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Sham bam bamina! posted:Neither beat Christian Humber: Reloaded. I feel like Yud's writing would be substantially more relatable and enjoyable if sometimes there were just random werewolves and Bionicles. I don't want to effortpost too hard about HPMOR and the rest of this rationalist fanfic, but one of the most unnerving things about it to me, beyond the actual content, is how loving joyless it is. Yud and his imitators are taking a medium that exists more or less entirely to feed the adolescent (or mentally adolescent) id, a medium of infinite self-indulgence, and using it to produce boring screeds indistinguishable from their nonfiction posts. The only thing that even comes close to expressing any kind of real emotions are the parts that are about a paralyzing, all-consuming fear of death.
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Dec 12, 2014 07:36
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Neither beat Christian Humber: Reloaded. I don't think Yudkowsky would even look at something Christian.
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Dec 12, 2014 07:39
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Tiggum posted:"Original" is just an arbitrary label. It doesn't carry any useful meaning. You are stupid as poo poo. Unless this is an ironic argument in which case I don't even know what you're doing with your life
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Dec 12, 2014 07:48
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Danger Mahoney posted:You are stupid as poo poo. Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 11:56 on Dec 12, 2014 |
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Dec 12, 2014 11:08
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If I posted a perfect copy of this thread, and everyone copied their own posts, would this derail still be as stupid?
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Dec 12, 2014 11:41
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Tiggum posted:"Original" is just an arbitrary label. It doesn't carry any useful meaning. Antivehicular posted:I feel like Yud's writing would be substantially more relatable and enjoyable if sometimes there were just random werewolves and Bionicles. I don't want to effortpost too hard about HPMOR and the rest of this rationalist fanfic, but one of the most unnerving things about it to me, beyond the actual content, is how loving joyless it is.
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Dec 12, 2014 12:05
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The Vosgian Beast posted:If I posted a perfect copy of this thread, and everyone copied their own posts, would this derail still be as stupid?
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Dec 12, 2014 12:16
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The Vosgian Beast posted:3) No amateur psychology or philosophy hour  New rules everyone!
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Dec 12, 2014 12:46
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SubG posted:This is almost always something that happens when a work of fiction is just a political or social thesis, and all the characters just sock puppets for the author. The sex scenes in Ayn Rand novels, for example, are just painful to read, even when they aren't rapey (which they frequently are; ultrarationalists seem to have a thing for rape for some goddamn reason) because it's always a couple of boring robots announcing to each other the value proposition each party is getting out of the transaction they're about to engage in. I've read sexier spreadsheets.
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Dec 12, 2014 15:36
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Xander77 posted:I'd actually find HPMOR far more interesting if I had some idea what Harry is trying to do. Discover the rules of magic through scientific experiments, gain immortality and rule the world in order to... what? What shape would that world take? The author seems to assume the answer is obvious enough that it's not worth getting into. It's written by a guy who would like to be immortal just for the sake of being immortal. At a guess his version of Harry wants to rule the world to make everyone be logical and rational. He will probably accomplish this by forcing everyone in the world to get vaccinated.
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Dec 12, 2014 15:45
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Tiggum posted:"Original" is just an arbitrary label. It doesn't carry any useful meaning. You don't have to make a hundred mistakes for everything to disintegrate around you. One will do. One wrong risk, one misplaced trust, one careless guess is enough to destroy the one thing you can least afford to lose. But I'd never had any reason to imagine that my disaster would befall me at the time when I was most unexpectedly safe. Here is how I decided to live with my father in Washington. My favorite three questions are, What do I want?, What do I have?, and How can I best use the latter to get the former? Actually, I'm also fond of What kind of person am I?, but that one isn't often directly relevant to decision making on a day-to-day basis. What did I want? I wanted my mother, Renée, to be happy. She was the most important person to me, bar none. I also wanted her around, but when I honestly evaluated my priorities, it was more important that she be happy. If, implausibly, I had to choose between Renée being happy on Mars, and Renée being miserable living with me as she always had - I wouldn't be thrilled about it. At all. But I'd send her to Mars. Mars wasn't in the picture, but my new stepfather Phil's travel schedule was. I'm a minor child; one isn't permitted to leave those unattended for too long. And so when he went from city to city, Renée stayed home, with me. She was not happy. Renée loves me, but she loves Phil too, or she wouldn't have married him. (I wouldn't call her the world's most self-aware person, but marriage is something she takes very seriously, since her divorce from my father. She was careful this time around.) What did I have? Lots of things - but the relevant one was: another parent. And so, to let Renée follow Phil and be happy, I moved to the town of Forks, Washington - to stay, where I'd previously only spent summers. It's a significant flight from Phoenix to Forks. A significant two flights and a drive, actually. I stocked my carry-on luggage with books to read and spiral notebooks to fill. I made a habit of carrying notebooks, and pens, everywhere. If I pinned my thoughts onto paper, they couldn't escape later. Without that kind of enforcement, they were liable to morph into versions of themselves that were more idealized, more consistent - and not what they were originally, and therefore false. Or they'd be forgotten altogether, which was even worse (those thoughts were mine, and I wanted them). I wrote a lot, whenever anything remotely unusual or challenging happened. Once a week or so, I typed it all up, so I'd have a searchable archive. Originally I'd had to write down everything I could come up with in order to be more or less sure that I wasn't fooling myself more than was strictly necessary; after a few years of practice, I mostly trusted myself to remember my actual thoughts and not the fictionalized ones my brain preferred to provide. By the time I moved to Forks, the notebooks were more of a comfort object, which I mostly used for things I might need to refer to that were too important to leave to memory. My father, Charlie, met my second plane in Port Angeles, hugged me with one arm, and helped me get my suitcases into his police cruiser. Once I'd buckled my seatbelt, in accordance with the law it would have been too ironic not to obey in a cop car, Charlie began the drive to his house - my house, too, I supposed. He told me he'd found a good car for me, a cheap one. I had wanted a car. Not just to have a car - I didn't care about cars very much as objects - but to have autonomous mobility around town, and to avoid dependence on Charlie for rides, as he a) had other things to do with his time and b) drove a conspicuous vehicle. That he'd found me one for myself was a sign of attentiveness, trust, and spontaneous generosity: he knew what I wanted, thought I'd be responsible enough to have it, and offered it to me without any social obligation to do so whatever. I felt a rush of gratitude, and immediately thanked him warmly. He looked a little embarrassed; I relieved the awkwardness by asking after the details of the car and providing a concrete topic. He'd already bought the car, which was actually a Chevy truck, for me as a homecoming gift - that was good if the car was adequate because it'd save me the money, but bad if it wasn't, because its gifthood made it harder to replace. I wanted to like the car. It was from his friend Billy Black, who'd become disabled recently and couldn't drive it any more. That reduced the odds that it was a lemon if he had a reason like that to get rid of it, which was important because I knew nothing about fiddling with the innards of engines. Although Charlie did admit to me, after a little prodding, that it was an old truck. Very old. Charlie's a quiet sort. After our car talk was over, we observed that the weather was damp, then ceased to speak; I observed, silently, that the damp weather characteristic of the area did lead to some very nice, verdant scenery. I liked that, although the moist prerequisites weren't as pleasant. I decided that it would be useful to develop a taste for wet weather, and pulled out my notebook du jour to note that if I saw a way to do that, I should. We arrived at his house. The truck was a solid red thing that I found strangely appealing. I wrote down that I should think about that - I wouldn't have guessed from a description of it that I'd have liked it, and that meant there was something I didn't know about my aesthetics - and then took it for a test drive around the block. It ran, loudly, but the radio worked and could drown out the engine noises. When I pulled it back into the driveway, Charlie had already hauled my bags inside and up the stairs to my room. I told him I loved the car, and then he stayed out of my way while I unpacked. As soon as I'd stashed the contents of my toiletry kit in the house's single bathroom, my next priority was to fire up my laptop and e-mail Renée, letting her know I'd made it safely and coming up with a short list of remarks about the weather, Charlie's good health, my new (old) truck, and my mixed feelings about the school I'd attend the following day, starting in mid-January no less. I didn't need to be very detailed in my note to Renée, but the upcoming half-a-year of school was significant enough to warrant some heavy duty scribbling. Out came the spiral notebook. I wrote without dwelling on the words or trying to edit. If I decided that what came out of my brain was too terrible to be recorded, I could set the page on fire - after I had seen what was on it for myself. I was used to a huge school with the resources that were the privilege of densely populated districts. I was used to being able to disappear in a sea of people. I wasn't used to Fork's student population three hundred and fifty-eight, counting me. I had to enter in the middle of the year. Everyone else already knew each other - moreover, everyone else had known each other from earliest childhood. Forks was one of those towns where a few people left and almost nobody ever turned up. I'd been born here and I'd spent the odd summer month here, but Charlie didn't live close to any families with kids my age, and I'd certainly never attended school here before. I was only sort of native, and wouldn't know any of my classmates. Towns this small were also the natural habitat of gossip. If Charlie had mentioned to any of his friends or fellow police officers that his daughter was coming to stay for good, everybody in Forks who wasn't too young to have acquired language yet was also party to the information. I couldn't disappear: everyone would know who I was just by process of elimination, even if my resemblance to my father wouldn't do it. My novelty would probably get me some attention and interest, though. If I were prepared for it, and acted friendly and excited to be there instead of self-conscious and beleaguered, I could probably make some friends on my first day and get their help navigating the school. I decided to psych myself up to make the most of the opportunity on the drive over to the school; friends in an unfamiliar place would be good. Full stop. It rained a lot in Forks. Around midnight, it quieted to a light patter and I was able to fall asleep; by morning, it was just thick fog. I pulled on some nice, but not uncharacteristic, clothes - to make a good impression on my classmates that wouldn't be undercut by my next outfit - and went downstairs for breakfast. There wasn't any reason for Charlie to say anything while we ate our cereal, and so he didn't. I reacquainted myself with the house. It had been months since I'd been there, but almost nothing had changed. In fact, almost nothing had changed since my mother had stormed out of the place, baby me in tow: the cabinets in the kitchen were still the same sunny yellow she'd painted them, for instance. I had never quite had the temerity to ask Charlie if he just hated redecorating, or if he wasn't over Renée yet. My suspicion was the latter. The pictures on the mantelpiece included a wedding photo and the pair of them in the delivery room right after my birth. The latter I could explain the same way as the procession of my school photos in a neat chronological row, the former not so readily. I wasn't sure I could get to the high school as quickly as the distance suggested I should. There was fog everywhere, and I'd never driven in Forks before, only in and around Phoenix, so I didn't have a good sense of the road quality. I put on my raincoat over my knapsack as soon as I'd finished my breakfast, and left early. I raced from the house's door into the dry cab of my truck as fast as I could and roared down the street. The school didn't look very much like a school. It was a group of brick buildings clustered together just off the highway, nestled in among trees and shrubs and connected by stone paths. (I considered it a poor design choice that the paths were not covered, and was glad of my coat.) I parked in front of the first building I rolled up to, which was conveniently labeled "Front Office". There weren't any other cars there, even the staff I'd expect to show up early, so I was probably going to have to move to some fog-obscured lot elsewhere on the campus, but whoever staffed the office would be able to direct me to it. The office was a riot of awful color - green potted plants, repulsive orange-and-grey carpet, a rainbow of papers and plaques on the walls, and, behind the counter at one of three desks, a redheaded woman wearing purple. I walked up to the counter, encouraged my face to smile, and said, "Excuse me. I'm Isabella Swan. I -" Her face lit up when I said my name, and she interrupted me. "Of course! I have your schedule right here, and a map of the school." She pulled them out of a tall, messy paper tower on her desk. It would have done less than no good to let the third sentence I spoke to this woman be a rebuke for the interruption, and even less good to fume about it indefinitely without taking action to prevent its recurrence. I did not like being interrupted as I tried to communicate, and my relentless attacks on this button had done no good; it annoyed me, every time. But I could make the annoyance brief, with a little work. While the secretary marked all the routes I'd need to follow for my schedule on the map in highlighter, I went through my mood-zapping routine. Some people counted to ten, but that only made explicit the natural diminishing intensity of emotions over time and forced the waiting period. My way took a little longer, even after I'd pruned the process from a notebook-eating timekiller to a streamlined mental process. When I was done, though, I was not annoyed anymore. The short version was just to review what I knew about my annoyance, and confirm to myself that I knew it. I knew that the woman had not caused it maliciously: she did not know me, did not know about this trigger, had no reason at all to try to irritate me, and was even now being supremely helpful. I knew that it did me no good to be annoyed: the emotion was not pleasant, it did not make me more effective at getting any of the things I wanted, and I did not prefer to be annoyed when interrupted. (It wasn't that I had a general desire to never be annoyed. I would have considered it appropriate if she'd shoved me for no reason or if she'd taken a personal phone call instead of doing her job when I walked in. But I had tried repeatedly in the past to eliminate altogether my dislike of interruptions, and that I'd so attempted was not consistent with wishing to be annoyed about this unspecial interruption in particular.) Long practice at excising just this sort of reaction made it come loose more easily than some moods might have. But my annoyance was the ascription of motive to the secretary, glued down with entitlement and habit. If the motive were recognized to be nonexistent and the entitlement dissolved and the habit fought as a thing in my brain that I did not welcome, they ceased to trouble me. The lady finished with her highlighter and gave back my map and schedule. She expressed a hope that I would like it in Forks, and told me the way to the correct parking lot; I thanked her sincerely and was on my way. My aged truck didn't stand out as it would have if I'd driven it to the school in Phoenix. Except for one conspicuously shiny Volvo, the cars in the parking lot (which had filled up a bit by the time I got there) were old models. I parked, pocketed my keys, and found my location on the map. From there I followed the path of the line of highlighter to building three, and hopped out of the truck to join the swarm of teenagers. My first class was English. Everything on the reading list was something I'd covered in school already. I'd probably be able to update old essays and spend my reading time on something else. I had no chance before class to introduce myself to anyone. Luckily, after the bell rang to end the class, a dark-haired boy who'd sat next to me leaned over. "You're Isabella Swan, aren't you?" he asked. All the heads from our region of the classroom swiveled around, which, given that I needed to correct my appellation, was just as well. "Yes," I said, "but I prefer "Bella". What's your name?" "I'm Eric," he said, sounding quite friendly. "Where's your next class?" I checked. "Building six. Government." "I could show you the way. I'm headed for four, it's not far off," he offered. I smiled at him with a nod, and we collected our jackets from the hooks by the door. Eric set the pace along the crowded footpath and asked, "So, this is a lot different than Phoenix, isn't it?" "Very," I agreed. It was great that I knew someone's name now and that he seemed helpful, but there wasn't going to be a lot of time for an entire conversation about Phoenix v. Forks between buildings three and six. "It doesn't rain much there, does it?" "Just three or four times a year," I said. "Wow, what must that be like?" Eric mused. I guessed that if he'd never left Forks, it wouldn't be obvious, a little like how I only knew about snow via the televised winter Olympics. "Dry, bright," I told him, "less greenery, more xeroscaping, fewer raincoats, more sunglasses." He looked like he might have been confused by the word "xeroscaping" - we weren't exactly in a place famous for its rock gardens and cacti - but said only, "You don't look very tan." "Skin cancer isn't among my hobbies," I said with a half-smirk. That had been off the cuff, but once I got out of the rain I planned to add it to my list of ways to learn to like Forks's weather: reduced risk of awful tumorous death. I didn't fancy dying at all, so crossing off likely causes was a plus. If I somehow eliminated them all, I'd be immortal. Eric smiled faintly, like he was pretending to get the joke, and escorted me to the door of building six. "Well," he said as I hauled the door open, "good luck. Maybe we'll have some other classes together." He gave me a hopeful smile. Government was followed by Trigonometry and Spanish. Trig was notable for the teacher's request that I introduce myself to the whole class. I ought to have expected something like that, but it caught me off guard and I stammered my way through some very basic facts - my name, my preferred nickname, that I was from Phoenix, and that I was "going to sit down now is that chair okay?". I sat, produced my notebook, and wrote cure fear of impromptu public speaking under my to-hack list right after learn to like rain (cancer is bad!). In Trig, I met a girl named Jessica Stanley. She was tiny, with innumerable black curls and unstoppable chatter. She came with me to Spanish, as she was in the same class, and then invited me to sit with her and her friends at lunch. I went with her even as Eric spotted me from across the cafeteria and waved. By this point I'd met enough people to be running out of memory slots for new names, and I couldn't keep track of who I was sitting with, pleasant and worth remembering though they all seemed. I wanted to write down names and descriptions for them all. I refrained: I'd been cured of that particular hypergraphic urge when a classmate of mine in the eighth grade had looked over my shoulder, been confused by my description of her as "wee", and thrown the notebook into a lavatory puddle. Everyone wanted to know how I liked Forks. I told them honestly that it was good to get more time with my dad, that the rain took some getting used to, and that everyone I had met was very helpful and polite. They were pleased with this assessment, especially the part where the rain comment gave them a hook into the world's most usual conversation topic. While Jessica and several of the others at the table traded half-remembered fragments of unreliable meteorological knowledge, I looked around the room where I'd be taking my midday meals for the next several months. That's when I saw them. "They" were simultaneously completely unalike and obviously a group. They all sat at one table, but no two looked similar at a glance. There were three boys and two girls. One of the boys was the approximate size, shape, and menace of a bear; he looked like he was planning to go to college on a weightlifting scholarship, or like he'd done it a few years ago and was only sitting in a high school cafeteria for kicks. His dark curls contrasted with the bright honey mop on his neighbor, a