Inside the Little Plastic Castle

Ugh I’ve got a chest cold which could mean endless coughing. The good news is I have a recliner for sleeping mostly upright, and copious amounts of guaifenesin-pills-and-water, and the right sort of social network.

• When I woke up early, I commanded Siri #4 to narrate amaruuk’s sweet Rosie & Johnlock series Paternity

• Got a phone call from kestrell

• Hopped on here, and tozka linked me to an excellent concert from Cathy Fink, Marcie Marxer and Chao Tian, hosted by the Smithsonian. Fink & Marxer were role models when I was a "movement musician" between 1976-1981, and I love how closely Chinese yangqin (hammered dulcimer) and Appalachian banjo music can intertwine

• Today’s prettygoodword was the wonderful campanulate

• minoanmiss shared strategies for smuggling the good bacteria past TSA

My public library’s Kanopy subscription provided two profound films, both under nine minutes:

• CODA is an animated short from 2015. This Irish masterpiece follows a lost soul’s encounter with death. Pro captions, no audio description, no gore. Watch on YouTube or ( stream here )

• Bacon & God’s Wrath meditates on loss of faith when Razie Brownstone, at age 92, tries bacon for the first time. CONTAINS: Very lifelike animated dead pig’s head, racist autocomplete results, emesis mentioned. Watch on YouTube without captions or ( stream here )

I find Facebook useful for groups, since it provides a relatively low tech barrier to their creation. (Tragically, it seems to offer no easy moderation.) In the Audio Description Discussion group, creator Alison Meyers, posted their funny 6-minute video. It demonstrates the benefit of narrative audio description, complete with color-coded open captions.

I’d read about color-coded captions, where each speaker has a distinctive color, and this is my first time seeing them in use. Very helpful. Do you use audio descriptions?

Check it out! An educational six minutes: the visual is a black screen until the end.

( video embed )