http://gopractice.biz/what-happens-when-we-dont-scale/ 

CrossFit posted this article on Facebook the other day, and I read it, and to some extent I agreed with it because doing things RX when you’re not in the shape for it is stupid—that much is common sense.

But then I read a comment by a fellow crossfitter (who I don’t know):

I think someone needs to go back to L1. If proper form is maintained, and speed is not completely trashed (going 2min longer than everyone else is not trashed), then this person was capable of doing RX weights.

I’ve scaled up many workouts, which took me longer than some other people and because of that, my RX times with weighted movements have improved greatly.

Sometimes you should think about the goals of your clients as much as you think everyone should be finishing at the same time. And if I ever heard someone talk to an athlete like that, I’d quit your gym and take as many people as possible with me.

—

After reading his comment, I realized exactly how wrong the article was in some regard. Yes, scaling appropriately is important, but knowing when to scale, how much to scale, and when you don’t need to scale at all is more important.

There should be a somewhat wide range of times people are allowed to finish in before the person isn’t allowed to do it RX. Elite athletes are fast, but that doesn’t mean everyone else should dumb down their weights to keep up with them. How dumb does that sound, right? I’d have to scale way too much in order to achieve a sub 3 Fran time, but I’ve done it RX before. My time is embarrassing, but it’s not that heavy of a weight and I haven’t done scaled pull ups in a workout in half a year, so why would I now? 

I did Nancy RX a couple days ago. I do more WODs in my day-to-day scaled than not, but I was positive I could handle the 65# OHS. I finished 2-3 minutes after nearly the whole class and 2:43 past our given time cap (20 min), but felt great and accomplished. Honestly, it was the running that slowed me down for the most part because my lung capacity is crap. But the weight? Perfect. Anything lighter wouldn’t have felt like as much workto me.

Even if the weight is heavy, manageable, light, or hell, no weight at all, I’m still not the fastest and probably never will be. But you know what? Unless I’m actually in a competition, being the fastest in a class matters not to me. What matters is getting the most out of my training and to constantly get stronger and better at everything so I blow my own damn mind. That’s why I continue to go. I definitely don’t continue to do CrossFit to finish first in a class so I have ten minutes of pride.

On the contrary to this subject, I know plenty of people who tend to scale on the light side than bother pushing themselves to their true max potential just so they don’t finish last. Maybe these people don’t like to work hard, don’t like pain or gains, like to cheat themselves by winning the easy way, or they have a fear of injuring themselves. Whatever the case, scaling too easy all the time is definitely not how you get better and if you’re not doing CrossFit to get better at overall fitness (which will inevitably improve your overall health, too), what are you there for?

It’s a fine line. You and only you have to know your strengths to determine the right (not too heavy and not too light) weight to use in a workout to get a proper outcome from it. It takes time to know this, and probably some trial and error.

A good coach (probably not the guy in the original article, who treated the athlete like crap for challenging himself and very narrowly missed the time cap) should advise a class to “do this weight RX IF your 1RM is ____” and simultaneously should give a percentage of your 1RM to use for the lifting in a workout. It takes the guessing out of everything (and makes keeping your maxes somewhat relevant crucial). It doesn’t always work and sometimes you have to estimate a bit, but you get the idea.

(FYI. Not a coach, just learning things about myself and my fitness and CrossFit as I go).

queen-breha-organa:

I’ll take whatever Matthew Stover was having when he wrote the Revenge of the Sith novelization-

“This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, forever: The first dawn of light in your universe brings pain. The light burns you. It will always burn you. Part of you will always lie upon black glass sand beside a lake of fire while flames chew upon your flesh.”

“This was not Sith against Jedi. This was not light against dark or good against evil; it had nothing to do with duty or philosophy, religion or morals. It was Anakin against Obi-Wan. Personally. Just the two of them and the damage they had done to each other.”

“But even in the deepest night, there are some who dream of dawn.”

