batteredrugosa

[batteredrugosa]

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4 Reasons to (Re)Normalize Masking

1. Apathy is violence: resist white supremacy by refusing to contribute to mass infection, disability, and death.

2. Destroy the state's argument that masking is only used by "criminals" to hide their identities.

3. Protect mask wearers from targeting: cops can't single them out if everyone is wearing a mask.

4. Combat the exclusion and erasure of disabled people from public spaces by making them safer.

[batteredrugosa]

Glowy dark mode site skin

🎼 You would not believe your eyes, if 10 million fireflies ended up in the header of your AO3. 🎶

It's been a while since I tried glow effects, but I saw the fireflies and I couldn't resist.

CSS code under the cut.

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[batteredrugosa]

at a conference I attended recently, a researcher pointed to the difficulty of finding material in archives because so much depends on the metadata and the terminology used to describe things changes over time. "it would be so helpful," the researcher said, "if I typed 'lesbian' into the library of congress database, it would also show me results that were categorised in the 50s, when the materials were interpreted as 'intimate female friendships'"

which is what tag wrangles at Archive Of Our Own do incredibly effectively: searching for "omegaverse" also leads to "alpha/beta/omega dynamics" and "alternate universe: a/b/o" and so on. but ao3 achieves this frankly incredible categorisation and indexing system by the power of countless volunteers putting in hours and hours of unpaid and unthanked free time, and it's completely understandable that most archives do not have that kind of infrastructure, but also how incredible that a fan-run website has better searchability, classification, and accessibility than the library of congress

[batteredrugosa]

100 year old Galapagos tortoise with a few weeks old Galapagos baby posing for a new family photo, and its own baby photo from 100 years ago.

[batteredrugosa]

why would you ever outsource fun to chatgpt? are you stupid? you can make mediocre shit by yourself too.

[batteredrugosa]

I love that I share my house with one of the most efficient apex predators millions of years of evolution could produce. I love that two of nature’s most prolific machines met and were like “hmmm. We should lay around and do nothing together”. Now we’re both fat and happy and full of meat. The hedonism of it all

[batteredrugosa]

i got these knockoff boots online and instead of the brand name on the tag they have the name of an apparently nonexistent martin scorsese movie??? what the fuck

[batteredrugosa]

[batteredrugosa]

The Tyranny of ‘the Normal’: Why the BMI has always been a hot ton of oppressive bullshit

A few years ago I was getting a pap smear. The doctor—whom I had just met that morning—had me in those cold metal stirrups and was rooting around in my vagina when she asked, ever so casually, “so, do you know what the BMI is?”

I laughed.

As if a woman who has been fat all of her life might have never heard of the BMI.

The thing is, we all know about the BMI. It’s a simple chart that measures our height against our weight, right? The number that comes out of that equation places us into categories—underweight, normal, overweight, obese.

The BMI is supposed to be a value-neutral way to assess bodies across populations.

Except that, did you know that the BMI has never been neutral?

Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1847), a French statistician, came up with the system we know today as the Body Mass Index. But Quetelet, influenced by early 19th century astronomers (!), charted human height and weight in an effort to establish ‘normality’—not health, or anything to do with medical risk at all. Quetelet believed that by constructing “l’homme moyen,” (the ‘average man’) through his chart, one could determine at what point bodies could be identified as deviant (by the way, Quetelet was also super interested in criminology and his work influenced the super shitty and oppressive fields of phrenology and eugenics). The chart shows that variances in body size more or less fall into a bell curve.

He noted in his work that artists have long used a similar way of looking at bodies: “deviations more or less great from the mean have constituted [for artists] ugliness in body as well as vice in morals and a state of sickness with regard to the constitution”. Quetelet noted from the get-go that the BMI is not understood in neutral terms, but is instead inscribed with cultural meaning.

So, Quetelet—this genius-level polymath with zero interest in health and 100% interest in categorizing certain bodies as ‘normal’ and the rest as ‘deviant’—created this nifty chart that even he knew was not value-neutral.

Then, in the early 20th century, life insurance companies decided to adopt Quetelet’s index as an indicator of mortality. The chart was a way for them to justify charging deviants—people at either end of the bell curve—more money for insurance.

You guys, the BMI is about capitalism.

Okay so eventually the medical community caught on, and studies were conducted in order to confirm that this NOT value-neutral categorization system could at least show us that some things were true about the different categories across incredibly large populations (but not at the level of the individual).