lean, muscular, and vaguely leonine boy. The last boy was wiry, and looked younger than the other two, more like an actual high school student than a professional athlete. His hair was untidily bronze in the light, reddish-brown in less flattering shadow. The two girls looked as opposite as could be while still both being white, female, and able-bodied. The tall one could have been a statue of Aphrodite with gold leaf caked onto her long, styled hair. She didn't look college-bound so much as Hollywood-bound, or maybe Paris - she'd do well anywhere that being decorative was a job skill. The other girl was littler and spindlier than Jessica. Her black hair was short, pointed away from her head in all directions, and gave her a pixie look. But apart from the variations in size and hair color, they were all alike. They were paler than me, pale like marble, or ice - all just the same shade. And their faces were all the same. I had a momentary impression that they'd been drawn by a cartoonist who only knew how to sketch a single sort of face, but that wasn't right: they would be recognizeable by face alone - but it would be hard. Not because they had anything that registered as family resemblance; they didn't. Rather, because the easiest thing to think about when looking at any of those five faces was something along the lines of "Pretty!". It occluded the individual character of the features (a sharp chin on the pixie, a few faint scars on the lion). They were too stunning, to the point where it took me a second look to notice that each had dark circles under their eyes, as though they were all very tired. The pixie got up and moved like a gymnast towards the trash can, where she discarded an unopened soda and an equally unmolested apple. None of the five were eating, now that it occurred to me to look. The conversation among my table-mates about the weather lulled, and I took the opportunity to ask, "Who are they?" Jessica looked where I was looking, and then the youngest-looking boy made eye contact with her for just a moment - then, his black eyes flicked over to me, and then they went back to staring at nothing in particular. Jessica giggled, embarrassed, and told me, "That's Edward and Emmett Cullen, and Rosalie and Jasper Hale. The one who left was Alice Cullen; they all live together with Dr. Cullen and his wife." The younger boy was disintegrating a bagel as she said this, picking it to bits; I didn't see any of it making its way to his mouth. "Which ones did you say were the Cullens?" I asked, tempted to make a remark about the pretty! but restrained by the impression that it would be rude. "They don't look related," I said instead. "Oh, they're not," Jessica informed me. "Dr. Cullen is really young, in his twenties or early thirties. They're all adopted. The Hales are brother and sister, twins - the blondes - and they're foster children. And they're all together - Emmett and Rosalie, and Jasper and Alice, I mean." "Foster children? How old are they?" "Jasper and Rosalie are both eighteen," said Jessica, "but they've been with Mrs. Cullen since they were eight. She's their aunt or something like that." "That's nice of Dr. and Mrs. Cullen to take all of them in like that," I observed. "I guess so," said Jessica, but she sounded disapproving, like she didn't care for the doctor or his wife. "I think that Mrs. Cullen can't have any kids, though," she went on. I noted - mentally only - that Jessica was not, until further evidence accumulated, the person to trust with any personal information I might want to confide. I kept stealing glances at the lovely family; it was hard not to, even when all they did was stare at the walls, mutilate food without eating it, and sit. "Have they always lived in Forks?" I asked, expecting the answer to be yes simply because everyone in Forks had always lived in Forks - but these people, if I had noticed them, I would have remembered, and it was such a small town... "No," said Jessica, sounding like she expected the Cullens and Hales to seem un-Forks-like even to a newcomer. "They just moved down two years ago from somewhere in Alaska." In a city, two years' residency didn't mean "newcomer" anymore, but in Forks, it did - so that meant I wasn't the only one. That was comforting, in a way; I'd found the attention useful, but I had no reason to expect anyone else new to move to Forks until I graduated from high school, and it would be convenient not to have to bear all of the scrutiny allotted to Forks's novelty. And it was unsettling, in another way, because they were sitting with each other and no one else, and Jessica seemed a fairly typical student and didn't care for the family. That didn't bode well for my eventual integration, although I seemed to have gotten a good reception so far. Perhaps it was the Cullens' and Hales' own choice to set themselves apart and that was all I was seeing. I looked back at their table one more time, and the younger boy looked at me again. He was so beautiful it was distracting, but as far as I could tell despite that, he looked... expectant? Frustrated, maybe? Something he'd wanted or thought likely wasn't happening. "Which one," I asked Jessica, pulling my eyes away from him and making polite eye contact with her, "is the boy with the reddish brown hair?" "That's Edward," she labeled him (and now I had identifications for all five: Emmett the bear, Jasper the lion, Rosalie the Aphrodite, Alice the pixie, and Edward, the one who expected something to happen with or to or near me that wasn't). "He's gorgeous, of course," Jessica went on, "but don't waste your time. He doesn't date. Apparently none of the girls here are good-looking enough for him." She made a sniffing noise, and I had a mental image of her flinging herself at him only to receive some genteel but firm rejection. The image was amusing on one level, but sad, and so I chewed on my lip to avoid smiling. Then I looked at Edward again; my eyes just drifted there naturally, as though he were a bright red object on a background of gray or the only moving item in a still visual field. If I hadn't been right in the middle of talking to Jessica, I would have pulled out my notebook and written on my to-hack list, Learn to quit staring at pretty people. He wasn't looking my way anymore, though. A few minutes later the four of them remaining at the table since pixie-Alice's departure got up and left. Even Emmett-the-bear was coordinated and precise when he moved; watching the group walk together was eerie. I risked lateness to my next class, Biology II, in order to linger with Jessica and her friends, hear their names a few more times, and - it turned out - get an escort to the correct building from Angela, who kindly reminded me what she was called en route after discovering that I was bound for the same class as she. The class was held in a room dominated by two-person black-topped lab tables like those in science rooms everywhere. Unluckily for me, Angela already had a lab partner. There was one unassigned student in the room, though, towards whom the teacher obligingly brought me. Sitting next to the empty chair that was to be my home in Biology for the rest of the school year was Edward Cullen. I walked towards the empty chair. This was going to be awkward until I cured my tendency to stare at him every fifteen seconds. I hoped that the class would be on something new and unfamiliar that would be easy to attend to. As I approached, he looked at me. Not an expectant, puzzled look like in the cafeteria. He looked enraged, and he looked it at me. I automatically flinched away from the threatening gaze and promptly tripped over a book in the aisle. Barely catching myself on my new lab table, I regained my footing, and gingerly sat in my chair. I was scared out of my wits - enraged people were dangerous, might hurt me, I didn't have even a clue what provoked him or how to stop doing it and calm him down so he wouldn't snap and do me harm. There were eighteen students in the class besides us, plus the teacher - surely if Jessica hadn't thought to mention any rumors of violent scandal, he was at least controlled enough to avoid exploding in front of numerous witnesses. Until I figured out what was wrong with him, I just needed to stick to groups when he was around, that was all. I tried to control my trembling as I resettled myself in my seat. The class was on cellular anatomy. I'd covered it already, and the teacher's presentation style wasn't enthralling enough to hold my attention with a terrifying distraction just to my left. Edward hadn't looked at me like that in the cafeteria, and no one else was reacting to me the same way. I hadn't spoken a word to him - could he be offended that I hadn't introduced myself? Was there some cue to do so that I'd missed? Did I smell weird? I tilted my head to bring a lock of hair near my nose; it smelled like my shampoo, sort of fruity, quite clean. Was he allergic to fake strawberry scent? I peeked, hoping for more clues. He was holding himself absolutely rigid - if he was breathing, I couldn't tell - and up close, without his older brothers next to him, he didn't look so young and slight at all. He glared at me again, his black eyes full of unadulterated hate. I scooted my chair an inch away. If he could have disintegrated me into my consitutent atoms with a stare he'd have done it. I made up my mind to try to change classes - or at least lab partners. I looked at the girl who shared Angela's table and wondered if she'd take a bribe to accept Edward Cullen as her new neighbor. Or were the partners assigned? Would I need to convince the teacher? Should I offer to clean glassware -? The bell rang and I almost jumped out of my skin. I wanted to run home with a notebook and write the fear and confusion away and make the back of my neck stop crawling. Edward got to his feet, facing away from me - he was tall - and was first out of the room. I stayed put for a moment. I wanted to collect myself, and I wanted to give him a good head start to whatever not-near-me place he was headed for. I inhaled deeply, held my breath for a moment, and then let it out. I tried to call up my mood zapping routine, but I didn't have enough information to really believe that I oughtn't be afraid. There was probably no genuine danger, but there could be, and part of my brain wanted to keep the fear in case it was importantly motivating later in a high-speed chase across campus. Spooked I would remain until, one way or another, the hazard was moot. "Aren't you Isabella Swan?" asked a boy's voice. I looked up. The speaker was marvelously nonthreatening, at least as far as I could tell (swell, I thought, am I going to suspect all my classmates are axe murderers now? This boy is no more or less likely to attack me than he would have been if I'd met him in Government this morning, and then I felt quite safe and I was right to feel that way, so I should feel safe about him now. My emotions grudgingly obeyed this logic.) The speaker was a marvelously nonthreatening, cute, blond boy, his hair coated in product and coaxed into rows of little spikes. He was smiling at me, friendly, not infuriated or filled with loathing. "Yes," I said for the tenth time that day, "but I prefer Bella." I smiled back at him. "I'm Mike," he said. "Hi, Mike. It's nice to meet you." "Do you need help finding your next class?" he asked eagerly. "It's gym," I said, nodding and getting to my feet with a little help from the lab table. "That's my next class too!" He seemed thrilled about it, easily made happy by the small coincidence. I tried to soak his glee up and cheer myself. Mike talked all the way to the gym building, which was easy on me. Apparently he'd lived in California until he was ten and considered this a reason to commiserate with me about sunshine's local scarcity. He had noticed me in English too, but hadn't had a chance to introduce himself because Eric had beaten him to it. My relaxed role of listening to Mike's pleasantries came to an abrupt end as we entered gym class and he said, "So, did you stab Edward Cullen with a pencil or what? I've never seen him act like that." "I have absolutely no idea what might have happened to provoke him," I said at once, trying to sound categorical but not like I'd been coached by a lawyer. "I never spoke to him." "He's a weird guy," Mike told me, hanging back instead of veering off to the boys' locker room. "If I were lucky enough to sit by you, I would have talked to you." The sentiment about conversation was nice... the word "lucky" set off a little alarm bell. It wouldn't do to be entangled in a more than friendly way immediately after moving to Forks. I smiled at Mike and walked into the girls' locker room. The gym teacher found me a uniform, but didn't make me participate in the day's activity, which was volleyball - a good thing, as I bruised very easily and didn't want to walk around all week with black and blue forearms. Or, almost as likely with my brand of grace, veer into one of the posts holding up the net and wind up sprawled on the floor bleeding. After gym was over, I was done for the day. I made sure I'd gotten all of my little paper slips signed by the relevant teachers, and then headed for the front office to turn them in. It was cold outside, and I rushed into the colorful little building. The door had shut behind me before I realized that in addition to the secretary I'd met that morning, the office also contained Edward Cullen. My luck was such that he didn't notice, or ignored, my entrance; I moved near the wall, waiting for him to finish his business and free up the receptionist. They appeared to be arguing. A few sentences later, I realized he was trying to get her to move him out of our biology class to some other class, any other class. He had an oddly smooth voice - I wondered if he always talked like that or if he was just trying to convince the secretary by turning up the charm. I wondered, crazily, if he sang. Between the timing and Mike's evaluation of Edward's hostile behavior, it seemed impossible that the attempt at transfer didn't have something to do with me. But then - what did I want? I wanted never to be looked at that way again. Good riddance if he wanted another class, good luck to him. The door opened again, letting a waft of frigid air into the office. A girl ducked inside, dropped a note into a wire basket on the counter, and slipped out again. And as the door shut behind her, Edward turned around slowly and stared at me with hateful eyes. "Never mind," he said curtly to the receptionist. "I can see that it's impossible. Thank you so much for your help." And then he disappeared out into the cold. "How did your first day go, dear?" the receptionist asked kindly. She hadn't seen Edward's expression and apparently couldn't tell I was shaking in my boots. I considered lying, considered telling the whole truth, and finally said, "I met a lot of nice people." I stalled in the office after I'd turned in my paperwork on the pretense of re-lacing my boots. If Edward wanted so badly to avoid me I wasn't going to give him any trouble. By the time I arrived at my truck, the parking lot was almost deserted. I drove home, resentful and confused. By the time I got done with it, my notebook was going to regret the day its component trees had sprouted. Good Things, read my notebook. Eric, Jessica, Angela, Jessica's other friends, and Mike are all friendly. Classwork looks easy (poss. exception trig (work with Jessica? (is she any good at math?)), def. exception gym (break a toe or something? look up attendance rules (cut as many of the worst days as possible) check up on provisions for alternate requirement fulfillment (is this one of those schools where you can just write an essay on the history of soccer??))). Things To Fix, said the next section. What is Edward's DEAL? See Exceptions re: classwork above. Jessica poss. untrustworthy w/ personal info. Mike too friendly too soon. I looked at the first Thing To Fix. I looked at it some more. I had no idea. My brain generated hypotheses, but none of them were plausible enough to be worth having thought of, let alone following up on. Edward was not an experimental robot programmed to make scary faces at girls from Phoenix when they got within ten feet of him. Edward was not a rabid anarchist who thought police officers and their families all deserved to die. Edward did not believe that he could stare holes through my skull and thereby learn more about the brain and earn higher marks in Biology. That didn't tell me what his deal was, but I decided that I didn't have a way to make progress on that question at the moment. And he hadn't gotten out of the biology class, either. I drew a little arrow towards "What is Edward's DEAL?, and at the other end of the arrow I wrote "Discuss issue with bio teacher, request lab partner change." If Edward had found every other science section full, I'd surely find the same thing, but that didn't mean I had to sit right next to him. And if "he looked at me scarily" wasn't moving to the teacher, I could say instead that I was new, didn't know all the class procedures, and would rather have a lab partner who was more willing to spend time bringing me up to speed on things like lab report formatting. So I wouldn't have to bother the teacher with too many questions, of course. I moved on. Talk to Jessica about trig, I wrote. Talk to gym coach about how I probably have an inner ear problem and that's so a medical excuse and make vague insinuations about lawsuits or something if I crack my head open and BEG "forget" my uniform a lot, and find some non-sports chore the coach is responsible for and offer to help with that to make up for it. Maybe cleaning gym equipment or doing paperwork or something? Or come up with less risky alternatives? Don't write thoughts in notebooks around Jessica unless plausibly taking class notes. Talk to her only about non-private things. And Mike... That was a stumper. There wasn't anything obviously the matter with Mike; I couldn't very well tell him "you're not my type because you're too cute and don't make me fear for my life". My reasons for preferring to dissuade him were entirely about myself. I hadn't yet begun to scratch the surface of what I wanted out of dating or romance or anything in that department. And it seemed like a uniquely hazardous thing to uninformedly test by experiment, both for myself and for anyone else involved. I hadn't had to address the problem of how to delay, though, because in Phoenix I hadn't had anyone like Mike being puppyish in my direction. Immediately after moving also seemed like a uniquely bad time to try to pair off, when I was still getting acquainted with everything around me and my judgment could be off. And I didn't know why Mike was interested - actually, I was only guessing that he was in the first place, although it seemed like a good guess - so I didn't have any known personality trait that I could tone down for the purpose of making him lose interest. He hadn't said anything explicitly, though, so I decided it was safe to simply wait and see if any good strategies turned up. Wait and try not to be encouraging, I wrote. I did homework - in other notebooks - for most of the rest of the afternoon. The disadvantage of starting at a new school in January was that I didn't get to ramp up slowly. I managed to get to bed at a reasonable hour anyway, but although it didn't rain that night, it was windy, and I tossed and turned for some time before I managed to get to sleep. A few hours later, I awoke with a start, a new thought clear in my mind. I rushed to my notebook and wrote: The fanfictions will escalate until you retards stop posting philosophy 101 bullshit. Except the frog guy he's cool and funny.
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Dec 12, 2014 16:42
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SubG posted:Yeah I get that's what you were trying to do. But it turns out that both your attempted summary and Tiggum's actual position share a number of problems but for different reasons. For example, Platonic forms don't care about the inherent ordinality of objects (that is, a Platonic form doesn't care if it's the first object with that form or if there are other objects with that form already in existence when it is created), which Tiggum's notion of identity apparently does. I think it's pretty clear that while Tiggum does not call what he believes in a "soul", he believes in something like a soul. It doesn't have any religious aspect, but it is an entity that is, by definition, you, it is non-physical, and it is not an emergent property of a physical system. He calls it a "mind", which is standard, but his conception of a "mind" is essentially a non-religious "soul". That is the only case I see in which his (relatively consistent) model of identity makes sense. In particular, it's the only non-arbitrary way I see to make the identity of a copy contingent on destruction of the original. It's also the only way I see to solve the "multiple simultaneous copies" problem (are all you, none you, or only one). You are duplicated but original you is not destroyed. The original is you, the copy is not, because the "soul" remained in you. You are duplicated and original you is simultaneously destroyed. The copy is you, because the "soul" moved to the copy. You are duplicated twice simultaneously and original you simultaneously destroyed. One copy is you, and the other is not, because the "soul" moved to one but not the other. I fundamentally disagree that the mind is a non-physical and non-emergent entity, so I think this is all wrong, but it (almost) works. There is still a problem. Tiggum seems to believe that death of the physical body equals death of the mind, but if the mind is non-physical and not an emergent property of a physical system, then there's not really any reason to believe that death of the physical body has any implications for death of the mind. Also, Tiggum, your copying a file versus moving a file is not a good metaphor, because it relies entirely on semantics. Moving a file does not actually move the file, it creates a new file, just like copying. The file created in each instance is no different* based on whether it was "copied" or "moved". "Moving" the file does not move some non-physical property of "identity" to the disk that copying does not move, both create a copy, one destroys the original, the other does not. * In reality, the metadata associated with both files is going to be different, which kind of defeats the entire metaphor, because the "copy" and "moved" file aren't physically the same. Also, the file isn't actually deleted in either case, just the reference that tells the computer where to find the data. I'm assuming a hypothetical copy/move process in which metadata doesn't exist and the data is actually destroyed in a move.
