Silver ingot, also at a sufficiently high temperature and poured over him. Shorting out the electronics and sealing him away so some mad necromancer technician can’t revive him.
It’s one of the few traits that carries across virtually every vampire myth from every culture in the world. Some kind of collective unconscious thing.
Not true, J. Just because something has not been diagnosed doesn’t mean someone doesn’t have it. For example, a person can die of cancer without ever having been diagnosed. A diagnosis is merely a professional confirmation that they do indeed have whatever condition they happen to have.
“Traditionally vampires have OCD that forces them to count scattered grains of rice.”
This is like the third or fourth time I’ve seen that mention this year where it was assumed this was a known fact, whereas before I had never heard of it.
This entirely based on Sesame Street, isn’t it? And that was just a pun on the title “Count” wasn’t it?
Or is this a Japanese vampire thing with grains of rice?
It’d be cute if Sesame Street is influencing lore.
From the Wikipedia article “Vampire”:
“Other methods [of vampire control] commonly practised in Europe included severing the tendons at the knees or placing poppy seeds, millet, or sand on the ground at the grave site of a presumed vampire; this was intended to keep the vampire occupied all night by counting the fallen grains,[27] indicating an association of vampires with arithmomania. Similar Chinese narratives state that if a vampire-like being came across a sack of rice, it would have to count every grain; this is a theme encountered in myths from the Indian subcontinent, as well as in South American tales of witches and other sorts of evil or mischievous spirits or beings.[28]”
(References are to a 1996 Skeptical Inquirer article and a 1967 publication respectively.)
I think Special Agent Mulder dumping all his sunflower seeds to get away from a pizza delivery vampire shoved this little known quirk of the legend into the public’s consciousness
Other way round. Sesame Street is making a pun on centuries old vampire lore. It’s a double pun, since A) Dracula pretends to be a count in the book by Bram Stoker, B) vampires are compelled to count small objects in several pieces of folklore, including Romanian, and C) the Count teaches children to count.
It’s a fairly common motif in folklore that devils and other malign supernatural beings can be controlled by ordering them to complete an impossible task, such as counting the grains of sand on a beach, or emptying a pool with a sieve. Personally, I’ve never heard of it in the context of vampires, or beings doing it from internal compulsion, but there you go.
I learned it first, I think, from Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula. Which is a series that everybody with even a mild taste for the vampire genre should read.
one of the ways to stop a vampire was to put a pile of seeds , usually poppy, on the path to your home and the vampire would be compelled to count them before they could go on
Some vampires have an obsessive compulsive trait. If you throw seeds in their path, they will stop to count them all. At least that’s how I remember it from a book I read 30 years ago.
Thanks for the lore. Hard to feel anything but disrespect for mere thuggy cowardly parasites skulking around. If silver will do for them, then, yes, silver bullets. Like the Lone Ranger. White horse optional.
Actually, the Y2K problem had nothing to do with hardware max_integer length and was more rooted in the problem that the software was designed to store the year specifically as a 2-digit number. The 19 was left implied, so it rolled over to 1900.
Y2K-vulnerable systems *could* count higher than 1999, they just *didn’t* when it came to keeping track of the date.
So even if the tomagotchi is somehow running Windows 98 under the hood, or something, if he doesn’t keep track of the date in the first place, or if keeping track of the date doesn’t impact critical systems, it might be fine. It would just think it’s 1919 right now.
Which actually dovetails nicely with the whole vampire shtick.
I think Baron Mistycorn is pretty much making up the rules as he goes along. (Which should eventually lead to some trouble with the robots: I certainly see the Madblood ‘bots as being rules lawyers. )
Out of the 15,000 robots, only a handful were turned into hamster suits. Dave only took two dozen with him, and if even twice that many found their own way up to Canada, that’s still fewer than one percent. The rest seem to have disappeared quietly into society.
I suppose it’s fortunate they could use Moustachio’s popcorn tins—would’a taken a couple of minutes to microwave some, and who knows whether the microwave would have cooperated with them against his fellow Machine Union brothers and sisters?
Should the different flavors each be counted separately, and should the popped and unpopped ones be sorted by color, as well? And then should Our little Cam-pire need totals, for popped vs. unpopped, for each flavor, and a grand total? Just deciding on the proper taxonomy could be crazy-making. And if the sums don’t match, what probability of error would be tolerable?
Can you write a program that can count to a billion in a couple seconds on Tamagotchi hardware? I remember the standard way to implement a one second delay on a Vic-20 was a do nothing loop that counted to 1000. That was in BASIC, which of course introduced some overhead. How much overhead do you suppose an AI running on Tamagotchi hardware introduces?
