Agatha Bird

[ID: youtube comment from Hal Sawyer:

My favorite relic English still used everywhere is the word "the" used in phrases like: "the more I look at this, the stranger it seems, or "the bigger they come, the harder they fall". This "the" is not the article of any noun, it is a different word, a conjunction descended from the old English "þā", pronounced "tha" which means either "when" or "then". Back in early Middle English the structure "if - then" had not taken over and if you wanted to express an if - then relationship you said "þā whatever, þā whatever", meaning "when such-and- such, then such-and-such". "þā" sounds almost the same as "the" and the spelling of the two converged, but the meaning remained totally different. "the more, the merrier" literally means "when more, then merrier" or "if more, then merrier'; same as centuries ago.

end ID]

My brain IMMEDIATELY began scripting a screwball comedy in which a broke millennial who desperately want to finish his long-abandoned degree but is drowning in student debt pretends to be a senior citizen in order to attend college for free.

I’m picturing someone Channing Tatumesque, applying age makeup every morning before he heads off to class. It’s sort of a cross between 21 Jump Street and Mrs. Doubtfire. He keeps forgetting which hip is supposed to be his bad one. His classmates laugh every time he uses slang. There’s definitely a scene where he attends a college party and busts it up on the dance floor.

Our Hero is stuck in a job where he keep seeing people get promoted past him because they have a 4-year degree and he doesn’t. He can’t afford to go back to school until he finishes paying off his student loans for the degree he’s one semester from completing. If he got the promotion he wants he could pay them off a lot quicker. But he can’t get the promotion without the degree.

Along comes a clerical error in his almost-alma mater’s records which lists his birth year as 1948 instead of 1984. He gets a call from them about their “free tuition for seniors” program. “Wow, that sounds amazing!” he says. “I’ll be sure to tell my, uh, grandpa, as soon as he gets home.”

It’s one semester. If he can keep up the charade, he’ll have the degree, get the promotion, pay off the student loans. Hell, if they figure it out after the fact and come after him for the tuition, he’ll be able to afford it by then. He just needs to pass as a 70-year-old until graduation. How hard could it be?

Coexisting With The Fair Folk Who Have Taken Up Residence In/Around/Beneath Your University: A How-To Guide

See more of my comics here, and my art here!

Whole bunch of lore/things I couldn’t fit/everything I love about the overlap in superstition and General College Weirdness below the cut-

So there has been a bit of “what if humans were the weird ones?” going around tumblr at the moment and Earth Day got me thinking. Earth is a wonky place, the axis tilts, the orbit wobbles, and the ground spews molten rock for goodness sakes. What if what makes humans weird is just our capacity to survive? What if all the other life bearing planets are these mild, Mediterranean climates with no seasons, no tectonic plates, and no intense weather? 

Human: “Honestly we can tolerate anywhere from -40 to 50 Celcius, but we prefer the 0 to 30 range.”

Alien: “……. I’m sorry, did you just list temperatures below freezing?”

Human: “Yeah, but most of us prefer to throw on scarves or jackets at those temperatures it can be a bit nippy.” 

Other human: “Nah mate, I knew this guy in college who refused to wear anything past his knees and elbows until it was -20 at least.”

Human: “Heh. Yeah everybody knows someone like that.”

Alien: “……. And did you also say 50 Celcius? As in, half way to boiling?”

Human: “Eugh. Yes. It sucks, we sweat everywhere, and god help you if you touch a seatbelt buckle, but yes.” 

“Yup, with blizzards you cant see through every other day just about.”

“Amazing! when did you manage to send drones that could survive such temperatures?”

“… well, actually…”

“… what?”

“…we kinda……. sent……….. people…..”

“…”

“…”

“…what?”

“we sent-”

“no yeah I heard you I just- what? You sent… HUMANS… to a place one hundred degrees below freezing?”

“y-yeah”

“and they didn’t… die?”

“Well the first few did”

“PEOPLE DIED OF THE COLD AND YOUR SOLUTION WAS TO SEND MORE PEOPLE?”

aka The History of Russia

aka Arctic Exploration

1. Learning to recognize all forms of animal tracks in the wild so you can avoid bears and moose and search out rabbits and other small animals to eat.

2. Extensive swimming and climbing on glacial pieces with competitions to see who could last the longest, followed by a group sit in the sauna so we wouldn’t get hypothermia (no, not kidding, I really did this many times as a kid!)

3. How to navigate using the stars to get back to civilization.

4. How to select the right type of moss from the trees to start a fire with damp wood (because, y’know, you’re in a field of snow. Nothing is dry.)

