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wizzard890 · 1 year

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So there’s a trend that I absolutely hate in online discussions of (non-satirical) genre, particularly genre that’s influenced by the gothic. This trend makes my eyes roll back in my head until I can see through my own skull. It makes me want to bite a car in half. It makes me want to step into the jellyfish tank at the New York Aquarium and beg for the sweet sweet annihilation of a thousand stings.

I call this trend: Oh Just Be Sensible, and it goes like this:

“Why do vampires always end up covered in blood when they feed, I don’t spill soup all down the front of my shirt when I eat dinner. Real toddler energy.”

“Why do people always cut their hands to swear oaths, everyone knows it would hurt way less on the [insert body part with fewer nerve endings]”

“Vampires shouldn’t be feeding from people’s wrists, it damages the tendons, if doctors don’t take your blood from your wrist, vampires shouldn’t either! No one will be able to flex their fingers the next day.”

(This comes up a lot with vampires, I mention, as I stride purposefully into the glistening mass of jellyfish.)

There are direct answers for some of these when it comes to the practical visual language of a particular medium (for example, you cut your hand on stage / on set because you can hold a blood pack in there, and even if you don’t have an effect, the gesture and its purpose can be discerned from the nosebleeds) but what really gets me is how thematically boneheaded this sort of observation is.

Like, let’s go down the list here.

Why do vampires end up covered in their victims’ blood? Well Scoob, do you think it could maybe have something to do with their bestial, inhuman nature? Or with the erotic and sensual abandon with which they can approach violence, now that they’re untethered from human morals?

Why do people cut their hands to swear oaths? Aside from what I mentioned above, do you think maybe it’s because it adds a layer of gravity to see two people swearing an oath to one another with blood dripping from their clasped hands? Do you think it’s maybe to evoke a unity of body, something greater and more primal than a unity of word? Or maybe to remind us of the dire consequences of breaking a blood oath?

Why are authors having vampires feed from people’s wrists if it damages their tendons? Damn, maybe that’s because it’s where the pulse is. You know, the pulse? The heartblood, the thing that races when you’re scared or turned on or both? The thing that stutters when you’re close to death and could, should the author choose, ring in the vampire’s ears like a chime or a great pounding thunderclap. Maybe in a story about undead beings who drink blood, we can sacrifice a bit of sensible reality in order to enforce the emotion and thematic heft of a scene?

Images like these communicate what is happening between two characters, not just the events that are transpiring! No one making stories forgot to consider ~sensible~ little observations, because it would be absolutely inane to consider an observation with the creative value of a wet paper towel. This stuff is part of our visual language for a reason! Themes also need to be communicated!

God, like, okay, I’m exhausted and the aquarium staff keeps yelling at me when they find me here, but let me just wrap up by saying that relationships, character and meaning are expressed in so many ways beyond dialogue or internal monologue, and those expressions are so rarely sensible.

(Also all this shit looks cool as hell, do you really want your protagonists swearing to die for one another by dabbing their slightly bleeding elbows together, grow up.)

#me: don't make me tap the sign #sign: fun allowed #(thematic clarity and character relationships should trump sensible realism every time)#(realism is fine! but monocle popping smirky little 'hmm I think dan brown was an idiot' smugness is just....bad!)#(it's bad and it makes for bad writing!)#my thoughts about books

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a-dinosaur-a-day · 11 months

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at this point you should just make one of those 'don't make me tap the sign' memes for responding to people about birds being dinosaurs 😭 lol

tadaaaa

#don't make me tap the sign #birds #dinosaurs #birds are dinosaurs #palaeoblr #birblr #meme

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dolceaspidenera · 8 months

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After yet another post against women who romance Astarion, I had to say it.

The whole point of Astarion's romance is that he loves you because it's you, because he feels safe and seen with you, which is really ironic when people straight up deny his sexuality to project their ideas and preferences on him. He is pansexual, not gay, he loves you independently of your gender, so stop hating on women who romance him (and fyi, women can be bi too). I understand wanting to see more content with the ship dynamic you prefer, that's valid, but I don't see what use it has to shit on other people's pairings.

