I mean, if we’re going to avoid the sparkling fucking vampires, then it’s gotta be mirrors. Makes no sense within the mythologies surrounding vampires imo.

Running water is about the purifying nature of it supposedly, as other “evil” entities are also unable to.

Wooden stakes being needed to pin them down or be a death blow, there’s links between wood and life that make sense within that framework. It wasn’t originally just any wood, it was (iirc) dogwood and ironwood. Something like that.

Garlic, also a purifier.

You gotta realize, most of the early written vampire stories did come from existing legends, and those legends did usually have an internal consistency to some degree or another. But not mirrors. Stoker pulled that out of his ass due to not understanding his sources, so it doesn’t really match with much.

The idea is that vampires lack souls, and thus fear mirrors, depending on what set of myths you’re working in. But there’s also supposedly a tie back to real people with rabies being easily startled, with mirrors apparently being something that would do so even easier, but I’m not sure it holds up to scrutiny since the tie to rabies is weak as fuck to begin with, and there’s no record of that being a specific thing. It seems more like a hypothesis being projected rather than something with provenance.

But we got being invisible in mirrors.

Now, some people have decided that the mirror thing is because of the silver in mirrors, and add silver being potent against vampires in some cases, but neither is based in any of the known vampire mythology as it existed pre-stoker. And there’s arguments there that kinda make sense if you buy into some of the supposed mystical and magical properties of silver. It’s tie to the moon in some beliefs would maybe give it sovereignty over most creatures of the night, and is supposedly why it’s werewolf killing.

I can’t even remember exactly when silver started being common against vampires in books. I know that the Blade trilogy made it seep into pop culture, but it did exist before that.

Most of the stuff around the older books does make a kind of sense, but not that one

Yup, you’re misguided.

Be yourself, all the time, unless you’re a bigot.

Don’t forget the Tick and that one BPRD agent in the Hellboy movie

Brobdingnagian

It’s a reference to the giants of Brobdingnag from Gulliver’s travels. It means that something is absurdly large. It is also a large word making it delightful in that way. It also rolls off the tongue musically.

Coming in a close second is petrichor or petrichorian.

Petrichor is the word for the smell of the earth right after a rain. Petrichorian obviously means that something smells similar, or can be used to reference petrichor. I love the word for multiple reasons. First that it just sounds wonderful. Second that there’s a word for describing this one specific smell that is a universal human experience to anyone not anosmic out of all other smells that are similarly universal.

Third that it approaches onomatopoeia on that it sounds like the way the smell smells. The earthy petri combined with the grounded ring of chor (pronounced like core, and references that the smell is a core thing of rain and earth) is the verbal sound of the way the smell tickles the nose and makes many people walk around sniffing like hounds on a walk through the woods after weeks in the city.

Petri chor. It’s like the tinging of raindrops off of a piece of granite or marble in the mountains while you shelter under a tree and revel in the scents of it all.

I mean, it’s no Brobdingnagian, but as words go petrichor is a bit magical. It invokes and evokes almost as much as tintinnabulation, but does so for a smell, which is so much harder to do. That, btw, is an excellent word: tintinnabulation. Of the bells, bells, bells, which may be the most enjoyable poem to read aloud, ever.

There’s some other words that have the ability to invoke phantoms of their related senses. Cadaverine and putrescine come to mind; both names of chemicals involved in the putrescent smells of decomposition of flesh. Knowing their meaning brings forth memories of their smells. Not quite as effective in that, because you do have to know what they mean for the incantation to work, but still quite wonderful words. Sulfurous is similarly scent summoning. Flinty works as well, but is less musical as it resonates in the oral cavity and echoes off the teeth.

Look, I can do this all day. There’s a word for people like me: logophile. There’s a fancy word for people that are into words. How awesome is that?!

Oh, that ?! Even has a word! The interrobang! Ain’t English awesome?!

