i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes
it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!
although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there – of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.
you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.
this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.
but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.
eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.
THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.
AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space – often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.
LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.
IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just – it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.
I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics. They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross. But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!” Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it. So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that? No.
In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.
Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality. And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.
Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?
1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse. It was not meant to titillate or arouse. It was meant to horrify. It was seldom explicit.
2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.
3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half. When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia. Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex. And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.
Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we? I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too. But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:
1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.
2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.
3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).
Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like. And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them. No, this was step one on a moral crusade. If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands. This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted. It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit. But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality. Then anything with teen sexuality. Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con. Then whatever is next on their list. It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.
Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service. You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call). You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising. And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids. Other than that? It’s fair game. You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge. There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.
We’ve been down that road. It doesn’t lead anywhere good.
Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.
During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.
If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.
reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.
AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.
This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.
^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary
Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received.
tl;dr – I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.
This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing – and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.
And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups – and their main support network – when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).
You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!
I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!!
People were terrified during Strikethrough. I was there. Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down. People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments – a LOT went on in comments on LJ. Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread. Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical.
LJ was, for many people, central.
It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time.
Having it attacked, having parts of your fandom’s territory just deleted like that, was very very scary. People didn’t know who was next. Every day, the list of stricken journals grew. And not all of them came back, not all of them recovered their content. Some people even voluntarily deleted their content as a form of protest. It was a bad time.
You do not have to interact with fic that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable. Tagging is a thing. And even outside of tags, you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience. It is not right to expect it to be curated for you. And it is not right to lash out when someone refuses to do so and expects you to walk away from things that do not concern you.
I was gonna say “things that don’t harm anyone” but I realize you can argue that. If you get triggered, that’s upsetting. That could be considered harm. And I have sympathy for that. I do.
I have run across fic that triggered me. I have pretty specific triggers, and people don’t always think to warn for them because they aren’t that big a deal for a lot of people. Or it’s sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if you’re okay with certain kinds of kink, you’re okay with this. So I’ve been blindsided by it before. And it sucks for a couple of days while I get over it.
That was not the fault of the authors! You could argue that tagging should have been used, and maybe it should, but ultimately that’s not an ironclad obligation. It’s a tool people provide out of courtesy.
That was not the fault of the site! The site is there to give authors a way to make fiction available, not to judge each work and interrogate its validity and make sure everything is tagged so that nobody has to see anything bad, ever.
That was not even my fault! It was my responsibility to try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasn’t my fault because I didn’t deliberately set out to trigger myself.
When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want.
Also, some people cope by writing about fucked-up shit. My best friend in the whole wide world has shared her fic with me, and HOO BOY it is messed up. She wrote it during a time in her life when she was in and just coming out of a horrifically abusive relationship. I mean, it was exactly the kind of relationship all of us here on Tumblr love to hate. She was married to a shitty, abusive man who preyed on someone younger than he was and used his influence over her to treat her in a way that would be right at home in that Lundy Bancroft book Why Does He Do That? He was a real rapist, a verified grade-A bad fuckin’ guy. (She was lucky to escape. I have immense respect for her.) And she wrote some fucked up fic to deal with it, and she shared it, and people were invested in it. And because this was early 2000′s, she had to host it on a foreign server and cover her tracks, because at that time no-place was safe to post it.
“Yeah, but if she’s writing it for therapy, she doesn’t have to post it where other people might have to see it!” I hear you say.
But like … what the hell??? “Shut up, don’t talk about it, it’s bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!” is something used against folks with trauma.
“This isn’t good for me, I can’t talk about this, I can’t be your audience for this,” that’s fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves. You should learn to say those things! It will help you!
But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderously oppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.
And nobody should have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected. I’ve only really been able to openly say “I was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from it” for the past couple of years, tops. I couldn’t talk about it before that. Couldn’t! And it was over 20 years ago!
I also believe, very firmly, that you don’t need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic. I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.
All y’all fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.
Fine, I don’t like it either!
But that fucked up shit? That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today. You don’t have to like it, but campaigning to get it deleted, harassing content creators, calling people rapists and pedophiles who have never done and would never ever do such a thing, that is not the way to improve the world, it doesn’t keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe. It wouldn’t have made me feel safe when I was 16 and did’t want what was going on. It doesn’t make me feel safe now. I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesn’t make the world safer for people like I was. It actually makes it worse.
Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you don’t like. It’s a skill, you get better with practice. Have someone else vet stuff for you if you need help doing it now.
Everything that is sketchy and gross is not criminal, and writing about a thing is not morally the same as doing it. Please stop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as the actual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actual elementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids. The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims. The second makes me want to vomit because even though he was just talking, that guy was gearing up to try something and create another abuse victim. A g a i n.
The first can be avoided because it is imaginary and you, an adult, have power over your back button so that you don’t have to witness harm to imaginary people. The second, those very real kids had to rely on real adults and real law enforcement to keep them safe from very real assault.
(It worked! The neighborhood rallied! He was arrested for violating parole!)
Pretty sure Sleazebag McDongface didn’t read some gross NC-17 Draco/Lucius fic before deciding to harm an actual human being. Pretty sure not having read it didn’t keep him from doing it. ‘Cause he fuckin’ did it. And he would have done worse. But actual people stopped him.