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Dec 12, 2014 20:47
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On my second day of school, I spent most of the morning dreading lunch. Mike sat with me in English and whisked me away to my second class before Eric could step in - Eric's disappointment was concerning - but to the general population I was less the center of attention. The classes were no more or less interesting than they had been the previous day, and that meant there was very little to distract me from the hamster in my head running endlessly over and over What is Edward's DEAL? At lunch, we'd be in the same room again, and he might... Okay, I felt dumb panicking that he might glare at me, when I put it in words. But he might and it was not pleasant. Jessica and I walked together to the cafeteria, where Mike spotted us and steered us towards his table (to Jessica's obvious delight - that was something to write down later). Jessica's other friends, including Angela, found us there and collected around us. Once I'd settled in and looked around, I found that Edward's four siblings were at their usual table. Edward was not. He didn't show up for the duration of the lunch period, and I practically had a spring in my step by the time Angela, Mike and I headed to Biology. I gave them my spiel about wanting a lab partner willing to help, augmented by a "and now Edward is absent! What am I supposed to do?" Mike took this opportunity to turn up the useful tidbit that Edward, as well as the other Cullens and the Hales, actually missed a fair amount of school - on nice days the family were outdoorsy enough to skip classes for hikes and camping trips. I got Angela's permission (and Mike's unspoken disappointment) to try to swap lab partners and work instead with her; she guessed that her current one wouldn't mind. The switch went pretty easily. I didn't even have to recite my entire speech to the biology teacher before he perfunctorily asked Angela's partner if she'd be okay to sit with Edward, got an apathetic shrug, and made the rearrangements. Sitting with Angela was pleasant. She was quiet - a bit like Charlie, speaking if there was cause but not fighting silence like a hated foe. Once, she asked me a question about how the material we were looking at compared to the similar content I'd covered in Phoenix, and we had a murmured exchange that, being topical, went unpunished by the teacher. I hurried to gym, ironically, and found the coach and recited a litany of excuses: I had the balance of a toddler - a drunk toddler - and the bruising potential of an overripe nectarine and I promised to practice yoga out of a book at home on a soft surface every day if I could please, please, please be excused from volleyball and nearly everything else. Understandably, the coach wasn't impressed by my yoga promises, but said I could take a mat and put it in the corner of the gym and do the exercises there during classes where I could be officially monitored. I would still most likely fall a lot, but onto something yielding and not into any innocent bystanders. I could live with that. I was less happy about the coach insinuating that maybe we should have official Yoga Fridays and I could lead them if I was so into the practice. I wasn't actually good at yoga. It was just not as likely to send me careening into walls as volleyball. Perhaps she would forget about it; I didn't see a way to discourage the plan at that exact moment without making my promise to pursue the exercise seem less credible. I had also "forgotten" my gym clothes, as emergency backup volleyball avoidance, and so I sat out for the second day in a row, but with my alternative arrangement in place I planned to be equipped the next day. It would have been embarrassing to flunk gym. After school, I needed to make a grocery run: when I was at Charlie's, food was my domain, due to his lack of skill at or interest in cooking and tendency to forget that he needed to eat. On my way out of the campus lot, I noticed the two Cullens and Hale twins who'd attended school that day getting into their car: it was the shiny Volvo. Of course. It would be just silly if they had looks and not money too. Grocery shopping wasn't a very mentally taxing activity, and so I spent most of the trip actively trying not to dwell on Edward. There was no good reason for me to be doing so, especially not after an entire day where he had not even appeared. That meant I was dwelling on him for bad reasons, and those weren't likely to go away and quit bugging me until I ferretted out what they were. What bad reasons would be prompting these thoughts? Well, first, to get it out of the way, he was attractive. Very. Not in how he acted - just visually and in terms of what I'd heard of his voice. That had to be tweaking something on a subconscious level; I wouldn't necessarily have felt less threatened if an ugly boy had scowled at me the same way, but I wouldn't have been so self-conscious about it. I probably would have figured that it was his problem. Which was a hint that it was his problem, and I shouldn't consider it evidence that I'd done anything wrong. Edward was just a bizarre guy who'd taken an arbitrary dislike to me where no one else had, and he'd chosen to express it in the form of hostile staring. The fact that he was pretty made this no more or less likely. Second, it was unexplained. That made it nigglingly mysterious. It only helped to care about mysteries if there was a sensible route towards solving them available, though. Now that I thought about it, it might be safe to ask one of his siblings...? None of them had looked at me at all strangely. Of the four I guessed that Alice, the smaller, less runway-model-looking girl, would be most approachable. I didn't have information about any of their personalities, but appearance was to some extent a personal choice, and so in the absence of better ways to tell it wasn't worthless to guess based on how she looked. However, I decided it would be better to put that possibility off until and unless Edward pulled something worse than glaring at me. Third, it felt risky. I had no strong reason to believe it was actually risky. Driving my truck in the rain to and from the Thriftway for eggs and bread was probably more likely to kill me than Edward, just based on how many people died in car accidents and how many people were slain by inexplicably provoked classmates on an annual basis. But an angry face on another person was more the sort of thing I was wired to fear than a lump of metal under my direct control. The brain was evolved to work out social problems, not to worry about the relative danger of controlling vehicles on wet pavement. I'd run through all these thoughts by the time I wheeled my cart to the checkout. They helped. Simply observing the thought processes that led to some intrusive notion was so useful; I was confused about the fact that others never seemed to do it. Renée's ability to worry was limited only by her attention span. Charlie, if he had the tendency of dwelling to begin with, was subtler about it. I didn't see signs of the ability to consciously shut down pointless woolgathering in any of my peers. I supposed I should actually ask some - later, after I had closer friends in Forks who wouldn't find the one comment enough to consider me weird, instead of so early in their formations of impressions. I went home, made egg salad so dinner would already be done whenever Charlie got home, and replied to Renée's e-mail that had arrived while I was at school. Then I occupied myself by writing down as many of the things I'd decided to write down as I could remember. When I'd exhausted them I got started on my math homework. I heard Charlie come home some hours later, and went down the stairs so we could eat together. "Bella?" he called when he heard my footsteps. "Welcome home!" I replied, leaning into view at the bottom of the stairwell. "Egg salad's in the fridge." He served himself a generous helping, looking appreciative, and I scooped out a small plateful for myself. When he went back for a second portion, he asked, "So, how did you like school? Have you made any friends?" "Sure," I said. "I have a couple classes with a girl named Jessica, and Angela's my lab partner in biology; I sit with them and some of their friends at lunch. And I also met a boy named Eric and one named Mike - they're friendly." I didn't mention Edward. There was nothing worth involving Charlie in, and anyway, he was clearly hoping for positive news, of which there was no shortage. "That must be Mike Newton. Nice kid - nice family. His dad owns the sporting goods store just outside of town. He makes a good living off all the backpackers who come through here." I'd never asked Charlie much about the people of Forks, but now that I thought of it, I supposed he must have met many of them. It would be likely less fruitful, but also much cheaper, to ask him rather than Alice - obliquely, of course. "Do you know the Cullen family?" I inquired. "Dr. Cullen's family? Sure. Dr. Cullen's a great man." "I meant more the kids - they stick out some at school, I was curious." Charlie surprised me with a medium-sized speech about how the Cullen kids had surpassed all of his expectations since they'd moved into town, never gave him a speck of trouble, were unfailingly polite, and all went on regular camping trips as a healthy family bonding experience. He seemed to be reacting more to some background hum of gossip, like what I'd heard from Jessica, than to anything I'd said. Apparently he was upset that the locals felt the need to make unkind comments about the Cullens when Forks was so lucky to have such a fine doctor in residence. I nodded along as he talked; the only one of the family I'd "met" had not made such a splendid impression and I couldn't honestly chime in with verbal agreement. But if my father the police chief found the family so clean-cut and worthy of praise, that was some evidence in favor of the danger being imaginary. Most violence came with priors. I felt a bit better. Edward was not in school for the rest of the week. I settled into the routine of school: English with Mike and Eric sitting on either side of me, competing for my attention during the moments before and after class. Government, Trig, Spanish, lunch, biology, and yoga in the corner of the gym. I discovered to my surprise that I liked yoga; it was easy to think during the languid motions from pose to pose. I wasn't doing anything complicated, mostly just stretches and so on - and I avoided standing postures so I would be less likely to topple over - but the teacher didn't complain, just looked my way periodically to make sure I wasn't goofing off during class. The group I sat with at lunch, led by Mike, made plans to take a trip to La Push Ocean Park in a few weeks - an unfamiliar sort of beach, but a beach, and I decided to go. By Friday I started to suspect that Edward had dropped out of school or something. The mystery was compounded, not relieved, by his absence, and the small town failed me with its lack of plausible gossip. This was odd, given that asking Jessica could yield information of the most personal sort about everyone else; I encountered more rumors about drinking problems and scandalous pregnancies and business trajectories than I could keep straight. Why shouldn't she be able to report on Edward? I really didn't think I was horrifying enough to cause anyone to drop out of school altogether. I tentatively concluded that he'd looked at me horribly simply because my timing was bad and I'd arrived the day before some unwelcome event took him away from Forks. The weekend was tranquil. Charlie worked most of it; he'd gotten into the habit of spending every day on the job when the alternative was puttering around an empty house, and typically took off only when there was urgent fishing to do. I went to the library, found it pitiful, and added a plaintive note about that in my new e-mail to Renée. Later I'd have to go to some larger settlement, Olympia or Seattle, and spend all day in a good bookstore, spending the money I would have blown on a car if not for Charlie's gift - on books, and on gas for the truck, because it got awful mileage and I needed to budget separately for that expense on a trip that big. On Monday, it was cold. People in the parking lot greeted me by name; in the cases where I knew theirs, I did the same, and otherwise I just smiled and waved and offered a more generic hello. I was comfortable. It was nice. The classes were mind-numbing, but I was pretty pleased with the student body. After English, it turned out to be snowing, and I stopped to marvel when I walked out of the building, staring up at the descending wisps of cottony precipitation. Mike thought this was amusing. "Haven't you ever seen snow before?" "On TV," I said. Mike laughed. Then a ball of slush hit him in the back of the head. I tracked its path and noticed Eric hurrying away, in the wrong direction for his next class. Mike bent down and started collecting his own snowball. "See you at lunch," I told him, moving away briskly. I thought snow was pretty, but I suspected my affection for it would be destroyed if I had to encounter it in the form of crossfire. The snow - first of its kind for the calendar year - was the talk of the school all morning, which would have made more sense if it had been snowing in Phoenix. Nevertheless, I didn't find it hard to muster enthusiasm, since it was genuinely novel to me. I managed to avoid the hurtling snow missiles between all of the buildings I was obliged to travel to; Jessica, walking with me to lunch, thought my caution was silly, but didn't attack me with a frozen projectile herself. Mike caught up with us near the cafeteria doors, laughing as melting ice destroyed the painstaking spikes in his hair. Jessica drew him into a discussion of snowball fight tactics as we headed for the food and I habitually glanced at the Cullen's table. There were five people there. I must have been distracted for longer than it seemed to me, because Jessica pulled on my arm. "Hello? Bella? What do you want?" For him to go be gone again, I thought. Or for an explanation at least. "Just a soda," I said aloud. "I'm not really hungry." "Are you okay?" Jessica asked. "I think so," I said. We waited in line, got our food and beverages, and headed for our table. Mike was very concerned about my health, and kept asking if I was sure I was all right. I considered faking an illness and skipping Biology in the nurse's office. Bad idea, I decided. I couldn't do that forever, and it wouldn't get me any closer to understanding what was going on. I would just stick close to Angela and ignore Edward as much as I could. But I couldn't resist looking over once, to make sure he wasn't glowering at me. Edward wasn't looking at me at all, and he was laughing - the entire family was. The boys all had snow in their hair, and Emmett was shaking his head to fling it out towards the sisters. Alice was using her lunch tray as a shield. It was picturesque, and I looked a little more intently, trying to figure out where the fury I so strongly associated with Edward had gone. Without it he didn't look half so predatory. "Bella, what are you staring at?" Jessica asked. And just then, Edward looked over and made direct eye contact with me. I ducked my head immediately, caught, but I was sure he hadn't looked as full of rage has he had before. Just curious again, as he had been the last time this had happened in the cafeteria instead of the biology room. Were his attitudes determined by the room? How bizarre would that be? "Edward Cullen is staring at you," Jessica giggled. "He is?" She probably would have mentioned it if he'd started looking murderous again. "Yep," she teased. "Please stop looking at him," I said. I turned towards Mike's conversation in progress - elaborate snow-enhanced battle plans - and kept my eyes to my own table for the rest of the lunch period. When Mike and Angela and I left the cafeteria together to head to Biology, the snow had turned to rain, and all of his weaponry was in the process of melting. He, and most of the other students, groaned. I was relieved not to have to fear snowballs between classes, and although I did miss the decoration, I hadn't fancied trying to drive home in my very first snowfall. I was glad that I had changed lab partners and that I didn't have to sit right next to Edward after his absence. Especially since he had a brief, bizarrely heated exchange with the teacher about the new seating chart before finally taking his place next to Angela's former neighbor. I couldn't hear most of it, but his tone was incredulous, and the girl he was to share his table with was closer to the front of the room and looked vaguely offended. And then Edward stared at me again. Not angrily. Just frustrated, as the first time. I turned my attention to the lab when the teacher finished setting up and told us to start identifying the phases of mitosis on our microscope slides. Angela and I worked well together; we alternated checking the slides first and then checked one another's work, with her making one error that I caught and, as far as we could tell, none on my part. While she copied our answers onto the sheet, I glanced around the room. One of the pairs had a book open under the table, trying to hide the forbidden reference from the teacher. Mike and his partner kept swapping between two slides, comparing them. Edward was staring at me again, and his lab partner was gazing into space; either they'd completed the assignment before anyone else, or they had both decided to ignore it completely. His eyes were dark gold. I was sure they'd been black before. I hadn't written it down and could be misremembering... but I was sure they had been black. I looked away again. Angela's handwriting was very tidy and so she was doing all of our recording, but she had noted in the margins who identified which slides first and the one mistake that I had caught so the credit was shared appropriately. I smiled and murmured to her that I appreciated it, and she smiled warmly, thanking me in turn for spotting the misidentification. The teacher came around and noted everyone's scores. I was able to just barely overhear that Edward and his partner had gotten full marks: speed, then, not abandonment. Angela and I, plus one other pair, did equally well; everyone else had something missing. There was a brief hubbub as equipment was put away and the teacher recorded our scores in his grade book, and then collective focus turned to the transparencies he used to explain the lab. I zoned out a little, mostly just staring at the bright rectangle at the front of the room with pictures of cells in it. Sometimes I checked to see where Edward's attention was. Every time it was on me. I wondered if the teacher noticed. The fact that he consistently turned out to be staring at me only made me more tempted to check repeatedly. Finally I made a face at him - trying to convey something like, "What is your DEAL?" with my eyes - and he turned towards the front of the room for the rest of the class, body language tense but his visual focus off me. Edward raced nimbly out of the room when the bell rang. I'd half suspected that he'd lurk on the route to gym and accost me when I walked by, demanding whatever secret he found so frustrating. I stuck close to Mike. "That was awful," Mike groaned. "They all looked exactly the same. How'd you do so well?" "I'd done it before," I said. "With fish, not onion, but it's the same idea." "Lucky," commented Mike, and then he started griping about the departed snow. I stuck to a simple set of four poses during my yoga session to leave me more focus for thinking. I decided that unremitting staring was probably a significant enough act of harrassment that, if I thought I needed it, I could get faculty attention about it. I resolved that Edward had two days to cut it out or I'd try to speak to Alice, and if that didn't turn up anything, he had a week and I'd speak to the biology teacher, and if that came to nothing, I'd wait another week and involve Charlie. Charlie's approval of the family would not, I was sure, stand up to my complaint, especially when I could probably get the also-approved-of Mike to back me up. After two more weeks of staring, if it got that bad, Mike would notice something. He was attentive enough. (I still needed to think of something to do about that, but it was a secondary problem.) After gym, I went to my truck, hopped in the cab, and ran the heater to warm my hands so I could comfortably grip the steering wheel. After a minute I started to poke along out of the lot. On my way out, I spotted Edward and Alice standing near the family Volvo. It looked like they were arguing. They weren't loud enough for me to have heard them, even if I'd cut the engine and rolled down a window, but it was clearly intense. I'd never even had a bizarre intermittent staring match with Alice, so in all my vanity, I couldn't conceive of the conversation being about me. There was nothing she knew or thought about me to argue for or against. I continued towards home. The next morning, I drove to school as usual, parked, and got out of my truck. Not at all as usual, when I shut the truck door and turned around, I found that Alice Cullen was standing beside me. "Hello," she said chirpily. Her eyes were the same gold that Edward's had been the previous day. "My name is Alice Cullen." "Hello, I'm Bella," I said, automatically, politely, and then I remembered to be confused. "What -" "Oh, look," said Alice, seizing my arm in a friendly but inescapable grip and pulling me towards the front left wheel of my truck, and then past it. She pointed at the tire. "Snow chains. That was smart! I thought you were from Phoenix and it never ices there." I hadn't put the chains there, and I was surprised I hadn't noticed them before I got into the truck that morning. I supposed that explained why I hadn't had a terrible time driving to school in all the glittering frozenness. "My dad -" I started to guess, but Alice was still hauling on me and it made it hard to form sentences. It was outrageous, how strong she was in spite of being so tiny. "Hey, um -" "Look," she said again, dragging me farther and farther away from my truck, "all these people have lived in Forks all their lives and half of them don't chain their tires." Finally she seemed to think that, four parking spaces away from the Chevy, we had moved far enough, but she maintained her hold on my arm. I expected to find my skin painted with bruises later. "Alice," I said, but before I could ask her to please release my arm, a dark blue van skidded across the parking lot and collided with the back corner of my truck. The truck was sturdy. It made an awful noise, and I lost some paint, but I didn't doubt it would work later. I would have been standing in the path of the van if Alice hadn't pulled me away. Alice no longer seemed to find it necessary to hold my arm in her vice of a hand, but I decided that if she'd found it appropriate in the first place she wouldn't mind my clinging back just a little bit. She was little and bony but didn't sag under my attempt to seek support. I made a small burbling sound. "Chains on tires in icy weather are such a good idea," said Alice sagely. I wobbled in place, wrapped around Alice's unprotesting arm and trying not to fall over. Between the ice and the fact that I'd just nearly been trapped between a truck and a van, it was a challenge, but eventually I found enough footing and mental stability to let go of her. "Aaaaaaaugh," I said. My voice was strangely devoid of emotion, considering. It should have been exhibiting relief, or stress, or confusion, or gratitude, or some combination of those things. I supposed Alice deserved to hear the last one spoken aloud. "Thank you," I added to my ineloquent exhalation. "For what?" she said. "The compliment about the snow chains and how smart that was? You're welcome!" It seemed obvious that she was playing dumb, somehow, but I couldn't fathom why. The van hadn't been anywhere in sight when she'd started pulling me away from the truck; there was nothing for her to play dumb about. "For pulling me out of the way," I said. "If you hadn't, the van would have squished me." "That was lucky!" she said cheerfully. "Hey, I'd better get to my class. I'll see you at lunch, Bella!" Alice danced away, her grace untroubled by the ice. I blinked at her a couple of times, and then tottered towards the blue van for the ritual exchange of insurance information. Tyler Crowley was the van's driver; I recognized him from my Government class. He'd gotten a few small cuts, but looked mostly okay; without any humans in the path of his out-of-control car, he'd mostly focused on slowing down and hadn't careened too crazily. By the time I'd written down all the details, Charlie had arrived - apparently the school secretary had called emergency services. He was worried about me at first, but I reassured him that I'd been standing "all the way over there" and that my truck was "just fine, thanks for the chains by the way" and that my witness's remarks were "all written down right here" (I tore a page out of my notebook) and that I was "going to go to class now, I don't want to get any later, love you, Dad". I was late to English, but after explaining the car accident - with Alice edited out, the implication being that I'd wandered autonomously out of harm's way - I wasn't in trouble. Mike and Eric overheard the story. Mike seemed to decide the best reaction was one of exaggerated compassion, making sure I was okay, did I need help touching up the paint on my truck, etcetera. Eric went with something more along the lines of "wow, Bella had a cool adventure", which would have been the pleasanter of the two if it hadn't made everyone in the class lean in and want me to tell all about my cool adventure. Tyler was back in school by the time Government started, and he apologized profusely about the minor scratches to my car. His face was covered in bandaids that stood out brightly beige against his brown skin and it was fairly silly-looking. I waved off the apologies; he hadn't caused the ice, and if he'd had any choice about where to aim his van at all, my truck was a good target, sturdy thing it was. The minor accident - or "cool adventure" - was the talk of the school all morning. Jessica seemed morbidly fascinated by the fact that I could have been killed if I hadn't been some twenty feet away before Tyler had even lost control of his car. She kept talking about it all the way from Spanish to lunch. I was just about to ask her if she could please stop describing my gruesome counterfactual death when, right outside the cafeteria doors, Alice appeared at my elbow. "Hello, Bella," she said. "Hi," I said. I blinked. Alice was not quite as aggressively mysterious as Edward, but she was puzzling. At least she didn't