The Hall of Fire

Bram Stoker obviously didn’t invent vampires, but they had always been portrayed in fiction and folklore as completely repulsive and monstrous. Stoker, as far as I know, invented the sexy vampire trope, and made the predatory behaviour of his vampires explicitly seductive. The scene with the three f...

Drive-by post as I’ve started re-reading the book to catch up. The scene at the Inn where Harker reacts with “how quaint!” to the villagers having terrified conversations filled with references to Satan and hell nicely sets up his journey in Book I. To him (and to many Englishmen of his background a...

Don't forget Stoker was Irish. Who could blame him :) I didn't know that! Interestingly, he didn't seem to consider Dracula to be a particularly significant work in his own lifetime. Working as a journalist, he interviewed Winston Churchill in 1908 , and when the book came up in the conversation, h...

Tales of vampires are hundreds of years old .. far before Stoker's time, as is driving a stake through the heart of a vampire and exposing them to sunlight. I think a modern tale could get around most of that by either having a very skeptical main character who just doesn't buy into superstition an...

Reading this reminds me a lot of Tolkien. People say "that's such a trope" but only cause Stoker and JRRT invented them! Its difficult to pretend we don't all know Dracula and read this as just an older gentleman in an ancestral home. We fill in the blanks immediately. This is probably th...

Notes from watching the Coronation. Penny Morduant fell short in her bid for Conservative Party Leader and PM last year, but she’s gotten some rave reviews for holding the Sword of State in her role as Lord President of the Council (and in a Greek-inspired outfit I understand she designed herself). ...

Frelga wrote: ↑Mon May 01, 2023 4:45 pm It was the Lord Peach that caused me to question whether the UK was a real country or a D&D variant.

The Government of the United Kingdom is wrapped up in arcane rituals at the best of time, but the impending Coronation really takes up it a notch. https://twitter.com/RoyalCentral/status/1651695212073197571 https://twitter.com/RoyalCentral/status/1651698232014012420 https://twitter.com/RoyalCentral/...

There's been this recurring pattern where Musk has gotten rid of some feature he's convinced Twitter users don't like and want to see the end of and then, by some convoluted and round-about way, ended up re-introducing it. It's as if McDonalds stopped selling Big Macs and then, after trialing some w...

From the U.K., Labour leader Keir Starmer has barred former leader Jeremy Corbyn from standing as a Labour candidate in the next election. His stated reason has been the party's failings on anti-Semitism under Corbyn's leadership, although this also shows a clear rift between Labour's current leader...

On the opinion polls, Labour will struggle to win the election coming up in October, so her resignation hasn't been entirely unexpected by commentators in NZ, although it's unclear if a different leader will do any better. It may simply be the usual challenges faced by a government coming to the end...

Avatar: The Way of Water.

Boringly, I agree with pretty much everyone else - a remarkable spectacle but a thin and contrived plot that repeats a lot of the beats of the first film. If you do see it, see it on the biggest screen you can.

Interesting article in The Guardian on the Reichsbürger plot. With most of these movements, there's a combination of the fantastically absurd and dangerously sinister. Quoting one expert: “I don’t believe for a second that this group would have succeeded in overthrowing the government”, he added. “...

Someone tried to restore monarchy in Germany and they had links to Qanon? Dafuq is this timeline? it's not GREAT that there was a big right-wing conspiracy in germany, but i'm glad the world is getting acquainted with the reuss dynasty, which names every male in the extended family "heinrich,&...

Of all the individual 2022 outcomes, this was the one I was most hoping for, on pure principle. Of course, there were still quite a few countries where Walker got in excess of 80% of the vote *headdesk*.

Glass Onion. Far more polished and entertaining than I expected.

Speaking of Nick Fuentes, here he is promising to give the most "racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying speech in Dallas" this weekend. "Anti-Semitic" and "Holocaust denying" got the loudest cheers. The level of anti-Semitism in the current discourse really is ...

The CBS affiliate in Colorado Springs has interviewed the father of the person who shot 24 people, killing 5, at Club Q a few days ago. He says his first reaction upon hearing the news was fearing that his son was gay. He also says he taught his son from a young age to be violent because "you'...

Has a serious candidate for president ever launched their campaign this early?

Weren't his first two bids 2016 and 2020?