I get wanting to protect victims when so many of us are victims ourselves, but man, going after fiction is not the way to do it.
An author is not a perpetrator. Stop trying to make those things synonymous in the minds of other fans, and in the minds of other recovering victims.
This was from like a year ago but wow is it suddenly relevant again.
Referred Species: A. valisineria (Canvasback, Extant), A. ferina (Common Pochard, Extant), A. americana (Redhead, Extant), A. collaris (Ring-Necked Ducks, Extant), A. australis (Hardhead, Extant), A. baeri (Baer’s Pochard, Extant), A. nyroca (Ferruginous Duck, Extant), A. innotata (Madagascar Pochard, Extant), A. novaeseelandiae (New Zealand Scaup, Extant), A. fuligula (Tufted Duck, Extant), A. marila (Greater Scaup, Extant), A. affinis (Lesser Scaup, Extant), A. shihuibas (Extinct), A. denesi (Extinct)
Ferruginous Duck by Francis C. Franklin, CC BY-SA 3.0
Aythya is a large genus of diving ducks from all over the world, including many different species including Scaups and Pochard. While most species in this genus are not threatened with extinction, a few of them are critically endangered, especially those in insular environments. The oldest occurrence of this genus is from the late Miocene, and as such it appears to be about 12 million years old, from the Tortonian age of the Miocene of the Neogene, until today. Almost all of these ducks are associated with marine environments, given their diving ecology.
A. shihuibas is one of two known extinct species in this genus, from the Late Miocene of China. A. denesi is another species, hailing from the late Miocene of Hungary, specifically the Polgárdi 4 formation in Feér County. There is also an Early Pleistocene member of this genus from Turkey that remains undescribed. These extinct members of the genus are, in general, known from fairly limited material. A. denesi is known from fairly limited material of the humerus, showing it was very similar to living members of this genus of diving ducks, showing advanced structures typical of this genus, but still retaining some of the more plesiomorphic (re: ancestral) features of ducks in general, including some fairly “primitive” characteristics. This shows that these diving ducks were still transitional in their evolution in the late Miocene, and it was only recently that modern forms for this genus were really starting to appear.
Canvasback by Dick Daniels, CC BY-SA 3.0
The Canvasback, A. valisineria, is an unthreatened species of this genus primarily from North America. It breeds in Canada and the Western United States, and spends the winters in most of the rest of the United States and Mexico. The largest species of this genus, it is about the size of a mallard, weighing up to 1.6 kilograms, though it is more compact than the mallard. The males have ruddy brown heads with black necks and white bodies, while the females are more brown all over. They nest primarily on water near prairie marshes, though some breed in subarctic river deltas. They lay about 5 to 11 eggs at a time. They feed primarily on seeds, buds, leaves, tubers, roots, snails, and insects, mainly by diving but also by dabbling, given their wide variety of habitats – they are highly migratory ducks!
Common Pochard by Tony Hisgett, CC BY 2.0
The Common Pochard, A. ferina, is a species vulnerable to extinction from Europe and Asia. They are migratory birds as well, spending winter in Southwestern Europe, and are commonly found breeding in the northern British Isles. The males have distinctive red heads, black necks, and white bodies, while the females are primarily brown and actually make growling sounds. They form very large flocks, often mixed ones, and feed by both diving and dabbling on aquatic plants, molluscs, insects, and even fish. They usually feed during the night. Due to urbanization and overhunting, their populations are currently on decline.
Redhead Duck by Kevin Bercaw, CC BY 3.0
The Redhead Duck, A. americana, is a nonthreatened species from North America, with males once again very distinct due to the bright red heads and greyish-black bodies. They spend the winter in Southern North America, and then breed in the Western United States and Canada, migrating between these two locations. They are very well adapted for underwater foraging, with legs far back on their bodies to aid in diving, but making land walking extremely difficult. They feed primarily on gastropods, molluscs, and insects, and will eat plants during the winter as well. They prefer living in wetland environments, especially ones with deep enough water for vegetation for their breeding habitat. They do flock together on lakes and migrate in pairs, with elaborate courtship rituals involving the males kinking their necks and stretching them for display, making calls until the female shows reciprocation. They build nests in thick plant material, and actually breed in very social environments, laying eggs of up to 7 young.
Ring-Necked Duck by Dan Pancamo, CC BY-SA 2.0
The Ring-Necked Duck, A. collaris, is another diving duck of least concern from North America, breeding in Canada and then migrating down to the Southwestern United States and Mexico for the winter season. Dark in color, the males have noticeable white beaks and bright white wings, with red rings around their necks, while the females are more dark in color all around (as shown above). They breed in wooded lakes and ponds, mainly in boreal regions, and then migrate to lakes, ponds, rivers, and bays in warmer climates. Though they form pairs for breeding, they usually separate after reproduction. About 10 eggs are laid per clutch, which are guarded by the mothers until the young can fly. They are omnivores, feeding on animals and plants throughout the year, though they prefer plants to animals as adults.
