l'oreal paris 1789

I was directed to the English translation at the recommendation of @tenlittlebullets and am very glad I found it because Charles Godfrey Leland is a hoot! At first blush and in no particular order, some of my favorite bits are:

The mysterious man on a black pony with a Spanish mustache holding a red-and-black banner with "Liberty or Death" written on it, who somehow didn't manage to make it into any adapatations

Leland refuting Heine's claim that the uprising was spontaneous by citing the aforementioned man and his banner; "such figures are not common at funerals."

Heine taking an opportunity to compare the crowds gathered at hte morgue to the audience of the opera Robert le Diable, which he apparently hated

Frequent invocations of the French Revolution, from the (invented?) figure of the old man dressed "according to the latest fashion of 1793" going to the barricades accompanied by his fretful wife, to Heine's claiming once to have "admired Robespierre, Sanctum Justum and the great Mountain"

"I could never endure being guillotined every day—and nobody did endure it—"

The real thread of admiration for the insurgents, aka "the patriots, who to-day are called rebels"

The comparison to Cleontes and Pantaeus, who are not quite as famous as Orestes and Pylades but that's how they tend to stage the deaths of Enjolras and Grantaire in the musical

"...This was related to me in the Church of Saint-Méry, and I was obliged to lean against the image of Saint Sebastian to prevent my falling to the ground from deep inward emotion, and I wept like a child."

Heine, then 35 years old, helping home a young neighbor who had lost her lover at the barricade and fainted when called upon to identify him at the morgue. He doesn't usually behave so decently and this is a touching change

Heine reports, perhaps unreliably, that the insurgents wore "garlands of willow 'round their small hats," which strikes me as a brilliant excuse to draw Les Amis in flower crowns

A fantastic roast of Lafayette which I will report in full later

Some really chilling descriptions of the "return to order" in the aftermath of the uprising. The brokers at the Bourse cheering as the stocks rise again, shops reopening with broken windows, the quiet progress of arrests, the awkward military review by Louis Philippe, and the state of siege that persisted through June. Nothing, not even the descriptions of the insurgents' deaths, makes me feel worse

Look at this tiger made by my friend! (She gave me permission to share)

“Oh that’s a pretty painting,” you’re saying. And you’re right, that would be a pretty painting

But it’s not a painting!

Friends, enemies, ladies, gentlemen, folks of all stripes and identities let me tell you: that is embroidery. That is fucking embroidery!!! You aren’t looking at a painting

and i didnt get blinded. so clearly lab safety isnt real and you should always risk it cus taking risks is awesome #gambling

instead, all her brainspace spent on that song would be replaced with the vivid memories of roman gladiator, taylaurius velox. she's able to hide this at first, but her music begins to take on a gradually romaner and romaner tint. at first, people are like "damn, she's getting REALLY conservative, huh" and other people are like "wow, she's so deep, she knows what a rubicon is" but eventually travis kelce leaves her out of nowhere (he wasn't sure if dating someone possessed by a roman gladiator made him gay or not and anyway he was getting sick of being like "we're going to play the lions" and taylor being like "LIONS? WHERE?") and taylor publishes an entire brutus themed album about this betrayal and it's beginning to weird people out

and so eventually travis kelce is getting like, bomb threats sent to his family for leaving taylor and eventually he's like "okay, okay, i left her because she kept having all these vivid nightmares of gladatorial combat and she kept saying that football was giving her the ick because we never actually killed anybody for the glory of rome" and then he just gets more bomb threats because he left a struggling woman during a mental health crisis

and eventually taylor is writing music about her forbidden roman senator lover and her fanbase is either whittled WAY down or WAY up because people want to watch this trainwreck happen (or maybe she influences culture so hard that we're just all really into rome now) but she's being super cagey about the name of this roman senator. until. and now here's the twist:

weird al has been getting all of the same vivid memories of taylaurius velox. and he still has all his memories of her old songs. so he's writing all these detailed song parodies of taylor swift songs that don't exist anymore including specific details about their shared gladiatorial reality that taylor has never shared with anybody else. including that her lover's name was publius, and she's been calling him Poob for short

at this point a lot of original swifties are leaving. they could do the brutus stuff, but they really can't survive poob. taylor makes a clapping back at the haters song including the lyric "these bitches don't know publius" and it ends up all over all sorts of merch. there's a renewed archaeological interest in roman gladatorial combat

most importantly, the internet discourse is the best it's ever been. does this make taylor swift transmasc? is travis kelce problematic for leaving his fiancee while she gradually morphs into a roman gladiator? is this good queer representation? if taylaurius velox was a gay man, does that mean the gaylors were technically correct? is weird al morally wrong for capitalizing off of her music if she cant remember it anymore? was weird al sent by god to torment taylor swift?

