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Dracula's Biggest Mistake

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Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#31

Post by dylan604 »

mrgoldenbrown wrote: post #22
dylan604 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 smalle…

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?

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

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#32

Post by at_a_remove »

jfengel wrote: post #28
kevinmhickey wrote: post #5

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.

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 storytel…

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.

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#34

Post by ben_w »

themaninthedark wrote: post #30
ben_w wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chang…

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

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).

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#35

Post by aidenn0 »

at_a_remove wrote: post #32
jfengel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 storytel…

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,…

> 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.

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#36

Post by WillAdams »

runeofdoom wrote: post #8

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 victor…

Saberhagen's other Dracula novels are a lot of fun, esp. _The Homes--Dracula File_.

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#37

Post by gwern »

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_.)

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#38

Post by RheingoldRiver »

kevinmhickey wrote: post #5

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.

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.

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#39

Post by atombender »

echtroipolemos wrote: post #27
runeofdoom wrote: post #8

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 victor…

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.

Are you mixing things up? Harker's fiancée is Mina, not Lucy. And the novel is quite clear that since Dracula is dead, she's no longer going to become a vampire.

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#40

Post by kstrauser »

RheingoldRiver wrote: post #38
kevinmhickey wrote: post #5

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.

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 artisti…

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.
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