Hardhead, by Fir0002, GFDL 1.2
The Hardhead, A. australis, is the only diving duck known from Australia, not considered threatened with extinction due to its widespread presence in its range. They are common in the south-eastern portion of Australia, but also is found frequently near coasts. They are fairly nomadic ducks, except during drought years, when they disperse in search of water. They dive deeply for food, and are often found submerged fro even a minute at a time, eating a lot of small water animals. They enjoy living in lakes, swamps, and rivers, but are usually avoiding the coast, and are rarely found on land. They are actually fairly small ducks, and both males and females are brown, though the males have darker brown heads.
Baer’s Pochard by Dick Daniels, CC BY-SA 3.0
Baer’s Pochard, A. baeri, is a critically endangered diving duck from eastern Asia, breeding in Russia and China and migrating to Vietnam, Japan, and India for the winter months. It is a fairly small duck with long, distinctive beaks, and dark heads with brown bodies in the males. They are fairly similar in general to other members of this genus, breeding around lakes with rich vegetation and nesting in dense grass, typically favoring coastal wetlands and ponds. Unfortunately, its numbers are decreasing very rapidly, primarily due to wetland destruction and hunting, with up to 3,000 individuals killed every year.
Ferruginous Ducks by Erbanor, in the Public Domain
The Ferruginous Duck, A. nyroca, is a near-threatened species from Eurasia, with males and females being a chestnut brown, though the females slightly darker and duller than the males. They live in shallow bodies of fresh water, sometimes slightly salty ones. They breed from the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb south to Arabia, and then winters in the Mediterranean Basin and Black Sea. They are fairly social, and lay eggs in sites next to water. They both dive and dabble for food, feeding primarily on aquatic plants and insects. They are threatened due to habitat degradation by humans, mainly due to impoundment, drainage, and pollution. Non-native species also cause invasive competition for these birds.
Madagascan Pochard by Frank Vassen, CC BY 2.0
The Madagascan Pochard, A. innotata, is a very critically endangered and rare species of diving duck, primarily known from Lake Matsaborimena in Madagascar. The population today is only around 80 individuals. They probably started an extreme decline in the mid-1900s, due to introduction of fish species that would kill pochard chicks. Rice cultivation has also lead to sharp population declines. The last sighting prior to recent times was a small flock in 1960; after that point, only a few more have been seen, though rescue plans are ongoing and captive breeding is working, with reintroduction on Lake Sofia planned for the near future.
New Zealand Scaup by Tony Wills, CC BY-SA 3.0
The New Zealand Scaup, A. novaeseelandiae, is a nonthreatened species found throughout New Zealand and no one else. It is commonly called the Papango by the Māori. The Papango is a diving duck that can submerge for up to half a minute, looking for aquatic plants and small animals. They are found in deep freshwater lakes and ponds, and it doesn’t migrate. They lay eggs from October to March, up to eight in a clutch, which are incubated by the females and brought to suitable diving locations soon after hatching. Males have striking yellow eyes and greenish heads, while the females have a white patch on their faces and non-yellow eyes.
Tufted Duck by Andreas Trepte, CC BY-SA 2.5
The Tufted Duck, A. fuligula, is a small, nonthreatened diving duck, with up to one million birds out in the wild. It is found across all of the Northern Hemisphere, found as a winter visitor in the United States and Canada, though primarily known from Europe and certain localities in Asia such as the Indian subcontinent and Japan. They breed close to marshes and lakes with vegetation to conceal their nests, and they are also often found on coastal lagoons and ponds. They dive for food, feeding primarily on molluscs and insects. The males are all black except for white sides of their bodies, with clear little crests coming off of their heads; while the females are more brownish.
Greater Scaup by Calibas, CC BY-SA 4.0
The Greater Scaup, A. marila, is a commonly known diving duck from the Northern Hemisphere. This duck is so commonly known that decoys for hunting are often designed off of it, and their distinctive patterns are see frequently in duck-related things (my mom had bookends that looked like Greater Scaups). The males have dark green and black heads and striped backs, with distinct white and black patterns on their bodies. The females are mostly brown, but also have white patches on their sides. These ducks live in both North America and Eurasia, typically near coastal areas and around lakes. They eat aquatic molluscs, plants, and insects, which they get through diving. They weigh up to 1.4 kilograms, and are primarily associated with polar regions as well. They breed in the tundra and boreal forests, nesting on islands in northern lakes. The males make quick soft whistles to attract the females, which make raspy vocalizations in response. They form monogamous pairs, which nest close together, and after the eggs are laid the males leave the females. The females lay up to nine eggs, and the chicks are able to walk nearly immediately, though the female guards them until they’re able to fend for themselves. They are threatened by a variety of predators, including humans; they are also threatened by pollution; but there are conservation efforts ongoing, including banding programs.
