Zagorath @ Zagorath @aussie.zone

Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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The events started on the 28th, but Dr Seward only wrote it down on the morning of the 29th. Presumably he was too tired to write when he got home from viewing Lucy's empty tomb and then surprising her with Morris and Holmwood.

Their favour mechanic reminds me a lot of the Rus in aoe4 with their Hunting Cabins.

Sheeeeet that's long. One entire chapter, plus significant amounts of the chapters before and after.

A very early use of the idiom "if looks could kill", if Wiktionary is accurate. It cites Nietzsche's 1878 book Human, All Too Human, and then second it cites this. (A user on Reddit found an 1851 citation.)

we saw...the woman, with a corporeal body as real at the moment as our own, pass in through the interstice where scare a knife-blade could have gone.

I think this is the origin of the idea that vampires can "turn to mist". But "mist" is not actually how Stoker describes it. She just somehow, while in human form, passes through a gap into which no human could fit. It's an almost Lovecraftian style of horror—that which the human mind simply cannot comprehend.

This whole section is done in a single trip in Dracula: The Musical, in Undead One. But there's no good recording available of that number on YouTube anymore. So here's a full production at the timecode of Undead One (or more accurately, of Lucy with Child, a short vocalise on the tune of The Mist that segues straight into Undead One, starting right after the Entr'Acte into Act 2). In that video, interestingly, this is the most replayed portion.

There's also the West End musical, which has one of its better songs here, She Devil, Nosferatu. Lucy's part in that is pretty polarised IMO, with parts of it being excellent, and parts being extremely jarring, not feeling like they belong in the same genre, let alone the same song.

The stake van Helsing uses is three feet long. That's nearly a metre. Much longer than we usually see in adaptations.

We don't actually know the origin of the word Nosferatu. Stoker gets it from Emily Gerard's Transylvanian Superstitions, but she does not get it from any actual Romanian or Hungarian folklore, so we're not sure of the origin. The Dracula Project says:

It has been put forth that the word "nosferatu" might stem from the Greek nosphoros (plague bearer); or the Romanian nesuferit (not to suffer), necuratru (unclean), or necuratul (devil), and that one of these terms was incorrectly transcribed at some point.

The penultimate sentence today is the first time we've heard the name Dracula since 26 July, when Mina is starting to get worried about the lack of communication from Jonathan.

Turns out a lot of European countries are still buying Russian fossil fuels. Bad because any fossil fuels are bad, and doubly bad because it helps to fund Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

And it's going to fuck them over come the next election.

More details on https://lemmy.world/comment/19464677

When I tried to talk about it, I was called a nazi and a fascist, then banned along with people who defended me.

And that thread is now 10 days old and has not had any further comment from the db0 people.

Which is sorta my point. They might not be as bad as Lund is, but they're at the very least of the same kind. And I don't love embracing that. Why not go to lemmy.zip, one of the country-specific instances, or pretty much any Piefed instance (I don't think I've ever seen admin drama out of a Piefed instance) instead of going from one drama-filled abusive overlords to another?

But that's my point. Put the AI slop on YouTube. If it's actually good enough to effect greater viewer retention, it'll work and the algorithm will feed more of it than human-created content. No need for a specific platform.

This feels like management said "we have AI, we need to build more AI-based products, what've ya got?"

I haven't actually watched The Simpsons in over a decade. So the suggestion that they should end the show, or failing that, let the characters age, doesn't bother me. The latter could actually be an interesting jolt of new energy the show needs to regain interest.

The video had a disappointing lack of clear side-by-side comparisons of the voice though, to be able to really understand the extent that it's a real issue. I assume that's to avoid getting caught in the YouTube copyright bullshit. And though he mentioned Moe and Otto, we got no samples from either of them.

I almost reflexively downvoted this because the news pisses me off so much, before I stopped myself because it's unfair to shoot the messenger.

If you're someone who actually believes AI-generated content can be good, why is this even necessary‽ Surely the AI stuff will just naturally rise to the top on YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram Reels. Is that not happening? I wonder why...

Gotta hand it to Meta though, that is actually a brilliant name for the product.

At least some of it is probably related to her medical condition and the treatment she's received for it. Gomez has lupus.

I'm not sad to see you've left LW, but I am sad to see that you're choosing db0 as your new home. I used to have really positive feelings towards that instance, but I was left very soured on them after an interaction I had a few weeks ago involving some pretty damn blatant abuse of mod/admin powers (admittedly, a different admin seems to have stepped in to correct some of the abuse, but the abusive admin is still around and has not been reprimanded). It feels no different to the shit that Lund engages in.

As a reminder, the order of community moderators in the sidebar has direct impact on the moderator hierarchy, where a moderator listed earlier is able to remove any moderators later in the list.

A reminder that mod order does not always federate correctly, so you may need to head to LW to see it correctly.

If Cruella was written with a K, it would be pronounced the same, too

I suspect that's why NATO uses Charlie. No other letter is pronounced ⟨tʃ⟩ with any significant frequency in English.

Can I suggest Chucky?

Edit: actually, even better: Chewbacca.

Not really related, but if you're hankering for a soft serve, I highly recommend heading to your local GYG instead of Maccas. Their machines aren't more reliable, but their soft serves are so much nicer. Thicker, creamier soft serve than Maccas offers.

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.