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C.A. Cooper's Writing

@cacooper427

I'm just going to write stuff sometimes. Mostly a place for me to reblog scifi/fantasy stuff so that I can keep track of it.

the freedom of stupidity

Having grown up as a Gifted Child ™, there was the constant pressure to be smart all the damn time. I still have a very vivid memory of my mom flipping out in panic and anxiety upon seeing that I’d gotten mixed up in my ABC’s Of the Ocean project whether the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean was bigger. It was a huge crisis… and this was just the fourth grade. 

Now that I’m three times older, I’ve finally started playing D&D, having finally found a group of friends I’m comfortable to play with. I made my character for a pun, which involved her needing to be a full Orc, and y’know what? She’s dumb as rocks. She’s a charismatic bard of an idiot, and I love her. I love playing her, in part, because she’s stupid.  She’s also a lesbian, because I always gotta gay, but as I have no idea how to flirt with women (and my dice apparently don’t either), she keeps striking out due to the stupid. She has the best damn awful ideas, and the look on my DM’s face is always priceless when she hears what the everloving fuck my bard is going to do. 

“I fling myself out of the cart.“  “You what?“ “He’s coming at me with a sword, I’m tied up, I launch myself over the edge of the cart with my feet.“ “Okay, roll Athletics… You’re now upside-down hanging out of the cart. I think we’re gonna count that as prone.“

“All right, crew, it looks like we’re facing a werewolf,“ says our wizard.  “Does anyone have glue?“ my bard immediately asks, being in possession of a mace and seven silver coins. 

“The werewolf turns and runs.“ “I throw the glitter [that I bought with the glue] at it.“ “Uh, why?“ “To make a sparkly trail we can use to track it.“

Some of these awful ideas have actually worked, which I guess makes them good ideas, but at no point am I ever afraid of offering a stupid plan. She’s supposed to be stupid, she has a -1 Intelligence modifier and is interested in only music, birds, and women who could beat her in arm wrestling. She’s allowed to mess up. Moreover, because she’s used to it, she even knows how to move on from it. 

So yeah. I’m having a blast. 

im gonna get a huge wolf-like husky and give it a name like James or David or Sandra or something. Something really human sounding. And convince everyone who comes to my house that theyre just my friend who was cursed with lycanthropy.

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maidofsalt

I’m gonna renovate my guest bedroom so it looks really lived in. It’s got posters for like. Wolves and stuff on the walls. And a to do list that has stuff like “pay rent” “turn into dog” and I’m gonna put some scratch marks on the walls and the bed and a chain on the heater. And I’m gonna train the dog to sleep there so it really pulls off the whole effect. This is a really long con plan.

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maidofsalt

I discussed this idea with a classmate of mine and they pointed out that when i was looking for a room mate and said “you need to be out of the house every full moon and be okay with large dogs” they would surely assume that I was the werewolf in this mix and really this is just the beginning of my life as a weird tv sitcom.

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It would be a great cover for your perspective roommate, an actual werewolf

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But seriously, when we got our property, it was all just…grass. A sterile grass moonscape, like a billion other yards. With two big old maple trees. Just grass and maples, that was it. 

But then I got my grubby little paws on it, and I immediately stopped fertilizing, spraying, and bagging up grass clippings and leaves. I ripped up sod and put in flowers and vegetables. I put down nice thick blankets of mulch around the flowers and vegetables. 

When I first was sweating my way through stripping sod, I saw a grand total of 1 worm and 0 ladybugs. The ground was compacted into something that would bend shovel blades. 

Now, six years later, I can’t dig a planting hole without turning up fourteen earthworms, and there are so many ladybugs here. Not the invasive asian lady beetles; native ladybugs. They winter over in the mulch and in the brush pile. I see thousands of them. 

The soil is soft and rich. There are birds that come to eat, and bees of many sorts.

Like this is something that you, yourself, can absolutely change. This is something that you, personally, can make a difference in.

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Like, last year I watched no fewer than twenty-nine monarch caterpillars grow up on my milkweed and fly away as butterflies. I watched swallowtails and moths grow. There are hummingbirds fighting over flowers now.

I did that. Me. You can do the same.

