Ornery Otter's boat of insanity

Hey there, so I'm a fanfic writer and I've finally started writing again - so you may see some of that on here. I am known online under the names Ornery Otter or Greiver Dhark. This tumblr is about more than sharing pics or quotes, but then, its my blog so it could be a boat of insanity.

[thelawfulchaotic]

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.

[thelawfulchaotic]

Forgot one part: I cuss. Like, a lot. Child confesses terrible trauma at the hands of police officers? “Wow that guy sounds like a piece of shit. Want me to kick him up the asshole for you?”

Child: “no that’s okay”

Me: “I might do it anyway”

Persist until child cracks a smile and/or laughs at your dumb bullshit

[bemusedlybespectacled]

I do literally all of this when representing child clients, lol. the only additional thing I do is to say that I'm not their mom or a cop, so I'm never going to tell them what to do. I will tell them if I think something they want is unlikely to happen or is a bad idea (and I will tell them why I think that), but I'm not going to stop them from doing stupid shit if that's what they want to do.

Usually I have to circle back around on it with "remember how I said I'd tell you if I thought you were going to do stupid shit? [running away with your boyfriend to live on the streets][attacking that kid when you get back to school][continuing to hang out with your friends who keep getting busted for drugs] would be really fucking stupid. if you still want to do it, I can't stop you, but if you get in trouble for it, it's not because I didn't warn you."

[thelawfulchaotic]

Truly it is a disservice not to mention the cussing, kids love cussing. Younger kids love it because you said the bad word!! And older kids are like “what you’re a lawyer you’re not supposed to say fuck” to which I respond “what am I supposed to say when something’s really fucked up” & they think it’s great

[myboyrozanovv]

@thelawfulchaotic I've been thinking this over, and what really stuck with me is your joke about getting them into or out of trouble, whatever they ask for. I think it's because it presents the possibility of a choice, and not a forced choice of "here is the good correct choice and here is the alternative of suffering", but just a value neutral choice of whatever the kid wants, not what general society or the people around them deem a good or correct choice. Pretty impactful concept to me, and i am glad you're including it.

[thelawfulchaotic]

I actually like saying this to adults too. (“If someone rolled into my office asking for some felony convictions, I’d do my best!”) It usually gets a laugh or at least a mildly amused huff, and I do think it shows them I’ll respect their choices. Humor I think also keeps them a little more engaged with my lawyering monologue.

Honestly I find it very hard to take myself seriously. Like, me? In my clown makeup and my clown shoes and my clown wig? Climbing out of my clown car with my clown friends? Please. I might (MIGHT) be smarter than my clients, or have better education and clothes, but there’s nothing that makes me more worthy than them to be treated like a person. If I need to honk my little clown nose to make that point, so be it

[nealashitposts]

So I've got this friend whose nervous because she's trans and dating this guy who she hasn't told yet because they've only been on a two dates. For this story let's call the friend Jane and the guy she was dating Jason. Happy ending don't worry. So I tell Jane to bring her boy over to a bbq I'm having and she can tell him she's trans at my place surrounded by queer and trans people who love her and will support her if he ends up being awful. She waits till the end of the bbq to tell him the news, by which point the rest of us have learned that Jason is a kind, friendly, empathetic, hard working, dummy. So we sit down, all of us a little worried about this gym bro's reaction when she tells him she's trans, and that she understands if he doesn't want to keep dating her it's no big deal. He's baffled, so we explain what trans is, and after the disclosure that she hasn't had bottom surgery yet... "Oh you have a dick?" "... yeah." He look's around at the room full of people with baited breath, his clearly a little afraid girl friend says "Oooohhhh! I get it! You think- don't worry Babe! Watch this!"

And ya'll this man jumps up, runs into the kitchen and returns with one of the bratwurst we had for grilling and proceeds to tilt his head back, put it down his throat, hold it in his mouth for a moment, and spit it up without even a whisper of a gag and then looks around at the group absolutely beaming with pride. My mans saw his worried girlfriend and her support network and thought to him self "Oh they don't think I can please my girl but I'll show them!"

[alexanderwales]

There used to be a plotline that goes something like "you're the best gamer in the world, and game was really just a covert training and recruitment tool, so now you're going to use those skills to fight aliens or whatever". It's more or less gone away, one of those speculative fiction tropes that did not stand the test of time.

I think it's a great premise though, and should start being applied to other hobbies.

"Ma'am, this regional knitting competition was actually a covert operation to find someone to run this machine of the elder gods we found buried in the desert."

"Congratulations on your silver play button, you are hereby inducted into the Paranormal Defense Force, a subsidiary of Youtube and a branch of the United States military."

"Welcome to the Olympic village. If you've made it this far, you're hereby recruited into the international super soldier program, fighting our enemies at the edge of the Crab Nebula."

[eldritchwyrm]

the fun part is this did actually happen in real life once. during WWII, several british women solved a crossword really well and subsequently discovered they'd been recruited as cryptographers.

