• 42 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 27th, 2025
  • Zagorath@quokk.autoTechnology@lemmy.world•The Average Man Is Such a BSer About AI That He’ll Claim to Know About an AI Executive Who Doesn’t Even Exist: Men caught hallucinating.English
    2·
    6 days ago

    I do think it’s worth distinguishing from the run-of-the-mill transphobe and the TERF. Both exist wherever you go, but the latter is notoriously much more common in TERF Island, while the orange fascist’s state has more regular bigots. And not just because there’s one prominent example from said island.

    You’ll find that if the concept of trans people never comes up, most TERFs will genuinely come across as progressive on gender issues. They’ll be, for example, the kind of person who runs a YouTube channel about swords and showing how women are very capable of learning to fight with them. (Sadly not a hypothetical.) They obviously carry somegender essentialism—that’s basically a prerequisite to transphobia—but they often apply it much more narrowly than the average transphobe.

  • Zagorath@quokk.autoVampires@lemmy.zip•Rules of vampirismEnglish
    1·
    6 days ago

    Oh right I see.

    Obviously the modern vampire has existed for just over 200 years and been told in many forms in that time.

    It’s been too long since I’ve read The Vampyre to be able to recall, and I’ve never read Varney or Carmilla to be able to comment on those, but the idea of vampires being emotionally stunted goes back at least as far as Dracula, where van Helsing monologues at length about the vampire’s “child brain”—its simple-mindedness and almost instinctive/animalistic approach to going about its plans. And obviously you’re already aware of how Rice’s vampires are stuck at the age they were turned. Though as I write that, I wonder how that general trend in her books meshes with the portrayal of Claudia in Interview developing sexual feelings despite having been turned as a very young child. A retcon/something Rice developed more as the series went on, perhaps?

    But anyway, my point is that the idea of vampires failing to mature is certainly not new as of Twilight or even the Vampire Chronicles. It goes back basically as far as the modern concept of the vampire. As for earlier vampiric folklore…van Helsing seems to talk about it as though he’s discussing existing folkloric tradition in Dracula, but Stoker’s idea of what that tradition was is very…idiosyncratic. It’s hard to say how much that actually represents true folkloric beliefs, how much it represents Stoker’s misunderstanding of said beliefs, and how much is the character of van Helsing. Regardless, personally I view the modern (post-Polidori) vampire as being so distinct from the folklore that there’s not much value in comparing the two too closely when discussing vampires more generally.

  • Zagorath@quokk.autoFuck Cars@lemmy.ca•Blind woman says quiet electric cars are dangerous, would need louder cars (because we don't actually have walkable cities...)English
    1·
    13 days ago

    When people say “biking on the sidewalk”, I don’t think most people are talking about the last 10 metres from the parking to the dedicated bike path. They usually mean riding hundreds of metres up into the kilometres along footpaths.

    The necessary approach to fix the issue is different in both cases. In the case I think most people mean, the fix is…install proper dedicated bike paths.

    In the case you describe, the answer is that kerb cuts should be fairly frequent to minimise the distance needed, and to mark the space around popular bike parking areas as a shared space, probably with some different colour tiling and tactile ground to make it clear to everyone (pedestrian and cyclist alike) that the space is shared and they should be careful.

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