Is this post about making a garden or beating depression

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As someone with clinically diagnosed anxiety and depression;

Yes.

“Not use collective punishment as it is not fair on the many people who did nothing and under the 1949 Geneva Conventions it is a war crime.”

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engineer-pearl0

Wait it’s a fucking WAR CRIME?!?! I mean that might not be 100% accurate but now I gotta know

holy crap, collective punishment is a war crime.

and according to the exact legal phrasing-

No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.

This technically counts, as students are civilians, and thus considered a “protected person”. So yes, collective classroom punishment breaks the fourth Geneva Convention, and she should be rewarded for standing up for human rights and doing her research.

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squided

Power-move: accuse your teacher of a war crime using knowledge they supplied you with

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"Rail only works over short distances" one of the most detached from reality carbrain statements I've ever read. Rail is objectively, demonstrably better to cover long distances than it is to cover short distances. Car culture legitimately gives you some kind of brain fungus.

did other Americans not get taught extensively in history about the Transcontinental Railroad and why it was such a huge deal

The entire POINT of rail is that it's good at long distances

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this advice is too late for the person I was going to give it to so I'll just say it in its own post

caffeine on a full stomach makes me feel the mirth and excitement of a noble who was challenged to a duel by a scrawny peasant (specifically, a peasant who does not know that royalty may select a champion in their stead)

caffeine on an empty stomach makes me feel like that noble's inbred son with every disease, Piotr the Bewitched, who everyone is independently trying to assassinate

Honestly, in my work as a therapist, I’m seeing this A Lot, and tbh I still don’t have a satisfactory approach to it. A heavy dose of Existentialist “create your own Purpose” tempered with “when the plane’s going down, put your own oxygen mask on first”, but… yeah, there is no ethical way to work on individual emotional distress without acknowledging the systemic socioeconomic, geopolitical fuckery going on at the moment, and the sheer grief that comes with it.

I’m a guidance counselor/psychologist for teenagers and it’s getting really hard to motivate young people to work for a future they don’t believe in. 

 They look at ther future and see global warming, wwIII, unemployement, political unstability, poison in everything  they eat, the earth and animals dying all around them. 

I saw this video where someone was asking french teens in the 50s how they imagine the future would be. The war hadn’t been over for long and yet it was all positive with like peace and flying cars and such. Then they went and ask the same questions to nowadays teens and hell that was depressing. Some still had hope, but it was just that “well I hope I’ll have a nice house and maybe some kid” but there was such a hesitancy to it, like they didn’t dare to hope too much. 

People mock Greta Thunberg but what they don’t get is that when she said “you stole my dreams”, it was the truth. 

Young people don’t get to dream like they used to. They don’t dream anymore, they grief all that won’t be anymore and that’s just so fucking sad. 

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The fact that both the tweet and these reblogs are pre-pandemic makes this post even worse

it's so chilling to walk through an area where the houses are surrounded by blank sterile lawns and see a big lilac bush in full bloom without a single bug on it. No bees, no butterflies, not a stir of activity.

The neighborhood association where I work hires a truck to spray the whole subdivision. It trundles up every driveway and sprays every yard with pesticides. The children excitedly tell me about "the bug man" and know which days he comes on. I know when he's been there, because in the following days I see the beetles, butterflies, bees, and more, all struggling on the pavement, slowly dying. The children do not realize why they are there. They poke at the bugs in fascination. I hate it.

That's. Horrible. I have no words

Like

Those insecticides are toxic to humans as well, many are proven carcinogens, and their residues stick around for years inside homes

But even if that wasn't so, insect populations worldwide are plummeting, and the entire food chain depends on them. Most plants and animals could not exist without insects, period

Keeping the insect ecosystem in balance is important for human health and long term flourishing. Not all species are impacted equally by these toxic chemicals, and the elimination of one species can cause an explosion in another.

