The Shifting Sands of Wonderland

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.

Context for other users:

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.

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

I don’t really know how to end this

I just need to know people are aware

@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.

(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.

*AND CRACKED SOME OF ITS SECRETS*

(loooong post ahead, click to unfold at your own risk)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Took me five minutes.