So again, a chart that was created to measure normalcy and deviance, which was acknowledged from the beginning as not being free of bias, was adopted by one industry as a way to make money, and then another as a “neutral” predictor of health risk??

Right. Okay.

Fat studies and disability studies academics have written about the BMI—and its construction by Quetelet—at length. Disability activist and theorist Lennard Davis calls Quetelet’s index “a symbol of the tyranny of the norm”. The norm, he argues, is even far more oppressive than the ideal: whereas the ideal is understood by most to be unattainable, the norm is something to aspire to, a “hegemonic vision of what the human body should be”.

Rosemary Garland-Thomson, another disability theorist, argues that the superiority of the ‘normal’ body (white, male, able-bodied, thin, etc.) appears “natural and undisputed”.

This is important. Because of the BMI, because of work by people like Quetelet, because of the way we value bodies culturally, what we think of as normal is actually just a social construction that seems natural because it has been hammered into our heads over and over again for the last 200 years. First by artists, then by astronomy-obsessed statisticians, then by money-hungry insurance companies, and, finally, by the medical-industrial complex.

Of course, it doesn’t take all this research to know that “normal” is a fucked up oppressive concept. But it was definitely fun to see the look on the doctor’s face when, still knuckles-deep into my vagina, I told her just how much I knew about the BMI.

(Note: information from here, here, and here.)

[batteredrugosa]

"these researchers published a paper on something that literally any of us could have told you 🙄" ok well my supervisors wont let me write something in my thesis unless I can back it up with a citation so maybe it's a good thing that they're amplifying your voice to the scientific community in a way that prevents people from writing off your experiences as annecdotal evidence

[batteredrugosa]

I took my little brother (autistic, mostly non verbal) out and he was using his voice keyboard to tell me something, and this little boy (maybe 4 or 5?) heard him and asked me "Is he a robot??" I tried to explain to him that no, he isn't a robot, he just communicates differently, but my darling brother was in the background max volume "I am robot I am robot I am robot I am robot"

[batteredrugosa]

🍖 How to Build a Culture Without Just Inventing Spices and Necklaces

(a worldbuilding roast. with love.)

So. You’re building a fantasy world, and you’ve just invented: → Three types of ceremonial jewelry → A spice that tastes like cinnamon if it were bitter and cursed → A holiday where everyone wears gold and screams at dawn

Cute. But that’s not culture. That’s aesthetics.

And if your worldbuilding is all outfits, dances, and spice blends with vaguely mystical names, your story’s probably going to feel like a cosplay convention held inside a Pinterest board.

Here’s how to fix that—aka: how to build a real, functioning culture that shapes your story, not just its vibes.

─────── ✦ ───────

🔗 Culture Is Built on Power, Not Just Style

Ask yourself: → Who’s in charge, and why? → Who has land? Who doesn’t? → What’s considered taboo, sacred, or punishable by death?

Culture is shaped by who gets to make the rules and who gets crushed by them. That’s where things like religion, family structure, class divisions, gender roles, and social expectations actually come from.

Start there. Not at the embroidery.

─────── ✦ ───────

2.🪓 Culture Comes From Conflict

Did this society evolve peacefully? Was it colonized? Did it colonize? Was it rebuilt after a war? Is it still in one?

→ What was destroyed and mythologized? → What do the survivors still whisper about? → What do children get taught in school that’s… suspiciously sanitized?

No culture is neutral. Every tradition has a history, and that history should taste like blood, loss, or propaganda.

─────── ✦ ───────

3.🧠 Belief Systems > Customs Lists

Sure, rituals and holidays are cool. But what do people believe about: → Death? → Love? → Time? → The natural world? → Justice?

Example: A society that believes time is cyclical vs. one that sees time as linear will approach everything—from prison sentences to grief—completely differently.

You don’t need to invent 80 gods. You need to know what those gods mean to the people who pray to them.

─────── ✦ ───────

4.🫀 Culture Controls Behavior (Quietly)

Culture shows up in: → What people apologize for → What insults cut deepest → What people are embarrassed about → What’s praised publicly vs. what’s hidden privately

For instance: → A culture obsessed with stoicism won’t say “I love you.” They’ll say “Have you eaten?” → A culture built on legacy might prioritize ancestor veneration, archival writing, name inheritance.

This stuff? Way more immersive than giving everyone matching earrings.

─────── ✦ ───────

5. 🏠 Culture = Daily Life, Not Just Festivals

Sure, your MC might attend a funeral where people paint their faces blue. But what about: → Breakfast routines? → How people greet each other on the street? → Who cooks, and who eats first? → What’s considered “clean” or “proper”? → How is parenting handled? Divorce?