Lesser Scaup by Connor Mah, CC BY-SA 3.0
And finally, the Lesser Scaup, A. affinis, is a smaller American species that is also not threatened with extinction. It breeds primarily in Canada, migrates across the Northern United States, and winters in the Southern United States, Mexico, and Central America. These ducks weigh up to 1 kilogram, and the males have black heads and striped bodies, while the females are primarily brown. Quieter ducks, they are frequently hard to distinguish from the Greater Scaup, especially since they often flock together. However, Lesser Scaups have darker irises than Greater Scaups. These ducks breed primarily in inland lakes and marsh ponds, and then migrate south. They forage through mud at the bottom of these waterways, and even will dabble rather than dive, though they primarily dive for molluscs and some aquatic plants. They nest in sheltered locations near the water, in shallow depressions lined with plants and down feathers, and lay up to 11 eggs in a nest, which are watched primarily by the mothers. Though not threatened yet, they are experiencing sharp declines in population, primarily due to decreasing breeding success, pollution, and habitat destruction, as well as climate change.
ion even care im so pressed tonight. anyway, why is asexual awareness day or whatever trending when just yesterday trans people’s rights were threatened, and are probably going to be taken away. And don’t give me that bullshit ‘owo they both need to have a light shed on them’ bc trans people are in fucking imminent danger here and we need support more than ever. For once in yall’s lives can you dig up some compassion and understanding? Call me aphobic all you want, but im sick of trans people being fucking ignored and left to fight for ourselves.
Don’t bother actin a fool, i’ll just block you
Can anyone on Tumblr shut the fuck up about asexuals for five fucking seconds? Can you please do that for me? I know you’re going to fucking assume I’m a cishet or some shit but I’m literally fucking tired of this. Who the fuck cares about a trending hashtag? We, as trans people, are going to lose our fucking rights in the near future and all you can fucking talk about is asexuals? Go to fucking hell and shove this post right up your ass on the way down. You have the fucking gall to gloat like “ooh stay mad” like it’s all some fucking game. I’ve not seen a single post from asexuals or some shit trying to distract from what the Trump administration is trying to push, but you’re so fucking absorbed in bullshit Tumblr politics that you literally cannot resist somehow bringing up asexuals. You’re fucking pathetic. People are going to lose their rights, their mental, spiritual, emotional, and physical health are in direct jeopardy because some of us might lose the right to change our bodies so we won’t want to fucking kill ourselves but oh thank fucking god that some loser online is speaking truth to power against the tumblr acey waceys!! This literally insignificant minority of people on a fucking website who happened to have an awareness day or whatever. You’re a fucking joke. Get your fucking shit together. Fuck this post and fuck everyone who reblogged it.
Full fucking offence OP but theres literally NO CORRELATION between ace people celebrating ace awareness week and trump administration threatening trans people’s rights and the fact that you are hiding behind the “Why dont we care about REAL issues!!!1!” to spread your disgusting views about asexuality is fucking DESPICABLE
TRANS ACE people exist and you arent doing them ANY favors by acting like they dont deserve to celebrate and talk about their aceness lol.In fact many of them are using ace awareness week to feel better about at least one part of their marginalized identity and distract themselves against something they cant control and telling them that they are horrible to do so isnt achieving ANYTHING
Its high fucking time yall stop taking out your anger on ace people and blaming them for every single problem in your life bc they are marginalized and can be easily rattled while the cis oppressors are too powerful to be affected by you.
Trump administration isnt gonna take back their decisions regarding trans people if people stopped celebrating ace awareness week so direct your efforts towards things that WILL MATTER and AFFECT this threat on trans people’s human rights instead of attacking marginalized orientations who just want to spend a WEEK without being felt guilty for existing
We will fight for trans people’s human rights AND celebrate ace awareness week.Also its SO funny how you are hiding the notes of ANYONE who is calling you out on your bullshit especially TRANS ACE people.Dont make posts speaking about trans people’s issues if you arent gonna listen to many of them
please have a terrible day week month year OP. you suck. you suck so much. punching on people who are already down. what a turd. what an absolute mess
Ace awareness week was a known date for like a year. It’s not any ace person’s fault the trans story broke at the same time. Also, shockingly, most people are able to care about multiple things at once, and if you’re too flighty to do the same, well, that’s only your fault.
Aphobes and their double standards…
Apparently, asexual awareness week is a distraction from trans issues because we can’t care about multiple things. And yet, here we are with exclusionists complaining about asexual awareness week which, you know, isn’t doing anything about trans issues, it’s just pointing fingers and flapping lips about something entirely unrelated. And apparently that isn’t a problem because exclusionists, the pinnacles of greatness that they are (/s), are able to care about multiple things.
Instead of postulating about how little the “asexies” are doing, how about you worry about how you’re spending your time. If you’re so upset about asexuals wasting their time and not focusing on the issues, how about you stop wasting your time preaching at them and go focus on the issues.
As far as I can tell, going by Internet key word searches, “Asexuality Awareness Week” happens every year in the third week of October. And nationwide Election Days have been happening the first week of November since the 1800s.
Trump is pulling out all the stops of his outrageousness to get his political base excited for voting two weeks from today.
Are you registered to vote? Are you going to vote Blue? I know I am – my application for an absentee ballot got approved today (The first application I mailed out got lost, somehow… I was getting nervous.). I am so ready to do my part and flip the House and Senate.
