Matt and Mara (2024) Kazik Radwanski

CLOSED-CAPTIONING, AS A JOB, has two distinct parts: transcription and timing in. Transcribing is the easy part; as long as you can hear and type and type the things you hear, you’re good to go. Timing in, where you go back through the episode and link your transcribed text up to the show’s action as accurately as you can, is tougher. Not hard, exactly, but complicated. 

There are a million tiny rules and shortcuts to memorize: character limits, text colors, house style, length. For example: a caption can appear on-screen for a maximum of five seconds and a minimum of one, and there must be a .45-second gap between all captions that end with an end-stop; otherwise, they have to flow seamlessly into one another like water. A caption can’t always be the same length as a spoken sentence, and text can appear on-screen in one of four different colors, each meant to signify a different speaker. Two speakers whose lines appear one after the other can obviously never be rendered in the same color, although this quickly becomes an issue in scenes that feature more than four people speaking at once. Captions need to be raised after a commercial break, with a one-second gap before the next block of transcribed text. If there is already text at the bottom of the screen as a part of the program, you need to raise your caption so both are visible.

There are seventy-six pages of rules like this. Mastering them gives me a tidy, funless pleasure, which is good, because working quickly is the only way to make any money. Captioners are paid not by the amount of time they spend working, but by the number of total minutes in each video they caption. A minute of video can have pretty much anything in it — music, birdsong, total silence, a roomful of people screaming over one another so loudly you can’t make out a single word — but no matter its content, each minute pays the same. Captioners get $3.00 per video minute for shows we have to transcribe from scratch and $2.75 for those where the network sends along a script for us to copy and paste in, though these are often booby-trapped with homophones and inaccurate phrasing, and can take more work to edit than you’d put in doing the whole thing from scratch. A captioner should, on average, be able to hit about forty video minutes per day without breaking a sweat.

[...]

Here are the books that I already own (physically or in e-book form) and that I REALLY want to get through in 2021! I am making this list and posting it here to hold myself accountable, because I don’t have the best track record for getting through my TBR. (I tend to... become more interested in the books that I don’t currently own, then buy those. But since I then own them, I suddenly become less interested in them and more interested in the books that I don’t currently own. And then buy those... [ad infinitum]). 

Also, I’m hoping it’ll be satisfying to continue to update this post and cross books off this list.

The Starless Sea (Erin Morgenstern)

Conversations with Friends (Sally Rooney)

Normal People (Sally Rooney)

Weapons of Math Destruction (Cathy O’Neil)

Hold Still (Nina LaCour)

The Club (Takis Wurger)

The Rehearsal (Eleanor Catton)

Shadow of the Lions (Christopher Swann)

Witches of Ash and Ruin (E. Latimer)

Whiste in the Dark (Emma Healey)

Tweet Cute (Emma Lord)

I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This (Nadja Spiegelman)

Shame (Inés Bayard)

All the Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr)

The Stranger Upstairs (Melanie Raabe)

The Shadow Year (Hannah Richell)

Perfect (Rachel Joyce)

Oola (Brittany Newell)

And Then There Were None (Agatha Christie)

Looker (Laura Sims)

Scienceblind (Andrew Shtulman)

The Sharp Edge of a Snowflake (Sif Sigmarsdottir)

Enjoy a book alongside your breakfast today 🥰

Elizabeth is Missing

By Emma Healey

*****