The Wordsmith's Forge

A poll is up on Dreamwidth regarding the theme of the bonus fishbowl.

Talking with dialecticdreamer, I stumbled across one reason why Terramagne-America has a legal system so much better than ours. They use rubrics. For each crime, there's a checklist of things that constitute that crime and steps required to prove it. That means everyone can check off completed items as they go along, and at the end, there's an interpretation note to show how much is required for probable cause to charge someone with the crime or to convict them of doing it. That's so much easier than trying to do it all in your head and hoping you haven't missed something. For official purposes, you then list references after each item leading to supporting evidence of it. Because it's much easier to prove crimes with physical evidence than without it, a key area of improvement lies with nonphysical crimes such as abuse or discrimination, where the rubric makes it easy to show a consistent pattern of misbehavior.

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I posted my few fills for the Fairytale Bingo over on allbingo.

Based on an audience poll, the bonus fishbowl on September 18 will feature the Big One, a thread about the Cascadia Cataclysm with earthquakes and tsunamis in Terramagne.

This poem is spillover from the August 7, 2018 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from erulisse, bairnsidhe, mashfanficchick, pantha, readera, and LJ user Rix_scaedu. It also fills the "skeletons in the closet" square of my 6-23-18 card for the hc_bingo fest. This poem is trade for pantha making a flow chart for the Way Back Program. It belongs to the Shiv thread of the Polychrome Heroics series. It follows "Moving Objects with His Hands," so read that first for the specific setup.

Warning: This poem contains intense and controversial topics. Highlight to read the warnings, some of which are spoilers. It features poverty, a terrible school in a poor neighborhood, petty arguing, discussions of past child abuse and neglect, a child held in a padded cell, past failure to account for traumatic stress and possible learning disabilities, verbal abuse, past reference to hitting a child with assorted implements, dishonesty, past reference to destructive behavior, failure to provide appropriate educational methods, lingering effects from abuse, scars, evidence that Shiv is not in fact stupid after all, vulgar language, prejudice, past quashing of help-seeking behavior, arrest of child abuser, possible case of reality tunnel rupture, angst, and other challenges. People who have issues with educational abuse and neglect, or other types of child maltreatment, may find this poem particularly fraught. If these are sensitive issues for you, please consider your tastes and headspace before reading onward.

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