Five witches are loaded into the cart bound for Gallows Hill: George Burroughs, Martha Carrier, George Jacobs, John Proctor, and John Willard. While in prison, Elizabeth Proctor had announced that she was pregnant, and local midwives confirm it before her execution. She is allowed to carry the child to term before being hanged.
It is likely that John Proctor made an impassioned speech to the crowd before his execution, but whatever he said is overshadowed by Reverend Burroughs.
After being lead up the ladder, Burroughs is asked one last time if he wishes to make a confession. Instead, he gazes serenely at the crowd and asks them to pray with him. The bewitched girls mutter that the Black Man is speaking through him, but they are shushed. As his accusers stand in stunned silence, Burroughs preaches his last sermon. Over the next several minutes, he proclaims his innocence and his forgiveness of the accusers, and concludes with a flawless recitation of the most fundamental Puritan prayer, the Lord’s Prayer.
Failure to remember basic prayer is a cornerstone of witchcraft accusation; by Cotton Mather’s own teachings, this is proof that Burroughs is not a witch. The crowd, shouting and moved to tears, begins to beg the executioner to let Burroughs down. Unfortunately, Mather himself has come up from Boston to witness the hanging and quiets the crowd to save his reputation. Mather shouts above the noise that Burroughs’s preaching in meaningless, as he has never been formally ordained. Also, he reminds them, “the devil has often been transformed into an angel of light”.
Burroughs, followed by the others, are hanged and the bodies are thrown into the crevice of the hill. As a final injustice, Burroughs’s clothes are considered too fine to waste, and he is stripped and put into second hand breeches before being hastily disposed of.
George Jacobs’s family later removes his body and buries in by his home.
According to Know Your Meme, on August 18th, 2005, Erwin Beekveld brought forth this work into the world. HAPPY TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY, THEY’RE TAKING THE HOBBITS TO ISENGARD.
sheds a single tear
every august 18th my notifications break and i go, fuck, tumblr has failed me once again, but it hasn’t. it hasn’t failed me. it’s just the taking the hobbits to isengard-iversary. happy 12 years
Lil Early, but fuck it! I’m not missing it this year.
I saw someone the other day lamenting social media forcing everyone onto the same three websites all day, and it got me nostalgic for the old internet (which, as some pointed out, is still there, you just have to look a lot harder). Granted, I’m not that old, my experiences online only go back about 20 years, but that’s far enough to remember the Before Times even if I didn’t experience Usenet.
What I found in my musings, is that a lot of the content I sought out in the old internet, particularly fan content, is still there, but because it’s mostly being filtered through social media feeds, it’s hard to navigate, and it’s also decidedly more short-form now. Even though everything is literally in one place, it feels scattered.
For anyone who doesn’t remember what the pre-social media world was like, a lot of things spread by word of mouth rather than via algorithm, but there were also ways of getting the content you wanted fairly easily. Allow me to elaborate and show what we’ve moved away from.
User-generated aggregate sites. There’s probably a better name for this, but this is where memes were born. This includes sites like Newgrounds, AlbinoBlackSheep, Cheezburger, etc. Users would submit content, be it singular funny videos or images, or even fully realized web series, like Neurotically Yours.
