my personal tinfoil hat conspiracy theory is that tiktok is a government strategy to normalize a surveillance state and raise up a generation that is not only acclimated but DEFENSIVE of the idea that no one should ever have privacy or autonomy over their information and activities at ANY point when they’re outside of their home
the number of people on tiktok who, with their whole chest, will spout off, “going in public means you consent to be recorded by anyone, anywhere, anytime and posted to the internet without your knowledge or permission” is BATSHIT. like it is CRAZY to me. the mental gymnastics of going “yes, The Outside, where absolutely everyone in the world has to go to be alive, should not be a safe space to not be posted on a global platform by a stranger” is WILD.
heyyyyy fellow tutu fans- im making a bunch of blingees glitterfys for a little project. if you have any ptutu images you really like feel free to share so i can overlay them with 1 million sparkles
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Once upon a time, there was a prose translation of the Pearl Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It was wonderfully charming and lyrical and perfect for use in a high school, and so a clever English teacher (as one did in the 70s) made a scan of the book for her students, saved it as a pdf, and printed copies off for her students every year. In true teacher tradition, she shared the file with her colleagues, and so for many years the students of the high school all studied Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the same (very badly scanned) version of this wonderful prose translation.
In time, a new teacher became head of the English Department, and while he agreed that the prose translation was very wonderful he felt that the quality of the scan was much less so. Also in true teacher tradition, he then spent hours typing up the scan into a word processor, with a few typos here and there and a few places where he was genuinely just guessing wildly at what the scan actually said. This completed word document was much cleaner and easier for the students to read, and so of course he shared it with his colleagues, including his very new wide-eyed faculty member who was teaching British Literature for the first time (this was me).
As teachers sometimes do, he moved on for greener (ie, better paying) pastures, leaving behind the word document, but not the original pdf scan. This of course meant that as I was attempting to verify whether a weird word was a typo or a genuine artifact of the original translation, I had no other version to compare it to. Being a good card-holding gen zillenial I of course turned to google, making good use of the super secret plagiarism-checking teacher technique “Quotation Marks”, with an astonishing result:
By which I mean literally one result.
For my purposes, this was precisely what I needed: a very clean and crisp scan that allowed me to make corrections to my typed edition: a happily ever after, amen.
But beware, for deep within my soul a terrible Monster was stirring. Bane of procrastinators everywhere, my Curiosity had found a likely looking rabbit hole. See, this wonderfully clear and crisp scan was lacking in two rather important pieces of identifying information: the title of the book from which the scan was taken, and the name of the translator. The only identifying features were the section title “Precursors” (and no, that is not the title of the book, believe me I looked) and this little leaf-like motif by the page numbers:
(Remember the leaf. This will be important later.)
We shall not dwell at length on the hours of internet research that ensued—how the sun slowly dipped behind the horizon, grading abandoned in shadows half-lit by the the blue glow of the computer screen—how google search after search racked up, until an email warning of “unusual activity on your account” flashed into momentary existence before being consigned immediately and with some prejudice to the digital void—how one third of the way through a “comprehensive but not exhaustive” list of Sir Gawain translators despair crept in until I was left in utter darkness, screen black and eyes staring dully at the wall.
Above all, let us not admit to the fact that such an afternoon occurred not once, not twice, but three times.
Suffice to say, many hours had been spent in fruitless pursuit before a new thought crept in: if this book was so mysterious, so obscure as to defeat the modern search engine, perhaps the answer lay not in the technologies of today, but the wisdom of the past. Fingers trembling, I pulled up the last blast email that had been sent to current and former faculty and staff, and began to compose an email to the timeless and indomitable woman who had taught English to me when I was a student, and who had, after nearly fifty years, retired from teaching just before I returned to my alma mater.