For example, some of the major predators of ticks are ants, spiders, and beetles

If you kill all your ants, spiders, and beetles, it'll take a long time for them to re-establish, but ticks can return because of a feral cat walking across your grass

What's more, scientists have found that excluding animals from an area makes the amount of ticks that can be collected in that area to explode. We're talking 2-3 times the amount of ticks actively foraging for things to latch onto. It seems like hungrier ticks seek food sources more and bite people more. This leads to the hypothesis that global defaunation is one of the causes of the explosion in tick borne diseases in recent years

Many birds depend on insects for food, bluebirds specifically eat a ton of mosquitoes

If you wipe out most arthropods, the the small mammals and birds that eat the bugs will visit your yard much less. Guess what that means

Current projections predict that the insect declines will be heavily impactful upon bees, butterflies, and moths, but could increase the populations of...flies and cockroaches.

Not to mention that as all the natural predators of agricultural pest insects suffer, more and more pesticides will be needed to get enough crop yields and it becomes a vicious cycle of poisoning the planet and farm laborers more and more severely to avoid collapse of food systems

Your neighborhood association is creating a bleak, sick, hungry future for those kids and everyone else.

Like, think about it:

If you kill and destroy everything in your surroundings that doesn't benefit you directly, soon the only critters that can live there are the creatures that are parasites on you directly or that compete with you for resources.

And now they don't have any predators to keep them at bay.

reblogging this again because researching ticks changed my brain around

like I thought "Yeah re-wilding will probably increase the risk of ticks but we just need to make tick safety widespread and common knowledge"

but then I RESEARCHED it

and the research was like "Actually tick diseases have increased DRAMATICALLY over the past 40 years, and tick ranges are expanding hugely and it's mostly unrelated to climate change so far. And we did experiments and in areas where there aren't any animals, the number of ticks that catch onto things passing through the area explodes, it's like 2-3 times the number of ticks. Which is like, wait, weird, I thought animals spread ticks. But we think what's happening is that when there's no animals, the ticks engage in more questing behavior to find food."

and I was like "Wait, but if the decline of animals is making the ticks look for food more, wouldn't they...wait. Oh no. OH NO. We're the food!"

and I looked at more research

and the research said "so the main things that kill ticks seems to be spiders, ants, and beetles."

and I was like "spiders, ants, and beetles? the things that people see as pests and try to kill with chemicals that contaminate the whole ecosystem?—OH FUCK"

Basically it's like

Expectation: destroying nature= fewer ticks, which means less disease

Reality: destroying nature= hungrier ticks that want to suck your blood way more and less spiders ants and beetles to eat them for you

Also: western fence lizards rely on a diet of bugs like spiders, ants & beetles. Western fence lizards have a protein in their blood that kills the Lyme disease bacteria in a tick’s gut. This is hypothesized to be the reason why some western states have lower levels of Lyme disease (but not necessarily other tick borne diseases).

the uncommon allergy haver to anticapitalist pipeline

in January 2023, companies became required to label sesame on all products it was present in, and undergo rigorous cleaning procedures to prevent sesame contamination, after it was declared the 9th "major" food allergen in the United States.

so, instead of considering this a mandate to give a single shit about people with sesame allergies, almost all American companies decided to just add sesame flour to all their relevant products. because apparently that was cheaper.

it's almost impossible for me to find hot dog and hamburger buns without sesame now. and I am one of the lucky ones. I'm someone who just so happened to notice the label updates, not get caught unawares and have a severe allergic reaction. I'm someone lucky enough to be surrounded by multiple choices of supermarkets, and someone with the incredible privilege to have parents who'll help me search the shelves, and cover those costs that my allergies rack up. not everyone with allergies/other intolerances has all or any of those privileges to begin with.

most food allergies will never be prevalent enough that under capitalism, it will be profitable to give them the level of accommodation that they deserve. I speak from experience with a wide portfolio of hypersensitivity quirks when I say that the rarer the food allergy, the worse it gets.

and here's the thing: I can live without hamburger buns, with only superficial decreases in my quality of life. but sesame isn't my only rare allergy, and ever since this legislation hit, I've been lying awake at night, afraid of what I might lose access to next.

I've been lying awake at night wondering what I'll have to do to live, to obtain enough safe food to survive, if any of my other allergies get this same treatment. and I reiterate. I am one of the privlidged ones.

what these companies have done is completely legal. what these companies did has also cut off up to over a million people from what were previously safe, affordable staples of their diets. a system that has any incentive not to accommodate the dietary needs of any population is not a system that can be allowed to exist. this is the uncommon allergy haver to angry, fuming anticapitalist pipeline.