And yes, at this point, the entire comment is sigogglin’ (or sigoggly, or sigoggledy depending on where in the Appalachians you are), which is a twisty and crooked word for something that is twisty and crooked.

Loquacious, no?

Believe in it?

Nothing to believe in, it’s a word that describes an evaluation of events on a subjective level.

Person does bad thing, bad thing happens, other people decide that the bad thing was good because it happened to the bad person.

Secondary to that, they believe that the bad person’s actions led to the bad thing happening to them.

Comeuppance isn’t the same thing as fate, karma, or doom, all of which do require abelief in external forces. It just means that people think any bad things that happened are appropriate

It’s harder than it was before I needed bifocals, but yeah.

Once you learn the trick of it, it gets easier to do.

I wanna say I was late teens/early twenties when they first started showing up in my area, and I stood in the store I first saw one for like a half hour trying to see the image. My vision was kinda bad across the board, even then. But I got the first one, which was a boat, and then flipped through the rest of the selection they had, maybe five or six different ones?

But any time I got new glasses, it would take a few minutes to adjust when I’d run across one again. Same if I needed new ones.

They really are fun

Yeah, that’s more or less where I stand too, though the exact amount of effort a mod needs to put into contacting the user may be lower in my stance than in yours.

But I went further back and edited in a revised take. I think you’re right that OP’s account that the ban was issued on made a news post in a news community, and didn’t engage in any fuckery in comments that merit the ban for that reason.

Edit: I went back further. Based solely on this account, your @[email protected] account, I lean PTB on this specific preemptive ban. I don’t have the level of patience required to dig up your main account and see if anything there would justify you the user behind the accounts being banned based on a pattern of behavior. I will say that using the ban reason as given is what pushes it back over the PTB line. Your Pro account didn’t make comments or posts that indicate intentionally breaking a rule regarding the israel situation, nor making comments that did so. And I went back 3 weeks.

So, I’m leaving the previous comment made here instead of deleting or overwriting it, since this edit wouldn’t make sense without the original context.

Eh, it’s generally a divisive issue when preemptive bans occur, and I didn’t see recent posts on that community, only elsewhere. Same with comments over the last two days. So I suspect this is a preemptive ban rather than one for immediate cause.

Keep that in mind during the rest of this.

I’m not certain this is power tripping, but I can’t say for sure that your account that you posted this with fully deserved a ban purely on the reason given. There are reasons based on behavior in other ways, but that comes back to whether or not any given individual believes preemptive bans are a useful and acceptable tool, and every time it comes up, the community tends to devolve into arguing about that rather than whatever an OP did.

Now, I’m in the camp that believes preemptive bans can be a useful tool. I just believe they need to be used rarely and surgically.

In this case, it comes down not to the post that started the whole thing, but how you handled everything after that.

The removal reason shown in this post doesn’t match what you did. Again, I only went back a little through the user history of this account, not any others you may use or have used in the past.

From this side of the screen, your comments are on the borderline of justifying a preemptive ban. I wouldn’t have done one, not without more than what’s visible in the last two days. If I had, I wouldn’t have used that reason at all.

That’s why I think this specific ban from the gaming community is really on the knife edge. Unless there was more to see that I didn’t scroll back far enough to see, or there are factors I’m unaware of, it does lean a little closer to PTB, but you really gotta recognize that you were either crossing civility line, or walking right up to them and spitting on the other side of it. Yeah, some of what you were responding to did as well, but two wrongs don’t make a right.

That’s my take on it. I suspect there’s more going on with the decision to ban you like that, or I’d lean heavier to the PTB side, but there’s a limit to how far back I’m willing to scroll looking for a specific comment that may or may not be relevant. That’s another personal peeve for me with the mod log; there should be more than an accusation in it when it’s a preemptive ban, and that’s not a one click process to make happen. So it doesn’t happen often.

Makes guesstimating for this community a slog.

Horse shit, there’s a few regular commentors that do their best with every question they can, and even more that contribute irregularly but in good faith, even if they fall short of accuracy.

