He's super interested in brain disorders and spins a good story about the trade offs of a terrible reaction to right angles in exchange for savant like powers of perception.
The idea that vampires needed to take “anti-Euclideans” and the way the ship was constructed to avoid generating right angles were some great details.
Just to pick a nit...
Stoker's story was inspired by "The Vampyre" by physician John Polidori, who doubtless knew whatever his contemporary medics knew about blood.
Polidori, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley told scary stories to each other by Lake Geneva in 1816, the "year without a summer". It couldn't get more gothic.
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-poet-the-physician-...
Has anyone tried garlic on him?
> Vampires don’t drink blood because young blood contains an elixir. They drink blood because their own blood accumulates factors that accelerate aging, and they need to periodically dilute it.
I don't think this makes sense. Our bodies do not use the same blood forever.
Various other mechanisms can improve how effective your body is at recycling cells, encouraging autophagy and filtering things in the blood. There are a whole suite of various supplements and medicines that work in this system.
As undead, though, vampires no longer produce new living blood, so require fresh blood of the living to restore lost function. Or something.
I guess that'd make Bryan Johnson the ultimate thrall?
You might want to read up on chaperone-mediated autophagy, and how that declines over time. There's a point to be made that yes, in old age we collect things in our blood that don't belong.
It might not be solvable through dilution, but it's not like we get a full blood change every 5K miles either.
Anyway, I hope your son, Adrian, is doing ok. I fondly remember hunting your horrors of the night with him
-T.B.
"If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete."
“As a devout Baptist, he couldn’t use playing cards…”
And I’m wondering if I missed something in my Baptist upbringing. I have long since removed myself from any semblance of the Church and manage my own relationship with faith and any related higher beings, so it’s more a curiosity than pertinent.
The reality is that most churches recognize that they were too legalistic in the past, and so now address things like gambling more directly, and are perfectly ok with playing cards. FWIW YMMV :-)
Consider that Titan was written maybe 100 years removed from the events and you're reading a secondhand telling of it from a blog. Maybe there is more context in the book if you're really curious, or maybe the context was lost from Rockefeller's time to the book, or from the book to the blogpost.
Consider a few more things: If you ask 10 Baptists about something secondary to scripture like this, you may get different answers from different people, especially if they are from different eras, as religion changes over time. As another example, some Catholics grew up hearing the mass in Latin.
It's funny though, Rockefeller appeared devout enough to understand that gambling was a sin. Rockefeller appeared to believe in an omniscient God. Did he really think his square counters would fool said omniscient God? People trying to find such loopholes in Religion is always fascinating to me. Of course, it could have all been a show.
My favorite example of this is the string of fishing line around Manhattan.
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/13/721551785/a-fishing-line-enci...
That's my current AI detector smell.
> He discontinued the blood exchange after data showed “no benefits.” A suspicious person might note that a vampire would say exactly this after the media got too interested.
I don't think it's the media (clearly the younger generations are media friendly), it's probably pressure from the older vamps.
NO CARRIER
Well, hello there!
This seems to be the emerging consensus. When you get older your metabolism creates all kinds of crap that circulates in the blood.
You would like to have boosted kidneys parallel to real ones that can detect and remove all the slightly wrong proteins.
Edit: You can donate every 2 months, so donating as often as possible would roughly halve the crud every year (0.9^6 ~= 0.53, ignoring the natural increase over time).
You can't start donating blood after 71.
From age section: https://www.nzblood.co.nz/become-a-donor/am-i-eligible/detai...
It's pretty effective if you have excess iron (hemochromatosis) and your local vampires accept your donation; some don't because a donation where you get a significant benefit isn't a donation for the sole reason of helping others (and a free cookie). In that case, traditional bloodletting may be required.
It's your metabolism that produces that junk with increasing ratio of stuff that you need. If you just remove blood, the ratio of good stuff to bad stuff does not change. Same with kidney filtering if they can't recognize the difference.
Blood transfusion from younger person gives you blood with better ratio.
> [20] Mehdipour, M. et al. “Rejuvenation of three germ layers tissues by exchanging old blood plasma with saline-albumin.” Aging 12(10), 8790–8819, 2020. The UC Berkeley team found that diluting old blood plasma with saline and albumin produced rejuvenating effects comparable to young blood — suggesting the mechanism is removing pro-aging factors rather than adding youth factors. This was, at the time of publication, the strongest evidence that old blood is the problem, not that young blood is the solution.
Maybe regularly donating blood would have more negative effects from losing good stuff than positive effects from losing bad stuff, or maybe not. There is evidence that it could be a net positive though.