[Image description: two screenshots of tumblr tags, reading:

"also pea protein. mcdicks just added pea protein without any proper warning so if you got a legume allergy, don't eat their buns."

"did you know pea protein and pea flour is a thing. i didn't. but i sure found out quick after i ate frozen nuggets and when i got gravy from a restaurant. now i have to check fucking everything because i've also found pea protein in ice cream of all things." End description.]

thank you @butchwelddone and @insidejupiter respectively for these psas. signal boosting here for all my fellow legume-allergic folks, stay safe (and stay away from McDonalds buns)

the mcu is the “the curtains are just blue” of cinematic experiences

thekobrakiddo3

Is that why it’s so good?

YOU

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f scott fitzgerald scared to say god himself is watching nick carraway and his band of socialite hedonists so he makes up an optometrist billboard constantly overlooking them (out of fear, hes scared)

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michael crichton throwing out a version of jurassic park that just says “science, without restraint, can be dangerous. and dinosaurs are cool”

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edgar allen poe’s first draft of telltale heart: “if you kill someone…..you might feel bad about it/:” but he starts trembling looking at it and says “no…..i’m too much of a pussy…to say this”

gently staples this thread to the forehead of the people going "ew why would you ship mohg with miquella when you could make an OC/self-insert to ship with him instead"

the answer, you'll find, is shockingly simple: because that doesn't interest me. because that does literally nothing for me. because i'd rather piss in my own eye than ship a canon character with my OC (or self-insert). i promise you, if i had any interest in that, i would do it without needing to be told, but i don't so i won't. you're asking a person who likes chocolate cake why they're not eating banana cake instead as if those two are even remotely the same

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Okay but this is serious, I work in retail and I had a lady come up and ask for 2 $500 Google play gift cards. We have been trained to look for these scams and to warn the customers NEVER give the card numbers over the phone unless you have met this person face to face. I told the lady this and she started crying, saying they were the IRS and that if she hung up they would call the police and have her arrested. They wanted to keep her on the phone so she couldn't call her husband, who was more aware of how the IRS works. I was able to convince her to hang up and call the police on *them* instead, and saved her $500.

Scams are serious, people lose a lot of money and older people are targeted the worst because they're easy targets.

First of all, the IRS will *never* call you and ask for money, and they definitely won't call the cops on you. They'll get your money if they really want it through taxes.

But now they're trying to target our generation using crypto, which is super hard to trace if the money gets lost. So they're getting smarter, and they'll use whatever they can to get you to give them money.

What you really need to know or take away from this is: NEVER, and I mean EVER, buy a gift card and give the barcode number on the back to someone over the phone. It is ALWAYS, 100%, a scam!

Please be safe and hang up on these fuckers the second they ask you to buy a gift card.

Once saw a clown say clowns & furries speak the same "silent language" and that stuck with me for some reason

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i bet this has to do with something called Mask Work in theater, which focuses on how masks can make a person automatically emote physically in a whole different way.

The one fact about Mask Work that will tell you everything you need to know about why i say this is: people, for whatever reason, tend to behave the same ways in the same kinds of masks. 

So for example, people putting on variations on this classic

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all have a tendency to push their heads forward, raising their shoulders and curving their back, and to move their heads with a bit of a twisty movement, constantly looking to one side or the other with twitchy head movements when not laser focused on something. This happens the first time a person spends open-minded time in the mask, usually in front of a mirror, and it happens whether or not the person has ever seen someone else wearing the mask.

Many mask designs produce an effect that people sometimes describe as being possessed by the mask, as if the mask has a character all of it’s own that shines through no matter who is wearing it. Some masks make people have a tendency to flounce, other masks will encourage slithery movements.

And people tend to agree that the masks do not talk (that is, people trying to embody the masks do not feel like they can say words and be in the character of the mask) but that they do vocalize - so one mask may seem to make people make a sort of grumbly gibberish, and another will tend to encourage people to make sort of nasally “fnee ... fnee” noises.

