ppl use crab bucket metaphor to describe the lateral social violence of oppressed people, but tbh I think it's more like how sometimes when chickens are kept in such abysmal horrific close quarters conditions with no ability to make decisions or control any aspect of their lives, they just start violently attacking each other, to the point where some factory farms where this is a problem simply cut or trim parts of their beaks off so they can't do as much damage. because this is more cost effective than providing them with more space, species specific enrichment, appropriate lighting, etc, and the system we live under prioritizes cost effectiveness over the well-being of alive creatures.
it would be a mistake to think that this represents the natural behavior of chickens.
it would be a mistake to think that the social displacement harms we do to each other as marginalized people under a great deal of stress, under capitalism, represents the natural behavior of people.
human beings, however, possess the ability to learn to identify when we are engaging in this type of lateral social violence, and the ability to prioritize developing alternate coping mechanisms that cause less harm to the other people in our communities, and leave us with more energy to address the actual causes of our suffering.
it's always "did you really need to burn down your workplace to prove a point" and never "how was the revenge arson? did you have fun doing revenge arson? were the flames pretty?"
On the morning of April 7, 2026, a fire was started at the Kimberly-Clark Distribution Center in Ontario, California. It escalated to a six-alarm fire and took nearly twelve hours to extinguish. The facility was completely destroyed and declared a "total loss". There were no injuries or deaths. An employee who was working in the warehouse is accused of arson.
Authorities stated that the employee had shared videos of himself starting the fire on Facebook, saying "all you had to do was pay us enough to live" and "there goes your inventory" while lighting pallets of toilet paper ablaze.
ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS PAY US ENOUGH TO LIVE
No injuries. No deaths. This was a protest fire. This is why unions are important, to prevent frustrations like these, to ensure people are paid enough to live.
If you were friends with @rubynye also known as minoanmiss in other forums, I am collecting photos of her and if art or care packages she sent out as part of a memorial slide show. I sincerely hope this is not how you're finding out.
Please feel free to DM me if you have any photos for this purpose.
Hawaiʻi is currently in the midst of a natural disaster if you didnt know
Apparently there isn’t much news coverage of this outside of the islands
Towns are flooded, homes destroyed and collapsed, roads collapsed, lives at risk, gas leaks from the flood damage
Haleiwa and Waialua are currently evacuated because the 120 year old dam is at risk of bursting
Mind you that damn is owned by Dole. Theyve known about it needing to be fixed for years and years and years. Despite having more than enough money they refuse
The state has been trying to buy it out from them for years so they can fix it, but the sale hasn’t gone through
Keep in mind that the Dole family were the ones who illegally imprisoned Queen Liliuʻokalani and illegally overthrew the monarchy.
If I see another goddamn person say how sad this is for the tourists whose “trips were ruined” and compare a messed up vacation to people losing their homes, belongings, and livelihoods, I’m going to lose my mind
I am so lucky that my family or friend’s are safe and the few whose houses flooded didnt have it too bad, but so so so many were not as fortunate
If you haven’t heard anything about this until now, I suggest looking into it
The sirens didn’t go off until the flood had been going on for hours. Our state government is spending so much money on a fucking monorail we don’t need rather than fixing the infrastructure.
It’s been the locals and Kanaka doing the most to help get people to safety from the start
btw i want to say that the entire tumblr community banding together is what got these changes reversed so i hope u all realise the power of a reblog and start reblogging posts instead of just liking them this is the reblog website so hit that button right now
The Death of the Digital Ecosystem: Why Decoupling Notes Destroys Tumblr
@staff
For years, the total note count on a post served as a universal metric of a piece of content's impact. Whether a user liked the original post or a reblog fifteen branches deep, that engagement flowed back to the source. This ensured that the original artist, writer, or editor received the full credit for the viral success of their work.
Under this new system, engagement is trapped within the specific reblog a user happens to see on their dashboard. If a massive, high-traffic blog reblogs a piece of art from a small creator, every like and reblog that occurs through that larger account stays with them. The original creator is left with a stagnant note count on their own dashboard while their work generates thousands of interactions for someone else.
Erasure of Creator Visibility
Instead of seeing one post with 10,000 notes, a creator may now have to hunt through dozens of different reblog chains to find where the conversation is actually happening.
If the notes no longer flow back to the original post, the creator loses the ability to see who is enjoying their work, what the tags say, and how the community is responding.
On a platform where engagement often dictates visibility, splitting that engagement into tiny, unlinked fractions makes it significantly harder for original works to gain momentum compared to the high-reach blogs that reblog them.
Incentivizing the "Big Blog" Monopoly
This system rewards accounts that have already established a large following at the direct expense of the smaller accounts that actually produce the content. It transforms reblogging from a method of sharing into a method of acquisition.