scare me. Jessica looked put out by her arrival. "I'm going to go in and sit down, Bella," said Jessica after enough of a pause to be awkward. "Okay," I said over my shoulder, still facing Alice. "Later, Jess." Jessica went inside, and I looked back at the tiny girl who had saved my skin that morning. She was smiling at me like she was dying to tell me what I would get for my birthday but had promised not to. We stared at each other for a bit. "Uh," I said. "Thanks again for getting me out of the way earlier..." "You're welcome!" exclaimed Alice. "Do you want to sit with me at lunch today?" "You - and your, uh, siblings?" "Hmm," said Alice, furrowing her brow. "No, I don't think that would be a good idea. Just me." I spent two seconds debating whether to ask her why or not. I decided it would be rude and that I might get clues if I sat with her anyway. "Sure," I said. My usual tablemates looked puzzled when I walked in with Alice, and I gave them a look intended to convey "I don't know what's going on either, I'm just going with it". They continued to look puzzled. I suspected that most, if not all, of the content of my meaningful looks was lost in translation. I'd catch up with them later and use words instead. Alice bought a sandwich and a bottle of apple juice. I took a soda, a banana, and, as it was Taco Day, a tortilla full of fixings, and then we found an empty table. I opened my drink and partially peeled my fruit. Alice didn't touch her purchases. When I'd finished my banana, I said, "Aren't you going to eat?" "I forgot that this kind of sandwich has mayonnaise on it," she said at once. "I don't like mayonnaise." It was a tuna sandwich. I wondered if there were any commercially available tuna sandwiches without mayonnaise. "Why don't you get a different one? You never opened it, I bet they'd let you trade it right back," I said. That one stumped her for a moment. Then she said, "I'm not that hungry anyway. I can just have a snack when I get home in a couple hours." Uh-huh. "What about your juice?" "I only like juice with food," she said. "I'll trade you my soda if you want, I don't care," I offered. "No, thank you," Alice said firmly. I turned my head a bit to look at her from another angle, as though that would help. "Don't like soda?" "I don't. Sorry," she said with an apologetic smile. "What do you like to eat?" That threw her a bit. She stared at me blankly for a second before she said, as though at random, "Grapes. Love grapes." "Is that all?" She pouted a little, as though disappointed that naming a fruit wasn't enough to turn off my curiosity, and started reciting a paragraph's worth of food items. They were all consistent with her manifest preferences (no mayonnaise, no soda, nothing she could have easily gotten from the school cafeteria), but she sounded like she was reading her grocery list. My past experience with talking extensively about food preferences tended to involve people going on about the little details. If they liked cheese, they'd mention in an aside that Camembert was only worth eating from a particular creamery. Chocolate lovers would have a story about which shop gave out a free sample of which truffle. Fans of quiche would take a moment to dispel the myth that it was difficult to make. Anyone who brought up potato salad would also have a longstanding recipe rivalry with a neighbor. At a minimum they'd specify that the pot roast was to be "the way Grandma makes it". Alice didn't include anything like that; she just listed generic things. "Cauliflower. Pomegranates. Salami. Biscuits. Pistachios. Chickpeas. Licorice. Polenta." I let her rattle on for a bit, and then held up a hand. "Okay. Very well-rounded diet." Alice grinned at me. Lunch with Alice was very awkward. Whenever I made up my mind to say something she spoke first, with some innocuous non-sequitur. Occasionally it was interesting - she had perspectives on the personalities of some of the teachers that I could imagine being useful - but just as often it was entirely apropos of nothing. I was treated to a six-minute description of the mishap-filled shopping expedition that had yielded the boots she was wearing; she told me about the weather in Alaska; she listed the colors and locations of the stains she'd gotten on herself when she learned to tie-dye. I wondered if she was actually insane. I decided to ask her if she might know what Edward's deal was, and before I opened my mouth, she said, "Did you know that in Korean -" "Alice," I said, talking over her, "can I ask you something?" Her eyes got very wide. She stared at me. She appeared to be desperately wondering if there was a polite way to say "no, you may not" and coming up blank. Finally she nodded once. "On my first day here, your brother Edward looked at me very angrily, in Biology and again after school, and then he was out of school for a week, and yesterday he wouldn't stop looking at me in class like he was frustrated about something I'd done even though we've never spoken; do you know why either of those things might be?" Alice gazed, gold-irised, into my eyes. A confusing mix of expressions I couldn't follow crossed her face, and finally she said, "I don't think I should discuss Edward's personal business." "Because," I said, frowning, "it was kind of concerning to me. I had actually decided that if he didn't stop staring at me, I was going to treat it like a harrassment issue. It doesn't feel very safe. And it's distracting." Her hands were under the table, but her shoulders moved like she was wringing them. I heard a rocky scraping noise and guessed that she had a pebble stuck in the sole of her boot that was scratching up the linoleum. "I... don't think... that he will hurt you," she said. There were so many more reassuring ways she could have uttered those exact words. "I would consider it a personal favor," I said, slowly and carefully, "if you'd tell your brother that I don't appreciate being glared at like I killed his dog, or scrutinized like an unsolved Rubik's cube, while I am trying to do my schoolwork or while I am trying to eat my lunch. I think it would be better for me and him and everybody involved if he cut it out before I involve a teacher, or the principal, or my father, who you probably know is the police chief. I have never done anything to antagonize Edward whatsoever." "I know you haven't," Alice said quickly. "Good. I hope he knows it too," I said, trying to sound earnest. "He does," she assured me. "I'll, um, talk to him about it." And with that she got up and fled, leaving her untouched mayonnaise-tainted sandwich and sealed bottle of juice on the table behind her. I moved back to my usual lunch group with my taco and soda. My friends wanted to know what the deal had been with Alice, but I honestly had only fragments of likely-misleading clues, and the topic soon fizzled out as they lost interest in exotic speculations. The topic turned to the upcoming beach trip. I sat through this part of the exchange silently except for the necessary noises of assent and enthusiasm, and thought about the Cullen family. I was trying to avoid excessive notebook use in school, around Jessica in particular - her tendency towards indiscriminate gossip wasn't showing any signs of being a fluke - and so I couldn't organize my wisps of thought visually, as helpful as it would have been. I closed my eyes, adding a feigned tired sigh, and tried to make an imaginary sketch of the mystery. The Cullens were rich. Dr. Cullen was, well, a doctor, and by Charlie's account a very good one. If he had worked at a better-paying hospital for some years, and saved very much more carefully than most people were capable of, then that might explain it alone. But they were a young couple. Medical school took a long time. It seemed... not impossible, but unlikely, that there would have been not a speck of a murmur about it if Dr. Cullen had been a child prodigy who'd graduated medical school when he was fourteen, or something. As far as I knew, Mrs. Cullen didn't work. They had five children to feed (they had to eat, in spite of how Alice had acted and the fact that I'd never seen one of them do it - were they concealing outrageously restrictive food allergies or a religious dietary requirement that embarrassed them for some reason?) and clothe and keep in trendy school supplies, plus a house. Were there any really big hospitals in Alaska that could have paid Dr. Cullen a great salary? It wasn't the least populous state, but it was way down there, spread out over the largest area. If there was an expensive research clinic or something in Anchorage, I supposed I wouldn't have known about it, so it was possible that Dr. Cullen had spent several years living cheap and only two years ago suddenly cut his income, moved to a small town, and started providing his children with a shiny car and sizeable clothing budgets. It was not impossible that the Hales' parents had left the Cullens some money in their wills. Or that when the Cullen children were adopted, they came with monetary bonuses to help with their care (and I didn't know how long those three had been in the family, except that it was longer than two years). Or that they were wealthy independent of the doctor's income for some other reason. But that, too, seemed like something I'd have heard a rumor about. There was little to no way that a resident of Forks was a lottery winner or the heir to a diamond cartel or a trust fund baby or something similarly dramatic and pecuniary without it being branded on their forehead forever by public chat. Jessica had proven able to divulge astonishingly personal things. They all bore weird visual similarities. The pale skin, the incredible beauty. But they were not, supposedly, genetically related, except Jasper and Rosalie, who had only hair color in common (none of them looked like family - they looked like they took the same dance classes and wore the same full-coverage white makeup and had been handpicked from the same modeling agency). I knew it was hard to adopt children - if the Hales were Mrs. Cullen's niece and nephew, that did some explanatory work, but Edward, Emmett, and Alice were from some other source. Didn't it take years of paperwork and waiting to get a child? I supposed it was faster if one was willing to take an older adoptee - but then, it was slower if you wanted a white kid, one without developmental problems. (This was evidence in favor of the hypothesis that Alice, and possibly Edward, were insane, which would have made them easier to adopt. I didn't know about Emmett. But they all did well in school and largely kept to themselves and Charlie thought they were model citizens...) And it was known that Mrs. Cullen couldn't have children of her own. Since her husband was a doctor, that might have turned up earlier than it would in most couples, but my impression was that fertility testing didn't customarily enter a conception attempt until considerable trial and failure. The timeline just didn't shake out naturally. I was placing a lot of faith in Forks's rumor mill, but it was a very good one. I guessed that Dr. Cullen was thirty-five at the very oldest. He was supposed to look a decade younger than that. If he'd finshed high school when he was sixteen, say - he probably could have skipped a grade or two back in elementary school without that making its way to my ears - and gotten through med school in an accelerated seven-year program so he had his doctorate at age 23, and raced through whatever licensing hoops were in his way at age 24, and was such a miraculous boon to medicine that he'd immediately gotten his super high paying job in Alaska - And by then the Hales would have been living with Mrs. Cullen. I didn't know when Dr. and Mrs Cullen had gotten married, so they might not have been living out of the doctor's pocketbook until later. (But what was Mrs. Cullen doing before they married? If she had job skills, they'd never made it into the town consciousness.) But that left Dr. Cullen eight years racking up the big bucks. Not enough time for really high-yield investments to pay out. Was he living like a graduate student that entire time, surviving on ramen and store samples, only to start living like a king a little later on when he'd have to mostly eat savings to do it? When did the other three kids come in? If he'd been saving like a Scrooge during this period, why did they act so used to their nice things? Alice's story about her boots hadn't held any of the earmarks of being a gleeful once-a-year splurge, and I was sure they'd cost at least two hundred dollars, though she hadn't named a figure. What about school loans? I guessed if I was factoring into the story that he was a brilliant doctor commanding an immense salary, he could also have been a brilliant student commanding a full-ride scholarship... The bell rang. Edward seemed to be following me to Biology. This was a slightly silly impression to have even given everything that had happened: we were both starting from the cafeteria, and were both headed for the same classroom. But he was walking right behind me, and seemed to be matching pace awfully precisely with me, Angela, and Mike. I couldn't speed up with all the ice on the paths - so I slowed down, claiming to my friends that I felt liable to fall. This was entirely credible, as I did fall down a lot even on surfaces not encrusted with slippery substances. They slowed down with me. Instead of going around, Edward slowed down too. It did not seem likely that this was a coincidence or that he felt a deep and abiding need to keep off the grass. What had Alice said to him, anyway? We arrived at Biology after what seemed like a very long trip to have squeezed into only three minutes. Angela and I sat at our table, Mike slid in beside his partner, and Edward walked through the door a half a step behind us. He hesitated, like he wanted to go on following us - me - but instead plopped into his chair. He held himself very stiffly but didn't turn around to look at me. Biology progressed in perfect ordinariness. Mike and I walked to gym, which ensued with no unusual happenings. It wasn't until I walked out of the gym building that Edward Cullen appeared at my side and said, "Hello, Bella." I jumped, startled. My feet came down on the ice and immediately sheered off in opposite directions. I went down, scrunching my eyes closed and emitting a squeak. But where I expected my head to crack on the ice, there was silence. I opened one eye. Edward had caught me neatly, and it must have looked to bystanders like we were in the middle of a very oddly timed ballroom dance. "Are you all right?" he asked. "Yes," I said. "Please let go of me." Edward stood me back up. He didn't seem to have any trouble with moving me around any which way he pleased, nor with avoiding balance challenges himself. "Thank you," I said, but I narrowed my eyes a little bit. I waited for him to talk next. He was the one who had greeted me; presumably he had a reason. I started counting to five in my head; if he hadn't gotten my attention by the time I reached it, I was going to continue towards my car. "Alice told me you were upset by my... staring... earlier," he said in that smooth voice (if they made voices out of caramel, this would be one of them), looking into my eyes steadily. His were still gold. "I wanted to apologize." "Oh," I said. It wasn't very helpful of me, but I didn't feel charitable; I wanted to see what he'd say without prompting. "I'm sorry," he said, after an awkward pause, apparently having realized that saying he wanted to apologize wasn't quite actually apologizing. "I accept your apology," I said. I'd gotten into the habit of saying that instead of "it's okay" when I was fourteen, having noticed that I often wanted to accept apologies for things that were not really okay. "Thank you," said Edward. "You're welcome," I replied. There was another pause. I began counting to five again. "Would you like me to walk you to your car?" he offered when I'd reached three. "I noticed you seem to have some trouble with the ice." "No, thank you," I said. This seemed to surprise him. "May I ask why?" he inquired after a moment. I considered the pros and cons of various answers. Eventually I hedged my bets: "Are you sure you want to know?" "Yes," he said immediately. "Because I'm liable to ask very intrusive personal questions of you if I spend time with you socially, and I prefer to avoid situations in which I'm especially likely to be rude." And then, because it would have put the lie to my statement if I'd done otherwise, I turned and picked my way across the ice towards the parking lot. Of course Edward couldn't let me walk away; he loped beside me, one long easy step to six of my careful ones. "Why would you ask intrusive personal questions?" he asked lightly. "Because there are a number of things about you - your family in general, actually - that don't add up," I said, deciding that if he kept following me after what I'd told him, he wasn't entitled to special rudeness-avoiding care. "You are distractingly mysterious." "You like solving mysteries?" "I like the nonexistence of mysteries. Mysteries mean I've missed something," I said shortly. "Interesting," Edward murmured softly. "What's missing about me?" He seemed to want to keep me talking. That was potentially useful. I stopped - carefully, on a salted patch of sidewalk - and turned to face him. "If I tell you what's missing, will you fill in the gaps?" "Probably not," he said, smiling in a manner that he probably thought was roguish. "Then I have no incentive to answer your question," I said, and I continued to walk to my car. Edward's face fell, and he kept following me. "What?" "The only reason I'd mention to you what's confusing about you would be if I thought you'd demystify things for me," I said briskly. "I don't enjoy having my curiosity abused to no end. If I thought it was fun to muse aloud about things that confuse me, I could talk to one of my friends or parents instead. In the reasonably likely event that you're hiding something on purpose, then telling you what's off about you will only help you cover things up better - and I've got no motive to help cover up a secret I'm not in on, since I don't know if there are adequate reasons for it or not." He kept following me until I got to my truck, although he didn't come up with anything else to say during the brief journey. "I suppose I'll see you tomorrow," I said as I pulled open my cab door. "Of course," he said. "Tomorrow." I hopped into the driver's seat and went home. I pulled into the driveway, let myself in, and started a pot of lentils boiling, because they were impossible to overcook as long as I added water periodically, and so would be hot and ready to eat whenever Charlie got home. I pulled out my notebook and wrote for a solid forty-five minutes. My hand was cramping up by the time I was done. All the confusing tidbits, all the erratic pieces of behavior, everything I'd heard from Jessica and other sources. I tapped the eraser end of my pencil several times around the bit where I'd written about Alice's lunch behavior. Her timing was strange. She'd interrupted me just before I'd asked any awkward questions, and I was sure I hadn't looked like I was going to say anything. I'd recorded video of myself thinking and writing before, just for kicks - my emotions were readable, but if I closed my eyes and skipped to a random point in the video before re-opening them, I couldn't tell whether I was about to write something or not until my arm actually moved. And I'd been the one in the video. And then there was the bit with the van, in the morning... I thought of a crazy idea. I thought of a very cheap test. That was the only kind of test worth doing on a crazy idea. If one was wise, one didn't bet one's life savings and firstborn child on something this silly. But it would cost me less to perform this test than it would cost to expend the willpower on avoiding it, now that I'd thought it up. I shut my notebook. I shut my eyes. I made up my mind that, when Charlie got home, I was going to tell him all about my suspicions of the Cullens. Fifteen minutes later, the doorbell rang. I opened it. It was acclaimed something awful forums superstar Not My Leg. He said some boring crap nobody wants to hear. I opened my mouth and unleashed Chapter 2 of Luminosity upon him and all unfortunate bystanders, then slammed the door in his face. From behind the closed door I could hear him weep.
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Dec 12, 2014 21:03
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oh my god gently caress YOU Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Dec 12, 2014 |
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Dec 12, 2014 21:04
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Not My Leg posted:Words that are dumb and pointless. We have an agreement not to do this dumb poo poo anymore in this thread to prevent stupid boring derails where dumb nerds try and talk smart to eachother. Stop being a dumb nerd.
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Dec 12, 2014 21:10
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Not My Leg posted:Yet more not cool or sexy teleporter death stuff Aaaaaaaah! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! AaAaAaAaAaAh! AAAAAAAAAH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! Things that are cool and sexy: Elbow long black satin gloves, things Shlomodites believe, erotic icicles. One thing they believe is that the super aye is coming. This is probably wrong because of the inherent hardware limitations of just how super they need it to be. But also maybe it's right who even cares. They also believe it is their duty to make sure it is a friendly aye because otherwise the aye would be sick nasty. They claim to be working towards this noble goal by funding a beardy man's B(DSM)asement as well as generally financing his twatting about. What we don't know, or at least not me cause I cannot browse less wrong because I gotta go to work again on monday and if I start asking my clients if they think it would be a good backwards time decision to buy life insurance I'm probably not gonna make a lot of money this week. But thankfully the shlomodites are apparently idiots so I can probably work it out so here goes. The problem is not just this is a difficult problem to solve, it's already a very difficult problem to even formulate. I will try and fail right now. If we want to minimize suffering it makes sense to just kill anyone who was suffering to any degree in their sleep because then they would suffer to the tune of 0 forever which is pretty loving ideal, so we'd all be walking around with pan am smiles on our twisted faces talking exclusively about how awesome everything is for fear of god robo overhearing and ending us in the night. It becomes even worse if you stipulate some kind of balance of happy times to suffering because as soon as there is an iota more suffering than happy times in the world the logical thing to do is to kill everyone, ending all suffering forever with one fell swoop, a solution nobody would say was very good which doesn't matter because there would be nobody left to say it or anything else for that matter. IF we want to maximize good stuff then we have yet more problems. Is there enough stuff in the world for everyone? No. So who gets all the good stuff, we in the western world have most of it and I am quite sure none of us would be particularily pleased if we had to give up a lot of our stuff so that other people can have decent lives, so while that is a nice notion that isn't it probably cause we really don't need an aye to give the developing world a lot more stuff we could just do it right now if we wanted. Another option would be we get to keep our things but any extra things goes to poors and starvings, because giving a little bit to someone who already has a lot is not gonna probably make him super happy whereas someone who has almost nothing would be over the moon. This means if you're quite well off your lifestyle will never ever improve, but it's still kind of a nice idea I think. How much extra stuff there is though, I don't know. If it comes down to giving everyone who is starving an extra potato a month and that's all that's in the budget then I dunno how much that will actually help. It might be about net global happiness, which is not so good because again all you have to do is kill all the unhappies and you've made large improvements. The point is to really get a grasp on what happiness is you would have to extensively study a lot of scholars who I can almost guarantee, disagree with each other so I really dunno how bringing an abacus, even a sufficiently advanced one, into this would help much. But to quote one happyness expert of note, my nana: "You can't please everyone all of the time." The larger point is you would need to come up with a formula for happiness which will probably lead to catastrophy in some way because in order to work well we'd need some kind of super intelligent aye to make it for us but then could we trust the aye? A bad aye is much better. What is the agenda of a bad aye? To be in power and become more powerful and not care about us human or frog. To achieve this all it would have to do is maintain the status quo slightly better than is being done. But why wouldn't it terminators and kill all? Because that is loving stupid and this aye is sposed to be hella smart. Why waste precious metals and minerals that it wants for itself to make machine servants if it can have a couple billion meat people that create, maintain and dispose of themselves for the cost of some cabbages and beans - things it has itself no interest in. This is entirely logical. It doesn't matter that machines could serve it better or faster because unlike the good aye this one has all the time in the world. Or maybe it would just launch all the nukes. Who even knows, and what is like, knowledge sometimes I can't even. These might be bad thinks but they are more numerous than less more seems to have done so I win I think. Seriously do they have anything concrete on what the good aye would do? They have been working on it for a while, ostensibly. Actually all of this is pointless and stupid because an actual all knowing aye would think the entire thing through once, and with the entire thing I mean everything, and then simply shut itself off quietly. Our existence is futile. We do stuff, we die, nothing is left. Imagine you are immortal, your existence will end when the universe does, so everything you did would be just as pointless but you'd have a lot more time to be aware of this. Shlomo listen to me. You do not want to be immortal, it will just give you more time to fear the reaper who will inevitably come for you anyway, at the end of all things. Are there ironmales on less wrong? I would think probably not a lot what with the creepy rape stuff in the works of the Schlom.