(See? I’m one of them Asex-you-alls. And I vote. I can be who I am, and care about people who are not me at the same time. Who’d a-thunk it?)
it’s facial reconstructions of prehistoric humans!!
like, look at this part-homo sapiens, part-neandertal man from well over 30,000 years ago:
doesn’t he just look like a dude you’d wanna hang out with? like he probably washes dishes in the kitchen with you, and has excellent weed
what a charming fellow. what stories he probably has to tell. i’d definitely go shoot the shit with him on Contemplation Rock after i’d finished my day’s work carving a bone flute for the autumn hunting ceremony, or whatever
people have been people ever since people first became people, i tell you what
they all had lives and histories and families and friends and dumb gossip and games they played and total bullshit in which they believed wholeheartedly
they all argued about the nature of the world, and of themselves
they all sang songs
they all drew pictures
they all buried their dead in graves, and they buried their dead in graves well before they did a lot of that other stuff. they buried their dead with flowers, with panther claws, with the bones of animals they’d killed, with the bones of family members who had died at the same time or earlier. they buried their dead with their arms folded across their chests
they fell in love
they took care of their old and their sick and their disabled, even when it cost them
they made new things, and worried about what the new things meant for people everywhere, as a whole
Oh I like him he looks like he would appreciate my jokes
This dude would have great stories at a get-together and would bring some really great homemade dip.
I feel like he really digs Lo-Fi Music
This guy was sculpted by Alfons and Adrie Kennis, and their Neanderthal reconstructions are all delightful.
I love the kid in the last picture a lot- they look like a kid, just a little kid who’s done some mischief and is trying not to laugh about it.
I also adore their Lucy- they’ve struck a wonderful balance between the falling angel and the rising ape.
And their Turkana boy- there’s something precious and wistful in those eyes.
But my favorite has got to be their reconstruction of H. floresiensis.
Just look at her. That’s a face of someone who’s lived and seen a lot, but also a face that’s known love and joy and laughter. That’s a face with a soul.
If nearly a decade interviewing the wealth managers for the 1% taught me anything, it is that the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor have a lot more in common than stereotypes might lead you to believe.
In conversation, wealth managers kept coming back to the flamboyant vices of their clients. It was quite unexpected, in the course of discussing tax avoidance, to hear professional service providers say things like:
“I’ve told my colleagues: ‘If I ever become like some of our clients, shoot me.’ Because they are really immoral people – too much time on their hands, and all the money means they have no limits. I was actually told by one client not to bring my wife on a trip to Monaco unless I wanted to see her get hit on by 10 guys. The local sport, he said, was picking up other men’s wives.”
The clients of this Geneva-based wealth manager also “believe that they are descended from the pharaohs, and that they were destined to inherit the earth”.
If a poor person voiced such beliefs, he or she might well be institutionalized; for those who work with the wealthy, however, such “eccentricities” are all in a day’s work. Indeed, an underappreciated irony of accelerating economic inequality has been the way it has exposed behaviors among the ultra-rich that mirror the supposed “pathologies” of the ultra-poor.
In fact, one of the London-based wealth managers I interviewed said that a willingness to accept with equanimity behavior that would be considered outrageous in others was an informal job requirement. Clients, he said, specifically chose wealth managers not just on technical competence, but on their ability to remain unscandalized by the private lives of the ultra-rich: “They [the clients] have to pick someone they want to know everything about them: about Mother’s lesbian affairs, Brother’s drug addiction, the spurned lovers bursting into the room.” Many of these clients are not employed and live off family largesse, but no one calls them lazy.
As Lane and Harburg put it in the libretto of the musical Finian’s Rainbow:
When a rich man doesn’t want to work
He’s a bon vivant, yes, he’s a bon vivant
But when a poor man doesn’t want to work
He’s a loafer, he’s a lounger
He’s a lazy good for nothing, he’s a jerk
When the wealthy are revealed to be drug addicts, philanderers, or work-shy, the response is – at most – a frisson of tabloid-level curiosity, followed by a collective shrug.
Behaviors indulged in the rich are not just condemned in the poor, but used as a justification to punish them, denying them access to resources that keep them alive, such as healthcare and food assistance. Discussion of poverty has become almost impossible without moral outrage directed at lazy “welfare queens”, “crackheads” and other drug addicts, and the “promiscuous poor” (a phrase that has cropped up again and again in discussions of public benefits over more than a century).
These disparate perceptions aren’t just evidence of hypocrisy; they are literally a matter of life and death. In the US, the widespread belief that the poor are simply lazy has led many states to impose work requirements on aid recipients –even those who have been medically classified as disabled. Limiting aid programs in this way has been shown to shorten recipients’ lives: rather than the intended consequence of pushing recipients into paid employment, the restrictions have simply left them without access to medical care or a sufficient food supply. Thus, in one of the richest counties in America, a boy living in poverty died of a toothache; there were no protests, and nothing changed.
Meanwhile, the “billionaire” in the White House starts his days at 11am – the rest of the morning is coyly termed “executive time” – and is known for his frequent holidays. “Nice work if you can get it,” quipped an opinion piece in the Washington Post.
We don’t hear much about laziness, drug addiction or promiscuity among the wealthiest members of society because – unlike Trump – most billionaires are not public figures and go to great lengths to seek privacy. Thus the motto of one London-based wealth management firm: “I want to be invisible.” This company, like many other service providers to the ultra-rich, specializes in preserving secrecy for clients. The wealthy people I studied not only had wealth managers but often dedicated staff members who killed negative stories about them in the media and kept their names off the Forbes “rich list”.
