Commander Cod

My fishy life. Ace pride icon by pigeontheoneandonly 

[softbonesclay]

more seals, ready for bisque firing

[kafk-a]

Klara Lidén Self Portrait with the Keys to the City, 2005  Digital print, 60 × 42 cm

[sobadbad]

FROZEN PLANET II 2.02 • Frozen Ocean

[kairosrhys]

Which one is your favourite? 😊

[lakevida]

walking around the dashboard at four in the morning stepping on all the creaking posts loud as fuck

[randumbkatt]

hi,, can i please have some,,

[kaiserin-erzsebet]

I made a short post about this yesterday, but I want to discuss how the brevity of the recent entries convey the horror of the situation.

The first entries establish one thing about Jonathan Harker: He writes down every detail of his experience from the spicy chicken to the weird dreams to all the things that people say to him (even when he dismisses these things as unimportant superstition.) He is long-winded and detail oriented when he’s comfortable. Arguably because part of this exercise is to have a shorthand journal that Mina can read later, so he wants her to have the details of his trip.

Then it becomes a kind of coping strategy. As the May 12th entry establishes, he is writing down facts to ensure that he isn’t imagining his experiences. He has no one to talk to, so he confides in his journal. He takes writing down facts as a way to confirm to himself that strange things really are happening. Like winding his pocket watch, it is something to ground himself.

The brevity of the recent entries really shows that his coping has failed. He cannot reassure himself with facts, since the reality has become too supernatural and dangerous for that. 

For example, earlier he wrote down the Count’s long description of the history of the region practically word for word. In today’s (May 19th) entry he writes a quick summary of the conversation with the Count with no exact dialogue.

It is a very clever way to show that Jonathan is becoming increasingly terrified and everything he has to comfort himself is failing. Modernity cannot save him now.

In a first person way, it shows the collapse of the rational in the face of monsters - which is a central theme in Gothic literature.

[foxglovedforest]

[theriu]

"I don't care if he's hot, you need to FLEE"

[ymutate]

Kazuko Shiihashi (1954-),

Cobalt Blue Hill, Nihonga, Natural mineral pigment on Japanese handmade crushed paper

[sepublic]

I do think it’s interesting how the novel Dracula is meant to be a modern setting from its perspective. It’s very much that genre of story about an ancient fantasy archetype finding itself in a modern setting, complete with the rules-lawyering that often comes with modern parodies (that isn’t to say the stories of Olde didn’t have fun with loopholes either though).

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!

So yeah. Dracula isn’t stupid and he reflects the idea that people of the past had just as common sense as the rest of us, they just had access to less/inaccurate knowledge and things worked differently back then. Dracula would be like… That bit of someone showing a medieval peasant a meme as they comprehend it perfectly and aren’t even wowed by the Doritos. If Dracula was set in the 21st century he’d probably understand social media well enough to become an influencer if he wanted to, though the issue of being invisible in cameras wouldn’t help.

[downtroddendeity]

Dracula is full of details that put it in what was at the time an incredibly modern time frame, which only isn't obvious to readers now because it's been more than a hundred years. A few off the top of my head:

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.

Jonathan literally makes a comment in Chapter 3 about the surreal contrasting modernity of sitting at an antique desk in an ancient castle and frantically scribbling steganographic shorthand in his notebook.

[kineticpenguin]

At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields

[kineticpenguin]

At the risk of sounding like an effete intellectual, I do actually think you should be allowed to just take college courses indefinitely

[yourunderwaterskies]

technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.

Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.

Free courses on Coursera.

Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison

For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.

When searching, the phrases you're looking for are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or you can do a general search of say, "free online college courses." Oh, and so you don't get surprised like I did, have an avoid: Hillsdale College is a conservative Christian site and not a valid MOOC place. Sign up with them and you will get things like THIS IS WHY THE LEFT IS TURNING YOUR KIDS TRANS AND GAY in your inbox.

[aloeverawrites]

@yourunderwaterskies I wanted to say thank you so much for adding these links, seriously, they've been life-changingly helpful to me-

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.