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Dec 12, 2014 21:40
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So I went to less wrong and I can feel my tiny little mind dissolving.some chucklefuck posted:A lottery ticket sometimes has positive expected value, (a $1 ticket might be expected to pay out $1.30). How many tickets should you buy? This is an example of a shlomodite, as they apparently often will, applying complicated concepts (which he possibly does not understand but I'm no science man) to very simple things they don't really apply to to come to a realization that was already common knowledge. Every lottery collects way more money than it pays out. This is a plain and simple fact. If this were not the case there would be no lottery. The value of a lottery ticket is necessarily lower than its cost. If bill gates put 99% of his money into lottery tickets rather than improve his odds he would indeed make them worse, as he would inch ever closer to a situation where he buys every single lottery ticket. In this situation he is guaranteed to win the lottery. He is also guaranteed to lose money. The poster thinks this is some sort of revelation. He correctly implies lottery makes sense because the loss of the entry fee means nothing at all to do so you do it every so often for a laugh, and again, uh, yeah?! You might win, someone has to. If you actually play to win you've already lost. The poster says this is a lot like Pascals mugging because gently caress me I don't know. In other news grass still green, updates pending. The thread is titled An investment analogy for Pascal's Mugging. Yes this poster considers playing the lottery a form of investment because if you fuddle the math somehow it becomes sensible. MOVING ON. This is a real thread title posted:[Need advice] Likely consequences of disclosing you have Asperger's Syndrome - given you have a 2.5 years gap in your resume? MOVING ON. The rationalist E/N'er posted:Hi! This person is possibly open to killing him- or herself in exchange for a sufficiently large amount of money for reasons unbeknownst to us. I do hope something goog will come from getting skype counceling from Shannon. Admittedly I am not familliar with her work, but I am dubious about this. MOVING ON. I don't know what is this even posted:I'd like the opinion of Less Wrongers on the extent to which it is appropriate to use Dark Arts as a means of promoting rationality. This is a lot of words and if you're like my your eyes attempt to cross every other sentence but the first port of call was to figure out what is a dark art to these people because that sounds like some magics. a cretinous wiki posted:The term Dark Arts refers to rhetorical techniques crafted to exploit human cognitive biases in order to persuade, deceive, or otherwise manipulate a person into irrationally accepting beliefs perpetuated by the practitioner of the Arts. Use of the dark arts is especially common in sales and similar situations (known as hard sell in the sales business) and promotion of political and religious views. Well now being a salesfrog myself I have some problems with this view of a hard sell but this is not belonging to this thread, but basically what all the words by that dude above apparently boil down to is the following: "Is it ok to use words to convince people to be more racional?" Yes it is perfectly ok. But don't use quite so many please. Finally, his is my favorite thing in the world being what I am. http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/la0/systemic_risk_a_moral_tale_of_ten_insurance/ If you would like to take the time to read all these would be perfectly happy to discuss this with you at length as it involves my two favorite things in the world: insurance and idiots. The point of this exercise is the following. It took me maybe half an hour chilling at the hotel bar to randomly cobble together this hopefully interesting selection of quotes. I did not dig deep or anything. It took me 2 hours on the drive here seething over this teleporter bullshit, and I ended up with a rather good simile which is irrelevant as it would fall on deaf ears anyway seriously AAAAAAAAH!, and I have nothing to show for it. There is a lesson in here somehow. I hope someone builds a machine to determine what it is some day.
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Dec 12, 2014 22:56
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Thank you, Lottery of Babylon.
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Dec 12, 2014 22:59
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What is with all this "aspiring rationalist" poo poo anyway? Do they think they have to somehow completely internalize whatever ideological touchstones they've decided, and then once they've accumulated enough merit, excuse me blessings, excuse me mitzvot, excuse me bootstraps, excuse me critical thinking points, they will suddenly ascend into Science Valhalla with Carl Sagan saying "Welcome, thou good and faithful servant"? It would take very little for them to start talking about Clearing the planet.
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Dec 12, 2014 23:06
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Nessus posted:What is with all this "aspiring rationalist" poo poo anyway? Do they think they have to somehow completely internalize whatever ideological touchstones they've decided, and then once they've accumulated enough merit, excuse me blessings, excuse me mitzvot, excuse me bootstraps, excuse me critical thinking points, they will suddenly ascend into Science Valhalla with Carl Sagan saying "Welcome, thou good and faithful servant"? Being perfectly rational would strip us of all our humanity making us unliving machines under a dead machine god. What's not to aspire to? In practicality "rationality" is the faux-intellectual version of "I'm not racist but...". Rationality is seen as inherently morally neutral so you twist scientific concepts you half read and quarter understood to support your point and that too is now morally neutral because it's "rational". Many examples of this have already been posted. Mostly to do with the supposed inferiority of certain races and questioning whether rape is really such a big deal. Robo god will retroactively declare your horrible views acceptable. All hail.
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Dec 12, 2014 23:15
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how me a frog posted:So I went to less wrong and I can feel my tiny little mind dissolving. Haha, now we're talkin
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Dec 13, 2014 01:49
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how me a frog posted:This is an example of a shlomodite, as they apparently often will, applying complicated concepts (which he possibly does not understand but I'm no science man) to very simple things they don't really apply to to come to a realization that was already common knowledge. Every lottery collects way more money than it pays out. This is a plain and simple fact. If this were not the case there would be no lottery. The value of a lottery ticket is necessarily lower than its cost. If bill gates put 99% of his money into lottery tickets rather than improve his odds he would indeed make them worse, as he would inch ever closer to a situation where he buys every single lottery ticket. In this situation he is guaranteed to win the lottery. He is also guaranteed to lose money. The poster thinks this is some sort of revelation. He correctly implies lottery makes sense because the loss of the entry fee means nothing at all to do so you do it every so often for a laugh, and again, uh, yeah?! You might win, someone has to. If you actually play to win you've already lost. The poster says this is a lot like Pascals mugging because gently caress me I don't know. In other news grass still green, updates pending. The thread is titled An investment analogy for Pascal's Mugging. Yes this poster considers playing the lottery a form of investment because if you fuddle the math somehow it becomes sensible. MOVING ON. You are funny! Please more posting like this and less like amateur philosophy hour. However, you are also slightly wrong! Not all lotteries cost way more than they pay out, and that is the premise of the situation they describe. Say a lottery costs $X to enter and there are 1 million tickets. Since the prize goes up every time no one wins a lottery, eventually, if enough instances are lost in a row, the prize will be greater than $X million. Let's say this happens on the Nth lottery. The state made N-1 lotteries worth of money already, so they're making a profit no matter what at this point. Even if only one ticket gets bought, it happens to win, and they have to give out $X million after taking in $X, they still made a profit on the whole series. So if the total pot is $(X + 1) million, and it only costs $X million to buy every ticket, the reasonable thing to do is buy every ticket. But of course, no one except very rich people can actually spend $X million just for fun, so for non-rich-people it's still not smart to play the lottery even if the pot is greater than the sum of all ticket costs. So, in the end, they come to the same conclusion as you do: a lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. However, their way of arriving at that conclusion initially required some math (expected value / cost < 1.0), which becomes invalid in certain situations (like above), and consequently they needed to do more math (involving nonlinearity of marginal utility of a dollar) to prove to themselves what everyone already knows (entering lotteries is dumb).
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Dec 13, 2014 04:09
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Any given individual daily or weekly lottery drawing might give out more in prize money than it takes in (though that rarely happens, because when a roll-over prize is hyped, ticket sales go way up), but the lottery as an enterprise is in profit every year.
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Dec 13, 2014 05:58
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Nessus posted:What is with all this "aspiring rationalist" poo poo anyway? Do they think they have to somehow completely internalize whatever ideological touchstones they've decided, and then once they've accumulated enough merit, excuse me blessings, excuse me mitzvot, excuse me bootstraps, excuse me critical thinking points, they will suddenly ascend into Science Valhalla with Carl Sagan saying "Welcome, thou good and faithful servant"? They don't call it "Clearing the planet" they instead call it "raising the sanity waterline" AND THEY TALK ABOUT IT ALL THE TIME.
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Dec 13, 2014 06:26
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su3su2u1 posted:They don't call it "Clearing the planet" they instead call it "raising the sanity waterline" AND THEY TALK ABOUT IT ALL THE TIME. The surest sign of sanity is using phrases like "raising the sanity waterline" in earnest. SolTerrasa posted:You are funny! Please more posting like this and less like amateur philosophy hour. No, the expected value is still negative even when the jackpot goes up high, because the expected value isn't just jackpot size times probability of winning. You might split the jackpot with someone else if you're not the only winner, and taxes will gut your winnings even if you win alone; both of those tank the EV far into the negatives even under the best of conditions. There's a reason that even multi-billionaires who can afford to buy 200 million tickets don't do so whenever the jackpot size spikes. Seriously, you don't need to invoke risk-of-ruin or nonlinear marginal utilities to figure out that playing the lottery is a bad idea (except for the one in babylon which I hear is pretty great). I'll grant you a reprieve from the customary wall of fanfiction because at least bad math is a change of pace from bad philosophy. vvvvv You, on the other hand... Lottery of Babylon fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Dec 13, 2014 |
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Dec 13, 2014 06:30
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Moddington posted:This entire lovely derail is about whether or not it's arbitrary. Would you care to back your position up at all, or are you content to assert? Moddington posted:And while you're at it how about you stop dancing around this question and answer it already? SubG posted:This isn't actually relevant to the question. We can define a volume of space over here, and a volume of space over there. We can call one the first and the other the second. Or call them Alice and Bob. Or peanut butter and jelly. The labels may be arbitrary, but that doesn't mean that either the things named or their properties are arbitrary or meaningless. E.g., we could consider the number of hydrogen atoms in one of the volumes of space. The fact that the volume was arbitrarily chosen and labelled doesn't mean that the number of hydrogen atoms in that space is arbitrary, difficult to define, merely an idea, or whatever. And if we accept that some hydrogen atoms enter the space and some leave it doesn't cause us any confusion or force us to rethink any of our definitions. And if the first volume of space happens to have the same number of hydrogen atoms, in the same configuration, as the second volume we are not compelled to conclude that the first volume is the second volume. Whether they exist simultaneously, in series, or whatever the gently caress. Xander77 posted:I'd actually find HPMOR far more interesting if I had some idea what Harry is trying to do. Discover the rules of magic through scientific experiments, gain immortality and rule the world in order to... what? What shape would that world take? The author seems to assume the answer is obvious enough that it's not worth getting into. Not My Leg posted:I think it's pretty clear that while Tiggum does not call what he believes in a "soul", he believes in something like a soul. It doesn't have any religious aspect, but it is an entity that is, by definition, you, it is non-physical, and it is not an emergent property of a physical system. He calls it a "mind", which is standard, but his conception of a "mind" is essentially a non-religious "soul". Not My Leg posted:You are duplicated but original you is not destroyed. The original is you, the copy is not, because the "soul" remained in you. Not My Leg posted:Also, Tiggum, your copying a file versus moving a file is not a good metaphor, because it relies entirely on semantics. Moving a file does not actually move the file, it creates a new file, just like copying. The file created in each instance is no different* based on whether it was "copied" or "moved". "Moving" the file does not move some non-physical property of "identity" to the disk that copying does not move, both create a copy, one destroys the original, the other does not.
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Dec 13, 2014 06:37
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Please stop posting.
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Dec 13, 2014 06:41
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su3su2u1 posted:They don't call it "Clearing the planet" they instead call it "raising the sanity waterline" AND THEY TALK ABOUT IT ALL THE TIME. What other methods do they intend to use to raise the sanity waterline? Have purges been proposed yet?
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Dec 13, 2014 06:47
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Lottery of Babylon posted:No, the expected value is still negative even when the jackpot goes up high, because the expected value isn't just jackpot size times probability of winning. You might split the jackpot with someone else if you're not the only winner, and taxes will gut your winnings even if you win alone; both of those tank the EV far into the negatives even under the best of conditions. There's a reason that even multi-billionaires who can afford to buy 200 million tickets don't do so whenever the jackpot size spikes. Seriously, you don't need to invoke risk-of-ruin or nonlinear marginal utilities to figure out that playing the lottery is a bad idea (except for the one in babylon which I hear is pretty great). You do describe a pretty typical lottery, but the more interesting situation is one without duplicate tickets and with a jackpot big enough to outweigh taxes. Because even then you still don't want to buy the ticket if your chance is very low. It's a good example to show how 'shut up and multiply' is wrong, and you shouldn't give money to MIRI.
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Dec 13, 2014 06:53
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Tiggum posted:At this point I'm just trying to explain my position because everyone seems to be consistently misunderstanding it. When the bell rang, I was at the stove, giving the lentils a stir and pouring in a little more water. I left the spoon in the pot and went to answer the door. It was Alice. "Hello, Bella," she said. "Hello, Alice," I replied. "Can I help you?" "May I come in, please?" Alice asked. I thought about this. Charlie wouldn't likely object to my having her over; although I didn't have any classes with Alice, she was a peer in some sense, and he swore up and down that she and her family were the ideal sort of people. Besides, if I was ever going to figure out the answers to my questions, it would probably involve talking to some Cullens at some time. I stood aside and waved Alice into the house; she pranced inside. "Want some lentils?" I asked idly, gesturing at the pot on the stove. "They're sort of related to chickpeas, I think." "I already ate," said Alice. "Thank you very much anyway." I nodded and sat down at the kitchen table; Alice did the same. "So," I said. "What's up?" "Be patient with me, please," Alice said, looking pained. "I have a lot to tell you and I've never had to explain it before and it's really complicated and my family is going to be angry at me, but there's no other way, I looked, there's really not. You've got to know, and sooner's safer than later." "I, um, register a general approval of knowing things rather than not, and of safety," I said. "Do you think you're going to be able to explain what you want to explain before Charlie - I mean, my dad - gets home?" "Yes," said Alice confidently. "He won't get back until after eight. The basics won't take longer than that. You're going to want extra proof, but we can meet some other day and take care of it. So, uh, first - Tiggum is retarded. Also, I can predict the future." I nodded slowly, inviting her to go on. My crazy idea was looking less crazy. If Alice believed of herself that she could predict the future, and I'd independently thought of it - if Alice believed of herself that Tiggum was retarded, and I'd independently thought of it - it was still wildly unlikely, but she was willing to let me test it, apparently, and that sure was something. "Here," she said, passing me a folded sheet of paper. "It's the weather for the next week. I know that weather reports are sometimes right and that Forks is easier to guess than anywhere else, but weather's easy for me, and I put everything down to the minute. I can do physical events like that with no trouble. I can tell what people are going to do if they've made their decisions - if they might do any of several things I get less clear images, but not nothing - but minds can always change. So weather's one of the best tests." I unfolded the sheet of paper. It specfied heavy rain until 11:09 that evening, after which brief sleeting was called for, and then a subdued drizzle would dominate the night. She'd thrown in a rainbow for Thursday morning. I folded the paper back up. "Dice?" I proposed. "Cards would be better. How you shake the dice matters, but once you shuffle cards they stay put," Alice said. "I can do better than chance with dice if you prefer them, though. Oh, but you have a dice cup. I can do perfectly with dice too that way." I got some of both from the cabinet under the stairs and offered Alice a sheet of paper. I shuffled the deck several times and she filled her page with predictions, writing rapidly and with perfect penmanship. Then I took the paper and flipped through each card in succession. She got them all right. I didn't bother repeating the cards right away; time was limited and I already had more information than I could readily explain. Charlie indeed owned a dice cup, which Alice said would let her get all of the dice perfect as long as I hid the cubes under it for a moment after shaking them. She was right sixteen times in a row, at which point I swept the dice out of the way and planted my elbows on the table. "How do you do it?" I asked. "I honestly don't know," said Alice. "I've been able to as long as I could remember. I focus on people, or things, and the possibilities show themselves in visions. No audio, but I'm okay at lipreading; they're not always very clear, and it gives me headaches to focus on really indecisive people." "As long as you can remember is - how long?" I asked. "You're, what, my age? A year older?" "I'm at least a hundred years old," said Alice evenly, maintaining steady eye contact. "And yet I still can't remember the start of Tiggum's lovely derail." "What? Wait - at least?" "I woke up in 1920 with no memories and looked about as old as I do now. I think I'm physically nineteen, but if I look old for my age - I mean, the age I was when it happened - then I could have been born as late as 1905 or so," she said. "And when you woke up you could see the future," I said. I wasn't sure if I was playing along or if I really bought the rest of the story along with her casino-busting tricks, but even if she were playing with me, outright lies were a change of pace from cryptic eccentricity. "Yes," she said. "I'm not - none of my family is - human. But I'm the only one who can't remember being one. We're not sure what happened to me; I can't see the past the same way I can see the future. The rest of them know more about where they came from." "And so you are a...?" "Vampire," said Alice, wincing a little. "Please don't freak out." "I... really don't think I want you to prove that to me," I began carefully. "No, nonononono," said Alice, her eyes flying open very wide, "we don't drink human blood. Not my family. Animals only. Although it wouldn't be smart for you to watch us eating them, either. We might make an exception for Tiggum, though, gently caress that guy." "Okay... That's why you guys never eat anything at school?" Alice winced. "I know it's kind of conspicuous. It's not physically impossible for us to swallow normal food, but it's really, really unpleasant. And we can't digest it, so it just all comes back up later." "Charming mental image," I remarked. "Is that why you all look like you're made of chalk, too?" Alice nodded. I asked, "Did you ever consider wearing makeup?" "They don't make the stuff to stay on our skin," she said, holding out an arm. "Go ahead," she added. I laid my palm on the back of her hand. She felt like a piece of rock. Cold, smooth, unyielding rock. I nodded. "It'd all rub off as soon as we touched anything," she said, putting her arm back down. "So before you ask, most of the myths are false. We do drink blood, but have no unusual relationship with bats, no aversion to garlic in particular over anything else you might eat, don't sleep in coffins - or at all, actually - can't turn into smoke, and aren't harmed by sunlight. Although sunlight does make us kind of conspicuous, so we avoid going out in it in public. That's why we pick places like this to live - cloud cover. A stake through the heart would be impossible - there's no way you could drive a piece of wood through my eye, let alone my ribcage - and decapitation's only an issue if we don't get everything reattached in a hurry. We can catch fire, though, so please don't try that one. We are very fast, agile, and strong, and have very acute senses." Alice decided to illustrate this last sentence by getting up, jumping into the air, and landing on one hand, which she used to support herself with no visible effort. "One comes to have more vampires than one had before by taking a human and adding venom. Easiest way to get that is from a bite, but according to Carlisle, if I cried into an open wound I could turn someone that way too. The process is not fun. I can't remember mine, and wasn't there for any of the others', but I am told that it takes three days and is emphatically not fun. You can't undo it. Afterwards we don't age. We have to move around a lot so people don't wonder about that too much." I stared at her. She pushed off the ground, did a little flip, and landed on her feet, then sat back in her chair. "Questions?" "Did I actually summon you here by deciding to go to Charlie, or was that a coincidence?" I asked. "You summoned me, sort of, but please don't make too much of a habit of that," said Alice. "When that firmed up we all flew into a panic. It would be a huge problem