scribe-a
Original: scribe-a on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1:
Narrator (a woman with dark hair, explaining): There's only one extant manuscript of the story we call Beowulf. We don't even know much about it, but we do know there were two scribes, likely of different ages.
Panel 2:
Woman: How? They use different font styles, and one of them is a bit older than the other. The person using the older style makes corrections to the person using the newer style.
Panel 3:
Woman: So presumably this young person and his old friend knew their names of each other. Each thought the other guy could not just up and die one day. That's not how things were sad at their day job.
Woman (continuing): Because they happened to be bad at their day job, we have compiling the oldest copy from history into the modern day. Imperfectly, perhaps, through eternity, one day people will be reading this exact manuscript here and inhabiting faraway galaxies.
Panel 4:
Woman (arms raised): During his lifetime, this guy had no idea about any of this, which would seem to show you fame and reputation and all human pursuits that don't seem distant around living well are idiotic.
A second figure: Wow.
Panel 5:
The second figure (to the woman): Is that why you keep this garbage in a mood named "mediocritas"?
Woman: May the work of us undying forever remain pretty okay!
Votey:
Caption at top: CIRCA 1000 AD:
A hooded medieval scribe seated at a writing desk, thinking: BOY I HOPE NOBODY EVER NOTICES THIS SHIT.
Narrator (a woman with dark hair, explaining): There's only one extant manuscript of the story we call Beowulf. We don't even know much about it, but we do know there were two scribes, likely of different ages.
Panel 2:
Woman: How? They use different font styles, and one of them is a bit older than the other. The person using the older style makes corrections to the person using the newer style.
Panel 3:
Woman: So presumably this young person and his old friend knew their names of each other. Each thought the other guy could not just up and die one day. That's not how things were sad at their day job.
Woman (continuing): Because they happened to be bad at their day job, we have compiling the oldest copy from history into the modern day. Imperfectly, perhaps, through eternity, one day people will be reading this exact manuscript here and inhabiting faraway galaxies.
Panel 4:
Woman (arms raised): During his lifetime, this guy had no idea about any of this, which would seem to show you fame and reputation and all human pursuits that don't seem distant around living well are idiotic.
A second figure: Wow.
Panel 5:
The second figure (to the woman): Is that why you keep this garbage in a mood named "mediocritas"?
Woman: May the work of us undying forever remain pretty okay!
Votey:
Caption at top: CIRCA 1000 AD:
A hooded medieval scribe seated at a writing desk, thinking: BOY I HOPE NOBODY EVER NOTICES THIS SHIT.
Alt text
A five-panel SMBC comic. A dark-haired woman explains to a friend that there is only one surviving manuscript of Beowulf, written by two scribes of apparently different ages, identifiable because they use slightly different font styles and the older-style scribe corrected the newer-style one. She muses that these two ordinary people, bad at their day job, accidentally preserved the oldest copy of the story through eternity, to be read one day even by people inhabiting faraway galaxies. She raises her arms and declares that the scribe had no idea about any of this, which shows that fame, reputation, and human pursuits of distant glory are idiotic. Her friend asks, deadpan, if that is why she keeps her garbage in a mood named 'mediocritas,' and she proclaims, 'May the work of us undying forever remain pretty okay!' Votey: captioned 'CIRCA 1000 AD,' a hooded medieval scribe hunched at a writing desk thinks, 'BOY I HOPE NOBODY EVER NOTICES THIS SHIT.'
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.