We should be supportive of each other, not be divisive over this stuff. Just post and share more screenshots of your own Tav if that's the content that you'd like to see more of, or do some fan art yourself. If you don't have the ability, ask some of your favorite artists, I'm sure there are plenty out there that would be happy to draw you something.

Honestly, I just love gushing over other people's Tavs, they are all so cool, and Astarion deserves all the love, independently from your Tav's gender.

So yeah... Don't make me tap the sign.

#don't make me tap the sign #bg3 #baldur's gate 3 #astarion #astarion ancunin #baldur’s gate 3 #baldur's gate iii

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unimatrix69 · 10 months

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k/s - almost (@sha-ka-re pointed this out)

#snw #strange new worlds #star trek #don't make me tap the sign #(the sign is that video of paul westley saying spirk in an interveiw and ethan peck repeating it)#the premise is endgame #in my housewife era #k/s

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janmisali · 1 year

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Tournament Hype Optimization

after spending the past several days running a number-themed tournament bracket (which at the time of writing is currently on the championship match), I've had a lot of thoughts about what makes a tournament exciting, and how to theoretically organize one in a way that ensures that it's as exciting as possible. bear with me, this is going to get very long and technical.

unpredictability

excitement (or "hype") is a subjective emotional experience that cannot be given an exact definition. nonetheless, it's still a little bit possible to make a mathematical model of what it means for a competition to be more or less hype than another competition.

here is my key assumption: the more predictable an outcome is, the less hype it is. this should make intuitive sense, I think.

imagine a competition between two competitors A and B where A has an 80% chance of winning, and B has a 20% chance of winning. I reckon that it would be generally more hype if B won than if A won, specifically because A winning is more predictable.

similarly, imagine an evenly matched competition, where two competitors C and D each have a 50% chance of winning. both outcomes are equally unpredictable, and I think either outcome would be more exciting than A winning against B, but less exciting than B winning against A.

so, a major factor of hype is what I'm going to call "unpredictability", equal to the estimated probability that a different outcome could have happened instead. so, A winning against B has 20% unpredictability, B winning against A has 80% unpredictability, and either of C or D winning has 50% unpredictability.

from here, we can define the oxymoronic-sounding notion of "expected unpredictability", a weighted average of the unpredictability of all possible outcomes of a competition.

the C vs D match would result in 50% unpredictability no matter what, so that's also its expected unpredictability.

then for the A vs B match, there's an 80% chance of 20% unpredictability (A wins), and a 20% chance of 80% unpredictability (B wins), which adds to an expected unpredictability of 32%.

for an event with n possible outcomes, the expected unpredictability cannot be greater than 1/n, the expected unpredictability in the case where all outcomes are equally likely.

unpredictability and hype aren't exactly the same thing, for some obvious reasons and some less obvious reasons. most of the remaining major factors can't be easily modeled with math (it's more hype when the competitor you're rooting for wins, it's not hype when something unpredictable happens if you just don't care about the competition at all, etc) but what can be turned into math is the idea of long-term consequences.

this is actually pretty straightforward to define. all we need to do is consider the average unpredictability across every match in a tournament.

formal definition

so, now that I've explained the basics of my idea, here's the formal definition of my hype-optimized tournament structure. note that a lot of things are "customizable", in particular the "elimination rule" and "scheduling rule". anyway, definitions and assumptions first:

a tournament is a sequence of matches, played between a set of competitors.

a match is a single event involving a set of competitors (specifically a subset of the competitors in the tournament), ending in some outcome.

the state of a tournament consists of the set of competitors in the tournament and the sequence of matches (including their outcomes) which have already occurred.

given the state of the tournament, there is some deterministic process (the elimination rule) for deciding which, if any, competitors are eliminated.

given the state of a tournament, it is known which subsets of the set of competitors would be allowed to participate in the next match. (the scheduling rule)

given a set of competitors and the state of a tournament, it is known which outcomes for a match between the given competitors would be possible, and it is at least approximately known what probability each outcome has of occurring.

the unpredictability of an outcome is one minus the previously determined probability of that outcome occurring.

