made with Amazon and Aliki - comes with Feelings and Manners for the 3 for 2

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