[HN Gopher] Dracula's Biggest Mistake
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Dracula's Biggest Mistake
Author : chesterfield
Score : 45 points
Date : 2024-02-26 15:16 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.ayjay.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.ayjay.org)
| jyunwai wrote:
| This was a fun read. Merging a few quotes to provide the gist of
| the article for discussion: "Dracula's own powers - superhuman
| strength, the control of local weather, the ability to summon and
| direct brute creatures - cannot match the powers of his Enemy.
| And that Enemy is not Dr. Van Helsing or Jonathan Harker or any
| of the other people who chase him, but rather technocratic
| modernity itself [...]
|
| "Our heroes' long pursuit of Dracula is largely a matter of
| tracing the written records of everything Dracula does in
| England. Note also that the enemies of Dracula coordinate their
| plan of action with reference to the sequence of events that they
| have recorded using typewriters and phonographs. (Dracula is the
| first novel featuring voice memos.) [...]
|
| "[And modernity reigns not just in England: even in eastern
| Europe the pursuers are greatly aided by Mina's knowledge of when
| the trains run -- and by telegraphs they receive from London.
| Railway timetables, telegraphs, phonographs, typewriters,
| invoices, bills of lading, double-entry bookkeeping: these are
| the instruments by which Dracula's pursuers draw their net around
| him."
| dang wrote:
| I get that your post was well-intentioned! But on HN, please
| don't post comments that just summarize the article or paste
| bits from it. The thread doesn't need to repeat the article--
| users can find it easily enough.
|
| This might make more sense if you remember that the purpose of
| HN threads is curious conversation. When you have an
| interesting conversation with friends or colleagues, the idea
| is not to repeat things that have already been said, but to add
| your own thoughts, reflections, experiences.
|
| If you look at the other top-level comments that have been
| posted to this thread so far, they all have the flavor of what
| I'm talking about:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39529274
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39529003
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39528984
|
| For example, they all contain some unexpected or unpredictable
| element--something we can be surprised by and learn from.
| jyunwai wrote:
| That is fair point, I'll follow this guideline from now on.
| Apologies, I wasn't aware of this before.
| zabzonk wrote:
| of course, drac does make it much later in the 20thC in kim
| newman's books, for example
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_Cha_Cha_Cha
| kevinmhickey wrote:
| On a related note, when I re-watch shows from the 1990's or even
| early 2000's it's amazing how many problems would be solved with
| a simple cell phone call or text message. Buffy the Vampire
| Slayer would be a much shorter show if the gang could just text
| instead of wondering where the others were or if they knew some
| key fact.
| dylan604 wrote:
| along the same line of applying modern day to older shows, I
| recently re-watched Stargate Atlantis. I found it amusing that
| with all of the futuristic tech, McKay still carried around a
| bulky laptop. Even the original Star Trek minimized the
| computer to a hand held device. The prop team kind of failed in
| SG:Atlantis on this one to me. How much easier would their off
| world adventures been with a tablet or other smaller futuristic
| compute device?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| OTOH it was kind of cool to have a more "realistic" take of
| what would probably happen if the US military merged with
| Alien tech. Contemporary tools would be used next to new
| gadgets.
| dylan604 wrote:
| For SG:1 sure. For SG:Atlantis, they had access to all of
| the ancient's tech.
| ben_w wrote:
| They had access to a lot of Ancient artefacts which they
| didn't really understand; despite many oddities that came
| to mind since first watching it, I think it would still
| fit the setting that they didn't know how to get the
| Ancient's 3D printers (or whatever) to spit out better
| hardware -- if they _could_ make it spit out more
| hardware on demand, even if they "could only find one
| file to print", it would radically change the show.
|
| This also means there was no way for either SG-1 or
| Atlantis to sensibly continue past the SG-1 finale, when
| they got Asgard replicators and all the instruction
| manuals for them... and that Star Trek TNG onwards is
| best done without thinking too hard about the
| implications of almost any of the tech they demonstrate.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| I really didn't like the direction that SG-1 and Atlantis
| took.
|
| There was a novel that took place after the movie that
| depicted Hathor coming back and trying to take over with
| a simultaneous plot of the US trying to extract resources
| from Abydos. I though it was really we done and wished
| that SG-1 used it as the starting point.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_literature
| ben_w wrote:
| I can sympathise with that; while I enjoyed both, they
| were a radical departure from the source material and
| non-trivial departure from the SG-1 pilot (which I only
| learned recently was initially a made-for-TV film).
