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The headlines are as golden as the medals he’s previously won. But this one just had me in hysterics.

People graffitid your mum jokes on the walls of Pompeii

Junior monks wrote complaints into their copied manuscripts

The Aborigines passed down 10,000 year old oral histories in campfire stories

Children played with little rolling ox toys in Mughal India

Indigenous Americans hurled balls around courts in games like ones we still play

Bored Roman soldiers carved dicks on Hadrian’s wall

Vikings climbed to very high places in distant countries just to carve their names there

Women in ancient Egypt sang songs making fun of their husbands while they worked

Victorian schoolgirls embroidered their hatred of stitching into their samplers

This is not a war, this is a massacre Azerbaijan and Turkey are committing against the Armenian people.

Turkey's president literally admitted that he wants to finish what his ancestors started. He wants to commit another genocide, and this time he wants to kill us all.

“Mom has been texting me for the last twenty minutes. She wants me to come home. It’s a four hour drive, when the roads are clear, and from what I hear everybody is trying to get somewhere right now. There’s no telling if I’d even-”

“Everybody else has left. All the other kids were picked up, the other staff left. They gave me all the keys. I promised to stay and wait for as long as- well. Even if some of the parents show up, I guess some of them won’t, so I’m just waiting. Until.”

[Clears throat.]

“A couple of people came after everybody left. Peter, one of Aidan’s fathers, gave me three hundred dollars for staying. What am I going to do with money? It’s- anyway. I kind of get it. He wanted to give me something.”

[Audio ends]

[Audio starts]

“They’re all between 2 and 4.” Sniff. “They’re so little. Too little to really- maybe if they were older, I’d have to tell them something. But um. I’m just- trying to stay calm and keep them happy and occupied. I think that’s the best thing, right now.”

[Heaving breaths.]

“I normally use this recorder to help me remember stuff. It’s just, uh, habit to talk to it. I don’t know. They’re napping, right now. I’ve got the baby monitor, they know that if they talk into it, I’ll come, so-”

[Sobbing.]

[Audio ends]

[Audio starts]

“Mom keeps texting, so I blocked her. I sent her a text telling her goodbye, first, but. I do. But these kids need me.”

[Sniff.]

“I tried calling their parents again, but I can’t get anybody. It’s just busy signals. I called the firefighter station, 911. I can’t get through to anybody.”

[Shaky breath.]

“I went out into the yard. Um, I think they can play. It’s nice out, and you can’t really see it yet. Little bit of a glimmer, if they ask I’ll just tell them it’s a plane, but it’s nice out and we’ve got hours before-”

[Murmuring child’s voice, indistinguishable.]

[Audio ends]

Here’s the prompt list I’m using in case anyone wants to join me in this challenge:

I made a very short comic about Eunice Newton Foote, an American physicist and an inventor in the 19th century. She was educated in Troy Female Seminary, a boarding school for women, where they were able to attend a nearby science college. She and her husband were women’s right activists.

In the 1856 she published a paper on the effect of gasses on the warming effect of the sun. Her findings for the first time showed that CO2 had direct effect on warming and cooling of the climate or what we would now call the greenhouse effect. Her work was presented by a male professor in American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, though women were in principle allowed to speak, but perhaps it would have been too much for the audience.

Three years after John Tyndall published similar findings about how various gasses trapped infernal heath radiation. In the paper he claimed that no one had done experiments on the issue and didn’t mention Eunice at all. For more than a century he was remembered as the first one to discover CO2′s effect on climate change, until very recently when Eunice’s work was uncovered again. There has been debate weather John Tyndall presented Eunice’s discovery as his own and didn’t name her or her work on purpose, or was is just a coincidence. Though he did publish a paper on color blindness on the same issue of the same journal where Eunice’s work was first published… Weather it was intentional or not, I imagine Eunice being pissed of that he erased her for history of science for a century and half.

Tagging my art peeps. As always I’m happy to add you or remove you from the tag list!

Great system, right? Except that I was such an insufferable little bookworm I routinely got them ALL right, which resulted in me being excused from spelling most weeks and told to write a story instead, which is really how it all began, because until then I hadn’t written anything down.