Humanity in War

Learn more about the Red Cross International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Program to train policy professionals, government officials, academics,

Kaya

Kaya is a free humanitarian learning platform which offers hundreds of training opportunities across a range of key topics, including the hu

[blueskittlesart]

if only time would stop for us

Katya & Sofia - Goncharov (1973) Dir. Martin Scorsese

[crykea]

[Image Description: a digital painting of sofia and katya from the fictional movie goncharov. they are standing together in gowns, sofia's red and strapless and katya's more chaste and white. they are smoking together. sofia's cloud of smoke has a clock in the middle of it. End Description]

[errorschacha]

The entire point of, OK, my phone really wants to call it Anastasia so I guess we’re doing that? The entire point of Anastasia (as administered by a board-certified Anastasiologist) during sugary. Sugary? Haven’t I suffered enough? The entire point of Anastasia during augury. Jesus Christ. Hold up. You know what, augury is preferable to sugary. Augury is obviously performed by an auger (makes sense if you give it a think) whereas sugary is performed by…? A sugardaddy? NO THANK YOU. Anyway. The entire point of Anastasia is so that you don’t know what music your sturgeon. Fuck right off. Was playing. While you were under. You’re not supposed to wake up from Anastasia and immediately realize you managed to get earwormed by Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” during your sugary.

[babypetals]

https://www.instagram.com/p/CA0jNxon4Oq/

[sepublic]

I do think it’s interesting how the novel Dracula is meant to be a modern setting from its perspective. It’s very much that genre of story about an ancient fantasy archetype finding itself in a modern setting, complete with the rules-lawyering that often comes with modern parodies (that isn’t to say the stories of Olde didn’t have fun with loopholes either though).

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!

So yeah. Dracula isn’t stupid and he reflects the idea that people of the past had just as common sense as the rest of us, they just had access to less/inaccurate knowledge and things worked differently back then. Dracula would be like… That bit of someone showing a medieval peasant a meme as they comprehend it perfectly and aren’t even wowed by the Doritos. If Dracula was set in the 21st century he’d probably understand social media well enough to become an influencer if he wanted to, though the issue of being invisible in cameras wouldn’t help.

[brellstudiosart]

the obligatory trolley problem post

[howtofightwrite]

ok ive actually been wanting to ask this for a while; can getting stabbed in the stomach/abdomen really cause blood to come out of the mouth or is that just a dumb trope for The Drama?

Yes, but also, yes.

There are a lot of injuries that can result in blood in your respiratory system. The most obvious would be puncturing a lung, or bruising a lung (called a pulmonary contusion.) Also, bleeding from the sinuses that gets into the throat can result in coughing up blood (though this one is pretty benign.) As a general rule, you do not want fluid in your lungs at all, and fluid that is prone to coagulating, blocking your lungs' ability to absorb oxygen is a very bad thing.

And it gets worse, for your body to effectively expel a large glob of blood, the way you usually see in films, you would need a lot of blood in your lungs. On their own, even relatively minor pulmonary contusions have a pretty significant mortality rate. What this means is, if you're ever coughing up blood, there's about a 30% chance you're going to die.

Also as a quick aside, particularly violent coughing can result in some minor spotting from broken blood vessels. It's not inherently life threatening, but it is something that should be checked out quickly, because it can be a symptom of something worse. (Such as lung cancer.)

The way these injuries tend to get inflicted is a mixed bag. When someone's been getting beaten (particularly in the upper torso), they've been in an explosion, or a car accident, then it's not that unreasonable for them to be coughing up blood. A pulmonary contusion is a pretty plausible injury in those circumstances. And again, that pulmonary contusion could easily end up being the fatal injury.

When a character has been shot or stabbed in the stomach, then it's less plausible. There's a bit of a distinction here, because if you have serious hemorrhaging from internal injuries and that gets into your stomach, it's quite possible you'd vomit blood. You don't see this very often in film, coughing is far more popular, and in a lot of cases, you'll see characters coughing up blood when they should be vomiting. As with pulmonary contusions, this is not a symptom to screw around with, if someone's vomiting blood, they're at very serious risk of dying, and need immediate medical care.

So, is it just used for drama? Yeah. It is. Stage coughing is pretty easy for an actor, and a little bit of slight of hand with a blood pack can let them get a nice death scene in. It's not about the realism of the injury, and in most cases, aside from coughing up blood, they're not exhibiting any of the other associated symptoms (including the ones that are more common.) When someone's coughing up blood like this, they're also suffocating, because their lung can't absorb oxygen out of the air. As a result, they'll frequently start hyperventilating. Which, you'll never see in one of these scenes. The actor will lay there, deliver their lines, feign pain, and then spit up a red dye pack and relax. Which, that's not how this injury works at all.

So, yes, it is a real injury, but also, yes, this is something that is used for dramatic effect and not out of any interest in realism.

-Starke

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