yes, there is more. i'd be happy to share

yes, taylaurius velox (the gladiator) gets her memories too. he gets a serious ick from publius now because he's into kelce

i harbor no ill will for sabrina carpenter. i know very little (ha) but she seems fun

i don't know a lot about taylor swift. i feel broadly neutral towards her, but very interested in the cultural effect she has

this is meant to be ethically strange and questionable, if not downright a little evil. yes, that's part of the joke

this is also meant to play fast and loose with roman history. my hc is that taylaurius is one of the trident and net guys. yknow. the trident and net guys?

i forgot poob was a thing on here. i went for publius bc it sounded silly. poob was just a small miracle i found along the way

for those of you asking if this is a kink--i hope it's somebody's!

my carbon monoxide detector works fine, thank you

i'm single

To convert CD audio into mp3s, you just follow the steps here

To play mp3 files, you download an mp3 player like Winamp here and away you go

On mobile? There are plenty of free mp3 players for your phone available, too, so check them out

If you have the CDs, it will be easier to rip them. Most music managers include this feature and you will have all the track information loaded into the file. There are also pirate websites where you can download entire albums with their metadata attached, but there could be risks associated (I would worry more about viruses than lawsuits these days, though). Deciding a method for acquiring music is a balance of the required time, the alternative costs, and other pros/cons like supporting the artist or taking the risk of pirating sites.

1. Find the song on Youtube. YT has pretty much every song at this point, usually in comparable quality to what you would get on a streaming service.

This is great if you already listen to music on Youtube, but there might be a better method for going direct from Spotify, though this will work either way. The main downside to this method is that official music (and even lyric) videos sometimes have non-music portions so you might have to listen to the whole thing to be sure. SponsorBlock will highlight non-music sections for most artists, so if you have it installed you can tell at a glance if this is the case.

2. Download the audio from YT. There are many ways to download YT videos completely for free. It’s probably against the YT terms of service, but you’re not going to get sued.

I like y2mate for downloading YT videos (or their audio in mp3s) because it’s a simple, ad-free website. You just paste in the URL for the video you want to download. Sometimes it’s laggy and you have to come back later, but usually after a few moments the video loads, you select your download quality (the highest), and then save it. For easy file management, download everything in folders for the Artist, and then sub folders for the Album, and name the MP3 file the “song name”.mp3.

3. Upload to your music player/manager of choice. The file will currently be lacking metadata (Artist, Album, track number, etc) and will be added to the library as a song with its title set as the file name minus its .mp3 extension. Various music players/managers have different ways to add metadata (usually accessed by right-clicking the song) with varying ease.

iTunes is free and and logical if you have an iPhone, but limited in its capabilities. I do all my management/listening in MusicBee (free for Windows) because of its playlist and management features, as well as having a very customizable interface. You can set it to scan the folders you download music to so it will automatically load things into your library, or do so manually. Once loaded into MusicBee, you can batch edit an entire album’s metadata at once easily with Auto-Tagging. Auto-Tag can fetch the details from the internet and fill in artist, tracks, album artwork, etc and save that information to the mp3 file. You can edit this manually if needed too. Drag and drop the edited songs to any other player you may want to add them to so it can find the files.

4. Now you can use the player of your choice to listen endlessly, form playlists, etc. Some free music managers also have music discovery/recommendation features for expanding your collection.

MusicBee allows you to create playlists with folders, subfolders, and dynamic features. You can export these playlists for cross-platform play on other computers with MusicBee installed. I think the playlist features on MusicBee are better than what is on streaming services. You can create an auto-playlist of your recently-added music so you can easily find the ones that are new and might need need editing, adding to other playlists, etc. I have custom tags for music by LGBT artists, sapphic love songs, and more. I also drag-and-drop these playlists directly into iTunes so I have them on my phone too (you can do this to make a new playlist or just edit/add songs to a current one).

There are many music managers/players, including cross-platform ones with streaming, though they usually have fees for that feature. Because you aren’t streaming the music and rather storing it, you’ll need space on each device you want to play the music on, but memory is cheap these days.

You can buy a 2TB external harddrive for less than Spotify or Youtube Premium costs for six months, so having to store the songs isn’t much of a downside. Plus, the song will never “leave the service”, you can listen to it offline, etc.