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When I am appointed to represent a child, my first action is to separate them from their parents and tell them the following things:

1. I am their attorney. I do not work for their parent or the judge or the cops. I don’t care what any of those people want.

2. My job is to listen to them and try and make what they want happen in court. (At this point I make a joke about how most people want me to get them out of trouble but if someone wanted to be in trouble I would do my best.)

3. What they tell me is confidential. It goes nowhere unless they agree to it. (If old enough, I talk to them about mandatory reporters, and how I’m a mandatory non reporter.)

4. I will give them lots of advice because I’ve been doing court for a while and I know a lot about it, and they don’t. It’s all really complicated, and if they don’t understand what’s happening it’s my job to help them figure it out.

5. They will make the decisions. (At this point I usually have to reassure them that I’ll help, I’ll speak for them in front of the judge, and I’ve got their back. It’s scary to have an adult say you’re in charge, most of the time.)

6. I tell them I know it’s absolutely wild to have some stranger come in here and say “hey, you can trust me!” and that I get if they don’t believe everything right away, because I plan to show them through my actions and my words that I’ll fight for them.

7. But nonetheless, I will treat them like a person who can make decisions, because they are living their life and I am not.

I do not:

Pretend to be cool.

Try to be their BFF.

Overwhelm them with detail.

Let their parents in the room until the kid asks for them. (I provide openings for this, and ask if the kid wants their parent to help them remember and understand.)

I want to emphasize I went into this job knowing nothing about how to interact with vulnerable populations, especially children. The training was minimal, and my role means that I can literally walk into a facility and get an unmonitored visit with a minor client one on one.

In my years of practice I have never felt threatened by a child, even one that was “violent” and “unstable.” It turns out just saying “hi, I think you’re a person with thoughts” is wildly successful? Now people treat me like I have special Child Whisperer powers. My powers are that I ask the child what’s up and I’m not scared to say things that are objectively awkward. I know nothing about anything.

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And is this train due in 0 minutes in the station with us right now?

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this is about [redacted]

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i woke up and i was trying to kill you

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I'm struck by just how much Shen Jiu's abuse of Luo Binghe is an elaborate self-harm ritual.

In ch 74 Shen Jiu seethes about how Luo Binghe has so much and how jealous he is of him. But I really don't think it's straightforward jealousy that drives his actions

For one, the peaks are filled with entitled young masters from noble families with much more to envy than homeless orphan Binghe, and he never treated them like that. But even moreso, the things he's jealous of are things that Shen Jiu also has. Or rather... had.

He's mad about Binghe calling his adoptive mother his dearest person? Well. Young Shen Jiu, at age ten, also had a dearest person. Someone who might not have been rich and powerful enough to ease his suffering, but who loved him and would do anything for him. Young Shen Jiu had Qi-ge.

He's mad about Binghe's amazing cultivation potential? Well. Shen Jiu, despite arriving much later than the optimal time to cultivate and having his foundation warped by demonic cultivation, somehow still managed to become an immortal peak lord of the world's most powerful cultivation sect. He's that powerful with everything stacked against him, imagine what his full potential must have looked like.

He doesn't hate Luo Binghe for these things because it sets him apart from Shen Jiu. He hates him because he's exactly like Shen Jiu... except for one crucial difference. That he got to the sect on time.

He's who Shen Jiu would have been if Qi-ge had come back for him.

He's Shen Jiu without the betrayal, without the corrupted cultivation, without the years of horrific abuse spent falsely hoping for help that would never come.

And that can't stand. Shen Jiu cannot witness what he could have had if only Qi-ge had kept his promise. He needs himself and everyone too similar to him to be doomed from the beginning, because otherwise he might start thinking about what ifs and he can't afford that. And so he does to Luo Binghe everything that was done to him. He becomes Binghe's Wu Yanzi, Qiu Jianluo, and Yue Qi* all wrapped into one. Singlehandedly, he turns Binghe into Shen Jiu.

And just like Shen Jiu, Binghe eventually snaps and razes the whole place to the ground.

(*well, the version of Yue Qi that exists in Shen Jiu's head, anyway. The promise of salvation that never comes. The person you'd thought would save you but who left you in hell instead.)

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Making the Werewolf: The Forsaken/Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist situation worse on purpose by running a game jam whose only rule is that each submission's title must abbreviate to "WTF".

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Balram: This is not the time for your shenanigans!

Krishna: It was a single shenanigan. Technically more of a hijink.

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"I keep on having these recurring dreams that I'm on the set of Supernatural. The other morning I woke up and it was about season 18..."

- Jerry Wanek, Supernatural Then and Now (52:34)

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the oceangate rabbithole is un-fucking-paralleled. what do you mean they left that thing outside in the snow in canada for the entire fucking winter. of course it imploded literally the next time they put it in the water. holy shit.

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This is going to sound so "oldie yells at cloud" of me but the radicalisation of the young into black and white, zero shades of grey thinking, both in the media they consume and in real life situations, is genuinely terrifying.

The world is complex. The world is grey. There is infinite nuance in everything. No amount of trying to shove it all into neatly labeled boxes is ever going to work.

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A good rule of thumb for AI is "would you trust a trained pigeon to do this?"

"We trained a pigeon to recognise cancerous cell clusters and somehow they're really good at it" okay great, that's something that could plausibly be a thing.

"We trained a pigeon to recognise good CV:s and left it in charge of sorting through all our job applications" uh perhaps consider not doing that.

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when gerard way sings "the broken, the beaten, and the damned" and when kermit the frog sings "the lovers, the dreamers, and me" they're talking about the same people btw

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we seriously need to stop conceding to the personhood trap when it comes to abortion rights. is a fetus a person? thats a spiritual question. i dont care about the answer. should another person dictate what someone can do with their body? simple answer: no.

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ben + the continental camp squad

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hi ive had ur fic “a transmigrator and a time traveller” downloaded for months and ive annotated the whole thing top to bottom and idk if youve said it anywhere but may i draw some art for it? if that’s okay? it lives in my brajn rent free i fear

That's more than okay and I will in fact gush and scream and become insane over it immediately!!!