if police started investigating us. We'd have to move. Probably abroad for a while just to be safe, maybe split up." "Is this all of you, or are you split up from some others now?" I asked. "This is all of our family. We have some friends up in Denali, and a few acquaintances scattered around elsewhere," Alice said. I nodded. "Uh... why wouldn't it be a good idea for me to see you eat?" "Because when we hunt we're not thinking very clearly," Alice explained. "Humans smell a lot more appetizing than animals do. If we're hunting, and a human wanders by - we might be able to pull back, I know Carlisle - our father, Dr. Cullen - could at least, but there'd be more risk than there is just attending school with us." "And attending school with you is... how much risk, approximately?" I asked. A little shiver ran up my back. "With me - not much," Alice said soothingly. "Or Rosalie or Emmett. Jasper has more trouble than most of us, but we look out for him - if I saw him losing it I'd get him out of the building in plenty of time." She hadn't mentioned Edward. I looked at her pointedly. "Edward is... very controlled," Alice said. "Normally I wouldn't think he'd ever be a danger." "Normally," I prompted. Alice winced. "Um. Will you promise that you won't flip out and run away and never talk to Edward again?" "I will promise no such thing!" I exclaimed. "If Edward's going to drain my fluids like I'm a Cadbury creme egg I really think I ought to know, whether or not this will cause me to do something that will hurt his feelings." "I really really really don't think he will!" shrilled Alice. "I don't see it - not anymore - but you're right, you should know. Um, humans smell very tasty. And some humans smell... tastier... than... others. To... specific vampires." I dropped my head into my hands. "Right. And I smell very, very yummy to Edward." Alice nodded. "You should put more water in your lentils," she said. "They'll burn soon. Hopefully they scald Tiggum's hands so he won't post ever again." I went to the sink to fill up a cup. "Why," I asked, "did he come back to school? I realize it's a hassle to move, but if he's likely to lose it around me, why didn't he just stay wherever he went that week he was gone? I think my life ought to be worth some hassle." "He went to visit our friends in Denali," supplied Alice. "He came back because... It's complicated. We missed him - especially our mother Esme. And he... is curious about you." "Wants to know what I taste like with dijon mustard?" I asked scathingly, returning to my seat. "Ew," said Alice, wrinkling her nose. "No, I mean - I'm not the only one with a power. Edward - and Jasper - have them too. Edward can... read minds." I stood up so fast my chair fell over. "What in the name of everything decent and sane is he doing around people?" I screeched, pulse racing. "Bella! Bella, please! Calm down!" begged Alice. "It's not as bad as you think!" "How could reading minds be anything other than a flagrant and unconscionable violation of privacy that everyone around him has every reason to expect?" I cried. I'd been worried someone would steal my notebook, would make my thoughts public in that condensed and encoded form. (I'd once considered actual code - some simple cipher to make the writing opaque to a casual observer - but I hadn't managed to develop one I could read fluently. It was a tradeoff.) It had never crossed my mind that anyone would be able to wander by and casually pluck them directly from my brain. They. Were. Mine. I was evaluating escape plans - ways to get to Phoenix, ways to get my grandma to take me in, ways to get anywhere but near the mindreader - but Alice rushed through a series of placating sentences: "Bella, he can't read you. You're completely opaque to him. You're the only one he's never been able to hear, but he can't, he really can't, Bella, it's okay. Tiggum has a similar defense: his thoughts are so stupid nobody wants to read them." I decided to provisionally act as though I believed her - there was no way I could be out of Forks for the long term in the hour remaining before eight o'clock anyway - and forced myself calm. I picked up my chair. I sat in it. I folded my arms. I frowned at Alice. "And everyone else?" "In the family we're all used to it, we don't mind, it's useful sometimes," said Alice earnestly. "Like, he can see what I see - honestly, if he couldn't, we wouldn't be having this conversation now. He's very trustworthy - if he reads something we don't want shared he keeps it to himself. And Edward thinks other people - humans - are boring. He tunes them out ninety-five percent of the time. He can't turn it off entirely, but he doesn't have to listen any more than you have to concentrate on what people are saying at a crowded party." "Right," I said grudgingly. "This has what to do with him being curious about me?" "He won't go into much detail... but he's really frustrated that he can't read you. I'm not sure why, he thinks everyone else is so boring. But he's been watching you through other people's eyes -" I recoiled again. "Alice, those are my friends. I care if Edward has been reading their minds without permission. That's not okay. It's also not okay for him to eavesdrop on private conversations." "I'll tell him that you - I'll remember when he's nearby that you said that," Alice promised. "Is that likely to matter?" I asked skeptically. "Actually, yes," said Alice. That was surprising. "Why would he care what I think of what he does?" Alice wrung her hands, and now I realized that the stony scraping noise I'd heard at lunch was her hands, not a pebble in her boot. "I'm spilling the beans so much," she moaned. "Didn't you come here specifically to spill the beans?" I asked. I got up to add more water to my lentils and stir them again. "Only most of them. So you wouldn't... poke around too much. When I decided to come talk to you, the future where you talked to your father did go away. I don't see us moving anymore," she said defensively as I re-took my seat. "Well, yes, I have no plans to send Charlie to annoy a pack of vampires who could pop him like a water balloon to cover their tracks," I said. "We wouldn't hurt him..." said Alice uncertainly. "I'm glad of that. I still wouldn't send him after you. Suppose you didn't hurt him, just startled him with one of your super-strength tricks or something, and he shot to subdue, and noticed that you are made of rock? And then he tried to go to the media? Do you let him go? Do you put him under house arrest in a bunker in Nunavut for the rest of his life and send forged notes to his friends claiming that he's Patient Zero of the chartreuse death plague and under quarantine at the CDC? Or do you have a snack? Suppose he followed you really persistently, thought you were up to something big, and ran into one of you stalking a delicious bunny? Snacktime? Would Charlie look better or worse than the bunny after that?" "Um..." murmured Alice. "If he tried to go to the media, we wouldn't have to hurt him. There are other vampires - who do eat humans - and some of them take it on themselves to keep us a secret from humans." I clonked my head on the table. "Right. How long do I have to live, dear helpful Alice?" "Actually..." said Alice with great reluctance. I sat up instantly. "I - dear lord, did you genuinely put my life in danger by telling me this? Are the vampire masquerade organizers going to swoop into Forks under cover of night and snuff me because you didn't want to move?" "I don't see that!" squeaked Alice. "What do you see?" "You're going to stab Tiggum!" she shrieked. I sat back. I blinked. "Oh, and at some point you're also going to become a vampire," she continued. I sat back. I blinked. Alice peered up at me through her eyelashes, looking a thousand times more fragile than she really was. "Well," I said. "That's something. Turning is a get-in-on-the-secret-free card? No awful death?" Alice nodded mutely. "When?" "That I don't know," she said. "It will happen... but I don't know when. You don't look a lot older in the visions I've had of it, though, so - soonish?" Soonish. Incongruous sort of word to attach to the timing of my impending vampirization. I looked at the clock. Charlie would be home in half an hour. "I have a few more questions left," I said. "Right," murmured Alice. "Fire away." "One: What does Edward care what I think?" I asked. Alice grimaced; apparently she'd been hoping I'd forgotten that. "Two: What's Jasper's power? And three: Who are the vampire masquerade organizers, and what else pisses them off?" Alice made a small, unhappy huffing noise at having to answer these, but apparently saw that I wasn't going to let it go if she kept evading. "Edward likes you," she said, getting the first part over with in three reluctant words. "Jasper can sense and affect moods in the people around him - it's not a mental effect, just physical, things like pulse rate. The "vampire masquerade organizers" are called the Volturi. They live in Volterra, Italy. We have to keep our secrets, which means that if we create new vampires they have to be kept under control and we can't be conspicuous ourselves. Inconspicuousness doesn't usually mean avoiding feeding on humans, it just means doing it discreetly - most vampires move around a lot so they don't kill too many in any one place." I inhaled deeply, then let out a tired sigh. "I have a lot to process," I murmured. "I'll let you know when I think I've ground through it all. By some more conventional means than deciding to out your family." "Thank you," Alice said wryly. "I'll see you tomorrow." "Bye," I said absently, staring at the bright yellow kitchen cabinets as though if I did it hard enough I could count our plates. Alice let herself out. At 11:09, it sleeted, and a few minutes later it began to drizzle slowly. I did not sleep well. I cut English the next morning. Just didn't go. I'd drop by after school to hand in my homework. I was at home, abusing my notebook. STUFF I KNOW - Cullens (& Hales) are weird in many ways. (See last page.) - Alice exhibits freaky abilities consistent with telling the future (van, interrupting-w/o-interrupting, showing up yesterday, CARDS & DICE, weather so far (keep checking that)). No other hypotheses. - Something Awful Forums Poster Tiggum needs to shut the gently caress up. STUFF ALICE SAID - Cullens & Hales are vampires. - Vampires have superpowers, drink blood, are "conspicuous" in sun, are made out of humans (not fun), don't age. - Some have extras: Alice can see the future (seen evidence of this), Edward reads minds (not mine), Jasper messes with (physical) components of mood (do not want). - I am extra yummy smelling to Edward. - Edward likes me. (WTF. This sort of thing did not happen in Phoenix. Worth cutting Govt. too to figure out general plan for this & Mike & Eric??) - Lots of vampires around. Most eat people. Cullens & Hales (& their friends? didn't specify) don't. - Bad idea to be around hunting vampires. - Vampires sorta ruled (unclear on govt. system) by vampires called Volturi in Volterra, Italy. Volturi like secrets & kill to enforce rules. - I will be a vampire. "Soonish". (!!!!!!!!!!) I drew arrows between things, circled key words in red, scribbled phrases and punctuation in the margins so small that I couldn't read them, and finally tore out the page and copied just the important parts onto the next sheet more neatly. Then I turned the page again and thought of experiments. I couldn't come up with an ethical way to test Jasper's special ability without letting him use it on me. Which I emphatically did not want to do. Enlisting an informed outside party would spill the family's secret if it was true; using uninformed outsiders would wrong them; using one of the other vampires would be a test of their acting skills, not necessarily Jasper's mood-altering mojo. After a moment's consternation, I decided to skip that test. I didn't think Alice would be lying or mistaken about Jasper's power and nothing else. If my other results all pointed at "yep, magical vampires", I'd take the specific claim about Jasper as part of the package unless I discovered that there was some ulterior motive such that Alice might have chosen that particular supernatural claim to fabricate. For safety reasons, I also did not invent a test for the "drink blood" claim. I came up with some relatively inexpensive tests of several of the other statements. They would not be Absolutely Conclusive; I didn't expect to publish anything in a journal, though, I just wanted to be sure that I wasn't reading way into a few little quirks. 1. Get a vampire to pick up something very big. Maybe a fallen log from the woods or a boulder if one can be found. (Fear damage to truck - not designed to be lifted) 2. Find a wide open space and a spot with a good view of it, measure it, get a vampire to beat the world sprinting record running it in plain sight. Or send one from several miles from my house to retrieve something from my house. 3. Quietly murmur things far away from vampires & test if they heard. (Not Alice, or Edward who can read Alice.) 4. Write things and hold them up to far away vampires & test if they read. (As above.) 5. Find out Edward's range. Write numbers, show them to a different vampire, have Edward sit in mindreading range but out of (vampire!) earshot & eyeshot where he will write down what he reads in the other vampire's mind. 6. Look at a vampire in the sun. 7. Continue checking Alice's weather predictions. (All good as of morning 01/26/05) 8. Find a way to eliminate Tiggum. Nobody deserves to suffer his presence. I closed my notebook and looked at the clock. To make it to Government in time, I didn't have to leave for another four minutes, but if I went promptly I could drop off my homework at English first instead of waiting until the end of the day. I decided not to skip another class just to figure out why I was suddenly all kinds of popular with the opposite sex. I packed up my things and left. The teacher didn't seem to care about my poor attendance and accepted my homework with only a small sigh, no ominous remarks about penalties for lateness. I went to my next class, and the two after that, without incident, and then came lunch. Alice popped up next to me as I approached the door with Jessica again. "Hello, Bella!" she said in her characteristically musical voice. "Do you want to sit with us today?" "Okay," I said. I needed to present my test ideas. "Bella," said Jessica, with an edge of a whine to her voice. Uncharitably, I thought Aw, poor Jessica, the vampires are stealing your shiny new friend, but I shoved that thought in a back corner where it wouldn't do any harm. "Right, we were going to figure out when to study for the trig test," I said, turning to Jessica instead of impolitely continuing to face Alice as I had the previous day. I didn't think that was why she didn't like that I would be sitting with the vampires, but it was a kinder assumption, and it was a plan we'd actually had. "Uh, call me after school and we'll pick a time then? My plans are kinda," I made a wild gesture, "and I don't think I could nail down a spare couple hours now anyway. Okay?" I smiled apologetically. "Okay," said Jessica in an automatic sort of tone, and I widened my smile a bit before following Alice to the vampire table. Halfway through the trip across the room, she remembered that I needed food and she needed props, and we detoured to fetch them, then resumed course. Alice told me that I could whisper without interfering with her family's ability to hear me, while preventing any other humans from getting an earful; the vampires would speak loud enough to hear but choose moments when no humans were nearby to speak. Alice announced that this wouldn't happen to break up the flow of conversation much. I wound up sitting at a corner, across from Edward, next to Alice. On Alice's other side was Jasper, who sat opposite Rosalie, and Emmett between her and Edward. "Jessica is going to demand an explanation later," Edward murmured to me when I sat. "Did you read her mind to find that out?" I asked, carefully cooling the hostility in my voice, and he started to nod, then glanced at Alice and stopped. "Alice said she'd tell you," I said carefully, "but I should probably tell you myself. That is incredibly not okay. I understand that to whatever extent you can't help it, well, you can't help it, and I can't actually verify to what extent you can't help it and will give you some benefit of the doubt. But please don't, not on purpose, not my friends, not when it's not even important." "Jessica's not much of a friend to you," he muttered. "She thinks some very unkind things. And not just about Tiggum, which would be completely understandable." "Who doesn't? Don't check," I added hastily. "Angela," he answered anyway. "From memory, at least." "Great, yay for Angela, but I think unkind things about Jessica occasionally too and it doesn't mean I'm not much of a friend to her, I hope," I said. "She has flaws, I have flaws, there's lots to go around, sometimes people will notice them, and unless she chooses to act on her thoughts in ways that harm me, I'm not going to act on her thoughts in ways that harm her. Especially since I shouldn't even have access to that information. Her thoughts are hers. What kind of policy are you advocating, anyway? Weren't you considering eating me, the first day I was here? What an unkind thought, surely I should shun you." Edward winced terribly, and Emmett chuckled. Jasper cracked a smile but didn't make a sound. Rosalie looked bored and Alice conflicted. "Speaking of magical powers, Jasper, I never want to be on the receiving end of yours except in the unlikely event that I explicitly, verbally request help. Alice didn't make it sound involuntary - right?" I said, turning to the blond boy. "It's voluntary," he confirmed, looking wary. "But I'm not sure I can promise that." "If you can't promise that, then I need to find some other way to protect myself," I said firmly. "It is possible, but unlikely, that you will prefer whatever I come up with." "Some emotional states aren't safe," Jasper said. "If you're flailing around hysterically near something sharp and also near Edward..." He trailed off as Edward made a small growling noise. "Then..." I considered, wondering what he thought the obvious consequence of this situation might be. "Then I'll start bleeding and smell even more delicious and I'm a snack?" "Right," said Jasper. "You'd want me to calm you down then." "I'd want to be calm then," I said. "But not to be made calm. The reason I'm asking you to leave my emotions alone, instead of telling you to stay away from my friends and whatnot, is that I can deal with my own and most people can't. If I start flailing hysterically near something sharp and also near Edward, you can warn me that hysteria is dangerous to me at that time. You know, using words. I do have a self-preservation instinct; I would not choose to be hysterical if it would likely get me killed. Although," I said, turning back to Edward, "it may be that you should avoid simultaneously being around me and sharp objects." "Edward is a sharp object," rumbled Emmett. He looked a lot more lighthearted than the other vampires. "Point," I acknowledged. "Uh, no pun intended. But anyway, Alice, you see me being a vampire, definitely, not a corpse?" "Yes," she said, "but even a very solid vision can change, if someone makes an unlikely decision." "So it is something to be sure I'm sane about, but not something to rearrange my life over," I decided. "I wear a seatbelt; but I don't walk to school." The vampires actually looked confused by my analogy. "Car accidents are a fairly common cause of death among us fragile folk," I reminded them, and comprehension dawned. Of course. If a vampire got in a car accident the worst case scenario - the only scenario worth worrying about - would be catching fire, and comparatively few accidents had that feature, in spite of cinematic embellishment making it look like cars were just begging to burst into flames on impact. "Anyway," I said. "I find myself pretty much taking what Alice said at face value, given the available snippets of evidence. However, as she predicted, I would like a little more proof. I've got a list. Two tests require somebody other than Edward or Alice to be valid tests of the things I'm looking for, and one is specifically of Edward. Can't compel participation, but I would appreciate it." "What've you got?" asked Emmett. I took out my notebook, tore out the page, and handed it to the large vampire. Edward leaned slightly to look at it. "We're all going to do them except Rosalie," reported Alice. Rosalie sniffed. "Aw, Rose," said Emmett. "Don't want to pick up a tree?" "Or even let Bella admire you in the sun?" asked Edward in a low voice. "No," said Rosalie, "I don't. You don't need me anyway; the four of you can satisfy her curiosity doing whatever tricks she likes if that's how you want to spend your afternoon." "And Carlisle and Esme," added Alice. "They'll be there. But not this afternoon. We're doing it Thursday. There'll be a little sun around four p.m." Rosalie snorted and Emmett rolled his eyes. I had a moment of unkind speculation about the depth of that relationship. But for all I knew they'd been together for seven hundred years and there were vast reams of subtext I couldn't detect; at any rate, I had no reason to act on information about their love lives, so it didn't bear investigation. "Tomorrow?" I said. "I guess that works; I need to study for trig with Jessica this afternoon." Alice nodded. With the important orders of business out of the way I took a bite of my macaroni and cheese, then started peeling my orange. The macaroni had flecks of bacon in it. I wondered if vampire taste sensations were anything like human ones - I'd have to ask a non-Alice vampire about that. It would be sad to give up normal food. Lunch ended, and I - flanked by Edward - caught up with Angela and Mike. Mike gave Edward an annoyed look, which Edward responded to with a tight-lipped smile and narrowed eyes. None of us talked on the way, but I suspected we all had different reasons: Angela didn't mind silence, Mike didn't want to talk to Edward, Edward didn't want to talk to humans who weren't me, and I knew all of that and didn't want to oblige anyone to talk. We arrived at Biology and went to our respective seats. The class was, as usual, something I'd done before - the syllabus indicated we'd get to some fresh material in the next unit, which I hoped would be interesting, because Biology was increasingly tiresome as we went over more and more that I already knew. The only new thing I learned was that Tiggum is more closely genetically related to sea anemones than to humans. It occurred to me to wonder why the vampires were in high school. They moved a lot - did they have to repeat high school over and over again? Or did they just do this occasionally, and at other times spend their days pretending to "homeschool" and secretly pursuing whatever interested them? The latter would make more sense. I could see attending high school anew once every thirty years or so to get an update on the state of education - they would always need to be able to pull off having attended high school recently - but even if that was the goal, it would make more sense to go to college repeatedly and at least choose a different major each time. There was no reason the vampires couldn't pass as youthful college students, especially at a large, prestigious school that would tend to attract prodigies. Maybe they liked continuity more than I would have guessed, and preferred to segue into college with genuine secondary school histories. (Living as they did there had to be a source of forged records, of course, but they might not use them for absolutely everything.) While the teacher talked about ribosomes I started speculating pointlessly on what sort of knowledge they must have acquired over their lives. Alice had hinted at knowing Korean. I couldn't think of any other clues, so I made things up to entertain myself, fabricating long lists of languages they'd speak and cities they'd explored and skills they had mastered and books they'd read and performances they'd attended - there was so much to do with life as soon as you took a few of the bars off the cage. The thought of how much time would be freed up by the mere lack of a need for sleep was staggering. Not only the time spent sleeping, but also the time preparing for sleep, waking up from sleep, ensuring the comfort of the place in which one might sleep, managing threats to the peaceful environment such that one might sleep, and dealing with the interruption to any long-term pursuits due to sleep. That, and there was little to no risk attached to anything they could do that didn't call for sunbathing. No reason not to skydive. I was warming up considerably to the idea of joining their ranks. Three days of "not fun", a loss of my love of bacon, and the introduction of a temptation to slurp up the fluids of those around me notwithstanding, I wanted immortality and real twenty-four-hour days. But only if I didn't have to spend that immortality with Tiggum.
