#I made this in AUGUST I was so right

[vilethot]

“kill the cop in your head” is supposed to be used in instances where a person is assuming the worse in a another person/group based on a prejudiced thought (ex/ “this person is talking to themselves at a bus stop they’re probably on drugs and are going to hurt me best call the police for my safety 😌” or “that person says they’re poor but I saw them getting Starbucks they should continue to be homeless since they are spending frivolously) not for stupid ass lgbt label bullshit, fandom nonsense, gross ass “kinks”or used to shame black people calling out you’re favorite blog for antiblackness

[leatherbookmark]

woosan cheekies 😊

[cozylittleartblog]

bug doodles so i can say i drew something

[wwheeljack]

Still haven't caught sight of Drag Strip's or Wildrider's names, but that's three out of five components of Menasor who show up in the race alone.

[ra-vio]

I miss nier. I have to watch the automata anime

[sindar-princeling]

I've been anxious for so long and so brave about it this year and I'm really hoping it will allow me to not have to brave for a while because. jesus fucking christ

[red-eft]

the fact that i immediately landed an awesome job right out from graduation but then got covid in august and now my brain doesn't work right and i might lose my job because of it . there's a funny joke in here somewhere maybe

[fictionadventurer]

August: Day 14

Adventures

Met a friend for lunch. Nice chance to catch up.

Treated myself to ice cream.

Went inside Barnes and Noble for the first time in ages, and saw several kinds of those Aesthetic editions of classics. Had fun looking at them and learning that most of them aren't good for reading.

Completed a library scavenger hunt.

Picked up a couple of library holds and a couple other books from my reading list, along with a book about silhouette-cutting that was so delightfully odd that I couldn't leave it behind.

Accomplishments

Uninstalled and reinstalled LibreOffice, in the hopes it will properly recover unsaved documents in the future.

Added just a bit to the Rapunzel outline

Helped my dad to patch my car's tire and change the oil.

[masterfuldoodler]

girlbossed too hard.... unless...

[neversetyoufree]

I have not stopped thinking about The Vampyre since I read it, so here's some extra trivia for y'all about Lord Ruthven's name:

VnC's Lord August Ruthven is, of course, named after the Lord Ruthven from the short story "The Vampyre." Written by John William Polidori and published in 1819, "The Vampyre" is often cited as the first piece of true modern vampire fiction. It makes sense for Mochijun to want to reference something so genre-founding.

However! The circumstances surrounding this short story (and thus the Ruthven character) are both deeply weird and deeply fascinating.

For starters, do y'all know the famous story about how Frankenstein was written? It started as a challenge between friends stuck inside due to bad weather—write a frightening story for everyone's entertainment. Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley) and her future husband Percy Shelley were there, of course, but so were the poet Lord Byron and his personal doctor: a man named John Polidori.

While Mary penned the beginning of one of the most famous books in history, Byron's own attempt at horror was abandoned partway through. He wrote a fragment of a novel about an aristocratic vampire and a foolish young man that traveled with him to Turkey, but he never inteded to finish it. However, after learning how Byron thought the tale would end, Polidori eventually came to write his own (complete) version of a similar plot.

The Vampire in Byron's fragment went by the name of Augustus Darvell, but for the majority of "The Vampyre," Polidori's titular monster calls himself Lord Ruthven. This name comes from the novel Glenarvon by Lady Caroline Lamb, a book that openly parodied and mocked Lord Byron (Lamb's ex lover) with its main character.

Now, why did Polidori name the monstrous, cruel, almost parasitic monster in his story after a parody of his patient and boss? That's because their relationship was deeply fraught. I am not the person to speak accurately on this history, so let it suffice to say that Polidori did not have a rose-colored image of Lord Byron.

Byron was famously promiscuous and often in terrible debt. He doesn't seem to have been particularly nice to his doctor. If you read about their time together in any detail, it becomes obvious why Polidori might feel the urge to mock him as a monster.

Polidori wrote a vampire that seduced, tore through, and ruined innocent young maidens. He wrote this after traveling Europe with a man who was forced to flee England with a rake's reputation and a charge of sodomy. He named his vampire Ruthven, after a caricature of Byron, because his own Ruthven was also based on the man.

In other words, the first finished story to create the modern trope of the aristocratic vampire was in large part a parody of Lord Byron. It is a monster inspired by him and named after a character that existed to sleight him. It is also based on a story that Byron wrote.

And in addition to this being generally fascinating, there's something so fun about this in the context of VnC.

The Case Study of Vanitas is its own story, but it's also so chock full of allusions and references that you could almost call it a pastiche. Half its characters are half-crafted out of pre-existing characters and historical figures, but they're only ever halfway stolen. There's always something new built from the base of the reference.

And in a big way, that's what Polidori did back when he penned the first piece of modern vampire literature. His first vampire was partly a reference to a real man, partly borrowed from a pre-existing story (Byron's fragment), and partly conjured from Polidori's own imagination. It's history and literature and new content all bundled together, just like VnC is.

Lord August Ruthven is a reference to Polidori's Lord Ruthven, who was in turn a reference to Lord Byron. He's named after both Byron's Augustus Darvell and Polidori's Ruthven, and Polidori's Ruthven is named after Lamb's Ruthven (who was also based on Lord Byron). He's yet another layer on this tower of self-referential Ruthven-ness, now totally abstracted from any real Byron traits.

As much as Mochijun is playing with the tropes and ideas of this era of vampire literature, it's really fun to see how her tendency toward allusion and reference is itself a nod back to vampire literature's beginnings. It's another way in which VnC slots in as another link in this 200 year old literary conversation.

Anyway, if you want to learn more about the bonkers story behind the Vampyre, here's a link to a not super scholarly but very entertaining essay about it.

[manasseh]

Yoimiya winding down ✨

[front-facing-pokemon]

[bolshevik-rpf]

dear lord i am not going to survive this martini

[mlady-magnolia]

Aboard the Syndicate are an infamous group of mermaid hunters known as the Apostles, led by Captain Solomon Lane

[bad0mens]

Just a friendly reminder: corporations are not your friend. Not those who you purchase from, or those who you work for. They do not care about you. They are much like Lovecraft's cosmic horrors: you are small and insignificant and meaningless to them. And they are unknowably massive monstrosities that will drive you to the point of madness.

[doerot]

I'm actually so happy they took once upon a time off of netfix bc I was about to give in and rewatch it and I do not need that rn