the average unpredictability of a sequence of outcomes is the sum of the unpredictability values of the outcomes, divided by the number of outcomes.

the average unpredictability of a tournament is the average unpredictability of the tournament's sequence of outcomes.

the expected average unpredictability of a tournament, given its current state and a method for determining from any state which match happens next (and when the tournament ends), is the weighted sum of the average unpredictability values of all possible ending states for the tournament, with each multiplied by its probability of that ending state occurring.

okay, and now here's the actual tournament structure rules.

if there is exactly one competitor remaining, the tournament ends, and that competitor is declared the champion.

otherwise, use the scheduling rule to determine which subsets of competitors may compete in the next match. let S be the set of these allowed subsets of competitors.

if S is empty (meaning a "next match" is impossible), the tournament ends without declaring a champion. as a special case (to discourage this from happening), a tournament that ends this way is considered to have an average unpredictability of zero.

otherwise, for every set of competitors C in S, determine the expected average unpredictability of a tournament starting from the current state where the next match is between the competitors in C, continuing from that point by following the rules outlined here.

hold a match between whichever set C in S was found to have the maximum expected average unpredictability in the previous step.

use the elimination rule to determine which, if any, competitors should be eliminated, and remove those that should be.

return to step one.

potential issues

this definition is recursive, and also very general. there is no guarantee that it would actually like, work. I also haven't actually been able to get a simulation of this working, but that's probably just because I'm not very good at coding.

for some rulesets, it's possible for a tournament to never end. theoretically, the rules for determining which matches are more unpredictable discourage this already (the definition of the expected average unpredictability of a tournament implies that if there's a nonzero probability of a tournament never ending, then that would count as a tournament with average unpredictability zero), but that's still a pain to actually calculate.

the fact that the matches happen in a linear order means that this tournament structure isn't very parallelizable. you kinda need to do all the matches one at a time. however, this can be worked around by crafting a scheduling rule that avoids having the same competitor go twice in a row whenever possible.

counting the unpredictability of every match equally means that the hypeness of the championship match is given the same weight as everything else. this could be addressed by altering the "average unpredictability" metric to give more weight to later matches, but I'm not sure which method of doing that would have the best results.

#jan misali #tournament hype optimization #don't make me tap the sign (points to my ''some ideas are just posts'' post)

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chxrlie-cox · 1 year

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Production on Daredevil Born Again has shut down for the rest of the week due to the WGA writers strike

via Deadline

#strikes are supposed to be disruptive #don't make me tap the sign #would be great to see charlie out supporting the strikes now #like nikki james did #charlie cox #matt murdock #daredevil #daredevil born again

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bonefall · 8 months

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Question about Tiger- what WAS his end goal? We know that he wanted to be TC leader but he really quickly pivoted to "world forest domination" after that failed, which is one of those things that feels like thistle's law would oppose. Also why did he start going after half clan cats while also preaching for the clans uniting under him and him alone one leader? Other than kitty racism of course.

(Gently) If you think that Thistle Law would oppose total forest takeover, then I really recommend you head over to the masterpost on Thistle Law as a concept. Nothing about Thistle Law is isolationist, never has been

The ideology sets itself apart from Hard Traditionalism because it becomes willing to enforce some standard of xenophobic purity. That's what Tigerstar wanted to do. There is no "other than kitty racism." That's it. Stonefur, Mistyfoot, Stormpaw, and Featherpaw's lives are the result of codebreaking and that makes them lesser than other cats.

There is no logical reason for bigotry. It's not a principle. It doesn't make sense. It's reactionary discomfort and cruelty given form.

Tigerstar wanted to decide who was pure enough to live and who was filthy enough to die. These categories are arbitrary.

(Under the cut TW: speaking frankly about miscegenation, segregation, and genocide.)

"But if they all united under one Clan, then they'd just start mixing in the end, wouldn't they?"

No. They wouldn't. The steps go like this;

The groups live together and mingle too closely. To prevent them from interbreeding, the code is emphasized.

Someone breaks the code. They are punished.

The kits are dealt with; either eliminated or considered lesser.