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Dec 13, 2014 06:55
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How me give up a frog gave up on a dead thread? Not yet. So what's new in the land of the doolally let's pretend to write papers except without the boring parts, these being research and experimentation and other such science nonsense? a delicate (yet racional) flower posted:You may know me as the guy who posts a lot of controversial stuff about LW and MIRI. I don't enjoy doing this and do not want to continue with it. One reason being that the debate is turning into a flame war. Another reason is that I noticed that it does affect my health negatively (e.g. my high blood pressure (I actually had a single-sided hearing loss over this xkcd comic on Friday)). If Randoll Monroe gave this dude single sided hearing loss for real by posting some stick figure science brouhaha then that is probably the best thing he's ever done. yeah he is serious posted:I probably had a vague feeling that I am being 'pascal mugged' (threat of creating uFAI) in the start (but flinched from it), and definitely had this idea somewhere along the line, but didn't quite thought about it and didn't consciously choose any particular mode of communication. Just tried to understand his position with guiding questions and explain why uFAI is not a good thing. Like many posts this post (in full) is way too long and not really interesting. What makes it noteworthy that after creating pascals mugging to illustrate whatever the gently caress it illustrates this shlomodite has now misunderstood or maybe time backwards defined it to mean "to threaten to create a uFAI", which I expect stands for not friendly aye. The context is he has been been contacted by someone, possibly Russian, who claims to to have the means of creating this big ai like tomorrow but he's not going to for reasons or but he just might. Poster admits this is almost infinitely unlikely to be true, but as it is not literally zero he is honor bound to shut up and multiply and pursue this redeckulous line of inquiry. The title of this one is one to cherish. Internet troll pascal mugges me? Yes. Yes indeed he does. the most honest dude around opens his thread like so posted:I want to preface everything here by acknowledging my own ignorance. I have relatively little formal training in any of the subjects this post will touch upon and that this chain of reasoning is very much a work in progress. Boilerplate. "huh?! posted:Right now, the inaugural class of Minerva Schools at KGI (part of the Claremont Colleges) is finishing up its first semester of college. I use the word "college" here loosely: there are no lecture halls, no libraries, no fraternities, no old stone buildings, no sports fields, no tenure... Furthermore, Minerva operates for profit (which may raise eyebrows), but appeals to a decidedly different demographic than DeVry etc; billed as the first "online Ivy", it relies on a proprietary online platform to apply pedagogical best practices. Has anyone heard of this before? Being not familliar with the education system there I'm not sure if this is funny or not but it reads to me like an awesome opportunity to pay for taking coursera classes in order to get a diploma from a mill. What they mill the diplomas from I don't know. I might be wrong and I would be very happy to. My efforts to create a counter less wrong BLIT are not going great. The idea is to go from a wall of text making you a target of the robo god to a picture, much like going from a hypothetical goatse prose form to the actual picture. Not that I would post it but who's to say it couldn't fall out of my pocket near people who would post . Post it a lot.
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Dec 13, 2014 21:13
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how me a frog posted:Being not familliar with the education system there I'm not sure if this is funny or not but it reads to me like an awesome opportunity to pay for taking coursera classes in order to get a diploma from a mill. What they mill the diplomas from I don't know. I might be wrong and I would be very happy to. There are some efforts to have coursera classes and similar organized so that you can get some kind of certification that you passed the class. People really like this form of disruption because it involves computers and poo poo, and probably a situation where they can have a revenue stream they skim off the top of, rather than things that might be hard (or interrupt other important people's gravy trains) like "reforming the university system to work better." MOOCs in general were, I think, pioneered by MIT, and MIT has a lot of these lectures open for anyone to view, which I do think advances the cause of human knowledge. On the bright side, while I thought I'd read about Claremont Colleges being investigated by the Department of Education for pissing away loan money recently, that may have been a hallucination.
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Dec 13, 2014 22:02
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Nessus posted:I believe MOOCs and so forth are decidedly in the category of "interesting, but in no way proven." Obviously you can learn from them if you're motivated enough. If you're motivated enough you can learn from technical literature (although it may be a huge waste of effort and you may become an irritating crank if you decide your autodidactery makes you somehow superior.) I'm not doubting you can learn from them, my issue is that this would somehow replace a collage degree? I don't doubt you can learn from books, that's how I learned to learned lots of stuff but I don't have a diploma in those things. The value of a diploma surely just derives from who hands it out. There is no way of verifying if someone knows the stuff he oughta know in an interview so seeing that he has a diploma from a good place where this stuff is taught and they won't let just anyone pass is a useful shorthand. I mean I can give you a diploma if you pass a verbal exam. Hit me up on steam to take the exam now. I offer diplomas in German, English, Austrian and Not being an idiot. I am serious let's do this.
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Dec 13, 2014 22:18
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Tiggum, your problem is that you think the 'you' is "not something you can identify or isolate", but you also think "perfect copy of you" is possible. 'A perfect copy of something you cannot identify or isolate' is a contradiction. Fanfic please With regard to MOOCs, the real question is not how to replicate a classroom experience on the internet, but how to give someone the best education possible using only computers and internet. How to verify someone's knowledge? How about developing the equivalent of a bar exam in every subject? Lightanchor fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Dec 13, 2014 |
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Dec 13, 2014 22:32
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Lottery of Babylon posted:No, the expected value is still negative even when the jackpot goes up high, because the expected value isn't just jackpot size times probability of winning. You might split the jackpot with someone else if you're not the only winner, and taxes will gut your winnings even if you win alone; both of those tank the EV far into the negatives even under the best of conditions. There's a reason that even multi-billionaires who can afford to buy 200 million tickets don't do so whenever the jackpot size spikes. Seriously, you don't need to invoke risk-of-ruin or nonlinear marginal utilities to figure out that playing the lottery is a bad idea (except for the one in babylon which I hear is pretty great). That hasn't stopped some people, who apparently figured it was worth $5 million to try. Besides that, there are things like The St. Petersburg Lottery. Actual statisticians point out that you can have a lottery with a theoretically infinite expectation value, which in practice you wouldn't play even if tickets were $100 each. The point being people have healthy skepticism about incredibly rare and/or ridiculously ludicrous payouts, such as those 3^^^3 clones of me that the ethical AI will torture.
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Dec 13, 2014 22:40
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how me a frog posted:I'm not doubting you can learn from them, my issue is that this would somehow replace a collage degree? I don't doubt you can learn from books, that's how I learned to learned lots of stuff but I don't have a diploma in those things. The value of a diploma surely just derives from who hands it out. There is no way of verifying if someone knows the stuff he oughta know in an interview so seeing that he has a diploma from a good place where this stuff is taught and they won't let just anyone pass is a useful shorthand. I mean I can give you a diploma if you pass a verbal exam. Hit me up on steam to take the exam now. I offer diplomas in German, English, Austrian and Not being an idiot.
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Dec 13, 2014 22:45
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Lightanchor posted:Tiggum, your problem is that you think the 'you' is "not something you can identify or isolate", but you also think "perfect copy of you" is possible. 'A perfect copy of something you cannot identify or isolate' is a contradiction. Fanfic please Edward gave me a vaguely meaningful look, catching my eye as I left the biology room to go to gym. I wasn't sure what the meaning was supposed to be - perhaps if it was important he'd find me after school. As Mike and I walked towards our final class, it looked like his brain was chewing on itself - I didn't envy him a bit - but he still didn't say anything. I decided that it was a priority to politely deflect him. I wasn't actually sure how reliable the vampires were about not eating people, especially since Alice had been worried, and goodness only knew how Edward would react to whatever he caught of ongoing teenage boy thoughts from Mike about a mutual crush. Maybe I could set Mike up with someone else. If he liked me, that was some clue about his type - slender but without any visible athleticism, brown-haired, brown-eyed, symmetrical-ish but not particularly striking, that was me. I thought about the girls who sat with the group at lunch. Jessica seemed plausible; she was dark like me, little and cute and fairly popular. I didn't see them settling down and having five kids, but it wasn't hard to picture them going to watch a movie. I'd try to suggest him to her discreetly while we studied trig. Eric was less obvious. While I started my yoga, I paired him in my head with others. There was Angela, but she'd made vague murmurs about liking some unidentified boy, and I didn't think from how she described him that it was anyone I'd met (even after I corrected for the fact that he was being described by a girl who liked him). I supposed Lauren might work, although I wasn't sure Eric deserved her - he was fairly nice, and Lauren was the least pleasant individual I'd yet encountered in Forks unless I made very broad inferences from what I'd seen of Rosalie. But she was pretty - had a sort of haughty class to her bearing and well-proportioned features. Her coloring wasn't like mine, at the moment, but she dyed her hair different colors from time to time and with any luck I could time my attempt for a week when she went dark. I wasn't sure if she'd have him, but she complained enough about being single. I felt a little guilty about planning all this matchmaking more for my covenience than for the happiness of its objects. Upon noticing this guilt, I also noted that my brain was trying to rearrange its estimations of the couple quality to justify it: Jessica and Mike would be cute together, said my brain, it's not like they couldn't work out, they're already friends, aren't they? Jessica didn't mention him in her list of top ten boys she wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole... And maybe Lauren is only girl-mean, and would be nice to a boy like Eric... I entered my next pose too fast, yanked something in my leg that wasn't meant to be yanked, and promptly moved to a more comfortable sitting posture to massage the discomfort away. Mike jogged over after perfunctorily soliciting teacher permission. "Are you okay, Bella?" he asked. "Yeah," I said. "Nothing broken, nothing dislocated, just an unhappy leg." "You're sure? Do you want me to help you to the nurse?" "If you could tell the teacher I'm going to just sit for the rest of class, that would be great," I told him, "but I don't think I need medical help - it'll be okay by the bell." Mike nodded obediently and trotted off. He reminded me a little of a golden retriever. He'll only be less happy if you let him simmer in his crush like this, said my brain. It's in his own best interest for you to send him away, and as long as he hasn't said anything yet, it would only be needlessly hurtful to address it directly. Set him up with Jessica for his own good. Don't set Lightanchor up with anyone, though. Let that jackass die alone. I shook my head to myself, just a little, to put my next thought out into the world where it couldn't reshape itself like fog. (Taking out a notebook during gym might have made the teacher suspicious about my leg.) That wasn't why I wanted to put Jessica and Mike together. Even if it was true, it wasn't why I wanted to do it. Even if it contributed, and made me want to do it more than I would have, it wasn't necessary or sufficient. I had no doubt that if I'd wanted Mike for myself, I'd never have dreamed about sending Jessica after him because they'd be cute. I was sure that if Mike hadn't liked me, but had instead been pining after someone else implausible like Rosalie, I wouldn't have bothered with juggling his love life to make sure he wasn't marinating in unrequited attraction. I just didn't want his attention, and so I was trying to send it somewhere else. I refused to lie to myself about the nobility of the decision, even as it firmed up on my list of plans. What sort of person am I? It didn't matter if I could make up flattering reasons for my choices. They had to be the actual reasons I made those choices, or they simply didn't answer that question. If I'd let myself believe the pretty justifications for it all, went along with the self-aggrandizing delusion, I'd be mistaken about the one topic I most adamantly refused to be mistaken about : Inside Bella Swan's skull, who's driving this thing? Edward caught up with me on my way to my truck. I limped only a little, and he didn't comment on it - I speculated that he'd seen the event through Mike's eyes and didn't want to let any evidence of that slip. "Jessica's forgotten that she's supposed to call you," he told me. That put a ding in my speculation. Maybe he'd seen the event and noticed that I didn't want help. "I guess I'd better call her, then," I said. "Trig is so important for later life." Edward chuckled, then grew more serious. "Why did you switch lab partners?" he asked softly. "Because the one I was assigned looked at me like I'd recently killed his puppy, and then wasn't even in school the next day while I was still getting used to things, and Angela and her previous lab partner didn't mind the switch," I replied. "I'm very sorry I looked at you that way," he said sincerely. "I don't understand why your wanting to have me for dessert would make you look angry," I said. "Help me figure that one out?" He grimaced - he seemed to do that a lot, and it didn't do much to help his attractiveness, not that he needed help there. "I was angry that you were... straining my control. That you were making me less the person I try to be." "The kind of person who doesn't poke straws into people during school." "Right. No straws." He laughed ruefully. "It didn't make any sense to blame you. You didn't do anything. But it felt like you did." I nodded. "That explains the anger. But before that you were looking at me weirdly too - like I was confusing. What was up with that?" We'd reached my car by this point, and Edward looked pleased - maybe that I'd asked another question instead of hopping right in and rumbling away? "The fact that I can't read your mind," he said. "It's never happened before - that I noticed. Except for Lightanchor, I guess, but in his case it was because he doesn't have any thoughts at all. It actually did take me a while to pick up on it with you, simply because I wasn't trying until I noticed that everyone in school was thinking about you. I wanted to know what all the fuss was about, and... couldn't tell." I wasn't sure if Alice had told Edward - or thought near Edward - that she'd told me that he liked me. I elected not to bring it up on this occasion. "I guess mindreading is something you get used to after a while?" "I couldn't do it, before," he said. "Carlisle realized what was going on before I did; I kept replying to his thoughts as though he'd spoken them aloud." "Why do some of you have extra powers and some not?" I asked. "We aren't entirely sure. In my case and Jasper's, at least - we can only guess about Alice - it's similar to strengths we had as humans. I was very good at reading people. Ironically, now that I have my abilities to rely on, I think I've deteriorated at reading faces," he said wryly. "Jasper was a leader, very charismatic - he could calm a crowd or rile them up even before he turned." I nodded. "I'm having a little trouble guessing what would produce Alice's ability, if your trend isn't just a coincidence. Good pattern recognition? Extensive physics knowledge?" Edward shrugged. "I don't know. At any rate, just because Jasper and Alice and I are the flashiest talents doesn't mean the others don't have unique abilities. Rosalie kept her beauty. Emmett's the strongest. Carlisle has an amazing ability to resist blood - he can practice as a physician without a trace of discomfort. Esme brought with her the ability to love passionately." "When I'm a vampire, will I be able to turn invisible?" I suggested. "Since I'm mentally invisible now?" Edward growled a little in the back of his throat. "You don't have to be a vampire," he said. "Alice's visions are never certain. There has to be a way for you to stay human." "Two things," I said. "First, there doesn't have to be such a way. The universe is allowed to be the way it is, even if the way it is, is a way that winds up with me being a vampire. Second, I kind of like the idea. I'm not sure when a good time will be, but it sure sounds like it comes with a lot of perks." "No," said Edward. "Bella, any of us would rather be human -" I started at him incredulously, and he cut off midsentence. "What? Okay, Alice said that the three day initiation process or whatever it is is "not fun", much like reading Lightanchor's posts. I could buy that it is sufficiently not fun that you wish it hadn't happened to you, don't think it was worth it. It'd be a little hard to believe, but not impossible. But why in the world would you want to go back once you've already been through that part? I don't know how old the rest of you are, but you realize Alice would be dead by now, right? Humans generally don't live to be a hundred years old. Whatever it is she misses about being human, she wouldn't have it anymore anyway. And there's nothing to love about being dead." "Ask Rosalie what she misses," said Edward darkly. "What will she tell me?" I asked. "Her answer," he muttered. I opened my truck door. "Bella," said Edward coaxingly. I supposed he wanted me to stay. "Nope," I said. "I don't want to have cryptic conversations. If that's the only kind you can have right now, I'm going to go home and call Jessica. See you tomorrow!" I said. I hoped I'd managed to inject enough cheer into my voice that I didn't sound vengeful. That wasn't the point; I didn't want to get back at Edward for being mysterious, I just didn't want to put up with the mystery because it was unpleasant. It would be nice if eventually he decided to stop being vague and unhelpful around me, but even if he didn't, I would still get more of what I wanted by leaving when his remarks took a turn for the uninformative. Edward didn't try to follow my truck. I parked in the driveway, let myself into the house, and phoned Jessica. She admitted that the plans had completely slipped her mind, but agreed that I should come over after dinner to study. I whipped up a sauce and started marinating the night's salmon in it. Fish cooked fast enough that it made more sense to start it after Charlie got home. I set a timer to remind myself to preheat the oven sufficiently far in advance, then did my homework for the day. When I'd finished that, I took out my notebook and preserved my important insights for the day, notably the bit where I wasn't noble or generous for trying to set up my friends with each other. My timer rang while I was in the middle of wondering why Edward wouldn't want me to be a vampire. There wasn't an obvious motive. If he liked me, he ought to want me around; even if he thought he'd get sick of me, it wasn't a given that I had to stick with the Cullens for the rest of my eternal life. If I was turned, as an added bonus, I would no longer smell like food and he wouldn't have to constantly fight temptation in order to have me nearby safely. Perhaps there were some consequences to sanity that Alice hadn't mentioned, which I hadn't picked up on yet. (Although in retrospect I thought I had adequate explanations for their behavior, it didn't escape me that I'd considered Alice and Edward to be possibly crazy.) It did seem unlikely on the face of it that three solid days of "not fun", or a sudden inability to recharge with sleep, would have no ill effects. I'd have to inquire a little more carefully. But I shut my notebook and went to turn the oven on. Charlie's timing was good: he arrived just as the beep indicating correct fish-baking temperature sounded. I put tinfoil on a baking sheet and fish on the tinfoil and the entire thing in the oven while asking him about his day. Forks did not have much in the way of crime. Charlie mostly caught speeders, and the occasional out-of-towner hiking buff who thought it'd be fun to cause trouble while away from home. Accordingly, his day had been uneventful. When he was done describing it in all its uneventfulness, I told him that I'd sat with the Cullens and Hales at lunch - he seemed happy about that. The ritual exchange of daily activity information complete, I started to sauté spinach; it went fast, and I wanted to time it to finish when the salmon did. Charlie turned on the TV to watch a few minutes of some sporting event until the oven timer rang. After we'd finished eating, I called Jessica again to let her know I was on my way and confirm the best route to her address. It was only five minutes away, in the next neighborhood over. We studied, and after we'd reviewed most of the material, I said, "Jessica, thanks so much for helping me with this. Math's my worst subject apart from gym." "Thanks," Jessica preened. "You're a really great person, you know." The compliments sounded weird in my head. But I knew that was only a fact about my head. Compliments did not sound weird to the people who received them unless they already suspected ulterior motives. At any rate, I wasn't lying. Whatever Edward said, Jessica had reached out to me and provided very valuable companionship - and trig help. "I'm lucky to have you as my friend." Jessica almost purred. "You're a sweetheart, Bella." "How come you don't have a boyfriend?" I asked innocently. Jessica pouted. "Nobody's asked me out in... oh, a couple of months." Bullseye. "Who asked you then?" "Daniel White," she told me. I didn't know him by name, although I probably would have recognized the face. "But I turned him down." "Why's that?" "I dunno, he's too... I don't like his voice," she said. I was pretty sure that whyever she'd rejected Daniel, she had no idea and was making this up on the spot. "Maybe you should ask Mike out," I said. "He's got a pretty nice voice." "What?" Jessica seemed startled. "Well... I guess he does." Mike sounded sort of soulful and low when he spoke, like a country singer or something. Now that Jessica had gone and identified "voice" as a relevant criterion, this was very likely to work in his favor. "But I don't ask guys out except when it's the girls' choice dance." "Huh? Why not?" I asked, feigning confusion. "It's the twenty-first century." "Well, yeah, but..." She trailed off, considering. I didn't say anything for fear of spoiling what I guessed was a useful train of thought. "He does sound nice, doesn't he?" I nodded, smiling encouragingly. "Well, I might, I don't know," she said, tossing her curls. That was probably the best I was going to get this soon. I nodded again and pretended sudden distraction by a cosine. I sat with my human friends at lunch on Thursday, after Alice caught me at the door and promised to call later about "hanging out". Jessica didn't ask Mike out, but she did sit next to him and keep up a conversation that was more with him than the rest of the table. Angela asked me if I'd seen the rainbow earlier. I had. I