“In the end, the shadow is all you have left. Because the shadow understands you, the shadow forgives you, the shadow gathers you unto itself—And within your furnace heart, you burn in your own flame.”

“This is Obi-Wan Kenobi: A phenomenal pilot who doesn’t like to fly. A devastating warrior who’d rather not fight. A negotiator without peer who frankly prefers to sit alone in a quiet cave and meditate.”

“Everything dies. In time, even stars burn out. This is why Jedi form no attachments: all things pass. To hold on to something—or someone—beyond its time is to set your selfish desires against the Force.”

“Obi-Wan looked down. It would be a mercy to kill him. He was not feeling merciful”

“This story happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It is already over. Nothing can be done to change it.”

zz9pzza:

samjohnssonvt:

doughtier:

ryuutchi:

lierdumoa:

There was a post I saw the other day. I can’t remember who’s blog I saw it on so I have no way of finding it. Basically the OP was complaining about ao3 not having a good blocking function, and someone else in the comments was laughing at the irony of being on tumblr and complaining about ao3’s filtration system.

Yes, tumblr’s filtration system is pretty shitty when it comes to curating *types of content* — AO3′s content filtering is obviously vastly superior.

But I’m pretty sure the OP was talking about blocking *people,* not content.

Tumblr is *excellent* when it comes to blocking people.

When I block someone on tumblr, they cease to exist for me. If I accidentally click on a mystery hyperlink to the blog of someone I blocked, I get a big warning asking if I’m sure I want to go there. If I click on a blog of someone who’s blocked me, the blog appears empty.

.

I’ve posted at length about this before, but as a POC in fandom, my biggest concern isn’t avoiding any particular genre or kink or pairing. My biggest concern is avoiding stories written by racist authors, who in most cases do not have any self-awareness of their racism, and therefore do not tag any of the racist tropes their stories are riddled with.

Author’s who, for example, write MCU fic in which Tony Stark becomes Wakanda’s white savior, or write “Alternate Universe - Human” fic where all the white characters are interns at a law firm, and all the POC characters are janitorial staff.

God, I’ll never forget this AU fic I read in Stargate: Atlantis fandom where the author made the white protagonists dog walkers and made the non-white protagonists … you guessed it … the dogs that they were walking.

That’s the kind of bullshit I want to avoid, and most effective way of filtering fic like that it is filtering the specific usernames of the authors who write it.

There are ways to do that. In fact my blog has an #AO3 hacks tag which lists 3 options. 

Unfortunately implementing these require a considerably higher degree of tech savvy than the average AO3 user is comfortable with. Especially if you want to implement the same filtering across multiple browsers on multiple devices.

.

And while I don’t post a whole lot of fic to AO3 and this has never been an issue for me personally, I know that authors don’t have a lot of options when it comes dealing with harassment via fic comments. I think you can turn off commenting on a story, or moderate commenting, but as far as I know, there’s no way to ban specific people from leaving comments.

Each story published to AO3 is equipped with its own comment forum. AO3′s the only site I can think of that has comment forums yet doesn’t allow the moderator of the forum to ban specific users from commenting in it.

.

I know much of what I’m saying here is stuff I’ve said before.

Anyway. 

I guess my point is that, AO3 is not a social media platform, but it is a media platform. And I think people assume, incorrectly, that because it has less “social” function than a social media platform, that there’s not enough user interaction to justify a block function.

But it’s actually a pretty major concern, especially if you’re a Person of Color in fandom. 

They are, apparently, planning to put blocking in place soon, even if it only took them… a decade.

There’s an interesting discussion going on in the notes between @ryuutchi​ and @elinimate​:

elinimate:
it didn’t take them a decade. This is not an issue that’s been brought up as a major priority until pretty recently. Plus programming a block isn’t as easy as it sounds. A pure block means a blocked author doesn’t show up in any fandom or tag you browse fics for as long as you’re logged in. And everything else needs to keep working as designed. 

ryuutchi:
Blocking has been requested pretty much since the site’s inception. Maybe it’s closer to eight years, but I’ve been seeing “why can’t we block people” for nearly the whole of AO3’s existence

Before I say anything, a disclaimer: I volunteer with the OTW as a tag wrangler, but I am not speaking on the behalf of or for the organisation, ao3, its coders, or the tag wranglng committee.