Many even present themselves as homeless – for tax purposes – despite owning multiple residences. For the ultra-rich, having no fixed residence provides major legal and financial advantages; this is exemplified by the case of the wealthy businessman who acquired eight different nationalities in order to avoid taxes on his fortune, and by the UK native I interviewed in his Dubai apartment building:
“I am not tax resident anywhere. The tax man says ‘show me a utility bill’, and the only utility bill I can present is for the house I own in Thailand, and it’s in a language that the European authorities aren’t familiar with. With all the mobility going on in the world, international marriages, governments can’t keep up with people.”
Meanwhile, the poor can end up being “resident nowhere” because no one will allow them to stay in one place for very long; as the sociologist Cristobal Young has shown, the majority of migrants are poor people. In addition, the poor are routinely evicted from housing on the slightest pretext, frequently driving them into homeless shelters – which are in turn forced to move when local homeowners engage in nimby (not in my back yard) protests. Even the design of public spaces is increasingly organized to deny the poor a place to alight, however temporarily.
It is as if the right to move around, to take up space, and to direct your own life as you see fit have become luxury goods, available to those who can pay instead of being human rights. For the rich, deviance from social norms is nearly consequence-free, to the point where outright criminality is tolerated: witness the collective shrug that greeted revelations of massive intergenerational tax fraud in the Trump family.
For the poor, however, even the most minor deviance from others’ expectations – like buying ice cream or soft drinks with food stamps – results in stigmatization, limits on their autonomy, and deprivation of basic human needs. This makes life far more nasty, brutish and short for those on the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder, creating a chasm of more than 20 years in life expectancy between rich and poor. This appears to some as a fully justified consequence of “personal responsibility” – the poor deserve to die because of their moral failings.
So while the behavior of the ultra-rich gets an ever-widening scope of social leeway, the lives of the poor are foreshortened in every sense. Once upon a time, they were urged to eat cake; now the cake earns them a public scolding.
This has happened to me before when I was in college at a frat party. This girl comes squeezing herself in between me and my friend and throws her arms around me. “Amanda, I am so glad you decided to come!” I was so confused and just figured she was drunk and mistaked me for someone else, until I saw the panic on her face. She leaned close and whispered that a guy was following her, was certain that he had put something in her drink and if I would please play along. I looked behind her and sure enough, some creep was watching her like a hawk. We invited her to hang out with us the rest of the night and even waited until her ride showed up just to make sure she was safe. Always look out for each other!
If you ever feel scared like this just come up to me like we have been friends since kindergarten, call me any name u can come up with ill play along.
🗣
👌🏾
Stay together, stay safe
Perfect advice. I’m reblogging this as a guy, because first of all, if you”re a guy : DON’T DO THAT. Don’t be that creep.
And if you’re a guy and you notice some creep is following or stalking a girl, and that she’s obviously uncomfortable or panicked, go ahead and say hi, long time no see, pretend to be her cousin, and tell her discretly you noticed there was a shady guy. Ask her if something’s wrong, if she feels unsafe, if she wants your help (very important – she may not trust you enough, no one could blame her, don’t take it personally). (and don’t you dare take advantage of the help you offered for a flirt opportunity, that would make you no better than the creep)
We can all stop “witnessing and do nothing”, and set an example.
Alternative option for a guy: if you feel safe doing so, go up to the creeper who’s following her and be like “hey WHAT’S UP bud do you like SPORTS? My favourite team is the redsox what’s YOURS my man? What you DRINKING dude that looks GOOD.” and be friendly and just loud enough to blow his cover. Draw attention to him and see what he does. He won’t feel as safe creeping if he knows people are looking at him, and maybe he’ll leave. It also means the woman won’t have to worry that you are *another* creeper she has to be wary of, and you may distract the bad dude enough to give her a chance to lose him.
Reblogging for that last comment.
TBH we would much rather you go up to the dude… Like please.
For my fellow anxious dudes: you don’t even need to talk to the other guy. You can legit just position yourself facing the creeper and your back to the creeped upon, and be a human wall. I’ve done this on the subway against a drunk attempted groper, and all I had to do was pretend he had awful aim in attempting to shake my hand.
Relaunching this again for a future ‘not-post’, but something better! Thank you to everyone who continued to send in suggestions. Submit here.
As an addition to the goth/post-punk/alt band masterpost, here’s a list of bands featuring members of color. Most are influential, others new discoveries or future freak gods. Thanks to research and helpful readers, here’s a bit of sick sound suitable for all taste buds:
Goth, dark or industrial:
Creature Feature– Erik X is an evil composer and organ player with a special gift for raising the dead.
Plastique Noir-the Brazilian band that made the song “Empty Streets” that’s just too dark to handle.
O. Children – contrary to popular belief, Tobi O’Kandi is not, in fact, a black reincarnation of Ian Curtis.
Thrill Kill Kult – sick industrial band with several poc members.
Dev Hynes – a British musician who started out in a punk band Test Icicles then went solo as a folk/indie musician as Lightspeed Champion and now is doing an electronic/R&B thing as Blood Orange.