But every birth of mixed children poses an "existential" threat. "Purity" is a concept that has to be protected, if a Pure parent mixes with the wrong parent, ALL of the resulting children are dirty. It is a threat to the concept of purity.

And this continues to happen, and "purity" must be protected, so... the groups need to be kept separate.

There is no such thing as "separate but equal." One group is an underclass, prevented from moving freely. This would have been RiverClan.

But the groups continue to mingle, people won't stay put in a ghetto. More extreme measures are taken. Sterilization, kidnapping, execution...

But that still doesn't work. There's only one solution; Genocide.

The logical conclusion of this ideology is genocide. That's where it ends. It doesn't matter if the fascist believes this at the stage he's at or not; that is the built-in conclusion.

Fascism is a death cult.

Tigerstar's goal was to take over the forest and arbitrarily decide which cats would be "True" cats of TigerClan. He would have weeded out cats seemingly at random, but heavily favored ShadowClan. Eventually, the Clans would shift into various classes, before each one is systemically eliminated.

IF he went unopposed. Fascism is unstable. Hyperemotional, self-obsessed, frothing egotists are REALLY bad at organizing government and its very structure is prone to infighting.

The enemy is everywhere, both strong and weak. You live in a constant state of paranoia. You waste all your money on ridiculous vanity weapon projects and overestimate your abilities to absurdity. You kill off all the intellectuals because you're too fragile to be told no. The biggest liar in history is the person who equated any kind of fascism with "evil genius," spite is blinding and insecurity makes you do stupid things.

Turns out, that's really bad for holding onto power. These regimes crumble like a shitty jenga tower eventually; problem is, they're deadly before that point and drag down thousands of innocent people on the way down.

#better bones au #Thistle Law #tw fascism #tw bigotry #tw genocide #I feel like I get an ask like this every couple of months and I hittem with the Bigotry Doesnt Make Sense line #I gotta make a bus driver meme lmao #Don't make me tap the sign; Bigotry is not a principle. It does not make sense #Ask to tag for anything else btw I feel like bigotry/genocide/fascism should cover it #But if there's anything specific you guys use in your tag filters I'll smack it in

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sirartwork · 1 year

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whys there no bulge on the try hard you sweaty coward

Big Dick Energy?

Medium Dick Existence

Is all that I know

#SIR #Asks #Don't Make Me Tap The Sign #Poetry #Haiku

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moonnlsbn · 1 year

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Actually I'm thinking about being pushed face down and having my legs forced open. Being used and slapped around basically like a toy. Just a hole for dykes to get off in <3 Ignore me if I beg you to stop. Spank me if I get too noisy. Make me cum just because you like the way I tense and clench on you. I'm just a useful place to dump a load for lesbians who top 🥰

MEN DO NOT INTERACT. Terfs & nonsapphics dni. 18+

#yeah i had my objectification kink re-unlocked today #what if i was a pussy in the wall *twirls hair*#don't make me tap the sign #moonn.shine

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seasononesam · 2 years

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2x13 // 4x07

I do pray every day. I have for a long time.

#supernatural #spn #spnedit #supernaturaledit #Sam Winchester #dean winchester #samwinchesteredit #spnsamwinchester #*#don't make me tap the 'we live in a society' sign

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a-dinosaur-a-day · 8 months

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@ tags: don’t make me tap the sign again

“Saying humans are naturally evil and violent is just another form of anthrocentrism and isn’t any better than saying we’re perfect and better than other organisms”

Humans! Are! Normal!

Not! Evil! Not! Perfect! Just! Normal!

#humans are animals #humans are normal #we are not uniquely evil #don't make me tap the sign

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flowerslut · 10 months

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Years after their departure from Forks, the Cullens have lowered their guard, moved on from their fear, and made plans for the future. There is no sense in a life half-lived, but despite evidence that assures, Jasper refuses to let his guard down. He knows what dangers can lie uncovered. Eventually, the peace is shattered. A package and a poem arrive in tandem. It is a warning. It is a threat. If the Cullens want to survive, they have to act fast.

roots, a twilight fanfiction

coming to an Ao3 + a FF.net near you

Rating: M (for sexual assault, body horror, graphic descriptions of violence) [full list of trigger/content warnings here] Words: ~197k Canon Compliant / Post-Canon / Canon Couples / Jalice-centric

[preview of chapter one under the cut]

Jasper was annoyed.

