Hugs

I wrote this in 2000.  Some of you seem to need it today, though.

Among those born as humans on the earth
within their mind the mirrored planet lies:
the universe contained behind their eyes,
more tangible with every day since birth.
Within, each place you love is held for you
perfected; every friendship dwells therein;
and if you dare, a thousand tales begin,
and if you close your eyes you'll see it's true.
    Within that place a forest lies, more real
    than all on earth, and all you count as dear,
    wherever they may be, you'll find them here,
    just as in life of sight, of sound, of feel;
there you and I will stay, and always be:
and when you need a hug, come visit me.

More on "Sita" in Shavian

I mentioned the other day that I'd been playing around with subtitling Sita into Shavian. I said I wasn't going to work on it for a while, but in the back seat on the long drive back from seeing Amy and John at the New Year, I was too sleepy to do anything that wasn't very repetitive, so I finished off the translation.

I believe this is (unsurprisingly) the only film ever to have been given a full set of Shavian subtitles.

Here's the .srt file. It's a static copy of generated content; the master copy is this wiki page, which also contains drakar2007's original Latin-alphabet subtitles.

However, the .srt file isn't very useful to most people, and besides most players won't play it because of flaky Unicode support (Totem being an honourable exception). You can play it with mplayer, but it involves creating a special font and running the .srt through a shifting filter.

I've run off a copy of the entire film in this way, and it's 1.3GB. I am wondering what to do with it now so that I can show it to people:

• put it on YouTube. More people look at this than anything else, but this would involve breaking it up into twelve ten-minute chunks.  Workable, but I'd rather be able to link to one particular page from shavian.org.uk than twelve.
• put it on Vimeo. This would involve breaking it up into 500MB chunks (or buying a pro account, which I'm not going to). It's possible that I could get it down to two chunks by shrinking the images a little (they're currently at quite a high resolution).
• put it on the moving images section of archive.org. This would allow it to be complete, but uploads don't seem to work for me: I get the whole file uploaded and then my session has timed out. Maybe it's worth the trouble of asking in the forums, though.
• all or many of the above.
• just leaving it as an .srt and expecting people to work it out for themselves.

What do you think?

Image from Sita Sings the Blues copyright © Nina Paley, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike licence.