I feel that!

I roll armed everywhere, and I would be all “yo, you got this! Ima nap, we cool?” And be snoring before they could even swivel my way.

Napping under unusual circumstances is my special power.

Well, I’ve dealt with insomnia since I was a kid to some degree, and as a teenager to a significant degree. I’ve kinda got a list.

The first thing I try is meditation. It’s a solid way to shift brain waves to begin with, and often leads to improved rest even if I don’t get back to sleep at all. So I always recommend at least laying still and breathing controlled patterns. Doesn’t matter much what style of breathing you do, it’s the control and regularity of it that helps being better rested. Half an hour of that, and 4/10 times I’m back to sleep. The rest of those, I’m usually at least feeling like I had another hour or two, so I can either get up, or switch off to other things.

Reading has been a lifelong help since it doesn’t bother anyone else and for me it’s almost a form of meditation of its own. So that’s usually what I’ll try if I still want to try to sleep more. It works fairly well. Out of those remaining 6/10, it usually gets me back to sleep 3 or 4 more times.

The rest though, I’m usually going to give up. When I was single, that meant maybe getting up and just starting my day, or fucking around doing what I could do without waking housemates. That’s where devices like phones and tablets have been a huge help. I can play games, fuck around on lemmy or whatever and not disturb my wife at all, much less anyone else. Sometimes I’ll throw on some headphones while doing so and listen to music.

Preach! We should be way past the silliness of body hair choices being open for other’s opinions. It took my sasquatch looking ass a while to get there for myself, but there’s still social pushback that just pisses me off. I’m glad you found your balance :)

Just for the hell of it, I don’t know about OP, but I don’t even know how to.

I went to the relevant linked section and couldn’t find a way to raise an issue directly. I’m going to try again, and if I succeed I’ll return here and make a top level comment for anyone scrolling by and wondering. I’ve never tried to do this before, so I’ll see how it goes.

Edit: aha!

You have to go to the issues page and select the “new issue” button, where you’ll be directed to log in to github.

Which, for me, means I’m finished trying. No desire whatsoever to have another login for a one time thing. If I ever manage to learn enough code to do anything like this often enough, I’d do it, but it just isn’t worth it to satisfy my curiosity about the process.

People are fucking weird. There’s also prudes and morons that assume any contact at all has to be some kind of horror.

But we’re supposed to teach our kids how to clean and manage their bodies. That’s the job; we do it for them when they’re too young to do it themselves, or if something temporarily/permanently disables them from doing so.

It isn’t weird to help with genital care under those circumstances either. You gotta teach kids how to wash their junk, and if they want/need to change their pubic hair, it’s part of the job to discuss it, decide if it’s the right choice at that point, and if the mutually agreed answer is yes, to teach them how not to screw up.

For real, who else is supposed to? You gonna hire a nurse or nurse’s assistant to teach them? That’s weird, and there aren’t any specialists in aesthetics that are going to agree to it in most circumstances when the kid is under the local age of consent. Too much risk.

And even that assumes that the kid is going to be okay with a stranger helping them with their genitals. Not every kid would be. For me, there’s no way I’m going to have a total stranger fiddling with my kid’s junk for non medical reasons, even if the kid was alright with it.

You did the job, end of story.

This is all you fucking do. These shitty little comments that are supposed to look like irony, but are empty and mindless.

What’s the deal? Why have you put in that much time on lemmy making essentially the same comment over and over again? Like, often enough that I don’t even have to look at the user name when there’s a comment like this, it’s going to be you.

There has to be a reason behind it, some kind of thing in your head that makes you think it’s a beneficial hobby, so what is it? Help a motherfucker out, I don’t like blocking people unless there’s no other choice, so show me the human behind the blathering.

Well, I don’t miss the kiddie porn being dropped into chat rooms and forums randomly like could happen back in the day. But I like having a decent chance of finding whatever product I want/need and a better than zero shot at finding whatever obscure thing I’m interested in on Wikipedia.