Not at the high-pitched whine of the overworked Mac or the fact that he could hear Renesmee loudly complaining to Esme on the level below. It wasn’t the pungent odor of whatever Esme was using to clean the oven that drifted through the vents, nor was it the fact that his chair had started squeaking this morning and they were conveniently out of WD-40. He wasn’t even bothered by the fact that Carlisle had ignored three consecutive calls from his cell while he talked on his work phone, and hadn’t muted any of the calls, letting the rhythmic buzzing on top of his desk echo throughout the second floor.

No. He was annoyed because Rosalie hadn’t answered his texts before their flight.

His eyes flickered to his phone where it sat, propped up against the unused lamp on his desk, before they moved back to the screen of his desktop. Then, he glanced toward the door of his study, back toward the phone, and then to the screen again.

He could hear the other occupants of the house moving about as the day finally ended and the night picked up where it left off. None of them were heading in his direction yet, but he knew that being interrupted tonight was guaranteed.

His last conversation with his wife flickered through his head and he frowned.

Jasper looked back toward his phone.

Then back toward his computer screen.

Eventually the annoying ‘SMS NOT DELIVERED’ notification flickered across his phone screen, mocking him with its stubbornness. He tapped the ‘resend’ button without another thought, restarting the arduous process of waiting for his damn text message to send.

It wasn’t his main focus tonight. His fingers clicked away on his keyboard, his attention focused more on the internet browser in front of him.

They were undecided between two different towns now. “Some place new,” their youngest family member had begged. Renesmee had been begging for years now, pretending to be tired of the old homes they’d been shuffling between for over a century now (barely thirty years for her), and it looked like she was finally going to get her way.

It wasn’t for anyone’s sake other but Renesmee’s. They all knew that. It had been almost ten years since his niece had gotten the idea in her head that it would be fun to live somewhere “separate, but close.” Those had been the peculiar words she’d chosen while trying to explain the hypothetical tunnels that they could use to travel between the hypothetical three houses that would be built all “close together but far enough away that any neighbors wouldn’t see”.

They’d never had neighbors close enough to see what was going on in any of their homes, but even so, ‘separate but close’ had turned into a running joke. A ridiculous joke that was inching closer and closer to becoming a true project they’d be taking on soon.

Bella still blamed her daughter’s idea on some urban exploration video she’d watched one too many times during, what she’d called, Renesmee’s ‘breaking-and-entering phase.’

That particular phrasing still made Jasper laugh.

But Edward had rolled his eyes before going off on another tangent about ‘ethical responsibility’ that they’d all heard some variation of before. He’d never been entertained by his daughter’s adventures across North America as she journeyed into every rusted, grown-over abandoned building she could find, and even less thrilled with the way she’d been enabled by her built-in best friend.

When Edward told Renesmee no, Jacob usually told her yes. Vice versa. Rinse and repeat.

Jasper’s eyes flickered toward the door across from him, then toward the screen of his phone. The red notification flashed right after he fixed his gaze back on his computer and he, without looking, reached out and pressed ‘resend’ again.

Jasper knew that thirty-six thousand feet above the Pacific Ocean didn’t make for a great place to receive text messages, even if the plane’s wifi worked. Knowing Rosalie, she would enforce her and Emmett’s ridiculous ‘no phone’ rule until they landed at LAX. The only person who had ever protested to that limitation on family vacations had been Alice, and then later, Renesmee had joined in.

Nowadays it was only enforced on trips where Rosalie was around.

Of course Rose and Emmett both checked in every few days for a handful of minutes. They sent pictures, asked how everyone was (Renesmee, mainly) and shared a quick anecdote or two from their trip across South Asia. It was one of the places they hadn’t explored yet, and because they didn’t seem to want to be careful or do more than the basest amount of research into their travels, someone had to.