That said:

Implementing a blocking feature takes a lot more work than even elinimate said; a user who blocks me would expect the following:

On their end:

• not see my works
• not see my comments on others’ works or on news posts
  
• not be assigned to me during challenge matchups and not getting me  assigned to them
• not see my bookmarks
• not seeing any of my prompts
• not seeing any of my collection
• not see any of the kudos I’ve left on any work
  

On my end:

• not allow me to comment on any of their works
• possibly not allow me to see any of their works
•  not be assigned to them during challenge matchups and not getting them assigned to me
• not allowing me to see theirbookmarks
• not seeing any of their prompts
• not allowing me to post a fill any of their prompts
  
• possibly not seeing any of their collections
• not let me see their kudos on any work
• not allow me to kudos their work
  

If that doesn’t sound horrifically complicated enough, there’s also the issue of anonymous works, private works, orphaned works, and pseuds. Are blocks pseud-dependent? User dependent? Are works orphaned by a person who blocked me still invisible to me? Full orphaning (= no name attached)? Orphaning with their username attached? Would we be able to see and interact with each other’s anonymous works? If no, then doesn’t it break anonymity, in a way? If yes, that could be harassment.

Add to that my concern as a tag wrangler: would I be able to see their tags in my bins so I can wrangle them? If a tag doesn’t make sense out of context, how can I check what it means by clicking on their work?

This isn’t an idle worry, by the way – I’m assuming that if I was blocked, it was likely because we were sharing a fandom space, possibly one of the fandoms I wrangle.

And that’s just me as a tag wrangler! What about a Support volunteer? A policy and Abuse volunteer? If the chairs of those committees are blocked by the user having trouble, and there’s a problem that requires their involvement – what happens then?

Basically, adding a block like what tumblr has requires touching the code of the entire infrastructure of ao3, on each and every level of the site. It takes a lot of planning and a lot of arguing and then a lot of coding. And after that? A fuckton of testing, because dependencies are a thing, and if you change one thing in how the works module works, you might end up breaking the tag wrangling module in fun and unexpected ways.

Nobody’s ever said that ao3 couldn’t use a blocking feature – on the contrary. Everybody in the otw I’ve talked to about it would love having it. The problem is that it’s a lot of work, done by volunteers in addition to their own full time jobs, schools, and families, and the plain fact is that keeping the site functioning as it does now is taking most of the volunteers’ focus. First, ao3 needs to work; then, it needs to do that core work well. Only after that can it work better.

To add to the list (using programming names):

• Are blocks retroactive? If Betty has been commenting on Alice’s works for the last ten years and gets blocked in 2022, what happens to the previous comments and kudos? Is the content hidden or destroyed?
• Conversely, what happens when Alice unblocks Betty? If the content was destroyed, it’s gone. If it’s only hidden, can we guarantee it won’t leak?
• Alice and Betty co-created a work in 2015. Alice blocks and mutes Betty in 2022. 
• Who’s listed on the work? 
• Where does the work appear? 
• Which creator can comment on the work?
  