[prokopetz]

Cozy life sim about a community of scavengers living amid the crumbling ruins of an unfathomably vast Brutalist megastructure of unclear origin and purpose. The nature of the structure or what lies beyond it are not addressed at any point.

[prokopetz]

"What's the point of a vast Brutalist megastructure that doesn't eat people" oh, it totally eats people, sometimes. Everyone knows somebody whose second cousin fucked with a mysterious orb and got shattered across countless dimensions, or some similar shit. Both the narrative and the characters who inhabit it treat these incidents as unfortunate but unremarkable, in the same way that the inhabitants of an Earthly small town might treat someone going wandering in the woods after dark and falling off a cliff as unfortunate but unremarkable. Honestly, it doesn't happen that often.

[flying-butter]

"Been meaning to put a fence there, but it happens so rarely that it's honestly not worth the effort most days."

[transperceneige]

Little gem from Reddit

[scretladyspider]

I mean

[furbearingbrick]

adhd is stored in the ass

[sunlitkoi]

the a in adhd stands for ass

[moonybyte]

What do the other letters stand for then?

[commodorecliche]

Ass Don't Have Dopamine

[theconcealedweapon]

I know this is supposed to be a joke post, but Ass Don't Have Dopamine is a much better name for it.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder sounds like it was named by outsiders who are annoyed by people not paying enough attention and being too active by society's standards. It says jack shit about how it actually feels to experience ADHD. It implies that punishing them in order to force them to pay attention and stop them from being hyperactive is successful treatment for ADHD.

Ass Don't Have Dopamine, on the other hand, describes it perfectly. It's caused by a lack of dopamine. If you understand what dopamine does, then you understand what it feels like to struggle to find things that give you dopamine.

If the condition were officially renamed to "Ass Don't Have Dopamine", it would lead to a much better understanding.

[spookybuttons-deactivated202101]

thinking about the time they sent me a seven year old autistic patient to investigate if he was suffering abuse because in every psychological test he kept drawing awful monsters

and I start the consultation already miserable as fuck and I give the kid some pen and paper so I can maybe communicate and see what's on his mind

and then I go WAIT A GODDAMN SECOND I KNOW THOSE MONSTERS

turns out the kid just had a special interest in Five Nights at Freddy's

[spookybuttons-deactivated202101]

I pointed at the monster and went "That's Freddy!" and I've never seen a kid that ecstatic in my life

the mom looked at me as if her son and I belonged at the same satanic cult and that's why I knew the names of the demons in his head

I wrote back to psychologist like "I'm not sure how to explain this but looking up five nights at freddys might bring you progress with this patient"

[spookybuttons-deactivated202101]

at some point the nurses realized the autistic children and I were like, Really Vibing

so they decided to highkey just appoint all of them to my day and it took me almost a month to realize that the fact that I kept arriving and finding that all of today’s appointments were autistic children was Not A Coincidence 

anyway this one time there was a kid who was really into christianity but it was like, specifically angels 

so I’m trying to start up a conversation with him and I ask what he’s reading and he goes “do you know what a nephilim is”

and like for one hellish second my soul is suckerpunched out of my body and thrown straight into supernatural-fanfic-on-wattpad hell, and then I reassume control of my flesh prison, ignoring the mental edits of Dean and Castiel making out, and go “Aren’t those the guys who are half human and half angel?”

and the kid was so fucking happy but the mom was staring at me like ‘why are you privy to this bit of occult jesus lore’

and my heathen lesbian of a self just looks at her and goes 

“i love bible”

[xain-russell]

It’s almost like taking an invested interest in what your children enjoy will help you understand them.

[wildflower182]

that addition might be the most savage call out i’ve ever seen

[animentality]

[anarchistmemedistro]

[weaselle]

i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again: what we want is for these things to be run like a HOUSEHOLD… a home. A household still has a budget and an income and resources to manage; all the moving parts are the same but the focus is different.

a business will let every person in it die a terrible death if it makes the business profit. A household will spend it’s last dollar to keep the people in it safe and healthy.

A household will use money as a resource to add value to the lives of the people in the household. A business will use people as a resource to add monetary value to the business

We don’t want a government run like a business, we want a country run like a household. Because we live here.

[hosseinis]

the thing about the mummy movies is that you really spend most of the time thinking "wow brendan fraser's character is so cool" or "man oded fehr is so mysterious and heroic" when the fact of the matter is that these two

are the absolute most batshit insane heroes in the entire franchise

these two are intellectual loner siblings with archeology backgrounds who read and speak ancient egyptian, hire a dude directly out of prison to take them to a lost city of gold, and fight mummies literally with their bare hands. twice.

no one in these movies stands a chance against the carnahans. frankly they're lethal in how willing they are to make the absolute and most undeniably deranged decisions. jonathan pickpockets a dude on fire. evy's resurrected from the dead and immediately remembers how to use sai. they're racking shotguns from a cliff in this scene and then proceed to blow away half the antagonists.

rick and ardeth should be so lucky

[soberscientistlife]

The fact that homelessness is controversial tells you everything you need to know about conservatives.

