dinosaur riding a bike

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[srune]

Vampire: the Masquerade is one of the most "newbie friendly" systems out there, and despite all her problems, I don't think we appreciate that enough.

"Ooooh I can't play because I don't know the lore!" Good. You weren't supposed to know the lore. There's a lore reason for why you don't know the lore. Now, I'm going to erase everything you are, turn you into a vampire, and we're gonna go through the horrors together just like god intended.

[oldcoffeeb-036]

🔥烧所有人屁股🔥

萌哭我了。。。好兄弟画的。。我将展示。。

（。。。这软件咋艾特人。。唉算了！）

[catchymemes]

[oldcoffeeb-036]

no curtain？？？

[alienburry]

[mystic-mae]

is this anything

EDIT: REBLOGS ARE SO MUCH COOLER THAN LIKES, FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING I'D PREFER IT IF YOU'D REBLOG MY POSTS. WHY MUST I SAY THIS ON THE "REBLOG POSTS" SITE.

[junk-thunder]

i've survived far worse. i've also died to far less though so who knows

[sassysnek]

I've lived more lives than enough, I haven't died quite as much-

Oh I'm not a real person just the shit you can't make up

[cry-ptidd]

Mina mina mina

[crumb-crumblet-s-crumbington]

i turned 21 today, all i can say is that it gets better

[artiisantm]

Jonathan Harker (before he goes to Dracula's castle)

(He will never be this put-together and normal again)

[salazar-bollinger]

[vtmb-references]

Tremere PC Clothing Reference

继续阅读

[silverhand]

Perfectly normal business trip about to begin...

[yxoque-deactivated20170920]

[pyrrhiccomedy]

Ridiculous. Nobody said anything about vampires needing to get all five liters of blood all at once from a single person. Vampires could be feeding non-fatally on lots of people at once. To even begin to attempt to track vampires by their adverse effects on the health of the human population, you should look at people complaining to their doctor about weakness, dizziness, and anemia.

[wizzard890]

in fact if you were a vampire who wanted to keep your presence a secret, you’d be out of your fucking mind to drain someone to the point of death. please take the stealth of these creatures into account.

[themuffinbaby]

Stupid vampires could be a thing. There could be 2,000+ willynilly vampires and hundreds of thousands of skilled predators that don’t kill their victims.

[space-y-disaster]

aright, the math was really bothering me, so I redid it all. Here’s a better calculation of the vampire population in the usa:

- Vampires would be the same weight as their corpse, as a non-decaying corpse doesn’t change body types wtf. The average body weight (in america) of a male is 195.7 lbs and 168.5 lbs for a female.

- An average adult male in america is 69.2 inches tall, and the average adult female in america is 63.7 inches. Assuming that they are lightly to moderately active (a generous estimate, taking in account that while they might be less active hiding out in their underground tombs or whatever, they have superpowers that will be more energy-consuming, as the average american is more sedimentary than that), this means that an average male will need 2,566 - 2,893 calories per day, and an average woman 2,048 - 2,309 calories per day.

- The basal metabolic rate (the calories spent regulating a human body and keeping it alive) is 1,866 for the mentioned average male, and 1,490 for the mentioned average female. As a vampire is dead and thus has no bodily function to run outside of the brain, all the other calories in the BMR can be discarded. As the brain takes up 20% of the resting calorie intake, the average male vampire really needs 1,073 - 1,400 calories per day, and the average female vampire needs 856 - 1,117 calories per day.

- In an average human body, there are roughly 450 calories in 500 mL of blood. This means that for every liter of blood in the human body, there are 900 calories. A human has about 4.7 liters of blood in their body, making the total calorie count of blood in a human 4,230. This can feed a male vampire for 3 - 4 days, and a female vampire for 4 - 5 days before they get hungry again. Assuming that vampires try to feed as little as they can, either because they don’t want to kill or they don’t want to be killed, we will say a vampire has to kill someone every 4-5 days.

- This means that, assuming they eat when they get really hungry, a male vampire would have to kill 91 humans and a female vampire 73 humans per year. Assuming the number of male to female vampires are the same as humans, 51% are women and 49% and men. This would total out to be 82 humans per year killed when averaged out. 

- The number of unresolved missing people (as in, not found alive or dead) in 2012 is numbered to be 2,079 cases. As it will most likely be known if a body was found up dead with vampire bites, we will assume that the victims are part of the roughly 2,000 people gone permanently per year.

- This would mean that the population of vampires can be, at the very most 2,000 vampires (if every missing person is the result of vampires, and they keep the human alive for over a year at the least), to around 24 vampires (if every vampire killed their victims every time and then destroyed all evidence).

Conclusion: ether vampires could have a whole underground society keeping humans as slaves for at least a year before dying, and have 2,000+ vampires, going up the longer the human slaves can stay alive, or there’s one family/group of vampires really attached to tradition. Maybe both, if the number of humans slaves is high enough. 

BONUS:

- The amount of blood that a vampire needs daily to survive is anywhere between 20% and 33% of a average human’s blood supply. Under 30% is Class 2 hemorrhage, where symptoms of blood loss are notable but not serious. Between 30-40% is a Class 3 hemorrhage, where a blood fusion is necessary. It can take months for blood levels to become normal after significant blood loss, around 5-6 months. This means that a good friend or armor of a vampire donating their blood to feed the vampire is not a feasible diet, as it can only happen around twice a year (and only if it’s a woman vampire or a lazy guy vampire), and in that time the vampire’s either dead or ate someone else. 

[yxoque-deactivated20170920]

Someone finally put quality content on the Less Wrong Facebook page.

[mask131]

Vampires before they were cool... (3)

A last post for now – maybe more shall follow.