• Ibid Series
• Ibid anything else that can have multiple creators.
• Orphan works are truly a sticky spot, because we don’t keepanyinfo on them. Even when you “leave your pseud on it,” that’s not yourpseud - it’s a pseud of the same string of characters made on the orphan account. It’s in no way connected to the original account. 
• How do we respect orphaning anonymity and blocking? (Probably can’t.)
• Alice blocks Betty’s works. Betty, for malice or incidence (name change due to co-worker nosiness, frex), transfers all her works to a new NotBetty account. 
• Is it possible to connect the accounts for the block but not out Betty’s new name? (Probably not - it’d have a different email, and IPs are not distinctive or identifying, and we don’t currently keep a creator chain on the works.)
• Challenges. If I drank, this would kill my liver. 
• For a soupçon of the simple questions: Alice is the owner of a challenge, Betty’s a mod, Betty has Cindy blocked, 
• can Cindy sign up for a gift exchange? 
• Prompt meme? 
• Generic collection? 
• If yes, does that break through Betty’s block? (Hope not.) 
• If no, it becomes obvious one of the mods has Cindy blocked. (And lo, the darkening of the sky on the horizon is the incoming wankstorm.) 
• Does it matter if the blocker is an owner or mod?
• Alice and Betty as mods are fine with Cindy, but Delilah as another participant is not, and has Cindy blocked: 
• Can Cindy sign up if Delilah’s already signed up?
• Can Delilah sign up if Cindy already has?
• Does Cindy get booted if Delilah signs up?
• Does Delilah get a warning that Cindy’s signed up?
• Does that warning trigger even when participants are still anon?
• (For once in the lifetime of challenges, matching is easy: it won’t.)
• Does it function differently in a small five-person exchange than it does in a large exchange like Yuletide or Kaleidoscope? (Side note: someone needs to resurrect Kaleidoscope once we have block-the-racist-assholes in place.) 
• How does blocking work in a completed exchange? 
• In an already-matched-but-not-fulfilled exchange? 
• Can a mod add a work of a person they blocked but not muted? 
• Can a mod add a bookmark of a person they blocked but not muted? 
  
• Alice blocks Betty. Alice creates a tag set. 
• Can Betty run a challenge using that tag set? 
• Can Cindy add Betty as a mod to a challenge using that tag set?
• If you can decipher the direct link, can you download works as the
• blockee? 
• Blocker?
• Fuck caching. Just. If you know, you know. Fuck caching.
• How against the ToS is evading a block? What about sharing that someone is blocked/muted?
• How “silent” is the block?
• Does it clearly let the person blocked know that someone applied the duck tape when they try to interact? (Wank.)
• Does it throw an “error”? (More work for Support.)
• Obligatory “when we get around to coding the (opt-in or I’m gone) PM system everyone seems to want for some wild reason” entry. Straightforward, but still.

Be advised that that is not comprehensive. That’s just off the top of my head.

I will note: Support has a staff account, and longer-term volunteers have dedicated admin accounts that will very likely be unblockable (read: I will fight people over this). None of the Support or PAC people do work on their fannish account, and many of them actually do their volunteer work under a different name than their fannish works.

It’s not that we don’t want blocking and muting. By all the gods, we do - most of us have a little of people who won’t be missed. But an actual working block/mute may possibly the most complicated thing we’ve coded on the Archive, and I troubleshoot challenge matching at least monthly.

Things I personally would find interesting:

Being able to have the block and mute list be exportable and importable.

Then you could have curated lists and we could all live in our bubles.

Even if you take nothing else from this post, please, for the love of all the fanworks on ao3, take this: implementing user blocking is hard.

If you want to hide certain users’ works from showing up in both tags and their own user profile, it’s easier to make a skin and add this bit of code there:

.blurb.user-user_ID_number_here {
  display: none !important;
}

You can find the user ID number in a user’s profile. This will hide works completely.

If you want to know that you’re blocking something and why, you can do it like this:

.blurb.user-user_ID_number_here :not(.summary) {
  display: none !important;
}

.blurb.user-user_ID_number_here .summary::after {
  content: "whatever reason you want to give";
}

You are not your worst season, dear one. You are more than the sorriest decision you ever made. You are more than the darkest sorrow you’ve endured. Your name is not Ruined. It is not Helpless. It is not Victim. It is not Irresponsible. History is replete with overcomers who stood up after impossible circumstances and walked in freedom. You are not an anemic victim destined to a life of regret. Not only are you capable, you have full permission to move forward in strength and health.

Of Mess and Moxie.

remember

i stay to myself like a mf.

Many booty pictures from the year