When a reblog functions as its own independent post with its own note count, the incentive to click through to the original source disappears. The platform is transitioning from a collaborative ecosystem into a standard social media feed where the person who posts the content last—not the person who made it—reaps the rewards.
Impact on Collaborative Conversations
Tumblr’s unique culture is built on the reblog chain: a chronological, evolving conversation. By allowing users to like or reblog "any part" of the chain as an independent entity, the platform is breaking the narrative thread.
If engagement is siloed into specific branches, the incentive to add to a conversation is replaced by an incentive to simply own a piece of the engagement. This change doesn't encourage conversation. It encourages the commodification of individual posts within a chain, making it harder for the original voice to ever be heard over the noise of the rebloggers.
The Disincentive to Create
Perhaps the most damaging aspect of this update is the psychological toll on the creative community. When the platform actively diverts credit and engagement away from the source, it destroys the motivation to share original work at all.
For many, the reward for posting is seeing how far their work travels. If that travel is now invisible or attributed to others, the labor of creating becomes thankless.
This system makes creators want to share nothing. If the platform is built to harvest a creator's effort for the benefit of curator blogs, the logical response is to stop providing the raw material. I am one leaning into this category. Without us creators, the curator blogs have nothing to curate.
By making it harder to protect and track one's own work, the platform is effectively telling creators that their presence is secondary to the conversations happening around their work: conversations they may no longer even be able to find.
A few weeks ago, I visited my parents out in the suburbs---and, as any dutiful granddaughter would, I also trekked over to my grandparents' house to bow obeisance and exchange polite small talk.
(To be really clear, I don't actually object to this. Their world is small, hemmed in by my grandfather's profound memory loss and my grandmother's mobility issues, declining cognition---visiting with them costs me nothing and makes them happy. But....well. Getting old is not for the faint of heart.)
Anyway, while I was there, my grandmother pulled out an old photo album of hers. There are a handful of pictures from her and her siblings' childhood, others from the brief period when she was a single gal in the city (she interned for a branch of a federal agency, spent time in Washington DC); plus a handful from her marriage, and when she was a young school teacher. She can name every person in every photo, even the schoolkids! It's an amazing map of her memory.
But what stuck out to me---and sticks out to me now, as I look through/edit my sister's wedding photos---is that the less-than-perfect feels realer, truer, and more emotive than the perfectly staged shots. I have lovely shots of my sister and brother-in-law, perfectly posed; but what I love is the slightly blurred, too-flushed photo of them about to kiss. I like the photos of my grandmother poised and well-dressed at someone's wedding---but I love the photo of her with her girlfriends, perched on a wooden fence beside a cliffside and them laughing, squirming, faintly fuzzed around the edges.
"Grandma," I said to this 80+ year old woman who only mostly remembers who I am, "you're so cute!"
"Oh, well..." she tried to demur, though I could tell she was pleased.
My mother likes posed phone camera pictures---everybody smile, hold it! type shots. What I love are the photos where the subject has not figured out that you're about to immortalize them. They're just laughing, or teasing; their mouth is open, things are flushed, there are folds. To look at images of human beings being human is worship, in my opinion. It doesn't make a difference whether that image is a bunch of 20-something women in 1950s Washington DC or a 20-something Midwestern couple in the 2020s. Either way, the humanity is unchanged.
OKAY SO. FINALLY. I HAVE PROPERLY (ish) MET THE WEIRD SPINNING WHEEL
*AND CRACKED SOME OF ITS SECRETS*
(loooong post ahead, click to unfold at your own risk)
INTRO
Welcome to Daelf's most involved rambling about old tools so far :D
So, in august, friends who are rarely around were coming to Paris, so we planned a guided group visit of the Arts & Métiers museum (meaning "crafts & professions"— it's all about technology, from the transformation of materials to communication and data, to the purification and precise measurement of scientific elements, to going to space, and also they have a Foucault pendulum and fun vehicles.)
Great! We'd never been there!
I loved it from the start, but *then* we got to the first ~textile~ room and OH. MY. GOD. so many semi-automated looms, and strange shuttles, and… ONE spinning wheel? huh.
I get closer to it, and it looks… Weird.
I am instantly obsessed, but the guide is moving on, so i can't do much about it… YET.
Fast forward a couple weeks. Our son Perco is coming back from summer camp, I have to go pick him up from the train station and then we have to wait for a few hours until Fifo arrives with the car so we can all get home with the *enormous* suitcase and assorted Stuff.
… Hey, why not put all that in the lockers at the station, and go to that museum you didn't see because you were away at the time, and yeah, don't worry about the thing i want to see more closely, it's fiiiine :]
… i spent like twenty minutes *just* in that room, taking as many pictures as i could, before Perco literally dragged me away because we were running out of time -_-°
IT WAS NOT ENOUGH. OBSESSION HAD ONLY INTENSIFIED.