L’Arc-en-Ciel – Okay, so these guys are Japan’s other most famous export. These guys got known outside of japan for doing some major anime theme songs (Fullmetal Alchemist, Gundam 00, NANA live action movie, etc) and were the first Japanese act to headline Madison Square Garden (Japanese rock bands really like New York for some reason). Their bassist tetsuya (formally known as tetsu) gets bonus points for being one of Japan’s only out LGBT celebrities (he’s Bi).
Gogol Bordello – self described as “gypsy punk”. Singer Eugene Hütz is Russian-Ukranian with Romani heritage and born with a ‘stache. Nearly crazier than Little Big and Korpiklaani combined.
Blasphemy – Black metal, the biggest irony on earth as Caller of the Storms remains one of the rare black musicians within the genre.
Babymetal – this Japanese trio is more metal than a viking woman on her period in the middle of a battlefield drinking the blood of her enemies to the sound of Immortal…for some at least.
Wicked Wisdom – Will Smith’s wife get a band?? Yes she Will.
Unlocking the Truth – these 13 year olds played in the streets of NYC before they opened for Living Colour.
Ego Fall – a Chinese folk metal band and also Corbac’s fave. Mixing tradition with heavier sounds.
Static X – Japanese guitarist Koichi Fukuda & Mexican-American bassist Tony Campos.
Sepultura – the founding members are all Brazilian, currently their lead singer (Derrick Green) is black. “Arise” is a massive album of pure metal awesomeness.
Tenger Cavalry – a folk metal band based out of Bejing who describe their style as “Mongolian folk metal”. Like this and you’d probably enjoy Ego Fall.
Cthonic – Taiwanese metal band who’s lead singer is also the president for the Taiwanese branch of Amnesty International.Most of their music deals with their goal of an independent Taiwan and they’re really REALLY great.
Invasion – a stoner/psych-metal band fronted by a valkyrie space wizard out of London.
Vodun – like invasion, marries punk, psychedelic, and doom metal influenced instrumentals with soul influenced vocals to create a unique and original takes on doom metal.
Body Count– Ice T’s metal band rules. It would be a little tastier with ice cubes though.
Hirax – pioneering thrash/speed metal band (with hardcore influences). Katon De Pena is one of the most distinctive vocalists of the then-burgeoning California metal scene. Though they never achieved the success of some of their contemporaries like Metallica or Slayer, they have long been an insiders’ favorite and cited as an influence by bands ranging from Napalm Death to Cannibal Corpse to Darkthrone.
X Japan – Probably Japan’s most famous metal export. These guys are the reason Visual Kei (basically Japan’s gothic metal scene) exists. All those flashy JRock bands wouldn’t exist without X Japan. They also recently just played a huge show at Madison Square Garden.
Maximum the Hormone – Also known as “the guys that did that weird opening and ending to death note”, MTH do a fantastic combination of metal, punk, and even pop. The best part about MTH is that their lyrics don’t make sense even when translated so you can just have mindless fun listening to them even if you understand Japanese.
Suffocation – one of the most influential death metal acts of all time. Terrance Hobbs’ incredible mastery of the guitar allowed the band to blend complex technicality into the genre without sacrificing raw brutality.
Acrassicauda – Iraqi heavy metal. There is a film called “Heavy Metal in Baghdad”, about the band. Another documentary called Global Metal, which is by the same director as Heavy Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, is highly recommended.
Sigh – one of the first japanese black mack metal bands led by a fierce lady.
BIS (Brand-New Idol Society) – considered “alternative Japanese idols”, and have done some amazing things including recruiting a new member who was rumored to be a high school girl and turned out to be Junko Koshino, a famous fashion designer who is 74 yrs old. Their song + video for MURA-MURA is excellent.
Go Betty Go – chicano rock, “pop punk”. Several of their songs are in Spanish.
ELLEGARDEN – JAPAN’S BEST 90s/EARLY 2000s POP PUNK ROCK EXPORT I’M NOT EVEN KIDDING. Part of what contributes to this is Takeshi Hosomi (singer/rhythm guitarist) writing ¾ of the band’s discography in perfect english. Unfortunately they went on hiatus in 2006, but that spawned two more fantastic bands: Takeshi does experimental progressive indie in the HIATUS (its the same guy I swear), and guitarist Shinichi Ubukata formedNothing’s Carved In Stone which is basically a Japanese alt. rock supergroup.
Shonen Knife – you can’t talk about japanese girl rock without the literal originators of the movement/popularity. Because Kurt Cobain said he listened them, a HUGE surge of all girl bands started popping up over Japan.
The links are all fucky, but the attempt was made to use Last.fm, which is one of the most comprehensive and useful music sites out there and it’s ABSOLUTELY worth plugging these names into the search bar.
Seen in the window at Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick, Maine.
Photo: Bill Roorbach
Except America wasn’t an endless expanse of forest with no certain borders. At least not while human beings inhabited it. The idea that native peoples did not cultivate or shape our land and that we had no borders is white propaganda meant to dehumanize and de-legitimize native peoples.
This illustration here show Apalachee people using slash and burn methods for agriculture. Fires were set regularly to intention burn down forests and plains. Why would we do this? Well because an unregulated forest isn’t that great for people, actually. We set fires to destroy new forest growth and undergrowth, and to remove trees, allowing for easier game hunting, nutrient enriched soil, and better growth rates for crops and herbs we used in food and medicine.