Anyway, the clowns and furries silent language thing has to do with this i think.

 Of course the sentence also serves as a quiet knowing look about the way both groups get similarly unwarranted, visceral reactions from much of the public -- a nice play on words from the clown there, who, after all, is an entertainer.

Solidarity with children is often neglected or even made a joke of, so I wanna take a second and tell y'all what I wish I could go back in time and tell myself:

You're right. School is bullshit, homework is bullshit, waking up early is bullshit, going to bed early is bullshit. Some adults are just pointlessly cruel, even those in positions of authority over you. Sometimes adults are wrong, and, in fact, sometimes you are right

You were born with an innate sense of justice and fairness and adults have spent your entire life trying to beat it out of you so you'll shut up and do what you're told in an unjust and unfair society. Don't let them. Many of us have to take effort to relearn the wisdom you have right now, the ability to tell when something is bullshit even if you can't articulate why yet

You deserve happiness, fulfillment, and liberation just as much as any adult. Those first 18 years are just as important as any other time in your life, and it's time you'll never get back. Don't let anyone take them from you just because you're too young to fight back

Question everything, and never take "that's just the way it is" as an answer. Sometimes when things don't make sense to you it's because they just don't make any goddamn sense

Pick your battles, and be strategic. Don't take this post as permission to go starting fights for no reason. But remember that you have worth, and our society tends to not respect that. And you're right: that is bullshit

(also, read Anarchy Works)

Haven’t read it myself, but if it interests you then you can read it here for free in case paying for a book online and having it shipped to your house isn’t an option for you

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I just saw a story on AO3 tagged "pet p!ay"

TIK TOK MUST BE STOPPED BEFORE IT DESTROYS LANGUAGE

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For a second there I was like “What? That’s a fairly normal AO3 tag.”

Then I reached forward to wipe away the dirt on the l. But there was nothing there...

Censoring tags literally helps no one.

It doesn't help people that want to find that kind of content because you censored it.

It doesn't help people avoid that kind of content because you censored it. It helps literally no one. No one at all.

STOP CENSORING THE FUCKING TAGS

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#literally stop it#i swear one of the worst things to come from tiktok#is censoring of tags and these uwu funny names for shit like#stop#stop it#not every website is tiktok#you do not need to censor tags on ao3#you will not be punished for it#fucking stop doing it

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Love bombing is not a euphemism for "too much affection too soon," or "high desire for contact."

"Love bombing" is a term originally used in the context of cults to describe a deliberate and coordinated recruitment method that involved feigning friendship and interest in a potential recruit, via flattery, flirtation, physical affection, and very directed positive attention to everything the recruit says in order to lure them into the cult.

Since cults and abusive relationships operate in similar ways and use similar tactics, love bombing in an interpersonal relationship looks like manufacturing closeness in order to trap someone into a relationship in which the abuser has all the control.

And I know these days there's a million bullshit junky articles out there that make you think this is a symptom of cluster b personality disorders, but there is no way for you to be love bombing somebody without realizing it.

If you are an affectionate person and the level of affection and attention you give makes someone uncomfortable, you are not "accidentally" abusing them.

If you are uncomfortable with the level of affection and attention someone is paying you, they are not de facto abusing you.

Love bombing is about using someone's desire for human connection to fast track them into a situation you control and will feel disinclined to leave.

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Me: Did you know that medieval cathedrals weren't actually supposed to be dark and rundown places with only stained glass as color? They were bright places full of light... the reason they look like that now is because of the centuries of accumulated grime and dust, here look at this restoration of the Cathedral of Chartres in France:

It's based on actual paint from the times, and when you think about it, it makes a lot more sense, after all a church is supposed to be a bright place of hope. Yet when we think about the middle ages we think about grimy and dark cathedrals. I wonder how much of our conception of history is shaped by our current visions of historical buildings.

My Goth GF: listen, I don't think this thing between us is working,

OP you need to date more goth history nerds

This is why I get mad when they only use old-looking books as props in period films/shows that are set during a time when those BOOKS WOULD’VE BEEN NEW AND FRESHLY BOUND AND STILL SHINY