Background

Let's kick this thing off with a bang. I'll lay out some basic information about myself, my job, the format I hope for this to take, and some general goals of the project.

First, I'm a full-time closed caption editor. I graduated from a small liberal arts college in the Midwest with degrees in English and Chinese. I have aspirations beyond this job for graduate studies. I work the night shift, meaning 4:00pm to midnight.

The main activity of my job is to take the script of the program I'm to caption (which is usually supplied by the client or the scripting division of our company), and I import it into a program that divides it up into blocks according to the specifications we give it. I then watch the program through once for the purpose of editing, i.e. making the blocks more coherent, italicizing words spoken off-screen, aligning the blocks of text to left, center, or right, and adding parenthetical sound descriptions. Finally, I watch the program a second time for the purpose of timing it, which making sure all the blocks of text appear at the proper time.

Because I watch so many television programs and movies at least twice through (sometimes more), I develop a number of opinions on what I see. I'd like to share these opinions with you, the reader. Also, I often get a little bored with simple transcription, so there are a number of little experiments I do and games I play. I'd like to let you in on some of these as well.

I hope to update this every day or two, preferably writing the posts at night, after work, while my work-related thoughts are still fresh in my mind.

The main purpose of this blog is to keep my sanity after one of my good friends and co-workers left. I find there aren't too many similarly-minded people at work who enjoy the kind of wordplay we attempt to infuse into our projects. In fact, last night, my supervisor chastised me (very gently) for describing an opera singer's vocal performance as (hitting highest echelon of upper register) and (reaching cusp of audibility).

I hope there are more people out in the world who do enjoy this sort of thing.

Also, if you have any comments or questions, I'll be happy to respond to them. Enjoy.