And even aside from the buildup of crud due to normal aging, environmental crud (nano/microplastics, PFAS, etc) is not produced by the body. It's still not totally settled science whether all of those things have negative effects, but regular blood donation would help clear it out, at least a little.
But a further horror is: you’re dumping your crud on the person getting your transfusion? I guess it’s better than dying in ER.
Vampires:
- Consume the life force of the living to sustain themselves
- Are totally isolated and perverted from any kind of human community
- Have no family, no community ties
- Unable to feel love, warmth, connection with any human
- Must avoid spending time in the virtuous natural world (daylight, sunlight) and must instead be cordoned off indoors or in darkness, they do not live as most natural things do.
- Are kind of fallen/perverted; at one point, they were human, but they failed at being human (for instance: unbaptized, excommunicated, murderous, etc) and so were forced into exile often due to their own choice to live sinfully
Billionaires:
- cannot become a billionaire without thousands/millions of regular non-billionaires siphoning money (== time, == life force) upwards
- when they become a billionaire they are forced to be distanced from their community/family of normal people; middle class people are never "regular friends" with billionaires
- either their normal family/friends are 'bitten/infected' (wealth inheritance) or cut-off
- often are profoundly isolated on a personal level (are they talking to me for my money or for me?)
- often the direct cause of or at least complicit in the destruction of the natural world (i.e. cut off from sunlight; unnatural)
- often must make unethical or immoral choices to catapult themselves to wealth/powers (fallen, sinful)
"The young blood doesn’t add youth. It removes age."
"Feeding isn’t nutrition. It’s dialysis."
Etc. Why is LLM so enamored with the "Its not x, its Y" idiom? Its so ridiculously overused its almost comical
In other words, some people actually write like this.
I have a friend that has used ems all his professional life and is livid that they're now a telltale for AI. So yeah, false positives.
Heck, anyone used to a word processor that automatically changes dash dash into em-dash.
There’s a lot of us that knew how to use em-dash.
The valley girl using "like" every other word, for example?
Or I had a colleague who would use the expression "we can say" (in French, because we were speaking in French) basically every couple sentences for a bit.
Humans also repeat speech/linguistic patterns, therefore "repetition of the same pattern" is not sufficient to mark text as produced by AI :)
Side note: for once, I'm enjoying a heavily AI assisted article.
[0]: you'll have to find that reference on your own.
Thanks for the recommended chuckle.
Bahman Guyuron et al., "Factors Contributing to the Facial Aging of Identical Twins" (2009) https://gwern.net/doc/longevity/2009-guyuron.pdf
[0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
I have a spoiler-tastic fan theory about the movie Marty Supreme that is apropos here.
Just donate blood as often as possible. This results in a loss of cholesterol, other bad lipoproteins, excess iron in those who have it, and PFAS toxins. It is frequency-dependently associated with longevity.
Whole blood donation avoids the plastic lining of plasma donations, with the latter undesirably transferring unwanted microplastics into the body.
For those with sufficient spare money, instead of donating blood, just get various blood tests every other week, additively comparable to a donation if the tests are substantial.
Granted, this is antithetical to being a vampire, but you will still have to make up for it by supplementing sufficient healthy nutrients, e.g. electrolytes, ferric pyrophosphate, protein, etc. to allow your body to quickly restore the lost blood.
As a disclaimer, do not ever donate blood if you use narcotics, disallowed drugs, injectable drugs, or have unsafe intimate practices, or might have chagas or TB or even long Covid.
Paper where more frequent cycles in women correlate to longer lifetimes? That would have to be true if this were true.
Nowhere close to the amount given during a donation.
Also, I'm not certain how much they treat blood, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being a purification system sort of similar to Dialysis where you rely on an external machine for removing impurities.
2 questions: is there any other kind? If there were, ate people requiring transfusion in a position to make demands to the donors (not vendors)
https://archive.org/details/HumanResourcesPdf
> Corporate management is the use of humans as resources. So is vampirism.
>Biomethods, Inc. is a struggling biotechnology company whose venture capital group is growing tired of pumping in new blood every quarter.
Still I gave this article a shot. I don't understand what it's doing. Like, one of the points about Thiel is that he destroyed Gawker to cover up his vampirism. He actually destroyed Gawker to cover up his relationship to Epstein, the pedophile and saboteur of US social/economic integrity. Why put a silly spin on that? I guess the entire thing is just a little joke... just doesn't feel like it belongs on the HN front page. I had higher expectations.
The Rockefeller one literally points out that the guy did all this weird stuff and then his son, who didn't, outlived him.
RMR1 done and shows promise, RMR2 started recently.