After staring at the email for approximately five or so minutes, I winced, pressed send, and let my plea sail out into the void. I cannot adequately describe for you the instinctive reverence I possess towards this teacher; suffice to say that Ms English was and is a woman of remarkable character, as much a legend as an institution as a woman of flesh and blood whose enduring influence inspired countless students. There is not a student taught by Ms. English who does not have a story to tell about her, and her decline in her last years of teaching and eventual retirement in the face of COVID was the end of an era. She still remembers me, and every couple months one of her contemporaries and dear friends who still works as a guidance counsellor stops me in the hall to tell me that Ms. English says hello and that she is thrilled that I am teaching here—thrilled that I am teaching honors students—thrilled that I am now teaching the AP students. “Tell her I said hello back,” I always say, and smile.
Ms. English is a legend, and one does not expect legends to respond to you immediately. Who knows when a woman of her generation would next think to check her email? Who knows if she would remember?
The day after I sent the email I got this response:
My friends, I was shaken. I was stunned. Imagine asking God a question and he turns to you and says, “Hold on one moment, let me check with my predecessor.”
The idea that even Ms. English had inherited this mysterious translation had never even occurred to me as a possibility, not when Ms. English had been a faculty member since the early days of the school. How wonderful, I thought to myself. What a great thing, that this translation is so obscure and mysterious that it defeats even Ms. English.
A few days later, Ms. English emailed me again:
(I had, in fact searched through both the English office and the Annex—a dark, weirdly shaped concrete storage area containing a great deal of dust and many aging copies of various books—a few days prior. I had no luck, sadly.)
At last, though, I had a title and a description! I returned to my internet search, only to find to my dismay that there was no book that exactly matched the title. I found THE BRITISH TRADITION: POETRY, PROSE, AND DRAMA (which was not black and the table of contents I found did not include Sir Gawain) and THE ENGLISH TRADITION, a super early edition of the Prentice Hall textbooks we use today, which did have a black cover but there were absolutely zero images I could find of the table of contents or the interior and so I had no way of determining if it was the correct book short of laying out an unfortunate amount of cold hard cash for a potential dead end.
So I sighed, and relinquished my dreams of solving the mystery. Perhaps someday 30 years from now, I thought, I’ll be wandering through one of those mysterious bookshops filled with out of print books and I’ll pick up a book and there will be the translation, found out last!
So I sighed, and told the whole story to my colleagues for a laugh. I sent screenshots of Ms. English’s emails to my siblings who were also taught by her. I told the story to my Dad over dinner as my Great Adventure of the Week.
…my friends. I come by my rabbit-hole curiosity honestly, but my Dad is of a different generation of computer literacy and knows a few Deep Secrets that I have never learned. He asked me the title that Ms. English gave me, pulled up some mysterious catalogue site, and within ten minutes found a title card. There are apparently two copies available in libraries worldwide, one in Philadelphia and the other in British Columbia. I said, “sure, Dad,” and went upstairs. He texted me a link. Rolling my eyes, I opened it and looked at the description.
Huh, I thought. Four volumes, just like Ms. English said. I wonder…
Armed with a slightly different title and a publisher, I looked up “The English Tradition: Fiction macmillan” and the first entry is an eBay sale that had picture of the interior and LO AND BEHOLD:
THE LEAF. LOOK AT THE LEAF.
My dad found it! He found the book!!
Except for one teensy tiny problem which is that the cover of the book is uh a very bright green and not at all black like Ms. English said. Alas, it was a case of mistaken identity, because The English Tradition: Poetry does have a black cover, although it is the fiction volume which contains Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
And so having found the book at last, I have decided to purchase it for the sum of $8, that ever after the origins of this translation may once more be known.
In this year of 2022 this adventure took place, as this post bears witness, the end, amen.
what d&d spell do you wish you could use in real life and why is it prestidigitation?
No. No, listen. Listen to me. Shut up about ‘fireball’. If you’re really that interested in arson, download the anarchists cookbook, coward. And shut up about teleportation, none of us asocial inside kids is prepared to deal with the consequences of a mishap, which will DEF happen if you use it frequently.
You know what has no chance of mishap and all chances of convenience? Prestidigi-fucking-tation.