I talked of how the vampire myth was born, and of the vampire craze that overtook Europe. But I only vaguely hinted at what the vampires were back then. So here’s a question: what was a “vampire” in the 18th century, and how did it differ from the creature literature and cinema built? This is not a complete or extensive answer, but here are some things to think about (that I am lifting from Jean Marigny’s works):

The 18th century solidified the three main traits of a vampire. 1) It is an “undead in body”: it is not a disembodied spirit, an ethereal wraith or a spiritual demon. It has a body, it is a physical entity on the material plane. 2) It leaves its grave at night, in order to suck the blood of the living, which in turn extends his unnatural life. 3) His victims become vampires too, after they die.

The idea that vampire lacks a reflection and cannot be seen in mirror was greatly exaggerated by fiction. It was not an universal trait of vampires: it was mostly present in areas where a Germanic culture dominated. There, vampires were said to lack both shadows and reflections in mirror – which was meant to symbolize how they had lost their soul.

The idea of vampires having very huge, big and pointy teeth was greatly exaggerated by the cinema – while indeed the confusion with werewolves led to the idea of vampires having fangs, not all the vampires actually had to bite their victim to drink their blood. Many vampires simply sucked or absorbed the blood directly through the skin, without using their teeth. And in many other cases, such as the “Nachzehrer”, the vampire doesn’t even touch the victim, he just absorbs its life-force from a long distance.

While the bat became THE iconic vampire-animal (especially thanks to Buffon, who named the blood-sucking Southern American bats “vampires” in 1761), traditional vampires are said to turn into all sorts of animals: they can be spiders, or even butterflies, just as they can turn themselves into straw or mist.

Garlic is not an universal remedy against vampire: the belief that garlic repels vampire comes mostly from Romania. However, the vampire of folklore was known to only be able to leave his grave at night, as he was forced to return to his tomb before the singing of the rooster. The vampire also fears holy water and running water (because water is the source and symbol of life), and other religious symbols of Christianity (like the crucifix). A wooden stake through the heart is the best way to put an end to a vampire, but sometimes it is not enough and requires additional rituals. In Russia, the stake must be carved out of aspen wood, because it was the wood in which the cross of the Christ was built; in other countries, people rather use hawthorn, supposed to be the origin of the Christ’s crown of thorns. In Dalmatia and Albania, a dagger blessed by a priest is used rather than a wooden stake. In Romania, the “execution” of a vampire is called “the great reparation” and must be performed at the first lights of dawn, and the stake must be plunged in one hit – else the vampire can resurrect. If the body doesn’t crumble into dust after having its heart pierced, one must decapitate the corpse (usually with a gravedigger’s spade) and burn it. The ashes then have to be either buried under the crossing of two roads, or scattered to the four winds.

Alright, but how do you recognize a vampire, huh? Things are even more complicated here because its region has its own variations. The most generic and recognized trait is that, when in his grave, the corpse that is the vampire doesn’t have either a rigor mortis, or any trace of rot, even several weeks after being buried. Another common trait of vampires is how hairy they are: they have bushy eyebrows, that often join together above the nose, and they have hair in the palm of their hands. Romanian vampires even have a short tail covered with fur, which grows with the heat, and which is supposed to be giving them magical powers. When there is a vampire epidemic, a ritual to know which grave is the one of the vampire went as such: a virgin teenager had to ride a horse who also had never known sex, either entirely black or entirely white. The horse had to enter the cemetery, and supposedly reacted to the grave where the vampire was to be found: a vampire tomb was also identified by how you could find little holes on the ground near it – because it was through these holes that the vampires escaped each night, turning himself into mist. It was also believed that the people born of the sexual union of a male vampire and a female human had the gift of immediately sensing and recognizing vampires: they were called in Serbia “vampiritch” or “vampirovitch”, while in Bohemia and Hungary they were called “dhampirs”.

Finally: how do you become a vampire? Good question! Technically speaking, every human being can become a vampire after death. Nobody is prevented from the risk. But some people are more likely than others to turn into blood-sucking monsters. As I said before, all those that did not received proper Christian funerals or were not buried in holy ground were more likely to become vampires. People who died by suicide or by violent death were more at risks, just like excommunicated people, witches/warlocks, and stillborn infants. Other individuals are predisposed to become a vampire rather because of traits they had when they were born: people born with one or several teeth in their mouth, people born with a “caul” (a piece of the placenta or of the amniotic membrane stuck on the face or head of the baby), people born with either very dark eyes or very bright-blue eyes ; as well as people born with red hair (which were thought to be the “hair of Judas”) or with red spots over their body. When these people came to pass away, extra-precautions were taken to make sure they did not return as a vampire: in Romania, a nail could be plunged in the corpse’s forehead, or the body was pricked with many needles ; or the body was covered with the fat of a pig killed on Saint Ignace’s Day.

It was also very common to place an item in the mouth of the defunct, to prevent the chewing of the shroud or to prevent the soul from returning inside the body: in Romania it was garlic, in Greece it was a Christian host, in Saxony it was a lemon. Sudetenland had the tradition of wrapping the dead in a sort of large stocking: the vampire could only break one stitch of it per year. In Russia, poppy seeds were rather placed in a vampire’s grave, cursing them to counting the seeds each night instead of going out into the world.

People who died excommunicated or of suicide were constantly buried at a crossroad formed by two paths. In Serbia, to protect a house from a vampire attack, a cross made of tar was painted on the doors and the windows ; while in Romania, garlic was hanged in every room, and rubbed onto the doors, windows, chimneys and keyholes. Finally, in Russia, all the roads leading to the cemetery had to be covered in either poppy seeds or briar thorns: the vampire would be forced to pick them up one by one on its way.

[decanost]

Some Renfield’s from 2024 !!!