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| STar Trek's handheld computers never made sense to me, unless
| they have some crazy good AI that does all the work for you
| based on vague inputs. How do you input anything like code
| quickly on such a tiny screen?
| dylan604 wrote:
| how much code do you enter into a mobile device? these
| aren't the devices to do that with. they just run apps that
| serve the purpose at hand dictated by the script.
|
| when ever you want to send a text, you don't enter the code
| for that. neither did anyone on an away team that needed to
| take air samples, or scan someone's health.
|
| seems like you had an idea not fully thought out
| jfengel wrote:
| Star Trek was well aware of that problem. They often
| encountered "ion storms", or landing parties got conked on the
| head and their communicators taken, or other ways of disabling
| communications.
|
| That also disabled the transporter, which is a convenient way
| to get into stories, but also makes it easy to get out of
| stories.
|
| Somebody somewhere must have done a PhD thesis on the way that
| cell phones have changed storytelling in TV and movies. I'd
| actually kinda like to read that.
|
| A quick Google turns up:
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254345825_Mobile_Ph...
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I've counted at least three civilization-shattering
| technologies in Star Trek which were simply thrown in,
| without consideration for the long-term, for reasons of
| budget and convenience, but largely to maintain the Sailing
| Ship, Days of Yore set of metaphors.
|
| Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious shuttle
| launches and landings and, most importantly, footage, these
| would utterly rewrite medicine, aging, manufacturing, and so
| on. Notice in many high adventure films, the dinghy, the
| shuttle's ancestor, is often ignored.
|
| Artificial Gravity/Inertial Dampeners: We want our ship to be
| under our boots, and occasionally slosh around when we are
| enduring space weather. Casual mastery of the force of
| gravity so we can have an ion storm to knock us about.
|
| Faster-Than-Light: Aside from that messy causality business,
| real FTL would make the concept of territories quite fuzzy.
| Sure, you could draw lines on your star charts, but given
| that someone could zip a few dozen light years in and attack
| your capitol planet, it's just not the same.
|
| I could go on and on about this, but a lot of this space
| opera harkens back to a time when governments would just have
| to trust that some captain or governor was a reasonable
| person to have in charge because messages back and forth
| would take so very long.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > Faster-Than-Light: Aside from that messy causality
| business, real FTL would make the concept of territories
| quite fuzzy. Sure, you could draw lines on your star
| charts, but given that someone could zip a few dozen light
| years in and attack your capitol planet, it's just not the
| same.
|
| Star Trek avoids this one by just completely ignoring the
| lightspeed barrier with handwavy "subspace" technobabble.
| They can communicate, detect, and track objects moving FTL
| with as much (or more) ease as done with radio tracking
| slow moving objects today.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| If you can get from A to B faster than a photon in a
| vacuum could, I'm counting it as FTL.
|
| They've been really inconsistent about it. For a while,
| communicating through subspace was not _quite_ as long as
| travel, but it was still a non-zero amount of time. Now,
| communication seems to be via ansible, and the less said
| about the wildly varying rates of travel, the better.
| mrec wrote:
| > _Artificial Gravity /Inertial Dampeners_
|
| Surely this one was much more about those "reasons of
| budget and convenience"? Star Trek couldn't afford non-
| styrofoam rocks, I can't see them stretching to filming all
| bridge scenes on the Vomit Comet or building a 2001-style
| rotational set.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| > _Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious
| shuttle launches and landings and, most importantly,
| footage, these would utterly rewrite medicine, aging,
| manufacturing, and so on._
|
| I'm more interested in how it would rewrite the rules of
| war. If you can transport a nuke (or even a strike team)
| directly into your enemy's headquarters, wars end faster
| with less widespread destruction.
|
| Until you develop no-transport fields but now you've just
| created massive dead zones which - in themselves -
| highlight key points of interest to investigate and/or
| target.
|
| Then you have to deploy LARGE scale (think city wide or
| bigger) no-transport fields or lots of smaller fields to
| obfuscate the high value targets.
|
| But regardless, you still need normal shields because
| teleporting a nuke just outside the zone and letting it
| drop in is just as effective.
|
| And all of that still ignores conservation of mass.. the
| physical material has to come from somewhere.
| kej wrote:
| That reminds me of this McSweeney's piece by Google's Peter
| Norvig: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/stories-that-would-
| have-...