I mean, look at that. what the *heck* is going on.
So, a few days later, having found nothing in the online data about the museum collection, I phoned them to ask about it, ended up exchanging a few mails with the lady curating the Materials section… but her specialty is glass working, not yarn related at all, so she offered to invite me to see the thing *out of its casing* on a day the museum is closed to visitors, and HECK YES PLEASE OMG
It was planned for december 1st, and (sparing you the logistic details) early in the afternoon, I was there with my mom, who had helped me get there with my own spinning wheel.
THE WEIRD WHEEL
sadly, we were not able to take the wheel completly outside, because (as you can see in the first pic above) it's linked to a distaff by a length of combed wool, and the distaff is fastened to the wall, so we were not going to touch that.
BUT. no glass.
So.
What is "wrong" with this wheel?
"well it has only one pedal…"
yes ma'am, but that's. normal, actually ^^° Modern wheels have two because it's more comfy, that's all.
no. it has a tiny bobin that's impossible to take off from the flyer, and in direct contact to the wheel itself, which means no tention adjustment. why.
but also, a very ingenious system, moving the yarn as it is spun so that the bobin is evenly and automatically filled!
in addition to that, there's a yarn swift to the side, with a complicated string-and-pulley mechanism… and between that and the wheel, a missing part, broken.
(the vice in the background also seems to do nothing, so there might be a missing part there too.)
so…
… what to make of all this?
especially in contrast with the demonstration I did with my own wheel, and all the talking of being able (well, having the *potential ability*…) to make pretty much any yarn I could want with it, it's clear this one was the opposite:
make One Specific Yarn, but easily and fast, with All The Steps on One Tool.
Not sure how the string and pulley bits worked, but they were a way to use the wheel to spin it instead of the flyer without having to do more than tightening a thing specifically for it.
I suggested that the missing part(s) helped with getting the yarn on the swift, and the swift was there because the rigid nature of the 'fill bobin easily with very regular yarn' meant you couldn't fill it much before tension needed adjusting, and everything else meant that you *couldn't adjust tension* because the whole point of this model was predictavility and regularity.
And that's all very cool, but a bit frustrating that the lil blurb under the wheel didn't specify anything but "spinning wheel with yarn swift", dating it even more vaguely to "sometime before 1840". And that was it.
And I realized I'd forgotten to ask the lady to give me the restoration notes she had pulled from the archives, but she had also mentionned something else we (I) could look up…
THE PATENT
At first I was like. Wait. What?
But OF COURSE there would be a patent for something weird like this made in the early 19th century! The industrial revolution!!
All I'd needed was the suggestion that such a patent existed, and the information that a public archive website listed All Of Them.
So I looked. And came up with nothing about spinning wheels: all the machines were after, like, 1855.
But then I realized there was *another* archive, for older patents, from before they were all numbered!
… And I found it.
I FOUND IT.
I haven't had the spoons to read *everything* yet (because, o boi, the cursive, and the *spelling*… it might as well be not-french to me)(yes, if you didn't get it yet, i'm french so the langue itself is not a problem, but. WELP)
A few notes though!
I didn't need to read everything to know it's the right one because
a/ it has schematics of the flyer (*only* the flyer though :/ ) and the description of the parts describes the motion of the yarn guide doing its work, so even though some parts are not clearly visible or a little different, clearly, this essential part of the machine is THE thing they wanted to file a patent on, and it's the same mechanism I found on the wheel at the musem
b/ at the very start, the authors of the thing explain why they did this, and as I deducted, it's mostly Time. But also saving up fibers and bits of yarn? I get how having one person do everything could save time (they apparently even did Tests, and mention Numbers on how much time was saved) but i don't know enough about the procedures of the time to get how fiber was saved. ah well. It definitely was important, though, because they specifically mention silk in the list of fibers it can be used for!
c/ I had NO idea how incredible it would feel to see a mystery object, have questions about it, get to answer them by looking at it up close (at least closer than a regular visitor of the museum can), discuss it with a professionnal who knew nothing about this specific tool but still A Lot about the textile industry at the time, formulate hypothesis about the Why of the Weird, and then *have them confirmed* by *finding the patent its inventors filed about it because they were super proud of themselves* (quite right, too!)
It was great.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I'll try and go read the rest of the patent to see if there are more interesting details, but it might take a while…
Si quelqu'un y arrive avant moi, n'hésitez pas à détourner ce post :3
"Well the queen of George street just went walking on by
Walking on by with some guy who don't care
That she stood in line
Since half past nine
And spent three hours on her hair!" -- Great Big Sea, Old Black Rum
How did her majesty make this work?
Get up at 5 am and do hair for 3 hrs before getting in line interminably.
Up at 8:45, roll out of bed and do hair for three hours in line.
