joan kovatch

BUT. but the thing is. you how selkies/seal women was a pretty common variation of this? another really popular one was swans.

i just want you to think about that for a moment. swans. like…I get it, they’re pretty, graceful birds, certainly it’s easy to imagine them magically becoming pretty graceful ladies? but have you ever fought a swan. swans are awful. swans are the devil’s geese. imagine seeing a pretty magic lady and being absolutely enchanted by her, and stealing her magic feather cloak, and then you go up and say ‘hey i’m in love with you, let me make you my queen, it will be great, we’ll be so happy’ and she just looks at you for a moment and…

finally one day, a swan comes up to her and says ‘why don’t you come and swim with us? you always sigh so wistfully to see us on the water, and you would be most welcome to join our company, for you have always been a true friend to our kind’

and the woman says, ‘i can’t swim’

and the swan says, ‘we’ll teach you’

and the woman says, ‘literally i can’t swim, my husband stole my sealskin and should i venture into deep water i would surely drown’ 

and the swan says ‘your husband fucking WHAT’

the next morning the woman’s front yard looks like this. 

Also? Swans don’t have a lot of obvious physical markings that divide the males from females. So some idiot might be like, “damn, that’s a sexy bird, I wanna marry her” and then like. It’s a dude swan. You just transformed thirty pounds of angry aggressive bird into 200+ pounds of angry aggressive adult man, who will totally kick your butt. (Also I’m pretty sure that if you turned a lady swan into a human, you would not get a willowy little 5′0″ girl. You’d probably have a 6-foot amazon with biceps the size of your head. Swans are heavy birds and it takes a LOT of muscle to get them into the air. They are among the baddest bitches in the bird kingdom)

Standing Rock is still in crisis while facing one of the highest infection rates per capita for Covid-19!

Can you help by buying or sending:

🧺 Laundry detergent to wash cloth masks 😷 Masks 🛏 Sleeping bags for kids who sleep on the cold floors without any bedding! ⛑ Cots so family members can sleep apart if someone has been exposed to Covid!

🎁 Buy off the Rock Creek Community Wishlist to support 38 homeless Lakota Youth. (Look for “Marliss Marshall’s Gift Registry Address” at check out).  

🎁 OR Buy medical supplies directly off Standing Rock’s wish list (look for Jon Edwards’ Gift Registry Address). This list helps the Boys and Girls Club of Standing Rock.

You can also send masks, laundry detergent, cots, and sleeping bags to these other addresses at Standing Rock:

📪 Jon Edwards via USPS:  P.O. Box 551 McLaughlin, SD 57642 via FedEx/ UPS: 505 1st Ave E McLaughlin SD 57642

📬 Alva Cottonwood via USPS:  PO Box 824  Fort Yates, ND 58538

If you haven’t heard about it yet, SISEA is a bipartisan bill introduced in the US senate by Ben Sasse (R) and Jeff Merkley (D)

It includes a series of overly strict regulations to be imposed on the online porn industry, and would basically have the same results as the tumblr porn ban, but internet-wide.

Here’s just a few of the rules it proposes:

Requires verified ID and signed consent forms for everyone involved in the production and uploading of adult content

Requires the PLATFORM, not the user, hosting pornography to include a banner or notice on the site that tells you how to request the removal of content if you didn’t consent to being in the video

Prohibiting VIDEO DOWNLOADS on all platforms that host pornographic content within three months of the legislation passing

These platforms are ALL required to have a 24hr MANNED hotline, staffed by the platform, for content removal requests. (No clarification on how the person requesting the removal would be expected to prove their identity, and this is IN SPITE OF the rigorous verification process the proposed law ALSO REQUIRES, so this is likely to be abused by trolls)

Requires removal of flagged videos within TWO HOURS.

Requires all platforms to have an algorithm to prevent videos that have been removed (by the host, not the uploaded) from being reuploaded after removal

The above is to be enforced by the FTC

Creating a DATABASE OF PEOPLE who do not consent to being in adult videos, which must be checked BEFORE ANY NEW CONTENT CAN BE UPLOADED, the specifics of which are to be decided by the Department of Justice, and failure to comply with this requirement will be punished with a fine

So I’m sure by now that everyone has an idea of how bad this will be for not only sex workers, but any and all platforms that people use to post adult content, whether it’s the platform’s intended use or not, as well as anyone who consumes said content.

The rules concerning digital content, as many are probably wondering, are incredibly vague. Here’s a breakdown on twitter of why these rules in particular would be disastrous:

So, you’re probably wondering

“What can I do to stop this from being passed?”

Right now, I haven’t seen any petitions about this particular legislation, but I 100% advise and advocate for calling your state’s representatives and senators and demanding they speak out against this bill and it’s absolutely impossible requirements.