Fanlistings. This website has essentially never changed. Exactly what it says on the label, it’s a list of all the fans of something. If you joined, your name would be added to the list, and you could add a snazzy button to your personal site to showcase it. Fanlistings often featured links to other sites, a bit like
Webrings, a collection of websites about the same theme that were linked together so that you could easily access a variety of similar content. I once knew an entire webring just for humor fanfic for Pirates of the Caribbean. A webring might include links to twenty different
Fansites. These could be large, multi-mod behemoths encompassing multiple types of content like Mugglenet, or tiny Geocities sites dedicated to pictures of a specific character. There were scripts for imaginary hand-puppet theater productions. A personal favorite contained nothing but hilariously captioned images from The Lord of the Rings. These were often one-stop shops made for and by hyperfixated nerds, and included everything from trivia, to scanned magazine images, to exclusive fanfic and art. The content therein could be short and sweet, or include novel-length explorations of the subject of your choice. The first site I frequented online was called The Tim Burton Collective - if you look at it, you’ll see a variety of information on there, including bios, articles, multimedia, and most importantly
Forums. This is what I really, truly miss. For any subject matter under the sun, there was a message board (and later Livejournal) for it. Take a look around the TBC forum up there and you’ll see the extent of conversation that went on that was meticulously organized into categories, moderated, and archived. Tumblr’s conversations can splinter into a million directions and Discord is ephemeral like a giant chat room; here, each individual conversation was a unique thread, easily searchable and contained. Almost all had an off-topic section where you could talk about anything you wanted, so people really got to know each other.
While social media is, by nature, social, I really do miss the sense of community that came from these spaces, which is bittersweetly ironic. This was a very targeted type of sociability, where people with specific interests could interact with each other in spaces that truly felt like their own. The current model, that contains splintered multitudes, just doesn’t compare in my opinion.
I saw someone the other day lamenting social media forcing everyone onto the same three websites all day, and it got me nostalgic for the old internet (which, as some pointed out, is still there, you just have to look a lot harder). Granted, I’m not that old, my experiences online only go back about 20 years, but that’s far enough to remember the Before Times even if I didn’t experience Usenet.
What I found in my musings, is that a lot of the content I sought out in the old internet, particularly fan content, is still there, but because it’s mostly being filtered through social media feeds, it’s hard to navigate, and it’s also decidedly more short-form now. Even though everything is literally in one place, it feels scattered.
For anyone who doesn’t remember what the pre-social media world was like, a lot of things spread by word of mouth rather than via algorithm, but there were also ways of getting the content you wanted fairly easily. Allow me to elaborate and show what we’ve moved away from.
User-generated aggregate sites. There’s probably a better name for this, but this is where memes were born. This includes sites like Newgrounds, AlbinoBlackSheep, Cheezburger, etc. Users would submit content, be it singular funny videos or images, or even fully realized web series, like Neurotically Yours.
Fanlistings. This website has essentially never changed. Exactly what it says on the label, it’s a list of all the fans of something. If you joined, your name would be added to the list, and you could add a snazzy button to your personal site to showcase it. Fanlistings often featured links to other sites, a bit like
Webrings, a collection of websites about the same theme that were linked together so that you could easily access a variety of similar content. I once knew an entire webring just for humor fanfic for Pirates of the Caribbean. A webring might include links to twenty different
Fansites. These could be large, multi-mod behemoths encompassing multiple types of content like Mugglenet, or tiny Geocities sites dedicated to pictures of a specific character. There were scripts for imaginary hand-puppet theater productions. A personal favorite contained nothing but hilariously captioned images from The Lord of the Rings. These were often one-stop shops made for and by hyperfixated nerds, and included everything from trivia, to scanned magazine images, to exclusive fanfic and art. The content therein could be short and sweet, or include novel-length explorations of the subject of your choice. The first site I frequented online was called The Tim Burton Collective - if you look at it, you’ll see a variety of information on there, including bios, articles, multimedia, and most importantly
Forums. This is what I really, truly miss. For any subject matter under the sun, there was a message board (and later Livejournal) for it. Take a look around the TBC forum up there and you’ll see the extent of conversation that went on that was meticulously organized into categories, moderated, and archived. Tumblr’s conversations can splinter into a million directions and Discord is ephemeral like a giant chat room; here, each individual conversation was a unique thread, easily searchable and contained. Almost all had an off-topic section where you could talk about anything you wanted, so people really got to know each other.
While social media is, by nature, social, I really do miss the sense of community that came from these spaces, which is bittersweetly ironic. This was a very targeted type of sociability, where people with specific interests could interact with each other in spaces that truly felt like their own. The current model, that contains splintered multitudes, just doesn’t compare in my opinion.