Jasper brought up another internet window. It had only been minimized, and he was trying not to watch it too closely. (He was barely even watching it at all.) It only took a few seconds to refresh the tabs in the window. Their flight coordinates updated, their plane’s flight progress trip refreshed, and finally the rental car shop around the corner from the airport in Manila updated their systems, confirming the prompt return of their coupe several hours before.

They were still a few hundred miles from the coast and out of radar range. Until their flight was back in line-of-sight range from a tracking station and off of satellite tracing he would continue to refresh the page periodically.

It was something to do while he clicked between ‘for sale’ advertisements in Elkins, West Virginia and in towns around the outskirts of Erie, Pennsylvania. The two towns weren’t similar in many regards, except for more cloud cover than the average small town. The hundreds of acres of affordable land was what had become most appealing to Esme, who had already begun to draw up ideas as to what their new home—or homes—would look like.

Of course Esme had also been far too willing to indulge Renesmee with her planning. It provided her with two things: the ability to keep her entire family close, and the challenge of designing and constructing multiple homes.

The upstairs loft area was covered end to end with sketches and blueprints and fabric samples. Alice had been forced to utilize her smaller sewing machine as of late, even moving it into his study so she could work “with some god-forsaken space to think” while fixing up a few of her current projects.

Jasper laughed when she first complained under her breath that the power of suggestion was useless in the face of Esme with a project underway. She’d ranted more than once to him over the past few months about how she’d have to restitch every hem she’d applied to the family’s winter wardrobe once Renesmee’s curtain-and upholstery-designing lessons were done with. When Jasper had suggested she use the area when Renesmee and Esme weren’t around, she just whined more about “the principal of it all!” and had since then refused any alternative ideas.

The power of suggestion, he noted, was also useless when it came to his wife.

Jasper sighed quietly and regretted it instantly. The footsteps that had been halfway toward the stairs at the end of the hall paused, and with a turn and a skip, he knew his peace was as good as over.

He minimized his pages of tracking details and pulled up the real estate website on his browser. Two seconds later, a peculiar knock that lasted several seconds and included a variety of multi-finger taps and scratches, echoed through his study.

“Is that The Prophet’s Song?” He asked, without needing to. They both knew that was the beat that had just been rapped against the wood.

A frustrated groan carried through the door before it was flung open. Renesmee’s exasperation was as clear in her tone as it was in her aura. “What the hell!” She flung her hands up dramatically before letting them fall to her thighs with a slap. “You’re too good at that,” she complained. “It’s so annoying.”

“If you keep picking songs from popular bands it’s going to be easy.” He fixed his eyes back onto his screen as she strode in. She didn’t bother closing the door behind her; anything they said would be heard throughout most of the house whether the door was open or not. “That’s also the third Queen song you’ve chosen this month.”

“I’m on a Freddie Mercury kick.”

“Is that so?”

“An 80s kick, really.”

“That song came out in ’75.”

She huffed. “You know what I mean.” Jasper knew he wasn’t getting out of this conversation easily when she didn’t sit herself down on the couch or the chaise beneath the window. Renesmee perched herself on the edge of his desk and grinned at him. “Dad doesn’t think I should get to have a room in Aunt Rosie’s house and their house so I’m digging deep into his favorite music eras.”

Jasper snorted. He kept his eyes trained on the screen as he clicked through photos of a few decrepit farmhouses on one of the properties he was looking at. “Very mature.”

“Thank you, I think so, too.” She crossed her arms over her chest and sighed. “At least I’m not campaigning for my own house. Which I totally could, by the way. Grandma said she’d help me design one and I know Mom wouldn’t fight me on it. Dad’s just stubborn.”

“He can also probably hear you.”

“No, he and Mom went ‘hunting’,” she stage-gagged and shuddered with all the dramatics Jasper had grown to expect from her over the years. He’d only met Bella’s mother twice, but sometimes he swore that Renesmee took after her more than she did either of her parents.

It was a theory that annoyed Edward, so naturally Jasper had adopted it into his belief system and brought it up at regular intervals.

He performed a quick sweep of the remaining auras in the house. Alice was down in the den with Esme, both of them highly amused by some conversation they were having or TV show they were watching. Carlisle was in his office, expelling a fragile exasperation that Jasper knew wouldn’t last, as he explained over the phone to a member of the hospital staff that yes, while he did want his patients to have a direct link to him for emergencies, a baby with repeated bouts of hiccups did not constitute as an emergency.

Jasper silently noted Bella and Edward’s absence. “Time to plot then, I suppose,” he hummed as he opened a new tab and prepared to research machinery rentals in Elkins. After they priced out how much it would cost to start construction there, they could get the ball rolling. The minimized window at the bottom of his screen was tempting him, but he pointedly ignored it. He could wait for Renesmee to leave before refreshing it.

Renesmee groaned and then laughed. “Aunt Alice is right!”

Jasper quirked an eyebrow but didn’t avert his gaze. He knew that, but— “About what?”

“You’re such a worrywart.”

He lifted his eyes to see her leaning overtop of two of his monitors to glance at the screen of his phone. The red words declaring ‘SMS NOT DELIVERED’ had flickered once more across the screen without him noticing. His unsent text message was still green where it sat in his phone.

He reached out for the device and turned the screen off before he pocketed it.

“Instead of sending them Zillow links you could just, I don’t know, ask them for updates probably. Not that Aunt Rosie will reply to either.” Jasper ignored her. Since she couldn’t see the screen he was looking at, he quickly closed down the browser that had held all of Emmett and Rosalie’s flight tracking information and trip details. It would take him a few minutes to hack back into the TRACON but it would give him something to do after Renesmee left. “Aunt Alice told me Aunt Rosie hadn’t replied to you in like, four days. I bet she blocked your number.”

He finally met her expression. Her shit-eating grin was the same one Edward wore sometimes.

Jasper rolled his eyes. “To what do I owe the harassment of my favorite niece?”

“And don’t you forget it!” She hopped up off of the desk and walked over to the couch, flipping through some discarded mail. “You really ought to open this you know,” she told him as she lifted up a letter from their new forger. “If Mom finds out you haven’t replied she’s going to steal this.”

Jasper stood and walked around his desk, taking both the unmarked letter and the rest of the mail from her hands. “Renesmee.”

“Uncle Jasper.” She tried to school her expression into something more serious as she saluted him, but the smile was still there on the corners of her lips.

He ruffled her hair before she could smack his hand away, then turned toward his file cabinets. “What do you want?”

“I want to go hunting!”

“No.”

“Oh, come on—”

“Why do you want your dad mad at me, too?”

A deal had been made last year when Renesmee got her way and they’d all agreed to do something different and start from scratch in their next town. She would have to turn her diet back to mainly human food before the new year, limiting her hunts to once a month and then, eventually, once every other month.

Something about theories surrounding her nutritional intake and the fact she needed to diversify her diet. Jasper hadn’t been paying too much attention to everyone’s renewed interest in Renesmee’s health. There’d been one incident in the past few years where her health had been taken into question—a flu that had made her bed bound for four days—but even that being a singular isolated incident hadn’t prevented it from turning into Carlisle and Rosalie’s main hobby.

“I thought you were the fun uncle.”

He cracked half of a smile at that. “We both know that’s not true.”

“If I go alone Dad will really have a bitch fit. You and Aunt Alice are like, the only two willing to let me do whatever without having an aneurism.” She paused. “Well, Mom sometimes, too.”

“Great. Talk to her when she gets back.”

Jasper almost felt bad about the wave of genuine frustration and acute disappointment that filled the room as Renesmee made a silent exit, not bothering to close the door behind her. If he weren’t currently occupied he’d probably consider her offer more. After all, she was right about one thing.

He loved his niece, but he didn’t give a damn what she did. If she wanted to test out whether hybrids could get tetanus or how much blood she could really ingest before getting ill, who was he to stop her?

#august 28th <- save the date yall! [alice voice] it's TIME #jalice #twilight fanfiction #alice cullen #jasper hale #roots #Dead Dove Do Not Eat; please don't make me tap the sign once chapters start coming out #shannon switches out the angst for her first attempt at horror #brace yourself for over a year of fic/playlists/moodboards/pain #anyways this is like 1/3rd of chapter 1 and it's not FULLY finished being edited but i'm too excited not to Announce this

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