Why vampires live forever

https://machielreyneke.com/blog/vampires-longevity/

by machielrey • 5 months ago

401 186 5 months ago

machielreyneke.com

yashasolutions• 5 months ago

very entertaining writing style

themarbz• 5 months ago

Now this is the kind of content I come to Hacker News for.

uwagar2• 5 months ago

exactly

insin• 5 months ago

Appears to not age but also to never have been young

/me snorts

larsiusprime2• 5 months ago

Honestly, the surest sign of the existence of vampires to me would be a class of investors with extremely anomalous discount rates, suggesting that they are operating on inhumanly long time horizons, combined with a particular interest in real estate, as first documented in the field's seminal publication (Stoker, 1897).

snvzz• 5 months ago

If interested in rejuvenation, I would suggest investigating LEVF's Robust Mouse Rejuvenation.

RMR1 done and shows promise, RMR2 started recently.

david9272• 5 months ago

This is a fun story from the early 18th century if you haven't read about it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_of_St._Germain

david9272• 5 months ago

And I don't want to add fuel to a strange fire, but in 1764 when Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote a letter to Beaumont regarding the absurdity of belief despite evidence, he used this as an example:

"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."

dsr_• 5 months ago

“Don’t be silly, Bob,” said Mo. “Everybody knows vampires don’t exist.”

-- first line of The Rhesus Chart, by cstross

kmeisthax• 5 months ago

Wasn't this the guy going around building animate porcelain dolls in suspiciously modern gothic-lolita dresses?

soiltype2• 5 months ago

Interesting... I first went to the linked recent post What the Longevity Experts Don't Tell You. Sorry to be harsh: it was nonsense. It just lists a few weird, unscientific behaviours of John D Rockefeller and tries to draw lessons (to what end? longevity? is Rockefeller still alive?) from them despite there being no indication those behaviors even had any effect, let alone positive impact on longevity. It also doesn't bring up things "the longevity experts don't tell you," it's just summaries of topics in a single biography.

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.

JimmyBuckets• 5 months ago

Also weird it didn't mention Peter Attia's connection to Epstein outright. It did this weird tongue-in-cheek thing for a few paragraphs referencing Epstein only in the foot notes. I still can't tell whether what I read was actually praising these guys or extremely subtly sardonic.

dgacmu• 5 months ago

It's not nonsense, it's satire. I was laughing most of the way through both of these articles.

The Rockefeller one literally points out that the guy did all this weird stuff and then his son, who didn't, outlived him.

soiltype2• 5 months ago

Oh, I admit that I didn't finish the Rockefeller article, since it looked like more of the same. I can see now how it's satire.

Honestly though, I'm still not sure what the point of the vampires one is. Satire relies on the reader drawing some conclusions that aren't laid out, and I don't really see where it's trying to lead me in that respect. Is it that these billionaires are fools for following bunk research?

FarmerPotato7• 5 months ago

Vampires are a kind of pedophile.

crmd• 5 months ago

I hope the old vampire Dons give some fashion advice to the new guys, e.g. “A vampire doesn’t wear Arc’teryx“.

achenet2• 5 months ago

Yes, if there's one thing I reproach Mark Zuckerberg, it's not that his company will occasionally enable genocides [0], but his crimes against fashion and good taste.

[0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

eviks• 5 months ago

Hope the author has some garlic silverware lying around after such a revealing article

machielrey2• 5 months ago

I realize now that I might be in trouble. Thanks everyone

amarant2• 5 months ago

Cute. But I saw through your thin veil Mr Tepes. The irony of bragging about your opsec and revealing your true identity for leverage in the same sentence is considerable.

Anyway, I hope your son, Adrian, is doing ok. I fondly remember hunting your horrors of the night with him

-T.B.

rbanffy7• 5 months ago

I am deeply offended by someone associating Thiel with vampires. That idea is completely absurd. Vampires are famous for being handsome, interesting, elegant, well educated, and having impeccable taste for fashion. Thiel has none of these traits.

OutOfHere4• 5 months ago

The article misses the simplest technique:

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.

kadushka• 5 months ago

Is there any evidence?

fyrabanks• 5 months ago

does this imply that you're just giving shitty blood to people that need life saving procedures?

overfeed• 5 months ago

does this imply that you're just giving shitty blood...

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)

munk-a• 5 months ago

Bad blood is better than no blood!

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.

mrguyorama3• 5 months ago

The microplastic filled blood will manage to oxygenate their brain and other organs and save their life, and then they can donate it on to the next person in need.

Feels a little homeopathy... How many people can we put the same blood through?

