The Diary Of Me

*checks wiki*

“Abu Simbel, Nubia” by Francis Frith

1857

albumen silver print from glass negative

In fact many jokes were surrounding the Cathloic churches antisemtic response to the titanic sinking, people joking that perhaps religious figures sunk the ship themselves (through prayer).

Here's a few examples, but I'm sorry I don't have a translation. I think it's in czech

If you want to read the paper these figures appear in its called

"What the hell are you doing on that iceberg?" Newspaper photographer: "Waiting for the next disaster. We made so much money with the Titanic..."

Except Dracula is a story that plays itself straight. The vampire himself is not stupid. He’s possibly the oldest vampire of all which means he upgraded from animal instinct and mindless echoes of past memories to someone who’s regained his critical thinking skills. The story begins because he’s already adapted to how the modern world works now by hiring a solicitor who understands modern laws.

He knows now that he doesn’t have to march into London with an army like he used to; He can just buy property and the laws of London are forced to respect that. Similarly he’s already experimented in and discovered loopholes to vampire rules and limitations; Vampires are bound by the permission of owners so he simply uses his solicitor to buy and own a bunch of properties. If he needs to be invited in, Dracula hypnotizes someone to let him in.

Vampires need to return to their grave every dusk/dawn (whichever comes sooner), which causes their coffin to act as an anchor that limits how far from it they can travel? Dracula simply rations the earth of his grave into fifty coffins and spreads them across London so his range becomes exponentially larger.

All of these things make the story almost come across as a deconstruction and it might just be! It’s just that Dracula the novel became such a trendsetter that people nowadays see it as playing things fully straight. It almost feels as if the novel is written with the idea that readers have a basic understanding of vampires and their rules, so part of the thrill comes in the revelation of how the titular vampire is working around these rules. Likewise I’ve heard it used to be a trope in English literature for a traveler to visit some foreign land with a monster and escape by going home. But here the foreign aspect of the story is just the first (and final) arc; The monster’s plan hinges on coming to the UK itself!

Jonathan brings photographs of the properties to show to Dracula that he took with a Kodak portable camera.

Seward keeps an audio journal via phonograph recording.

Seward being a psychiatrist- the idea that you could actually try to talk to and understand a "lunatic" in order to help them get better instead of just throwing away the key was a depressingly novel concept in medicine at the time. Freud's Studies on Hysteria only came out two years before Dracula, for instance.

Blood transfusions. It's easy to make jokes about how Dracula was written before people knew about blood types and that's why Lucy gets transfusions from so many people with no problem, but because blood types wouldn't be discovered until 3 years after it was published, blood transfusion was still an extremely experimental and risky treatment that many doctors would hesitate to even consider, because sometimes when it was performed the patient would instantly die and no one knew why.

Mina's joke about "the New Woman"- anxieties about gender and feminism in Dracula are the kind of thing whole theses have been written about, but there's an obvious irony to this comment because Mina kind of is the New Woman. In contrast to Lucy, Mina is a highly-educated woman with a real actual job, and she works to hone those practical job skills because she plans to be an active participant in Jonathan's work.

When Van Helsing decks Lucy's room out with garlic flowers, he telegrams to Holland for overnight shipping across the Channel from a friend who owns a greenhouse, because garlic flowers are a good 3 months or so out of season at the time the chapter is set.

I don't think enough people are appreciating how insane this is???

I went, "What. no. she/her."

"How does that work? With she/her/hers and they/them?"

I stared at her. "What are you talking about?"

"Well you came out as-" and I said, "I'm asexual."

She replied, "Like an amoeba, I know."

"Oh. My god. No. Mom. It doesn't- it's not the asexual you learned about in biology. I didn't come out as a single celled organism."

With heavy relief, she said "Oh, it has a different meaning?"

The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely.