The WTF? Thread

[ad hoc]

It's an excellent story I think. I've read it a couple of times. Once years ago and then again a few years after I moved here. The second time was better. It's definitely a page turner.

Stoker (who never came here) used a composite of various characters he read about in the British Library where he did all his writing. The most prominent were Vlad Țepeș and Báthory Erzsébet. In the novel Dracula is actually a Székely (they are the people who live where I am) not a Vlach like Vlad or a Magyar like Báthory.

(it's a right pain to travel from Transylvania to Whitby by sea mind you, even after you make the trek over the mountains to Galati)

[scratchmonkey]

I really enjoyed it, as gothic page-turners go.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

It's a ripping yarn.

[San Bernardhinault]

It's perfectly readable dumb schlock. It's like reading a 1890's airport novel, if such a thing had existed in the 1890s.

[Hot Pepsi]

The weirdest thing is a terrible hack writer and his terrible hack tale captured the imagination so much. Carmilla, which he certainly eagerly mined for inspiration, is a far better vampire story.

I’ve never actually read it.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Vampire stories exist in a lot of cultures.
I don't recall why Stoker chose to attach the vampire lore to Vlad Dracul.

He thought that dracul was the Romanian for devil, rather than dragon

[Lang Spoon]

Vampire stories exist in a lot of cultures.
I don't recall why Stoker chose to attach the vampire lore to Vlad Dracul.

The weirdest thing is a terrible hack writer and his terrible hack tale captured the imagination so much. Carmilla, which he certainly eagerly mined for inspiration, is a far better vampire story.

[Janik]

Vlad the Impaler might have been a vegan
https://www.newyorker.com/news/lette...a-vegan-really

(to be honest the wtf part of his story is the scientific ability to analyse his diet from something he wrote)

Agree about the WTF part - I think the phrases signal-to-noise, vast potential for cross-contamination and wild-overclaiming over jogging merrily up to this fellas claimed techniques.

That said, most diets of the time probably would have been very substantially vegan. Unlikely for the nobility, though. Eating meat, dairy and sugar would have been obvious status symbols for them.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Vlad the Impaler might have been a vegan
https://www.newyorker.com/news/lette...a-vegan-really

(to be honest the wtf part of his story is the scientific ability to analyse his diet from something he wrote)

Well was it a letter to John hunyadi imploring him to give a plant based diet a try?

[Hot Pepsi]

Vlad the Impaler might have been a vegan
https://www.newyorker.com/news/lette...a-vegan-really

(to be honest the wtf part of his story is the scientific ability to analyse his diet from something he wrote)

Vampire stories exist in a lot of cultures.
I don't recall why Stoker chose to attach the vampire lore to Vlad Dracul.

[Satchmo Distel]

My students today told me about someone called Eugenia Cooney who has become an Internet celebrity due to having a body image that celebrates being skeletal; not just Kate Moss thin but with her ribs exposed and barely any flesh on her bones. I won't link because I find her impossible to look at but the phenomenon of her celebrity is disturbing.

[ad hoc]

Vlad the Impaler might have been a vegan
https://www.newyorker.com/news/lette...a-vegan-really

(to be honest the wtf part of his story is the scientific ability to analyse his diet from something he wrote)

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

ha ha, that is hilarious!

[Nocturnal Submission]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-67204915

[ursus arctos]

https://twitter.com/phil_lewis_/status/1715504635581018567?s=12&t=xvOireV8JOIS_CpbTtDBow

[Hot Pepsi]

Somewhere along the line, “controversial” has become a euphemism for “hated.”

[Plodder]

Cromwell may well be the least controversial figure in Irish estimation.

[Hot Pepsi]

The suggestion that we should just let the smart people be in charge is very old and it never works.

John Dewey had a lot to say about it. There was a Simpsons about it too.

Because the smart people in charge become a class of their own, with their own interests that they will protect. .

There was an anime film - probably many, but one I saw - which imagined an AI that could order all of human affairs and it would be served by a bunch of androids sprinkled about society who could help prevent conflicts by always being calm and selfless.

I can’t recall the title. It’s an intriguing idea for sci fi. Needless to say, all does not go as planned.

[scratchmonkey]

The US has enough "barren" land that if that kind of value proposition was realistic, the question is why then do we still have all this open land/why aren't people like Musk doing more of this sort of thing.

We also have a fine and lengthy history of people losing their shirts on speculative land deals as well as people assuming that a singular technocratic "genius" will solve all the problems that are largely, being created by a society built around coddling technocratic geniuses.

[Lang Spoon]

Assuming the Scottish education system is less forelock tugging obsessed with 1066 and other barely relevant bits of ye olde England than when I were a lad, someone who was schooled in Scotland (or Wales) would be at a serious disadvantage if applying for citizenship.

[Fussbudget]

Lol. Hashtag problematic.

They might have updated it but when I studied for my test a few years back the history of the UK section could more accurately have been called "history of England" as there was nothing about the other countries pre-unification. Really long section about Henry VIII though and I had two separate questions about him in my test and one about Elizabeth I

[ad hoc]

The Life in the UK book, which is the thing you have to study to take the citizenship test, has the following paragraph (which is the only one on the subject)
"Cromwell was successful in establishing the authority of the English Parliament but did this with such violence that even today Cromwell remains a controversial figure in Ireland."

"controversial"

[Amor de Cosmos]

Ah yeah, I do remember that from reading John Dos Passos eons ago.

[ursus arctos]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%...ia?wprov=sfti1

[Amor de Cosmos]

It would end up like that rubber city Henry Ford wanted to build.

Wha...?! Was that like 100,000 bouncy castles glued together?