Pre-Colonial New England, where my tribe the Abenaki are from, looked more like an extensive meadow or savannah with trees growing in pockets and groves. Enough woodland to support birds, deer, and moose, but not too much to make hunting difficult. We carefully shaped the land around us to suit our needs as a thriving and successful people. Slash and burn agriculture was practiced virtually everywhere in the new world, from the pacific coast to chesapeake bay, from panama to quebec. It was a highly successful way of revitalizing the land and promoting crop growth, as well as preventing massive forest fires that thrive in unregulated forests. Berries were the major source of fruit for my tribe, and we needed to burn the undergrowth so they could grow.
That changed when white people invaded, and brought with them disease. In my tribe, up to 9 in 10 people died. 90% of our people perished not from violence starvation, but from disease. Entire villages would be decimated, struck down by small pox. Suddenly, we couldn’t care for the land anymore. There weren’t enough of us to maintain a vast, carefully structured ecological system like we had for thousands of years. We didn’t have the numbers, or strength. So the trees grew back and unregulated. We couldn’t set fires anymore, and we couldn’t cultivate the land. And white people would make certain we never could again. Timber, after all, was the most important export from New England.
Endless trees and untamed wilderness is a nice fantasy. But it’s a very white fantasy, one that erases the history of my people and of my land. One that paints native peoples are merely parasites leeching off the land, not masters of the earth who new the right balance of hunting and agriculture. It robs us of our agency as people, and takes our accomplishments from us. Moreover, it implies that only white people ever discovered the power to shape the world around them, and that mere brown people can’t possibly have had anything to do with changing our environment.
Don’t bring back untamed wilderness. Bring back my fire setters, my tree sappers, my farmers and my fishers. Bring back my people who were here first.
My face is having uncontrollable spasms. Great. It hurts really, really, really bad.
I think part of why I have trouble explaining pain to the doctor is when they ask about the pain scale I always think “Well, if someone threw me down a flight of stairs right now or punched me a few times, it would definitely hurt a lot more” so I end up saying a low number. I was reading an article that said that “10” is the most commonly reported number and that is baffling to me. When I woke up from surgery with an 8" incision in my body and I could hardly even speak, I was in the most horrific pain of my life but I said “6” because I thought “Well, if you hit me in the stomach, it would be worse.”
I searched and searched for the post this graphic was from, and the OP deactivated, but I kept the graphic, because my BFF does the same thing, uses her imagination to come up with the worst pain she can imagine and pegs her “10″ there, and so is like, well, I’m conscious, so this must be a 5, and then the doctors don’t take her seriously. (And she then does things like driving herself to the hospital while in the process of giving birth. Probably should have called an ambulance for that one!)
So I found this and sent it to her. Because this is what they want to know: how badly is this pain affecting you? Not on a scale of “nothing” to “how I’d imagine it’d feel if bears were eating my still-living guts while I was on fire”.
I hate reposting stuff, but I’ll never find that post again and OP is deactivated, so, here’s a repost. I can delete this later, i just wanted to get it to you and I can’t embed images in a chat or an ask.
This is possibly why it took several weeks to diagnose my fractured spine.
Pain Scale transcription:
10 – I am in bed and I can’t move due to my pain. I need someone to take me to the emergency room because of my pain.
9 – My pain is all that I can think about. I can barely move or talk because of my pain.
8 – My pain is so severe that it is difficult to think of anything else. Talking and listening are difficult.
7 – I am in pain all the time. It keeps me from doing most activities.
6 – I think about my pain all of the time. I give up many activities because of my pain.
5 – I think about my pain most of the time. I cannot do some of the activities I need to do each day because of the pain.
4 – I am constantly aware of my pain but can continue most activities.
3 – My pain bothers me but I can ignore it most of the time.
2 – I have a low level of pain. I am aware of my pain only when I pay attention to it.
1 – My pain is hardly noticeable.
0 – I have no pain.
It’s also really important to get this kind of scale to people who have chronic pain, because chronic pain drastically lowers your perception of how “bad” any kind of pain actually is, and yet something like this pain scale is extremely user friendly.
For example, if someone asked me how much pain I’m in at any given time, I’d say hardly any, and yet I’m apparently at a chronic 2.5, and it only goes up from there depending on the day.
I haven’t been below a 5 on this scale for 4 years
Here’s the fatigue scale
One: if you feel inhibited about describing your real pain level according to what the scale says due to fear of being perceived as whining and fussing, try benchmarking what you’re thinking of as a “10” right out loud. some years ago I had a bowel obstruction, which is a Dilaudid in the ER and emergency surgery thing; since then there have been one or two lesser bad times in the ER and I was like “well, if the time i had the bowel obstruction was a 10, then right now is a 6 or 7,” and it was like magic. they got all serious and kind and visibly recalibrated their hot takes.
Two: this is the first time I’ve ever come across the fatigue scale and ??? I spend ~95% of my non-work life at 4 to 7? 7 is most weeknights, 5 is at least half of most weekends, 4 is a good normal day. what. what. what even is this. if the pain scale drives pain med selection and dosing, what does this drive.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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