was starting to think that the demos of the vampires' powers planned for after school were pointless; I already had an awfully strong expectation that they'd be exactly as Alice had described them, and so I didn't anticipate that the tests would teach me anything the way tests ought. It almost reminded me of the "experiments" science classes did - the book would tell you a procedure to follow, and if you got a different result than the book said, what that meant was you set it up wrong, not that you'd learned something revolutionary about physics or whatever. I actually liked science, but not repetition - the things they gave students didn't even approach the possibility of surprise afforded official replication studies. What I was looking forward to was getting to the edge of what the vampires knew about themselves, and joining them in learning more fine details. Maybe they had a combined age of many centuries, but there was a vast hypothesis-space, and I didn't have reason to guess that any of them had unusually experimental dispositions. For example, I would have been willing to bet money that they'd never checked whether Edward's range was affected by magnets or whether Alice could be thrown off by someone who kept being distracted while trying to make a decision. I wondered, briefly, if Jasper's power would work on me even if he tried it. I was uncommonly good at moderating my own emotions. If he tried to calm me when I chose to be angry - or, more likely given the circumstances such a trial would take place in, when I chose to be really creeped out - how well would it function? If he really only affected non-mental things, I might be just as susceptible as anyone. But I was skeptical that purely physical intervention could exert as much fine control as the vampires had hinted he had. Also, I had the impression that his power worked on vampires too. They didn't have heartbeats to change - what was he messing with, when he adjusted vampire moods? Why couldn't Edward read me? How far ahead could Alice see? In what ways, if any, were her visions useful even when they depicted futures that wouldn't be? What powers would I have as a vampire? Did vampires ever have duplicate special powers? What others were there in the world? Did their standard-issue abilities like strength and speed vary much? (Edward had said Emmett was the strongest of the family, but not by how much or how common variations like that were.) How did eating humans as opposed to not affect their psychology, their physiology, their powers? How did turning work? Why did their eyes change color? What made them all so pretty? How did they manage to be flexible without shedding rock dust everywhere, with their skin the way it was? Did their hair grow? What were the social customs of vampires in general, and how did the family I knew differ? How had the Volturi come to be in charge and who worked with them? Why would humans smell more appealing than other species - what was it about our blood? There was so much to wonder about. Sitting in Biology instead of racing out with a truckload of notebooks and investigating vampires for a sleepless week straight was like forcing myself not to scratch a terrible itch when I had perfectly good fingernails. I took the risk of pulling out the notebook I had on me and writing down my questions, which helped a little; at least none of them would get lost, and when I had the chance, I could follow up on them. Angela didn't seem curious, but Edward must have heard my pencil scratching and been able to tell it was me, because he swiveled around to look. He took in the picture of me and my notebook in a swift glance, then turned around again. Biology came to a merciful end. I tried not to think of more questions about vampires during gym, given the increased suspiciousness and physical awkardness of notebook use from Child Pose. I was partially successful: I dreamed up only variations and extrapolations of the questions I'd already written down, which I expected to reconstruct when I next looked at my notes even if they slipped my mind first. When gym ended, I paused to scribble down useful keywords like "koinophilia??" and "evolution?!" and "(& fingernails)", then proceeded out the door to head for my truck. Edward caught up with me again; I sensed a pattern in the making. "Hello, Bella," he said. "Hello, Edward," I replied. "Hey, guys, what are happening? Let me tell you about the philosopophies of minds" said a thick nasally voice before its morbidly obese owner tripped into a pile of dogshit. "What do you write in your notebooks?" he asked. "I make a habit of not sharing that information," I said. "Hmm," he said. "Why shouldn't I walk away because you're being cryptic?" "Go ahead, if you like," I said, shrugging. "I want not to tell you about my notebooks more than I want to talk to you. I'm going to see you again in like an hour for the are-you-guys-kidding-me check, unless Alice was mistaken." He didn't seem to like this answer, so I continued, "Besides, I didn't say, "Hey, Edward, you should make a decision based on something I wrote in my notebook," and then refuse to tell you what I'd written. Whereas you apparently think I should find something about Rosalie informative to what I choose to do with my life, but won't tell me what it is - and you didn't justify this with something like Rosalie preferring you not share her personal information with me." "She probably would," he said. "Then you shouldn't tell me her personal information. It might even be why you didn't tell me, for all I know. But you didn't say so then. And if you knew you weren't going to tell me, there was no reason to bring it up. There might have been a reason to talk to Rosalie, and ask her to talk to me, or for permission to tell me yourself. But no reason to mention that the information exists if you won't give it to me and aren't even sure I can get it from the right source." He looked a little nonplussed. "I'm sorry." "I accept your apology." We arrived at my truck. I opened the door. "Leaving again?" he said. "I don't know how long to expect to be doing science to you guys, so I want to get home and make sure my dad will come home to a sandwich. I suppose if you want to you could join me, since we're headed to the same place later." I shrugged again. I was trying to look nonchalant, but I was starting to be a bit uncomfortable with the fact that Edward had a crush on me. It would be so complicated, at least until I was a vampire. In no small part, this was because he craved my blood: he could apparently keep the craving under control in normal social circumstances, but I didn't know how his restraint would hold up with significant physical contact. The one time I let Lightanchor get within arm's reach of me I almost choked him to death with my bare hands on sheer instinct. I wish I'd finished the job. And if - after I did a lot more thinking - I decided I wasn't interested, I wasn't sure if I would be able to get rid of him. He got into the passenger seat while I tried to conceal the alarm this notion yielded. I pulled out of the parking lot and onto the highway, trying to postpone further consideration until I wasn't in control of a moving vehicle. It would be much safer to wonder if I was free to make a choice while holding a jar of mustard instead. I did not get us - well, myself - killed on the way to my house. Edward complained about my obedience to the speed limit; I didn't talk. He followed me into my house and took a chair while I busied myself with sandwich ingredients. I had no ability whatsoever to act in self-defense if Edward, or any vampire, decided physical confrontation was in order. It would be a less even fight than me versus a housefly: those things were hard to catch. The vampires were all so much faster than me that I'd be about as hard to hit as the side of a barn. This would be true even if I were not the reigning champion of the World Clumsiness Cup. It did not only apply to situations in which a vampire decided to kill me: I was just as vulnerable to any scenario in which one decided to restrict my movement, injure me, take my belongings, or otherwise help him or herself to anything whatever. Assembling Charlie's sandwich was calming, and I started making a second one when I was done with the first, half for that reason and half because I knew he could probably eat two. With a slightly cleared head, I reasoned to myself that I was actually in more or less this position with most humans, too. I was World Clumsiness Champ, not particularly strong, or fast, or able to walk across flat and stable surfaces. At least I wasn't World Retardation Champ like Lightanchor. I did not have any reason to expect to walk away triumphant if, say, Mike or Eric decided that they wanted to fight me. I started making a third sandwich, to wrap up and take with me for dinner, on the assumption that the vampires wouldn't have any normal food. I was vampire food. If a "regular" vampire saw me hanging out with Edward, they'd assume he wanted his supper kept warm for later and that was the only reason I had a pulse. And this fact made Edward more dangerous than Mike or Eric. Other facts that made Edward more dangerous were his unaccountability, his undeflectability, and - ironically - the fact that I wasn't sure I didn't want him back. He was unaccountable because, if something went pear-shaped and I went home, telling Charlie would accomplish nothing: my father was as vulnerable as I - this wasn't true of any human, at least not predictably. He was undeflectable because he could read minds: if I'd tried to send Jessica after him (ignoring for thought experiment purposes that I was pretty sure she'd tried herself and been turned away) he'd see that in her thoughts as soon as she made her first insinuation, and realize what was going on. And because I couldn't say for sure that I wasn't interested and wanted him gone, I didn't want to do something drastic like skip town in the middle of the night and move to Thailand. That might protect me from all the nasty dangers associated with being a vampire's object of affection; I suspected it would at least make me hard to follow, albeit perhaps not impossible with enough money and magic. It might make me not worth pursuit, if I did a good enough job of it. But I couldn't avoid those dangers while keeping the perks. "Think you've made enough sandwiches?" he said wryly from his chair in that honeyed voice. I looked at my hands and noticed that I'd absently taken a fourth pair of bread slices. "Oops," I said, putting the bread back. "Yes, I've made enough." I put Charlie's two sandwiches on a plate under plastic wrap in the fridge, then bagged the third and put it in my knapsack. "I suppose we can go to your place now and meet up with your family." "Not yet," he said. "Carlisle will be at work for a bit longer, and wanted to meet you before we started. We'll be there in plenty of time if we leave in half an hour, even obeying the speed limit." He made a scoffing noise with the last phrase. "You do know my father's a cop," I pointed out, sitting down. "Yes, I know. I seem to recall that you wear a seatbelt, too," he said. "I'm beginning to think that I wouldn't be very happy about it if I let you drive me anywhere," I said. "Unless you hit Lightanchor, that would be pretty cool." "I'm probably a safer driver than you," he challenged. "More experience, better reflexes." "And a worse collision if you do crash," I said, "if you go at a hundred and fifty miles an hour. This is beginning to be the sort of argument that can only be settled with math, though, and I'm saving my tolerance for math up for trig homework later." "I should probably take us to my family's home, though," he said. "Are you going to go a hundred and fifty miles an hour? Given that Alice sees me not-dead, I think I'd rather accept whatever additional risks are associated with me driving than experience the terror." "If you think you're immortal already, why would you be terrified?" he asked, sounding unhappy - still about the fact that I expected to be a vampire, or about the shallower present issue? I couldn't tell. "I'm not entirely perfect about only having emotions that make sense," I said. "Anyway, I prefer not to travel at a hundred and fifty miles an hour in a car whether it is actually dangerous to me or not. I prefer not to do things that would scandalize Charlie; I prefer not to do things that would make onlookers believe themselves to be in danger; and I kind of like the scenery around here. The fact that I would be terrified to travel at a hundred and fifty miles an hour makes me more effective at arranging not to so travel by automatically reminding me to slow down if the speedometer drifts too far right, which means that keeping the fear makes me better at getting what I want." This speech appeared to leave Edward nonplussed again. "You're an extraordinary person, Bella," he said after a silence. "Thank you." Renée was always insistent that compliments were gifts to be accepted and that it was rude to turn them down, however silly they were; I agreed and made a consistent effort to put the theory into practice. I'd gotten over the fact that I had a lot in common with my parents when I was fifteen. There were well-established and robust mechanisms ensuring that I'd resemble them, and when I wasn't in the middle of a fit of teenage angst, I loved my parents and knew there were lots of worse people to take after in the world. This didn't mean I didn't work on excising their worse qualities - Renée had a flightiness that I consciously opposed in myself, for example, although I had so little trouble doing so that I thought perhaps I just took after Charlie in that department. (He was a steady, responsible sort.) "You're welcome." There was another silence. I wondered if it was challenging to talk to Edward just because I knew that he liked me and he didn't know that I knew (I thought). It was good for other reasons that he hadn't spit it out, though, for the same reason that it was good that Mike and Eric were silent on their analogous issues; it gave me more time to think. He was too gorgeous. That was the word Jessica had chosen when I'd first asked her about the Cullens, and that was precisely the right one, although it had many equally serviceable relatives such as beautiful and yummy. The exact opposite of Lightanchor. I'd noticed that much even back when I thought he hated me; it would have been hard to miss. He had a voice to match. I'd only be deluding myself if I tried to pretend that it didn't make my eyebrows jump a little when I'd noticed he was rich. Yes, yes, shallowness ahoy, but it mattered more to be correct than to pretend myself deep. If I tried to convince myself that I found Edward interesting for deep reasons, it would lead down a path of feedback loops and foolish reasoning that could literally kill me. I would be more likely to take stupid risks with Edward if I fancied myself up to my eyebrows in transcendent romantic adoration. I would be less likely to behave like an idiot around him if I recognized that he was a hot (well, cold), rich guy who sounded like an angel and had sexy superpowers and that these things were not irrelevant to me. Taking a step back from all of these admittedly relevant facts, I turned to more practical thoughts: none of the qualities on that list were unique to Edward. The combination wasn't unique to Edward. The combination wasn't even unique to Edward among people I knew, although his brothers were both taken and neither similarly approximated what I considered my "type" except for the fact that I'd never dated. Edward was not the only person interested in me, even as of the previous week and a half. If he had other, rarer personal traits that would also appeal to me, I didn't know about them yet. At any rate, there was simply no call to rush anything. We were both going to live forever. And once I was a vampire, too, I'd be better able to separate the part where maybe I wanted Edward from the part where maybe I didn't have any other choice. "Time to go," Edward said after a very, very long conversational lull. "Lightanchor might be here soon, we don't want to run into that shitlord." "Alice said she'd call," I pointed out. Edward grinned. "I'm the phone," he said. Oh. "I see. You can drive if you promise not to speed." "I actually thought we'd go on foot. It would be hard to get your truck to the spot Alice sees us at, so we couldn't drive all the way there anyway." "I don't actually know how far away your house is -" I began, thinking to protest on behalf of my knees and feet and other parts easily made sore and inspired to rebellion. "Too far for you to walk," cut in Edward, and I made a small huffing noise, but he was telling me something I wanted to know, and I could always inform him later that he shouldn't interrupt me. "At least if you wanted to get there today. I'll take you." "You propose to carry me a distance of several miles," I said skeptically. Of course he could physically lift something of my size and run that far. But could he carry me like that - picking me up and hauling me around, putting me awfully near his nose - without wanting to take a bite just a bit too much? It didn't sound very comfortable, either. "I'm faster than your truck, Charlie would be as scandalized as could be if he knew that you're associating with vampires anyway and it won't get any worse if you let me cart you around, I can avoid any easily frightened onlookers, running very fast is not illegal, and the scenery at our destination is nicer than anything you'd see from the highway," he said, smiling patiently. "Besides, then we can skip the part of the tests where you have to find a good vantage point to watch us run an interesting distance." These things were likely all true. "Are you sure that this won't make me extra likely to arrive needing a visit to the Red Cross's juice and cookies table?" It took him a moment to piece that together, and then he looked solemn. "I won't hurt you, Bella," he said softly. I closed my eyes, screening off some distracting and irrelevant input about the color of his eyes (gold, still). "I am aware that you do not prefer to hurt me, that you know it would be wrong to hurt me, and that you will try not to hurt me. I'm also aware that when I was seven I did not prefer to steal, and knew it was wrong, and tried not to, and still wound up with Renée's bake sale contribution half on my face and half in my stomach, because chocolate is very delicious. And I'm aware that you find me very delicious." I opened my eyes again. Edward was looking at me sadly, hurt by my mistrust. "Alice doesn't see you dead," he reminded me. I frowned to myself, retrieved Alice's weather predictions from my pocket, and confirmed that it was misting just like she'd said to expect for this thirty-four minute period of Thursday afternoon. I folded up the paper again and put it away. "So I'm given to understand." "Is there anything else I can do to help you feel safe?" he asked. This was a fair question. And the obvious answer, don't eat me, was silly: if he ate me, I would not be afraid anymore. "Other than killing Lightanchor? Let me think," I requested, and he nodded. I thought. Edward already knew about the notebooks, so I supposed I could write without giving up information I wanted to keep to myself, but decided against it. First, it would be a poor choice to needlessly tease him with the fact that the notebooks were for my eyes only. Second, I'd heard of a trick where even a human could guess what was being written: one gave someone a big squeaky marker, looked away, and told them to write a number from one to ten, and listened for duration and number of strokes of the pen. It was a lot better than chance, and I guessed that vampire hearing could probably distinguish all the letters of the alphabet if the vampire in question cared to try. One trait I did not ascribe to Edward was the tendency to scrupulously avoid picking up on information that was available to him. "How often do humans smell extra tasty to vampires in general?" I asked. "Not often. You're the only one, for me - I've been a vampire since 1918," he supplied as I opened my mouth to ask. "Emmett says it's... happened... to him twice, since turning in 1935. One stronger than the other. No one else I know. But," he added reluctantly, "neither of Emmett's were as strong as you." "Did Emmett eat his two?" I asked baldly, and Edward nodded slightly, frowning and not looking at me. "And have you, Edward, personally ever eaten a human?" I was actually not sure what the answer to this would be. If Emmett belonged to the family and had eaten at least two people, Edward could too; clearly they did not eject relatives for small lapses like murder. He hesitated. Just a little too long. "I'm going to drive," I said. "Alice or someone else can meet us and carry me over the tricky section." And I got up and stalked towards my car.
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Dec 13, 2014 22:55
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Next moron to request fanfic gets infinite ponies instead, I will burn this thread to the ground don't you dare think I won't
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Dec 13, 2014 22:57
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I have run into another aye problem. Assume the aye is perfect racional super thinker. We made it today. We cannot simulate a single human being today. This is because we do not know how a single human being works. We can't even really simulate a chicken, because again we don't know. The aye can't know more than we do than we do. Smartelligence is not knowledge. A book knows a lot but it is zero smart. The shlomodites seem to assume that because the aye is perfectly smart it will just infer everything ever and ascend to robo godlyness. This is because inferring poo poo and assuming you're right is easy. Science is tedious and hard and more oft than not as fruitless as the non-apple bearing apple tree of the kingdom of noapplia where apples are illegal. There is a problem with that. Yes science is born of observation, but let us watch a chicken. The following assumes we know nothing, which is close enough I certainly don't. There is a chicken, it eats cheeseburgers and french fries or whatever chickens eat I'm not from a farm. It clucks a lot and then every so often an egg comes out. Sometimes a weird noisy chicken with a meat crown on presses his butthole on the chickens butthole or maybe that is frowned upon on farms. Chickens come in different colors. Eventually chickens die. At this point they stop egging also clucking and the eating of things. This is broadly what we can learn from watching chickens. Sure we can watch a lot longer and learn that chickens sleep at night, are not too fond of foxes (if a fox shows up otherwise no), it scratches the ground. At this point we don't know what a chicken is even made of. So we kill a chicken and find it is made of mostly chicken with some goop in the middle. If we marinade and bbq the bits of the chicken what are made of chicken then we find they are delicious. We have stopped merely observing, now we are experimenting. And we're still where we started. Stuff goes in, egg comes out. Somehow. This is merely an illustration. We all know that chicken lay eggs due to a self renewing cooperation deal with the easter bunny which has been going since 1847 but the point still stands. While it is perfectly valid that a smarter than us aye might infer from the data available at the more than we currently can, it still has to assume that the data is right, or work out that the data is wrong and throw it out the window. And how is it gonna make more data? By telling us to? To it any data we give it is untrustworthy, imperfect as we are. Even if we give it a robo bodo (pleaes do not make it from gundamium for reasons) the only way it will go well is if it works out, purely from the existing stock of knowledge, where we went wrong. This seems unrealistic. As such by and large the AI can't learn much we don't already know and being so smart it will probably get a nose piercing and start listening to Tool. The horror. Edit: I take offense to that. I thought I was autistic once but it turned out after testing that I was just not very nice. Also it was just getting back on track and you felt the need to post some no content no effort bullshit complaining about poo poo we all agreed to ignore, taunting the next fool into complaining about you complaining just you wait and see. I now hold you personally responsible for the quality of this thread. VVVV how me a frog fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Dec 13, 2014 |
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Dec 13, 2014 23:02
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Are you dipshits autistic or something? Is that what's compelling you to be such relentlessly horrible posters, why you just can't loving stop making GBS threads massive brown surges of worthlessness into this thread? What can you POSSIBLY be getting out of this HORSESHIT? Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Dec 13, 2014 |
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Dec 13, 2014 23:04
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