There’s a difference between counting and just incrementing a counter, the former requiring object recognition and persistence, with some strategy involving spatial placement to avoid counting the same object twice.
And as was mentioned above, Cammy may only be able to count up to 255. The counter would either restart at zero, or it could cause a catastrophic failure. Either way, regardless of how quickly she could count up to 255, she could never count all of the items.
What other robots should we see in the background? The one from Lost In Space has already been mentioned, but what about Rosie from the Jetsons? Or Bender?
Discussion (71) ¬
guess it works on electronic vampires as well, does silver short him out too?
Silver solder, at a sufficiently high temperature.
Silver ingot, also at a sufficiently high temperature and poured over him. Shorting out the electronics and sealing him away so some mad necromancer technician can’t revive him.
Silver bar, dropped from a height of like 30 or 40 feet.
Less if that’s a concrete floor as opposed to dirt.
The lore eludes me. Why is this working?
Traditionally vampires have OCD that forces them to count scattered grains of rice.
Japanese vampires that is. Don’t try this on Dracula. ^_^
…and Tamagotchi are Japanese!
No, it’s also Romanian.
And Pratchett’s variant as well, although with them it’s only because they believe that’s the case, they run the scale gamut.
It’s one of the few traits that carries across virtually every vampire myth from every culture in the world. Some kind of collective unconscious thing.
Rice, seeds, salt, it’s usually something small.
It’s also why the Sesame Street has the Count. Ah! Ah! Ah!
Owlrageous: Thinking about it, it seems pretty cruel to have him live somewhere called “Sesame Street”.
It’s a rather seedy neighbourhood
Another variation involves throwing a fishing net over a vampire. The vampire won’t be able to escape the net until they’ve counted every knot.
Hence Sesame Street’s The Count.
Michael,
Until the Vampires have been diagnosed by a medical professional, all they have is a quirky personality, not OCD.
What if Michael is a medical professional?
Not true, J. Just because something has not been diagnosed doesn’t mean someone doesn’t have it. For example, a person can die of cancer without ever having been diagnosed. A diagnosis is merely a professional confirmation that they do indeed have whatever condition they happen to have.
“Traditionally vampires have OCD that forces them to count scattered grains of rice.”
This is like the third or fourth time I’ve seen that mention this year where it was assumed this was a known fact, whereas before I had never heard of it.
This entirely based on Sesame Street, isn’t it? And that was just a pun on the title “Count” wasn’t it?
Or is this a Japanese vampire thing with grains of rice?
It’d be cute if Sesame Street is influencing lore.
From the Wikipedia article “Vampire”:
“Other methods [of vampire control] commonly practised in Europe included severing the tendons at the knees or placing poppy seeds, millet, or sand on the ground at the grave site of a presumed vampire; this was intended to keep the vampire occupied all night by counting the fallen grains,[27] indicating an association of vampires with arithmomania. Similar Chinese narratives state that if a vampire-like being came across a sack of rice, it would have to count every grain; this is a theme encountered in myths from the Indian subcontinent, as well as in South American tales of witches and other sorts of evil or mischievous spirits or beings.[28]”
(References are to a 1996 Skeptical Inquirer article and a 1967 publication respectively.)
Word for the day: “arithmomania”.
Never heard of it in my Mandela-verse. I’ve gotta stop sliding so fast.
I think Special Agent Mulder dumping all his sunflower seeds to get away from a pizza delivery vampire shoved this little known quirk of the legend into the public’s consciousness
Other way round. Sesame Street is making a pun on centuries old vampire lore. It’s a double pun, since A) Dracula pretends to be a count in the book by Bram Stoker, B) vampires are compelled to count small objects in several pieces of folklore, including Romanian, and C) the Count teaches children to count.
It’s a fairly common motif in folklore that devils and other malign supernatural beings can be controlled by ordering them to complete an impossible task, such as counting the grains of sand on a beach, or emptying a pool with a sieve. Personally, I’ve never heard of it in the context of vampires, or beings doing it from internal compulsion, but there you go.
Works on witches too.
I learned that bit of lore from the great X-Files episode “Bad Blood”.
I learned it first, I think, from Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula. Which is a series that everybody with even a mild taste for the vampire genre should read.
one of the ways to stop a vampire was to put a pile of seeds , usually poppy, on the path to your home and the vampire would be compelled to count them before they could go on
Some vampires have an obsessive compulsive trait. If you throw seeds in their path, they will stop to count them all. At least that’s how I remember it from a book I read 30 years ago.
To all: nope, never heard of it before now. Of the works mentioned, I did read “Anno Dracula” but that particular bit must have not sunk in.
The toaster will have wings after it enters the VR
It has aspirations to become the old Windows screensaver.