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| It's really interesting to me how precisely you can date modern
| tv shows.
|
| - Do computers exist? Does everyone have a computer? Is the
| idea of searching the web a novel thing? - Do they have cell
| phones? Are they smartphones? - And now the new one, are they
| mentioning LLMs in some way?
|
| Like one thing that really dates _The Expanse_ imo is the
| complete lack of AI technology in the books /movies. It was
| probably an artistic choice, but it's completely unbelievable
| now in a way that wasn't a problem 4 years ago.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I can see the complete absence as being more realistic than a
| partial or limited presence. If there were a Dune-style
| Butlerian Jihad, AI could be banned altogether.
| runeofdoom wrote:
| The author thinks that Helsing & company killed Dracula... and
| that is certainly the narrator's desperate belief. But as Fred
| Saberhagen pointed out in his more modern telling of the tale,
| Van Helsing himself maintains Dracula must be staked, decapitated
| and have his mouth stuffed with garlic to perish. And yet,
| despite this and despite knowing that Dracula can turn himself to
| mist, the heroes are content with victory when, in the shadows of
| sunset, they stab and cut Dracula with steel knives and he turns
| to "dust".
|
| Fun article though, even with that small "mistake". :)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| If you've ever wondered why staking or decapitation
| specifically, see the mechanisms proposed in
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/715512.Vampires_Burial_a...
| echtroipolemos wrote:
| In the Bram Stoker novel, Dracula is eventually killed, but at
| what cost? Harker must eventually drive a stake through his
| beloved Lucy. Dracula is a virus, not a man.
| atombender wrote:
| Are you mixing things up? Harker's fiancee is Mina, not Lucy.
| And the novel is quite clear that since Dracula is dead,
| she's no longer going to become a vampire.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Saberhagen's other Dracula novels are a lot of fun, esp. _The
| Homes--Dracula File_.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Along the lines of villains skirting identity-providing
| technocratic modernity, my head canon for Walking Boss Godfrey in
| _Cool Hand Luke_ : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34284609
| smackeyacky wrote:
| None of the things mentioned in tracking Dracula were
| particularly modern even then. We have receipts and travel
| documents from thousands of years ago, silly article is silly.
| mrkeen wrote:
| > Poor Dracula, he never had a chance - not against the double-
| reinforced power of a Catholic Modernity.
|
| To be fair, he hoarded wealth, drank blood, and sought eternal
| life. If I were in a room with Dracula and his enemies, and you
| told me to point at the Catholics, I'd be a bit stumped.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by
| sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it
| sucks_ -- KM
|
| _Das Kapital_ was 1867; _The Time Machine_ , 1895. They sure
| loved their vore in the 19th century!
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Today Dracula would be a massive influencer in the style of
| Andrew Tate with legions of fans offering themselves.
| Animats wrote:
| The more modern version of that mistake.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otAuH6FDhgw
| gwern wrote:
| OP is echoing, with a Catholic-centric viewpoint, a point that's
| been made in much greater depth by others: I suggest
| https://gwern.net/doc/economics/2014-robbins.pdf and then more
| briefly, https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/turning-back-the-
| economic-c...
| https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/br...
|
| I read _Dracula_ afterwards, and I think this perspective is 100%
| correct, and perhaps the single largest theme from Bram Stoker's
| _Dracula_ which has been thrown out by successors.
|
| (For fellow Gene Wolfe fans: I was reading up on this topic
| earlier because of "Suzanne Delage", where I interpret
| (https://gwern.net/suzanne-delage) as an inversion of _Dracula_ -
| in "Suzanne Delage", the protagonist & his allies are defeated by
| Dracula due to a lack of coordination/technology, in contrast to
| the successful protagonists of _Dracula_.)
| exolymph wrote:
| Out of sheer nerdy curiosity, have you read The Historian by
| Elizabeth Kostova and if so what did you think?
|
| I didn't realize Dracula lore was among your many sidelines :P
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