Zagorath @ Zagorath @aussie.zone

Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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I'll also just point out that the rules of this community don't actually say anything about "memes". They say:

A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts...Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.

Vietnam is formally known as the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam. It's officially communist today. But like most officially-communist countries, they operate with a significant amount of capitalism. In some ways more so than officially capitalist countries, with a lot of businesses being under-regulated and prone to exploitation. If you have a bad experience with a business, you're much less likely to be able to use the law to make you whole again than you would somewhere with strong consumer protection laws like the EU or Australia. It's much closer, in some ways, to that libertarian caveat emptor ideal. But it's also got a strong welfare state that looks a lot more genuinely socialist.

It's also an authoritarian single-party state, which those of us in the west usually associate with communist countries, but realistically is kind of a separate spectrum. Sometimes the government can step in and use that power for good, such as somewhat regular attempted (though usually ultimately ineffective) crackdowns on corruption, which runs rampant. Sometimes it's less good, such as also somewhat regular attempted (and likewise ultimately ineffective) crackdowns on online free speech. On this latter point, I recall when I lived there 15+ years ago they at one point tried to block Facebook. Word quickly spread around my school that changing your DNS settings to a particular number would bypass the restriction. (This is before quad9, quad1, or Google's quad8, so the number was a bit harder to remember.) It's not a country where you want to be on the government's bad side, but it's generally speaking much softer in that regard than the PRC or DPRK.

Do they prioritize the data at the beginning now?

I remember my bittorrent client having an option to do that even back in like 2010, though I never used it to actually stream, because my Internet wasn't good enough.

And that really is it. Not a lot of denouement here. Dracula is slain, a brief note to explain the publishing of the book as though it were real and to give a clear "happily ever after".

Thank you everyone for joining me on this wonderful read, whether it was your first time reading Dracula, your first time reading it in chronological order (like me), or if you'd done this all before. Especially to Sergio, BennyInc, Œil, 7uWqKj, and pseudo, whose regular contributions to the conversation added another layer to this that made it so much more enjoyable. Thanks!

Our busiest days of conversation were day 1, 3 May and 25 May, followed by 31 May and 28 May, then 28 July in the midst of the Demeter's logs.

I'm going to take some time away from vampire novels for a while, to finally get back to the Wheel of Time and finish that series. But I'm thinking in the new year it might be fun to come back to vampires and read through some of the other classic literature, with a bookclub of Polidori's and Le Fanu's classic pre-Dracula works. I've only once listened to The Vampyre before and don't remember it well, and have never read Carmilla, so that could be fun.

Yeah the funny thing is I remember cheering for Hera during his initial rise. It felt so great watching a relative newcomer rising through the ranks and toppling Viper, during the early days of Definitive Edition. But now, Hera has gone 13 S-tier tournaments in a row without defeat, and it doesn't even feel like there's anyone on their way to beating him. (Unless he's under-prepared, as he sometimes is in lower-tier tournaments.)

One thing I really enjoyed was when Return of Rome came out and a bunch of people were briefly playing the aoe1 mode within that. Hera came onto a small Australian streamer's stream to ask for tips before his showmatch against Daut. Chat recommended he try a strategy they called "boning": stone age rushing with villagers, where they attack with weapons that appear to be bones. Hera actually tried it..

I definitely enjoyed it, but I tend to watch at >2x speed (thanks, Enhancer for Nebula!—Chrome link). It's a pretty systematic refutation of John Forester's anti-cycling infrastructure, pro-"vehicular cycling" book "Effective Cycling". And that book says a lot of dumb things that need to be refuted.

He does repeat himself a bit, but then, so does Forester.

Maybe. I think the fear was that once at home in his castle he would be more powerful and more difficult to assault.

Oh yeah, good spot. I think it's a little debatable since the actual meme part of this is rather small compared to the main content, which is Robert Inlakesh's post. But Zachary Foster's original post is definitely worthy of being called a meme.

Following the Internet definition of it? (Because we wouldn't want to commit the etymological fallacy, would we?) It's a piece of content that follows a known predictable format, or that at least appears to do so but subverts it. I don't agree with @FishFace@piefed.social that anything funny on the Internet is a meme, or even that memes need to be funny (though they usually are). But it's certainly a notably different meaning from the broader cultural one that Dawkins came up with 50 years ago.

Wiktionary's definition 2 is pretty good:

Media, usually humorous, which is copied and circulated online with slight adaptations, such as basic pictures, video templates, etc.

As others have said, Nebula is pretty great. Much more limited in content, since creators are invite-only, and they curate for high quality creators. But it's growing quite quickly and has a wide variety of content from leftist cultural video essays, to music analysis, to urbanism, film criticism, science, original films, game shows, and more.

There are a couple of centrist creators on there that I personally avoid, but most creators are centre-left to leftist, and I don't think there's anyone I would explicitly describe as right-wing.

It's subscription only, but extremely affordable at $36/year or $6/month if you sign up through a creator's invite code, and I think they promised grandfathered pricing if they raise the price in the future. You can see their library without an account at https://nebula.tv/explore/videos. Or ask any more questions you might have at !nebula@lemmy.world.

Yeah Nebula is for sure the best with the volume and variety of content they have. But there are also many creators/groups creating their own independent platforms. The NZ-based videogame sketch creators Viva la Dirt League have Viva+, the ancient tech podcast/vodcast company This Week in Tech has Club TWiT, and probably most successfully the former CollegeHumor is now focusing on improv comedy as Dropout, among others.

I assume many of these are probably white labelled Patreon (or similar) services, or possibly a front-end site with white-labelled Vimeo for serving videos, rather than building their own infrastructure from scratch. But as far as the viewer is concerned those technical details don't matter.

Kinda like pirating a movie these days

Not really. More like pirating a movie in 2012. These days, there are excellent-quality pirate streaming services, there's the ability to stream videos over bittorrent (if there are enough seeds), and probably other options I'm not thinking of that make pirated video more accessible than ever.

My local Hungry Jacks closed down a little while back and is currently undergoing renos to become an Oporto.

So I guess I'll have Red Rooster to boost my immunity.

Damn, nice one!

https://puzzmo.com/play/circuits/hc15yp1i3f/share

Crossherd #243
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crossherd.clevergoat.com 🐐

these were not acted upon

Only because Dracula intervened and stopped them!

It is done. Dracula is slain. Interesting that they did not require a wooden stake, as they used with setting Lucy to rest. Much has been written about this, including in The Dracula Project. The iconic tool of vampire slaying was not used to slay the most iconic vampire.

My memory of this passage is of being very anticlimactic. But reading it this time certainly didn't feel that way. The build up felt appropriate.

Oddly, my paper copy spells the g-slur for Romani with both a 'y' and an 'i' in this passage at different times. The full public domain text spells it with a y 10 times (all the times from today), and with an 'i' 3 times (all the earlier times). Not sure what Stoker was up to there.

Here's the finale in the Frank Wildhorn musical., and on stage in German (with English subtitles—translated from the German, so it's not quite the same as the English version). In this version, Dracula, feeling cornered, decides to tell Mina to kill him rather than letting the hunters do it.

We've got one more entry, set 7 years later. I'll share it tomorrow rather than wait until 2032.

The problem with that reasoning is that as far as I can tell, there should never be a version that looks how my browser is showing it. The whole line was added at once.

Ok even weirder... clicking that link after I created the post...it does display fully when I open it Incognito, but not in my main logged in browsers.