This is the day that, back on 30 August, we learnt that Lucy was supposed to be married to Arthur.

It's interesting the way the book is presented. If we had skipped the first 5 chapters with Jonathan, this entry could perhaps have been a credible reframing of events so far. That's sort of the problem with this whole Lucy section. It's framed kinda like a mystery to be solved. But we already know that Dracula has come to England and that he is some ghastly supernatural creature.

The new Audacity logo:

There are two separate issues with lootboxes.

First, children. Porn games (and videos) have never been marketed at children. Lootboxes have. It's not an age-gating issue, it's an issue of actively promoting gambling for children. Games with gambling elements should be illegal to sell or market to children, and platforms can back this up with parental controls tools, without the need for any privacy-invading ID or facial recognition.

The second is relevant to adults. General things around lootboxes being exploitative bad game design, regardless of the audience. You don't have to support banning it to be able to say it's really shitty. Personally, I would advocate very strict reporting on odds of success, and mandate the implementation of self-exclusion features, the same as the law requires (at least here in Australia) for casinos.

Including when they get private corporations to censor by the implication of consequences. Jawboning.

DDG's results are based in Bing's index, but they're not identical. I'm still waiting for DDG to act on a report I made of an extremely antisemitic (actual antisemitic, not anti-zionist) website made up mostly of freebooted content that shows up front and centre in a search I made. Bing doesn't show that site, despite the rest of the results for my query being similar.

Apparently in some of Stoker's notes that never explicitly made it into the text vampires are affected only by crosses and religious artifacts which are older than they are.

“hmm so these women abandon their ‘motherly’ duties of raising children and staying in the home

More than that! When Lucy is turned into a vampire, she feeds on children. She turns into the very opposite of the motherly feminine ideal. The same is true of Dracula's brides, who feed on a baby in one of the early chapters. Dracula, by contrast, feeds on adults. He shows an interest in Jonathan (bisexual? Eww, that's not natural!—side note, Stoker himself was likely bi) but most of his attention is focused on women like Lucy and Mina. The expectation of a gentleman being a chivalrous protector of ladies is inverted.

There's also the fact that Lucy, who early in the book expresses her wish to marry all three of the men who proposed to her:

Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?

It's the very sexually-forward woman who ends up succumbing to vampirism and being killed for it. But not before receiving the bodily fluids from all three of those propositioners—plus van Helsing. The sexual undertones of the blood transfusions are hardly subtle, but this also ties into another major theme of the book, which is how powerful modern science and technology can be as a tool to defeat strange unnatural superstition.

We've recently been doing a Dracula bookclub over at !vampires@lemmy.zip, reading through each diary entry/letter/newspaper clipping on the day it is set. We are, as we speak, amid the section between when Lucy has died and arisen as a vampire, but before she has her final death at the hands of the crew of light. In fact, as soon as I'm done with this thread I'm gonna go and do today's reading, and I think that might be Lucy's last. edit: I was wrong. Lucy unlives for another night...or two...

There is a more detailed explanation somewhere down the comments

Yeah I had already seen that, but it was so nonsensical I was hoping for something a bit more solid.

I appreciate you finding the longer source. Not sure why you're getting downvoted for sharing it...talk about shooting the messenger. I'll respond to it here, since I can't reply directly to @atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org's post on Mangane.

No offence to Chris, but their take here is utterly deluded. I'll avoid using "bro" with them (not that it's a particularly common part of my vocabulary, to my knowledge) out of kindness, but the reason they want it avoided is just insane. Suggesting that a friendly "hey bro" has anything to do with the toxic "bro culture" they describe is like suggesting Java has anything to do with JavaScript. Or cars are related to carpets.

Calling someone "bro" is no different to "mate". With the wrong tone or context, it can be passive aggressive, but by default it is jovial and good-natured.

Chris seems to have serious problems understanding context, and seems to be completely ignoring one of the first rules of online social interaction (and, to be honest, all social interaction): assume good intentions. They're looking for something to be angry about. And so they find it.

🇫🇷🎶

Expecting perfect loyalty, like significant sacrifices, is certainly naive. Expecting them not to steal from you? That's just basic common decency.

I don’t know if you ever read Wilkie Collins’ novels

I have not, but his The Woman in White is a pretty direct inspiration for aspects of the current events in Dracula.

The truth is that there isn't a huge amount of good science about them, but most of the anecdotal evidence and the scant amount of research I have seen has suggested that yes, they do help over 5k, especially if you're doing sub-4:00 min/k. It's possible that some of this is just the psychological effect of "gearing up in your race gear". But I don't think that's all they can do. Supposedly they help make every step that little bit more efficient, which directly translates not just into reduced energy usage, but into speed. There seems to be a large variance in how much they help depending on the individual and pace, but in general they work better at higher pace.

Ah, IIRC he said in the video that the lemon option ended up runnier than some of the others? So that might make sense.

I couldn't possibly venture a guess, but this is what my inbox looked like this morning:

Maybe relevant?