Do you hate doing dishes? Poof. Every dish in a 5 foot cube is now clean. Even if you hardlined the rules as only applying to individual objects, less than 6 seconds to clean your curry tupper ware without getting those weird stains on it is worth it. never have to run a dish washer, never be without your favourite mug. And that’s just dishes.
Hate laundry? Boom. You can just clean your clothes immediately after taking them off at night. Hate putting on your fitted sheet? Boom. Don’t even take it off the bed. Your sink? Bathtub? Toilet? all of these things can be cleaned instantly and without needing any electricity and water guzzling machines. You can even do it on the go- stained your shirt? No you didn’t. Sweat through your shirt? No the fuck you didn’t. When you have prestidigitation, you are perpetually impeccable.
But wait, there’s more! Prestidigitation doesn’t just clean! Did your tea go cold? Boom, heat it up. Forget to put your wine in the fridge? Boom, now it’s cold. Do you hate how water tastes? Boom- now it tastes like whatever you like. You will never again be forced to suffer a taste you don’t enjoy with this one neat trick, because prestidigitation is technically like 5 tricks rolled into one convenient spell that is both practical and flashy.
Light candles with a snap of your fingers for dramatic effect! Conjure scissors from thin air! Create ominous whispers to follow you as you walk past your enemies! Leave a message on the wall that looks like dripping blood to remind your spouse to give the dog it’s pills! Make an illusion of what haircut you want at the salon! and do all of that as many times as you want because we are cooking with cantrips baybe! You can even have multiple effects running simultaneously! The possibilities are as endless as the time, money, and frustration it will save you!
No other spell will give you more bang for your buck than prestidigitation. It is The spell, and every day it continues to be not real is a day I weep. I want this. YOU want this.
Presti
digi
tation
Ok but subtle spell catapult to gaslight people into thinking you have a ghost.
Or mage hand similarly
My dear you do not need magic to be a real life scooby-doo villain. You can do that with some gumption and basic stage production. But only magic can extricate us from the Sisyphean hell of laundry and dishes.
It’s so fucked up how tiktok culture has made clout-poisoned people turn the public into content, every day I see people minding their business have their entire faces put online for thousands of likes, a couple kissing on the train, a lady dancing across a cross walk, a guy nodding his head to the music at a club, a lady buying a banana at the store, ring camera footage of the neighbors kids being stupid. Just let people live jfc
I think I may have made it seem like this is about wholesome content (which my sentiment towards that is the same) but most of the time when I see this stuff people are being ridiculed for being completely normal. And I didn’t make up any of these examples btw, I couldn’t find the dance one but only because there are too many videos of people being recorded at cross walks
(Faces censored and additional text added by me)
Im gonna add this to every post about this i see im never gonna shut up about it. This will get people killed. This will ruin lives. More people live in hiding than you think. So many people are one post away from having to abandon their whole lives. Dont ever post anything of anyone without their consent, stranger or not.
I am a photographer. It is my job to go into schools and take candid photos for the yearbook.
The number of kids that are on a ‘do not photograph’ list isn’t large, but it is a non-zero number. If that kid is even out of focus in the background, we do not use that photo.
If a child shows even the tiniest bit upset that there’s a person in the room with a camera, I do not take their photo.
At pop culture conventions, I ask people if I can take their photo. Or if I take a candid of them, I track them down and give them my info and get th3ir consent before posting.
At events like parties, concerts, performances, consent is generally implied because these are photographed events, but if an attendee approaches me and tells me to crop them out then I crop them out.
This makes street photography tedious, but I learned in my very first job as a camp counselor that people have very good reasons for not wanting their photo publicized. There are kids in the foster system with abusive parents. There are adults with stalkers. There are people who might be a witness to a crime.
Even outside of this- I’ve seen how private persons become memes against their will just by going out in public. Some people are super not normal about meme fame.
Leave people alone. The world is complicated. Make your own content.
youre literally not using tumblr right if youre not following a bunch of weird blogs that arent even your interest. weirdchristmas and jimhenson-themuppetmaster are prized members of the community to me
chartreuseabstruseness