Here’s a list of current US Senators and their official contact info:

Here’s the info for US Congresspeople:

And here’s the article where I originally heard about SISEA, because I don’t see many people talking about it yet:

Look, we remember old filthy tumblr, right? And how SESTA/FOSTA absolutely wrecked it? Because the path of least resistance was to be overly restrictive.

For SISEA, the easiest and cheapest route to compliance will simply be to ban anything NSFW. Boom, done. Fan art, erotic sexting, you name it - it will get nuked.

The group orchestrating all of this, Exodus Cry, is a far-right-wing organization: https://medium.com/@justinethalley/the-siren-song-of-exodus-cry-d507a594c05d

The US Congress has been so absolutely wrecked by getting nothing accomplished that this would be an easy win for them, legislatively. This could coast alone on the need to show that they’re bipartisan.

Please reach out to your representatives. This will be disastrous for sex workers who are already disproportionately impacted because of the epidemic. It will censor social media platforms with impossible requirements. It will absolutely stifle creativity and sexual expression.

This is how you listen to someone before you hit them with facts.

Patrick: Ah, what a lovely day it is here at this ancient grave/mystical site!

Random Priest #1: Yes, let us spread out some blankets and have a picnic!

10ft tall ancient pagan warrior, long thought to be dead: *appears from behind mysterious mound looking menacing and weilding weapons*

The gaggle of priests that follows Patrick everywhere he goes: Oh Jesus! Oh God! We are all going to die!

It was a classic, truly.

from one cursed creature to another, here are some tips:

- around midnight one lonely night a temptation will come to reach out to someone who hurt you in the past, and an urge to forgive where forgiveness is not due. resist for three nights - and on the third night, if this haunts you still, channel that desperate loneliness into a powerful curse, and cast it over the one that dared hurt you so.

- if you take one look too many at yourself in the silver of the mirror, you will be possessed by the idea of changing it all. if you feel the urge to shave your head, do it. if you feel the urge to shave your eyebrows or dye your hair bloody red, do it. if you feel the urge to give yourself bangs, find out which deity is currently designated to your area and pray to the that this horrid urge passes soon. flagellate if you must.

- a thought will appear while wasting your precious mortal minutes observing someone you will never meet and listening about their vessel surface routine that you should, perhaps, start working out. abandon that thought as you’ve wasted enough time already. you will rot, and soon, and sore muscles are not a delicacy among worms.

- you will feel guilt for the amount of sleep. you will feel lazy and blasphemous in your wastefulness. banish that guilt immediately, however you see fit. sleep even more: but this time invite an ancient terror or two to visit you in your dream, and duel them. or fuck them, should you wish. once you wake up you will feel quite achieved and motivated.

- once boredom becomes nearly too much to bear, you will contemplate starting this show this one girl in your workplace keeps talking about. do not watch it. there is a reason you are not friends with that girl, and why risk finding out that it’s her terrible taste in media that’s the root. leave some sweet mystery there.

- you will be overcome with disdain towards certain people as you realise who they truly are. but remember, the time of the plague is great for strengthening important relations. therefore, take some extra time for the ritual and ask your favourite hell-born beast to smite that asshole.

Late last year, Propublica published a deep, blockbuster investigation into the use of brutal “discipline” techniques in Illinois’s special ed classes, some of them so extreme as to qualify as torture.

https://features.propublica.org/illinois-seclusion-rooms/school-students-put-in-isolated-timeouts/#170648

These techniques, including physically restraining children and locking them in small isolation rooms, sometimes for whole days, or even for whole consecutive days, had been strictly limited or eliminated altogether in the rest of the US, but not in Illinois.

Instead, Illinois had passed a rule requiring schools to document the use of force against children with learning disabilities. As a result, Propublica was able to FOIA thick sheaves of handwritten notes documenting children’s pleas for release at mandated 15-min intervals.

It was real Banality of Evil stuff, and it shed light on mysterious broken bones and bruises that parents had been told were self-inflicted. In the ensuing scandal, the state banned the use of these techniques, finally catching up with the rest of the nation, 20 years on.

But, it turns out, they didn’t.

https://www.propublica.org/article/illinois-quietly-reversed-its-ban-on-a-dangerous-physical-restraint-for-students#181893

Thanks to intense lobbying from Illinois private schools, notably Giant Steps and Markland Day School, and the public A.E.R.O Special Education Cooperative, some of the physical restraint tactics were reinstated.

Notably, face-down restraint - a tactic banned in 30+ states due to the high risk of asphyxiation - is once again permitted in special ed programs.

We can thank Rep Jim Durkin [R-82] for this. He sits on Giant Steps’s board along with 5 former colleagues from state government.