After Dark started on Macs, actually.
Or it will look like Caprica Six
I was thinking of this guy, from Hardware Wars.
And the winner is…
equisetophyta
Yay!
Thanks for the lore. Hard to feel anything but disrespect for mere thuggy cowardly parasites skulking around. If silver will do for them, then, yes, silver bullets. Like the Lone Ranger. White horse optional.
One can hope Cammy can only count to 255, then have to start over! (talk about a personalized hell…)
Imagine if Cammy’s counting code worked in signed integers, rather than unsigned…
Depending how old it is, it might be able to count as high as 1999.
Actually, the Y2K problem had nothing to do with hardware max_integer length and was more rooted in the problem that the software was designed to store the year specifically as a 2-digit number. The 19 was left implied, so it rolled over to 1900.
Y2K-vulnerable systems *could* count higher than 1999, they just *didn’t* when it came to keeping track of the date.
So even if the tomagotchi is somehow running Windows 98 under the hood, or something, if he doesn’t keep track of the date in the first place, or if keeping track of the date doesn’t impact critical systems, it might be fine. It would just think it’s 1919 right now.
Which actually dovetails nicely with the whole vampire shtick.
And now Baron Mistycorn disqualifies Nick for bringing in outside assistance! Is there any difference in principle between popcorn and a bazooka?
Sure.
Popcorn’s not a machine, so it can’t compete.
I think Baron Mistycorn is pretty much making up the rules as he goes along. (Which should eventually lead to some trouble with the robots: I certainly see the Madblood ‘bots as being rules lawyers. )
Meant to reply to David B Huber there
I think the Madblood robots all got turned into gerbil suits. (yeah I typed something that has never been typed before!)
There appear to be some Madbloods in the crowd: http://skin-horse.com/comic/face-registered/
Are they gerbils planning to infiltrate the VR for their own sinister purposes?
Out of the 15,000 robots, only a handful were turned into hamster suits. Dave only took two dozen with him, and if even twice that many found their own way up to Canada, that’s still fewer than one percent. The rest seem to have disappeared quietly into society.
“Tell me why you’d be a good fit for Olive Garden.”
“DESTROY.”
The robot on the right in the last panel looks familiar.
Danger! Danger Will Robinson! Well… not quite, but close.
I suppose it’s fortunate they could use Moustachio’s popcorn tins—would’a taken a couple of minutes to microwave some, and who knows whether the microwave would have cooperated with them against his fellow Machine Union brothers and sisters?
One pop corn, two pop corn three no one popcorn kernel two popcorn three no one
no 4 popcorn ARGH!!!!. How to drive a vampire crazy
Should the different flavors each be counted separately, and should the popped and unpopped ones be sorted by color, as well? And then should Our little Cam-pire need totals, for popped vs. unpopped, for each flavor, and a grand total? Just deciding on the proper taxonomy could be crazy-making. And if the sums don’t match, what probability of error would be tolerable?
+1
When it comes to a fight, Nick knows what really counts.
Um.
You realize computers can count a lot faster than humans, right?
Like, I could write a program in a couple of minutes that could count to a billion in a couple of seconds.
What I’m getting at is, I respect the tomagotchi’s dedication to the character. That’s some solid kayfabe!
Can you write a program that can count to a billion in a couple seconds on Tamagotchi hardware? I remember the standard way to implement a one second delay on a Vic-20 was a do nothing loop that counted to 1000. That was in BASIC, which of course introduced some overhead. How much overhead do you suppose an AI running on Tamagotchi hardware introduces?
There’s a difference between counting and just incrementing a counter, the former requiring object recognition and persistence, with some strategy involving spatial placement to avoid counting the same object twice.
And as was mentioned above, Cammy may only be able to count up to 255. The counter would either restart at zero, or it could cause a catastrophic failure. Either way, regardless of how quickly she could count up to 255, she could never count all of the items.
Oh, snap. I forgot about the max int size. Gonna gonna go back to the well on that Sam & Max gag from yesterday:
“That’s impossible. That would require calculations in excess of ERROR_NAN.”
I only hope we see the heroic Boilerplate the Robot among the background characters…
What other robots should we see in the background? The one from Lost In Space has already been mentioned, but what about Rosie from the Jetsons? Or Bender?
I have occasionally pondered asking Shaenon to draw the full version of the Know Your Robots poster sometimes seen in the old SH offices.
Fun fact: there’s only robot in the background of panel 1. It’s Silhouettatron, the world-renowned shadow puppeteer!
“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven…all good children go to heaven…”
“…You can’t count to eight, can you.”
Looks like someone was house-ruling their V:tM. Or maybe someone had a flaw from a really obscure splatbook?