It only takes one try before the reality of the situation sets in: human definitions of ‘taming’ and ‘habitable’ are woefully incomplete.

“Why did you not eliminate the venomous plant life?” Grahssk’ti moans, clutching one limb.

“Those?” The human laughs. “Why bother? They’re not that bad. And they eat the mosquitoes.”

Grahssk’ti shudders. The ‘mosquitoes’ are… not to be mentioned. Just one swarm of them caused a landing shuttle to crash three planetary daylights ago.

“And the acid storms? Why did you not warn us of them?”

“I mean, they’re annoying,” the human says, shrugging, “but we figured the cool sunsets made up for it.”

Grahssk’ti flails helplessly. “What about the ten-meter tall Fanged Death Bringers? They can eliminate an entire settlement in under an hour!”

Favorite.

Petunia was jealous, selfish and vicious. We will not pretend she wasn’t. She looked at that boy on her doorstep and thought about her Dudders, barely a month older than this boy. She looked at his eyes and her stomach turned over and over. (Severus Snape saved Harry’s life for his eyes. Let’s have Petunia save it despite them).

Let’s tell a story where Petunia Dursley found a baby boy on her doorstep and hated his eyes—she hated them. She took him in and fed him and changed him and got him his shots, and she hated his eyes up until the day she looked at the boy and saw her nephew, not her sister’s shadow. When Harry was two and Vernon Dursley bought Dudley a toy car and Harry a fast food meal with a toy with parts he could choke on Petunia packed her things and got a divorce.

Harry grew up small and skinny, with knobbly knees and the unruly hair he got from his father. He got cornered behind the dumpsters and in the restrooms, got blood on the jumpers Petunia had found, half-price, at the hand-me-down store. He was still chosen last for sports. But Dudley got blood on his sweaters, too, the ones Petunia had found at the hand-me-down store, half price, because that was all a single mother working two secretary jobs could afford for her two boys, even with Vernon’s grudging child support.

They beat Harry for being small and they laughed at Dudley for being big, and slow, and dumb. Students jeered at him and teachers called Dudley out in class, smirked over his backwards letters.

Harry helped him with his homework, snapped out razored wit in classrooms when bullies decided to make Dudley the butt of anything; Harry cornered Dudley in their tiny cramped kitchen and called him smart, and clever, and ‘better ‘n all those jerks anyway’ on the days Dudley believed it least.

Dudley walked Harry to school and back, to his advanced classes and past the dumpsters, and grinned, big and slow and not dumb at all, at anyone who tried to mess with them.

But was that how Petunia got the news? Her husband complained about owls and staring cats all day long and in the morning Petunia found a little tyke on her doorsep. This was how the wizarding world chose to give the awful news to Lily Potter’s big sister: a letter, tucked in beside a baby boy with her sister’s eyes.

There were no Potters left. Petunia was the one who had to arrange the funeral. She had them both buried in Godric’s Hollow. Lily had chosen her world and Petunia wouldn’t steal her from it, not even in death. The wizarding world had gotten her sister killed; they could stand in that cold little wizard town and mourn by the old stone.

(Petunia would curl up with a big mug of hot tea and a little bit of vodka, when her boys were safely asleep, and toast her sister’s vanished ghost. Her nephew called her ‘Tune’ not ‘Tuney,’ and it only broke her heart some days.

Before Harry was even three, she would look at his green eyes tracking a flight of geese or blinking mischieviously back at her and she would not think ‘you have your mother’s eyes.’

A wise old man had left a little boy on her doorstep with her sister’s eyes. Petunia raised a young man who had eyes of his very own).

Petunia snapped and burnt the eggs at breakfast. She worked too hard and knew all the neighbors’ worst secrets. Her bedtime stories didn’t quite teach the morals growing boys ought to learn: be suspicious, be wary; someone is probably out to get you. You owe no one your kindness. Knowledge is power and let no one know you have it. If you get can get away with it, then the rule is probably meant for breaking.

Harry grew up loved. Petunia still ran when the letters came. This was her nephew, and this world, this letter, these eyes, had killed her sister. When Hagrid came and knocked down the door of some poor roadside motel, Petunia stood in front of both her boys, shaking. When Hagrid offered Harry a squashed birthday cake with big, kind, clumsy hands, he reminded Harry more than anything of his cousin.

His aunt was still shaking but Harry, eleven years and eight minutes old, decided that any world that had people like his big cousin in it couldn’t be all bad. “I want to go,” Harry told his aunt and he promised to come home.