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Damnant quod non intellegunt

@batsutousai / batsutousai.tumblr.com

eternally 30, self-identifying with she/her (but not picky), living under a rock (though my heart lives in Venice). Writing fanfiction since 2002 & still going strong.
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About Bats

(Since I’ve actually been opening some tumblr pages on mobile browser & got annoyed with how many things DON’T WORK on it, I realised I should...probably bring my about me page from a page to an actual post. ^^; Also, gonna go ahead and pin it.)

Hi, I’m Batsutousai, but answer to most nickname variations (I understand my name isn't really easy to spell at a glance), most notably Bats, Batsu, and Batty. I self-identify with she/they, but I don't particularly care what pronouns are used for me. I'm asexual and demi-romantic. When I turned 30, I decided I will be 30 for the rest of my life. (Given the number of people irl who think I've only just graduated high school, it'll be a while before this stops working.) I am American, but I've spent quite a few years in British fandoms, and it shows in my spelling and some of my turns of phrase. I don't, necessarily, do it on purpose (except to make my mum twitchy), but I also don't go out of my way to correct myself, unless I'm writing from the point of view of an American character. I first started posting fanfic back in 2002, under the name Katmon, and while you can find some of that on AO3, most of it has (thankfully) vanished into the ether. After a bad breakup and a brief hiatus, I began writing under the name Batsutousai in 2004, and have no intention to change names again (even if some of the ‘04 stuff’s kinda crap, imo). While I have a preference for male/male ships in fandom, what little original stuff I’ve done tends to be female-centric. You can find a list of all my ships here, on my writing tumblr.

In 2012, I became a Tag Wrangler for AO3, and while I fairly regularly bitch about ‘tumblr-style’ freeforms and weird ships, I actually really love the work. Unfortunately, I had to quit it summer of 2020, because I couldn't make the time while working retail during the pandemic, but I fully intend to pick it up again, once life settles back down. I’m happy to talk about my experiences as a tag wrangler, and I don’t really hide what fandoms I wrangled for (Digimon, FMA, Radiata Stories, & some minor fandoms), but I DO NOT speak for the tag wrangling team or the archive as a whole. (I also don’t out other wranglers.) In real life, I’m currently living with my younger sister, work at a family-owned local repair company (currently answering phones, but being transitioned into more of an admin assistant job), & occasionally catsit from some friends. I have an Etsy shop, where I sell crocheted things (nothing up there right now, because it costs money to keep things listed, & I don't sell enough to excuse the constant cost).

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miraclemaya

this is problematic of me (joke) but i really enjoy the splashing of french into english speech or writing. just adds a pizzazz

*adds a certain je ne sais quoi

see the problem is that despite around 8 years of french schooling the french language has utterly escaped my brain so even the most obvious set up i had created for myself by accident was missed by me. such is life.

*c'est la vie

god damn it

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bundibird

I was at a courthouse once, and saw an indigenous australian woman in a dressing gown very carefully and gingerly making her way down the steps outside the courthouse, surrounded by family who were helping her down the stairs. We asked if she was OK, because she looked awful. She looked like she should have been wrapped up in bed with blankets and hot soup, not on the steps of a courthouse.

One of her family told us that she had given birth yesterday evening, but that Child Protection services had taken her baby away with no warning, claiming that she wasnt prepared to look after him. What had happened, is that she'd literally only just given birth -- hadn't even passed the afterbirth yet, is holding her blood-coated, crying, newborn baby to her chest -- and a nurse asked what her feeding plan was. She was tired from the birth and distracted by the brand new baby in her arms and thrown off by the timing of the question, but still, she managed to answer, and said she planned to breastfeed him whenever he was hungry.

Well apparently that wasn't enough of a plan for the hospital staff, who reported her and claimed that she was unprepared to look after the child, and claimed that had no social supports, and that the baby was at risk if left with her. All because a brand new mother, 30 seconds after giving birth, didn't have a PowerPoint presentation ready to go that cited the timing cycle she would feed her kid on, and instead simply said that she would feed him when he was hungry.