[inkskinned]

“if you take medication for that, you’ll be taking medication all your life!!” yeah, and?? bud, i already put on my glasses every morning. it’s like. a condition of mine, not a side hobby i’m pursuing irresponsibly. 

[lady-harrowhark]

and the thrilling sequel: “taking meds for that is the easy way out!” right you are my dude, i’m a huge fan of not making things harder than they have to be

[reddpenn]

Something I love about writing fanfiction is that when canon drops an absolute dungheap of a writing decision, you do not have to just sit there and be disappointed about it. You have a whole world of interesting options.

1) Nothing here is salvageable. This plot point is a trash fire and it’s quickly setting the rest of the franchise ablaze. We as a fandom have elected to ignore it. It did not happen. I will write events as if they continued correctly.

2) Nothing here is salvageable, trashfire, etcetera, but let’s just play in the space for a moment. If we allow that fine, this incredibly stupid thing happened, can we mulch it down and grow something interesting from it? What led to things ending up so off the rails? Where do we go from here? What are the worldbuilding implications? I will dig deeply into this dungheap and make something worthwhile out of it.

3) There is the seed of a really good idea in here. The execution was garbage, but if it had been done differently, with better writing, with better pacing, with more thought and care and tact, it could have been golden. I will redo it, but better.

And there are many interesting combinations of correct/worthwhile/better! I love delving into this in my own writing, and seeing it in other people’s writing, because suddenly your fic is having a conversation with the original work. It’s transformative! It says something about what you personally loved and hated and took away from the story!

[surrealtiktoks]

[thefriendlylover]

The peacock. The music. The person leaping over a tombstone. The cemetery. It just works.

[theundeadpumpkin-deactivated202]

[impiusangelus]

“GRAVE PEACOCKING” IM DEAD

[fizzyhedgehog]

Great post everyone

[ash-and-art]

i hate that even self proclaimed radicals think "people shouldnt have to work to survive" is too radical. yes yes advocate for fair wages, but dont forget those wages, even if fair, are just a prize you get for being better at capitalism than ppl like me

[audacityinblack]

starvation is torture and you want to inflict it on people like me for the crime of not earning every breath I take

[naamahdarling]

Disabled people deserve generous disability benefits whether or not they have ever worked and "paid into the system" and "earned it" but a lot of folks who should know better still really do seem think there's some moral virtue in work.

There is none.

Ideally there is satisfaction, and labor is of benefit to and necessary for society to function because someone has to do all those things we need done, like build roads, deliver mail, make food, staff the pharmacy, but there is no inherent moral value in the labor itself. That's the lie capitalism tells you to get you to make up for everything that gets suctioned away from you. The powerful don't even believe it. It's just a means of control, and a way to keep you looking down in disdsib at those you consider below you, so you don't look up and question those who consider you beneath them.

[linssweater]

This thread omg

[thejeksburyguy]

Family doesn’t have to be blood related.

Sometimes family is a righteously angry little girl, her supportive brother, a random stranger with a thirst for chaos and justice, two foreign grandmas, and The Rest Of The Plane.

[featherfrond]

yasss this makes me happy like nothing else lol

[seananmcguire]

As a note for many of the commentors, we were not ON THE PLANE at any point during this encounter. We were at the departure gate in the Melbourne Airport.

We were not remotely the most chaotic thing happening. International departure gates are a circle of hell.

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

obsessed with the fact that naked mole rats seem to have a whole caste of special little guy whose job it is to be really fat, horny, unhelpful, and disgusted by incest

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

guy whose social role is to say “I fucking hate it here, I don’t respect literally any of you people” somehow so much funnier in a mammal than a bug

[homunculus-argument]

I think the funniest dynamic for arranged-marriage royalty would be a queen who came here 100% prepared to murder her future husband and rule as a widow queen in her own right, only to discover that the king is autistic as hell and responds to her wish to rule with "oh thank god please do, I don't want to be bothered by these people. I can just tell them to go bother you instead, if you really want that. I've got beetles I wanted to study."

[stele3]

"I'm really not good at it," the king admits with horrible, aching grief. The country is in disarray. Peasants go hungry. Nobles trade power amongst themselves with impunity.

So the queen takes over and ruthlessly sets things to rights. Fires several generals, hangs nobles, redirects wealth to the peasantry. It isn't long before the first assassination attempt, which she expected.

She did not expect her docile, beetle-obsessed husband to go absolutely feral and fling himself at the assassins wielding a pair of sharp knives.

[stele3]

Also, the beetles are intended to attack and kill a certain type of invasive worm that has been killing off the gourd and potato crops for decades. He’s been trying since he was a child to crossbreed several native species to be hardier and better diggers. When he finally gets it right it’s all over for you bitches (“you bitches” being mass starvation of subsistence farmers).

[alexaloraetheris]

Mad Scientist and the Head of HR ass dynamic