(UP TO 1 MINUTE) Our friend Shoshannah Stern reads children’s stories in ASL with her Operation ASL Storytime. Let’s take a page out of her book: Find your favorite childhood story and read a page from it, all in sign language. (If you aren’t fluent, contact someone who is to verify accuracy. Any dialect is fine.) PLEASE NOTE: DO NOT post it online tagged with Shoshannah’s hashtag. That is a resource to provide linguistic access to children who are at risk of language deprivation. We need to keep that resource protected and accessible, so we’re serious about this: Don’t use her hashtag or you will be penalized! If you have posted with the hashtag, please delete and repost.
Category: Videos
Video submissions. Usually an embedded YouTube link.
Item 183 – Human Voice Bank
Add your voice to the Human Voice Bank at VocalID to help create a diverse resource so that people living with speechlessness can be heard in a voice that is uniquely theirs. Submit a video recording your voice for this tool.
Item 180 – Jewelry Box Pole Dancer
A hinged jewelry box, but instead of a spinning ballerina inside, it’s a pole dancer. (no nudity)
Item 174 – Pandemic-Safe Wind Instrument
How are horn players weathering COVID? Show us a pandemic-safe wind instrument, such as a saxophone or other horn modified to be filtered (without muting the instrument.) Hint, the instrument wears the mask, not just the player.
Item 172 – GISHY Cooking
(UP TO 30 SECONDS) As you may know, this year my family unveiled “The Adventurous Eaters Club Cookbook” to help teach people to be curious, healthy eaters — and to help families in disadvantaged situations to get access to healthy food. (100% of the profits from the book go to charities.) But the most important recipe in the book is the recipe for adventure. Create a 30-second video in the style of Buzzfeed “Tasty” cooking videos showing the most adventurous, irreverent recipe you can come up with using AT LEAST 1 food you have never tried before and feed it to a quarantine compadre (or if you’re alone, eat it yourself). End it with a title card that says “GISHY.” Our favorite adventurous cooking videos will win a free copy of “The Adventurous Eaters Club Cookbook”!
Item 158 – GISH Super Short Socially-Distanced Cinema
(UP TO 5 MINUTES) Celebrities performed a speed-run of The Princess Bride recently, but they’re not the only ones that can do this! It’s time for GISH Super Short Socially-Distanced Cinema starring Everybody! Collaborate with your teammates to recreate a single scene of your favorite movie (EXCEPT the Princess Bride), 100% at home and 100% socially-distanced. Post it online tagging #GISH with a fundraiser link to the World Central Kitchen, No Kid Hungry, or the World Food Programme. Submit your movie to us along with a link to show how much you raised.
Item 154 – Ballerina Soldier
Show us a soldier dancing a beautifully choreographed, physically distanced rendition of the Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy or Swan Lake while dressed in full combat fatigues.
Item 147 – Fruit Basket Hair TikTok
(TIMELAPSE) A TikTok-style “process” video of you braiding your hair into a fruit basket.
Item 124 – LEGO-Proof Sock
Invent LEGO Socks. Not socks made out of LEGO (we already have those). We mean socks that protect your feet when you step on a LEGO brick in the middle of the night. Not shoes. SOCKS.
Item 121 – Slam Poem Eschewing Prescriptivist Language
Not that we have a strong opinion on the topic, but to be a casual English language grammar prescriptivist is to be complicit and prideful in systems that, by nature, devalue cultural and colloquial flexibility in the use of language (lookin’ at you, AAVE) by maintaining that only those selective demographics who have dominated the academy, or been deemed valuable by the academy, have the license to create language to suit their communicative needs — Big Academia only affords the grace of words to the voices of a specific demographic (generally, in the West, the well-educated, affluent and predominantly white members of society). Perform a mic-dropping slam poem highlighting the value of eschewing prescriptivism and embracing dynamic, evolving forms and dialects of grammar. You may not USE any language variance that’s currently in use (like AAVE) to do this item as it may be appropriative or racially or technically insensitive, depending on the speaker… instead, you must perform it in academic English. Hypocritical? Yup.