It’s not just that the leaves will break down on their own (and enrich the soil while they’re at it!). During the winter, all sorts of insects use leaf litter for shelter, and they’re the first food available to larvae in early spring. Leaves also insulate the plants under them during the winter, which is important if you’re in an area prone to frost heaving.
One of the best thing you can do for native pollinators in your area is Leave the Leaves!
My mom stopped raking her leaves when she found out about this but her neighbor used his leaf blower to clear out her yard the first year she decided to try. So she started posting a Leave the Leaves sign in the yard each year with an explanation about why it’s good and two winters later only one house still rakes their lawn each year.
We’ve seen a dramatic increase in the biodiversity in the neighborhood since. We have birds that we haven’t seen since we moved into the city from living rurally and those birds are starting to nest in the trees and gardens in spring. The swallows and bats are back at night. The single woodpecker we would only occasionally see visits daily and even has a friend that has joined it. We have more squirrels and rabbits and shockingly fewer moles and voles. We heard an owl outside last fall.
Anyone in the greater Denver metro area want to come play TTRPGs with me and my friends?
We're having trouble with people's schedules conflicting or changing, resulting in last-minute cancellations, so we're looking for more gaming friends who have more compatible schedules.
Requirements:
Able to RELIABLY attend a Saturday or Sunday game in Westminster/Broomfield
Okay with cat and dogs that really, really want you to pet them
Over 18 (might be possible for a teen to attend with a guardian but we'll have to hash out the details)
Able to play with LGBT+/Neurodiverse/Nonwhite group members. You know, normal about other humans.
No smokers (I'm allergic to even trace amounts)
IN RETURN WE OFFER:
Regular gaming group
Home-cooked meal at every session (can accommodate many food restrictions)
Cat and dogs that really, really want you to pet them
My husband is used to being the DM but if there is a premise or system you want to try out we're game.
Can accommodate many mobility or sensory issues
Send me an ask and we will hash out details and determine if we'll be a good fit for each other.
have y’all ever had communion bread that was just so….nasty? like i know we have to suffer as christians, but do we really need to have whole wheat bread as the body of christ?
Some old housemates of mine were Syrian Orthodox. At their church different members of the church took turns baking the bread that would be consecrated for the Eucharist. This was all well and good until one woman baked raisin bread. This led to the memorable occasion of a rather flustered priest, who had not seen the bread until that moment, declaring, “This - except for the raisins - is the Body of Christ.”
A friend who grew up UU told the story of their infrequent communion, which was done with grape juice and Wonder Bread. Along with the usual explanations of what they stood for.
Cue my friend standing awestruck before the massive supermarket display of Wonder Bread, shortly after his first communion, turning to his mother and blurting earnestly, "Mommy? How BIG was Jesus?"
The world has gotten so insane that political satire doesn’t even exist anymore. RIP Phil Ochs, you would absolutely HATE modern day America. (but you would appreciate the theatricality of it.)
I'm starting to go the opposite direction of all the "you're a literal baby infant until 25 bc your bwain is a baby bwain :(" shit
We should be treating teens as more adult than we do. I don't mean some lowering the age of consent creep shit, I mean presuming competence. Get a job, learn life skills, learn to cook, be fully responsible for a pet, walk places alone (in daylight) or with a friend, have intergenerational friendships, teach skills to littler kids, be someone people can trust with more than wiping their own ass. Be someone they themselves can trust to do stuff and go places. We're stealing children's confidence by treating them like they can't do anything. Treat them like they can and should do many adult things and more will find the confidence to practice at them.
Yes, the brain isn't finished growing when you're like 15. No, you shouldn't get treated like a preschooler till it is. The general experience of adulthood is like 90% practice 10% maturity I think. The maturity is needed but it doesn't account for much if you just do nothing.
YES. And with support! Teach your teens to make their own doctors appointments by sitting by them in case something comes up they don't know the answer to. Show your elementary schoolers how to cook a meal. Teach them how to read a map and guide you where they want to go. Kids are capable.
But also, "the brain is still developing until you're 25, when it finishes" is nonsense anyway. The oft-brought up "fact" (it's a myth) might have come from studies that just stopped testing people at 25, but no one ever cites a specific source so we can't be sure, and there are NO studies that actually say brain development stops at 25. Or that it stops at all.
You yeah we definitely shouldn't be waiting until an arbitrary age chosen by internet rumour to start treating people as though they're capable of responsibility and decision making.
please actually reblog this post this time, as this one will gut national parks for more fucking paper. we have 14 days to stop it, giving us literally no time to do so.
they are literally betting on us to not do anything about it, because they're that desperate on keeping control, and ruining lives for everyone, but themselves.
The proposed rule would rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule (2001 Roadless Rule) (66 FR 3244, 36 CFR Subpart B (2001)), which prohibits road construction, road reconstruction, and timber harvesting in inventoried roadless areas, with limited exceptions.