There’s tradeoffs. But the old net was a lot more fun.

Well, having sat with people of that age bracket when they were sick or dying, when most people drop pretence, I have a different opinion than those already presented.

It isn’t necessarily about “simpler times”, though some folks that age use the term. And it isn’t about racism or sexism either, because it isn’t just white folks or men that express the idea.

There is a big dose of nostalgia involved, but you don’t see the desire to return to the era of childhood or teen years as much in older or younger generations.

The common thread that makes 50 kids yearn for the era is largely that they lost a sense of their place in the world. The 50 were before vietnam made the big schism it did, before men and women needed to examine their own expectations for themselves, and before the post war wave of optimism faded.

You gotta know, the kids and teens in the fifties, despite the cold war and nuclear bomb drills, had an optimistic world around them. Well, in the “western” world mostly. The good guys won the war, and regardless of what anyone else thinks now, that’s what the perception was. To someone growing up then, the prospect of being able to have a career, family, and eventually retirement with relative ease was real.

Again, this isn’t just for white men. Black people have expressed to me that despite the awareness there was going to be a fight for equality, the hope of success was strong. Little girls had moms that had worked during the war, and gained the prestige that comes with it, but came back to being moms and wives because they didn’t need to work (again this was perception, and that matters more than current ideas about that for this purpose).

That post war generation, the literal boomers, had hope, even the ones that were dirt poor, even some of the black people, and most of the women. By the time the sixties came around, that hope was changing. They were reaching young adulthood among the earliest boomers, and they started to see that the world wasn’t what they thought it was.

Sexual revolutions, the pill, the civil rights struggle, vietnam, things were no longer as rosy as they were promised, though many of them were finding freedoms as much as they were finding struggles. They just couldn’t look at the world with those rosy, optimistic glasses any more. Shit got complicated and confusing and it was the boomers and the younger segment of the preceding generation that drove some of the positive changes at the same time they were being chewed up by the meat grinder of capitalism and war.

Who wouldn’t look back at a period of optimism as a better time? If the eighties had been as promising as the fifties, I’d be looking back on it as a golden era too.

But hey, us Xers and millennials, we will look back on the nineties as a better time most likely. We saw a lot of good happen. It’s largely being undone now, but damn it was nice while it lasted seeing the expansion of acceptance of gay people, reduced barriers between black and white people in specific (less so with other “races”) as the freedom to marry and blend together worked its chemistry. Even some of the racists backed off once their grandbabies were mixed.

Yeah, like the fifties, that optimism covered an ugly reality, but it was still better than the seventies had been, and we thought that the worst aspects of the Reagan era were going to eventually get fixed.

Now, OP, I can’t speak for your dad. The above definitely didn’t apply to everyone I’ve ever known from that generation. Some of them were racist assholes even then. Some of them still think women are only good for one thing (and some of those are women). And you’re definitely right that living queer back then would be horrible even in more accepting cities. To gain access to all those things people were optimistic about, you’d have to be closeted and very very careful.

But it isn’t as simple as folks tend to think. Your dad’s generation wasn’t a monolith, and even the more progressive among that peer group often look back on the fifties as a great era to be born into. I can’t even entirely disagree tbh. Looking back on it from now, the thirty years after 1950 were amazing in the amount of progress made socially, technologically, and economically for a lot of people. It’s easy to ignore the bad parts when we’re/they’re sitting here with these magic devices in our hands.

Conservatives are more prone to wanting to return everything to the way life was then, but plenty of us liberals, progressives, general liberals, and even full on leftists can see that we lost some of the good stuff when we had to root out the bad (despite failing to do so)

Break the shaft in half, now you have two spears.

Only one problem with this.

A spear is superior to a gladius any day. I will fight on that hill. And win, because I have a spear, obviously.

Ikr?

I’d be impressed as hell, and at least salute them as I died from my severed arm bleeding me out