Jean Martin Charcot was a French neurologist who attempted to use hypnotism to cure "hysteria", and who was an influence on Freud. He was apparently a source of inspiration for Stoker in his depictions of trance-like states throughout this novel.

Methusalah is a character in Christian mythology said to have lived over 900 years. Thomas "Old Tom" Parr was a real man who died in 1635, and is reputed to have been born 1483. (Most likely, his birth record was actually an ancestor of his with the same name.)

Well, that is an excellent chapter break. It's almost unfortunate that we can't treat it as a cliffhanger, since our daily reading schedule requires continuing immediately on.

The theme of science & reason versus the supernatural returns here in a pretty big way with van Helsing's talk. But even it gets overshadowed by the gender dynamics at play. Dracula, we have always seen, preys on adults. First Jonathan, and more recently Lucy. But Lucy, as a vampire, is feeding on children, and Dracula's brides, back in Transylvania, were seen to feed on a baby. This reflects an unnatural inversion of what would have been expected in society at the time: that women should have motherly instincts to protect and nurture children, while gentlemen should be chivalrous and protective of ladies.

and Van Helsing treating her like crap and calling her a “worthless wretch”…

She did steal from Lucy before van Helsing said that. I can't really blame him tbh.

The Westentra will thing is super weird though. If they were already married, I could maybe understand it as a weird old timey legal thing. But not even being married yet? The best I can say is that Mrs Westenra was perhaps showing an incredibly naive level of trust.

Super shoes have special types of foam designed to give maximum energy recovery, which the Novablasts lack. Their foam is more about shock absorption and comfort. And more famously, super shoes also include a carbon plate between layers of foam in the sole to further help with energy recovery, almost like a spring. The Novablasts lack this.

My racing shoes are the Metaspeed Sky, which over the last 3 and a bit years helped me break a 17:44 5k (previous PB: 18:54) and a sub-3:15 marathon (first marathon). Though obviously different training and circumstances mean that it's hard to properly compare. Those paces are certainly not ceteris paribus.

"I suppose this upset him, for when we were in town on Thursday last he had a sort of shock."

Of this section, The Dracula Project says:

The shock Jonathan had was recorded as happening on the 22nd, which would have been on a Thursday in the years 1887 and 1892. According to Stoker's notes and the typed manuscript, however (See Note 858), the incident in question was originally supposed to have been September 21st, which would have been a Thursday in 1893, the popularly agreed-upon year for the novel.

For those keeping up with the debate about what year it is set, or those frustrated at the confusing dates over the past two or three weeks.

Yeah it's weird. Surely they couldn't deliver a letter and deliver a return letter half an hour later, all in the evening‽

Ok I misread that. The "woman in black" is a reference Stoker was making to a hypothetical earlier serial killer. But it's probably based on Wilkie Collins' 1859 novel The Woman in White (thanks, TDP!). Which interestingly, was an earlier epistolary novel than Stoker's own. Stoker was apparently working on a theatrical adaptation of Collins' novel.

Well, this is a really long entry, and it's also one extremely dense with relevant context.

I'm not a huge fan of the songs from the West End Dracula musical as a whole, but I do really enjoy The Lady in White, based on today's newspaper entry about the "bloofer lady". It's changed from a "woman in black" as reported in The Westminster Gazette to a "lady in white", in keeping with a long tradition of Dracula adaptations, back at least as far as the 1931 Universal adaptation starring Bela Lugosi (which will be entering the public domain in under two years! And which received a soundtrack scored by renowned minimalist composer Philip Glass in 1998—which will not be public domain. Here's The Woman in White from that soundtrack.), which kicked the famous Universal Monsters franchise into the talkie era.

"Bloofer lady" is child speak for "beautiful lady". I've run an introductory D&D and Pathfinder campaign based loosely on this section a few times (with the idea being that after this introductory mission is completed, it leads into Curse of Strahd). The players always investigate the children, and I always have them talk about the "bloofer lady". And invariably, they have no idea what that means.

Some time over the past couple of days is where one of the Frank Wildhorn musical's biggest showstoppers, Life After Life fits in, showing Dracula ultimately raising Lucy as a vampire after her funeral. It's one of the easier songs to find covers of, both theatre snippets and on the concert stage or recording studio. [1] [2] [3] [4]. That ends act one, with act two opening to the stories of the bloofer lady we read tonight.

Both the telegram and knowledge of train schedules come in important today. The wonders of modern technology!

Talking to Mina today is the first time we have any confirmation of van Helsing believing in the supernatural and being willing to tell someone about it. That the first time he does so is to the wife of someone who has actually experienced it himself does lend credence to the idea that perhaps the reason he hasn't told anyone else is that they will not believe it without evidence, even coming from him.

Mina's little prank on van Helsing with the shorthand gets a good chuckle out of me. That is exactly my sort of humour.

The timeline here is rather perplexing. Was it possible, in 1893, to get a letter delivered at 6pm, and returned at 6:30?