Child Protection services showed up, took her kid, and she was told to show up to court the next day to contest custody if she wanted her baby back.

So a woman who had given birth less than 24 hours prior was forced to rally her family and show up to court to prove that she a) had a feeding plan for the child, and b) had enough social supports to justify reclaiming her baby.

It was one of the most appalling things I'd ever seen. I don't even know if she won her case. They didn't know at the time we saw them, and after that brief interaction on the stairs, i never saw them again. I sincerely hope she got her newborn baby back.

That was about 5 years ago. And the exact same kind of thing is still happening today.

News broke today from a South Australian whistle-blower of the appalling treatment new mothers frequently receive, including hospital staff taking the baby away from the mother "for medical tests," only for the mother to then be told, with absolutely no prior warning, that the baby was not going to be returned to her.

Here's the article, and here are some excerpts:

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moniquill

also a problem in Canada: https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/from-the-60s-scoop-to-now-canada-still-separating-indigenous-children-from-families-1.5606935

This is genocide! It is an effort to destroy culture by stealing children away from their parents.

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tamamita

Is it me or has this site become much slower as of recent?

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toskarin

worth checking your cookies, because tumblr was trying to run games on mine

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specterthief

what in the fuck

if you're using firefox on desktop, you can check through the settings! the menu you're looking for is in the "privacy and security" section under "cookies and site data":

hit "manage data" and you'll find what the sites you use take up:

as we can see, google's got 161 cookies (goodness gracious!) and it's taking up about 24 megabytes. i already deleted tumblr's data, but it was taking up a whole gigabyte worth of storage.

you can select the individual sites you want to remove data for, too, if not all of them.

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Don Wilson:

"I have noticed a significant increase in general laxity about PPE since COVID masking has been dropped. A significant % of OR staff (esp anesthesia & RTs) not bothering to mask inside actual OR even when sterile fields are open & set up.

Nurses inside OR generally much more consistent (they directly handle & set up sterile equipment).

I’ve seen unmasked anesthesiologists & RTs for emergency CS & gyne cases… I don’t get it. We mask to prevent contamination of open surgical wounds. Just because COVID mask mandates are over doesn’t mean INSIDE an operating room is a mask free zone.

Used to be that it was unthinkable to be unmasked inside an active OR. Even in the hallways during active OR time. It’s a sad commentary on the impact of the antimask stupidity spilling over to areas where it can impact quality & safety of the patient care environment.

I’m just one person who chooses to be fastidious about masking inside the hospital, I can’t take on the entire system. But it’s discouraging to see & I wonder how many patients go on to have nosocomial surgical infections because of relaxed cultures around masking now."

Yesterday I saw an article about Hantavirus prevention that didn't mention respiratory protection when cleaning up mouse poop. Just gloves, bleach, and wetting rather than sweeping. Which is better than nothing, but for a disease as dangerous as HPS, I'm going to put in the tiny extra effort of an N-95 also.

Construction workers are masking less around sawdust and worse.

The anti-mask brainrot runs deep.

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Once again, Fox falls victim to Thorn’s sunny disposition and irrepressable good cheer

This commission was so much fun to draw! It’s been ages since I drew Fox and I’d forgotten just how much I love this cranky, overcaffeinated child 🥰

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ithillia

Honetly, the amount of art of Thorn hugging Fox on my dash today is ridiculously high, and so are my spirits for seeing them each and every time. <3<3<3<3

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works w/ youtube, soundcloud, twitch, twitter (gifs and videos), tumblr (video and audio), and most other websites you're probably lookin to download stuff off of.

for anyone wondering about privacy and whatnot, i'm happy to say that the developers are pretty committed to have 0 trackers and 0 data retention. you can read more in their "about" section, but here's the basic important stuff:

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