Big Slug Art

my brain at 12:00 am on june 1st:

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears

Dorsal view by the same photographer:

And from the side:

This is what's so fucked up about "nothing that requires the labor of others is a human right".

The labor is already being done under capitalism. The laborers are already being underpaid under capitalism.

When you propose removing the greedy profiteers and paying the workers a reasonable wage, people call that "slavery" while they have no problem with the current system.

it was basically rushed through. there's a vague timeline on this that starts in 2023, when a law (i don't remember which one at this point) was passed trying to define gender as being only male or female in kansas and restricting what bathrooms we're allowed to use in government facilities and shit like that, and Kris Kobach tried to take that law and say "THIS MEANS YOU CAN'T CHANGE YOUR SEX/GENDER ON YOUR BIRTH CERTIFICATE OR DRIVER'S LICENSE" and in June of 2023 all such actions across the state were frozen by a county judge.

it was initially expected that this freeze would end in a matter of weeks because you can only put a hold on these things via judicial action for so long. they managed to keep this tied up in legal limbo for almost 2 and a half years, though. in October of 2025, that ruling was finally and decisively overturned, and we were able to start changing our gender markers again.

that's when i finally changed mine. (i had received my updated birth certificate on a saturday in june of 2023, and the judge put a hold on gender marker changes the following monday, bright and early. i woke up early all excited to go update my driver's license only to find out i couldn't.)

anyway, we knew in October of 2025 that Kansas Republicans (who hold a supermajority in our legislature, if that wasn't clear) were going to do something to fuck with all of that again. we've known this was coming. it just got pushed through way faster than expected, and in the most cruel and inhumane way possible. the lack of grace period on updating our IDs is likely due to manifold influence, but more on that in a moment.

SB 244, the bill that resulted in the ID of every kansan who has legally transitioned being revoked LITERALLY OVERNIGHT, was introduced in its current form on January 27th, 2026. It passed the house 87 to 36 on January 28th, and passed the senate 30 to 9 on the same day. Our governor, gods help her, was presented the bill on February 3rd, 2026. She vetoed it on February 16th, 2026.

On February 17th, the senate voted to override that veto, 31 to 9; and on February 18th, the house voted to override the veto, 87 to 37.

we knew this was coming, and we knew it was coming fast, but it has been less than a month since the bill was introduced, and the kansas legislature website is an archaic piece of shit. the news in kansas mostly leans pro-republican, so there's little reason for them to cover this in a way that's actually helpful and informative, and that's assuming you even trust mainstream news enough to watch it at all.

i forgot i was going to discuss the manifold influence on why they've done this! thank you for the reminder.

the reason they didn't give us a grace period on this is manifold.

they want as few of us to understand the specifics of what's happening to us, legally, as possible so that

we will drive without a valid license

we will use the "wrong" bathroom in public

we will try to vote without a valid ID (and, yes, presenting a valid ID to vote is required in Kansas, which is fucked up for many reasons)

and all of that is so that they can fine and/or jail us. the fines are prohibitive for many trans people (including myself) and jail time is already traumatic enough, but we would be jailed according to our assigned sex at birth, making it extra traumatic

and the added layer, the cherry on top, is that these are all attempts to force us to either leave the state and go be disgusting faggots somewhere else or, even better, just detransition and stop being disgusting faggots.

100%. i live one of the most urban areas of kansas, and public transit will still only get me so far. on top of that, i'm physically disabled, so while for an able-bodied person the, for example, branch of the public library nearest to my home is in cycling or walking distance, for me it is not. i have to drive there- or, now, get someone to drive me. it's too close for me to be able to utilize public transit and too far for me to be able to convey myself there as a pedestrian.

worse still, my therapist, who i now desperately need to see, as you might imagine, is in a different city an hour's drive away. i cannot take public transit to see her. i now need someone to drive me.