Culture is what happens between plot points. It should shape your character’s assumptions, language, fears, and habits—whether or not a festival is going on.

─────── ✦ ───────

6. 💬 Let Your Characters Disagree With Their Own Culture

A culture isn’t a monolith.

Even in deeply traditional societies, people: → Rebel → Question → Break rules → Misinterpret laws → Mock sacred things → Act hypocritically → Weaponize or resist what’s expected

Let your characters wrestle with the culture around them. That’s where realism (and tension) lives.

─────── ✦ ───────

7.🧼 Beware the “Pretty = Good” Trap

Worldbuilding gets boring fast when: → The protagonist’s homeland is beautiful and pure → The enemy’s culture is dark and “barbaric” → Every detail just reinforces who the reader should like

You can—and should—challenge the aesthetic hierarchy. → Let ugly things be beloved. → Let beautiful things be corrupt. → Let your MC romanticize their culture and then get disillusioned by it later.

─────── ✦ ───────

📍 TL;DR (but like, spicy): → Culture is not food and jewelry. → Culture is power, fear, memory, contradiction. → Stop inventing spices until you know who starved last winter. → Let your world feel lived in, not curated.

The best cultural worldbuilding doesn’t look like a list. It feels like a system. A pressure. A presence your characters can’t escape—even if they try.

Now go. Build something real. (You can add spices later.)

—rin t. // writing advice for worldbuilders with rage and range // thewriteadviceforwriters

Sometimes the problem isn’t your plot. It’s your first 5 pages. Fix it here → 🖤 Free eBook: 5 Opening Pages Mistakes to Stop Making:

🕯️ download the pack & write something cursed:

[batteredrugosa]

The relationship between client and therapist is one sided, boundaried, and limited. When I say don't be your friends' therapist, what I mean is don't let your friendships become those things. It is easy for high empathy people to minimize their own needs and become support batteries for people around them.

I am a clinical psychologist and I mentor a lot of new therapists. In that first year, almost everyone has work with has to learn this lesson and stop holding space for people in their life at their own expense. When your job is holding space, empathising, and helping people to hold their hardest moments, you have to learn to manage your capacity more. You have to find spaces where you can coexist with your loved ones and be a whole person.

Point is, make sure your friendships are reciprocal and your needs for support, advice, fun, and caring are being met. Don't be a therapist to your friends. Be reciprocal. Work within your own capacity to give. Expect your friends to show up for you too.

Ultimately, I really do believe that the whole “don’t try to be your friends’ therapist” mindset has done more harm than good. I understand and agree with the original premise behind it—codependency bad, enmeshment bad—but it has morphed into something godawful that I can barely even stomach to look at. Why the fuck are we encouraging people to outsource critical mental health support and genuine, vulnerable human connection to authority figures who don’t necessarily give a fuck about us as people, with whom we have a tenuous client/employee relationship that is ripe for abuse and held together only by the exchange of money??? If I have advice for my friends or am capable of helping them with their problems in other ways then why the fuck would I not just. Do it. Why are we limiting the boundaries of actual fucking human relationships by expecting that no one will ever ask anything of us and we should never ask anything of them in return!!!! Do you people not see how fucking miserable and lonely that is!?!?!?! How can you people say that you truly care about your friends when you care more about holding them at arms’ length and “encouraging them to seek help on their own” rather than actually fucking helping them yourself when they ask it of you!?!?!?!?!?!

[batteredrugosa]

My part for Halsin week 2025! Day 5: Protection. Unwise to poke a bear and mess with his grove!

[batteredrugosa]

This man's laugh is infectuous

[batteredrugosa]

Can we talk about how devastatingly sad Lenore's abandoned wizard tower in the Underdark is?

She was so lonely, yearning for a lost love due to a mistake made. She created automatons to act as companions. She owned a dog.

Outside the tower, in the little alcove on the left hand side, you can find a letter she's written to her love, caving and apologizing for her mistake and asking for them to wait for her. Then you read further to see that her lover wrote a return note on the same sheet of paper that said they came and that they waited for ages, but she never came. Likely, she died before she could return.

The whole tower is a woman gone mad with loneliness. I can't help but see Lenore as a parallel to how Gale might have been without Tara or his mother after Mystra cast him aside.

[batteredrugosa]

asexual sex workers are braver than any US marine