[DoctorEldritch]

Hello Legion Gamers!

A bit of news! After success last year, Steam is having a Tacticon digital convention again, which will happen 11-15th of May!

Though there are no announced panels yet (as of the moment I am writing this), last year there were some interesting talks from developers, and not focused just on games, there was also advice on how to design the games or get them published, so could be interesting for both game lovers and aspiring game designers alike. More about last year's panels here.

@Saka, the one about challenging but relaxing games may be of interest, maybe it would have some options for your "games in bed" thread.

And, as last time, selected games were chosen to be a part of the event, both upcoming and released. And many releases will have some discounts until the end of the event, so check out if something catches your eye!

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch I should find some time to watch these videos, maybe when my tv comes back. My luck strikes as usual, I decided to be a first-time tv owner and the unit was shipped with a defective panel. It looked like it met an angle grinder on its way. So now I am back to no tv and waiting for the replacement.

I rarely watch very long videos, because these tend to be exhausting for me. With just single sided hearing (and not good one at that) there's a lot of concentration fatigue involved, even if there are some captions available. It takes a lot of focus to follow captions, especially the automated ones without proper pacing and punctuation.

This is a shame, because there is some very interesting stuff in the internet that doesn't have a written version. A while ago I wanted to write about Intel Arc cards bringing new promise to the stale market of graphics cards and well, the whole idea got stuck in progress of watching a two hours talk with an Intel engineer.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka This is not as common to have a TV these days as it was before. I do not have one. Were you going to use it more for console gaming or for watching? At least you're getting it replaced. How long does it take?

It is interesting that you say that, personally, I find it more exhausting to watch videos with subtitles if they are on some subject, but with anime, I do not have that level of fatigue. Maybe because it is mostly entertainment with anime, and videos on subjects require more cognitive effort. Automated captions make me dizzy, though. But I hear they are teaching AIs to transcribe those better now.

I want to say it is a shame, but it seems to be getting better gradually. More and more creators start to recognize the value of purpose-made subtitles with several translations. I know TED is very good at that, with an impressive choice of subtitles and even talk transcripts available. Maybe start with it?

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch The complaint was submitted last Monday, then the TV was sent away on Friday (for some reason the shop wasn't in a hurry to arrange the shipping). The replacement should arrive sometime this week, hopefully soon. I found it much nicer to play Ring Fit Adventure with a big screen (plus one that I don't have to mess around with, just a few button presses on the remote) than hijacking one of my monitors. The plan was to make the console gaming more convenient, and possibly some Steam Link usage on it too. No plans of hooking it to the regular TV network. The Finnish news I can watch online through YLE Areena, so the TV can do that via the app that is installed.

Anime or movies typically have human-made captions, which generally have okay timings and punctuation. Podcasts and videos in the internet usually have just the auto-generated captions, which are much lower quality. That reminds me, there was this uproar a while ago, when YouTube decided to remove community-made captions from videos. The creators used to be able to allow third parties to upload their own versions of captions. That option was taken away under the guise of "trolling prevention". However, often the third party captions were very helpful and good quality. The Deaf and Hard of Hearing communities were really upset and tried petitioning Google to revert the change, but it was like fighting with a goliath.

Google's automatic captioning has gone a long way, but it's still far from satisfying. From freely available resources Windows Live Captions actually provide much better quality and they do try to form complete sentences, which makes the content much easier to follow.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka Ah, so in this case, it is more of a glorified monitor rather than a proper TV? To be honest, I am not sure of the difference between computer monitors and modern TVs, but there should be one, surely? Does one substitute for another?

Oh my. Let's hope they will bring that functionality back in some capacity in the future. I mean, the simple solution would be to give creators a task to approve all captions that their users submit to them, it should have been easy enough to do. I wonder why they decided to go down the route of total removal of a clearly useful feature... Then again, maybe the troll problem is more serious than we know...

I agree, complete sentences are much easier, YT has this thing where it tries to caption word by word, and it can get confusing, especially if it is a comedy sketch.

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch Modern TVs are a little bit like smartphones hidden inside a monitor. They generally run proprietary versions of Android OS. I am mostly going to use mine like a glorified huge monitor with OLED. Pokemon Violet looked really good on it compared to the handheld mode, as both picture the picture was brighter and the framerate slightly higher (docked Switch has a bit more power).

Problem with checking the captions is that the creators don't necessarily speak the language that the submitted captions were in. I think the issue might be that some channels were more prone to trolling than others, but it still feels like a mountain was made out of a molehill.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Saka Ah, interesting. Good to know modern TVs can do that. Though I still have my sights set on a gaming monitor. @GoLLuM13 helped me to choose one last year, but due to some happenings in my life, I still did not get to buy one. Maybe next Black Friday...

Can YT creators work around this problem by asking their followers, ones they trust, to transcribe for them privately, as in, send them the file via email or something, and then use that file as creators to supplement their content?

[Saka]

@DoctorEldritch At this rate you might need new recommendations, the technology does move forward after all. My monitor was one of the first 1440p 144hz IPS panels and nowadays you can get ones with higher refresh rate and better latency for significantly lower price.

You can upload a subtitle file to the video, but it is harder now, because the community option was granting access to the YT tool showing the timeline and the video.

[GoLLuM13]

@Saka good thing that they took it to replace, and hopefully you'll have a brand new one this time, and by new I mean really new

[Saka]

@GoLLuM13 Actually this is funny, the packaging looked intact, the TV itself also didn't have any signs of use, only the panel itself was missing foil and had the scratches. But the pictures of everything else being pristine helped convincing the shop that the unit was defective.