OutOfHere4• 5 months ago

That's a gross mischaracterization because anyone who is donating blood regularly as a discipline is likely to have blood that is substantially better (rather than worse) than average. Those with poor health practices will typically simply stop donating as they will lack the discipline to continue.

Fwiw, it is the responsibility of the blood banks to do due diligence testing.

psychoslave• 5 months ago

That's more nuanced. The alternative is they get no blood and die.

If the blood don't contains long term detrimental pathogen, that's seems like an okayish tradeoff.

drewg123• 5 months ago

So maybe they were on to something with leeches?

koakuma-chan5• 5 months ago

Every time I do blood work I almost faint.

janeerie• 5 months ago

I used to have this problem until I was given the tip to tense various muscles throughout my body during the process. Do not listen to the nurses who tell you to relax!

OutOfHere4• 5 months ago

I don't know if this will help, but you could try drinking a WHO ORS electrolyte powder packet in room-temperature water just before donating blood. Or you could drink half before, and half after. Drink it slowly, and practice first at home.

Or if the fainting is psychological, then work your way up to psychological dominance via multiple blood tests rather than donations.

1970-01-012• 5 months ago

It is frequency-dependently associated with longevity.

Paper where more frequent cycles in women correlate to longer lifetimes? That would have to be true if this were true.

Sohcahtoa82• 5 months ago

I'm assuming you're referring to blood loss from menstruation? That's typically only 30-40 mL (1-1.5 fluid ounces, about a shot glass).

Nowhere close to the amount given during a donation.

jamilton2• 5 months ago

The public begins to associate blood transfusion with eccentric billionaires rather than with undead predators. This is a critical narrative shift.

Not much of a shift...

kps• 5 months ago

You misunderstand. Coming out as vampires is meant to improve their reputation.

_joel• 5 months ago

Why am I reading this in Freddie Mercury's signing voice?

layer8• 5 months ago

In that version, there can be only one.

block_dagger• 5 months ago

Although better known for his singing voice, it's true that the voice he used when cryptographically signing private messages was also impressive.

jagged-chisel• 5 months ago

Completely OT: In the link “what the longevity experts don’t tell you”[1] I found this:

“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.

1 - https://machielreyneke.com/blog/longevity-lessons/

jvalencia2• 5 months ago

As a devout Baptist minister, this is likely about one of two things, avoiding the appearance of evil (gambling, 1 Thess 5:22 - Abstain from every form of evil), and giving up something for the sake of others (gambling addictions within the church, Rom 4:21 - or do anything that causes your brother to stumble).

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 :-)

prometheus762• 5 months ago

I was under the impression that the injunction against playing cards was because of their proximity to tarot/occult practices. Mormons had the same injunction against playing cards until the 80s, when the teaching was no longer promulgated. Speaking as a former Mormon...

mikestew• 5 months ago

I knew plenty of Midwestern Baptists that didn't participate in the triple crown of no-nos: dancing, drinking, and gambling. And cards aren't necessarily gambling, but cards are the bricks that pave the road to such evil. It's guilt-by-association (and some will tell you, wrongly, that playing cards are an outgrowth of tarot cards and the like), but there ya go. Oddly, I knew plenty of Baptists that played Yahtzee, which involves dice, and that seemed acceptable. Never minding that the Roman soldiers cast lots ("dice") for Jesus' clothing. :-)

larsiusprime2• 5 months ago

This is actually how the popular Texas dominoes game of "42" was invented. It's similar to Spades and other trick-taking games with bids and trumps, but it's played with dominoes, not cards, and therefore it's okay :) Two boys from a Baptist family who got in trouble for playing cards came up with it.

http://texas42.net/42Article.html

dfxm12• 5 months ago

Consider some writing contemporary to Rockefeller (there is a section on cards): https://baptisthistoryhomepage.com/social.amusements.willis....

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.

ceejayoz2• 5 months ago

Did he really think his square counters would fool said omniscient God?

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...

u1hcw9nx3• 5 months ago

They drink blood because their own blood accumulates factors that accelerate aging, and they need to periodically dilute it. Feeding isn’t nutrition. It’s dialysis.

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.

johnisgood2• 5 months ago

Are there any reasons for this to work on non-vampires? :D

delecti4• 5 months ago

That was my thought as well. At least naively, it seems to follow that regularly donating blood might have health benefits. A typical donation is half a liter, and a person has about 5 liters of blood, so donating should in theory remove about 10% of the crap you've got circulating, right?

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).

glitchc2• 5 months ago

To reframe the argument, it's more likely that mechanisms for clearing cellular debris become less effective with age.

jyscao• 5 months ago

Big if true :P

solidasparagus• 5 months ago

Here’s what’s genuinely interesting.

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.

ZoomZoomZoom• 5 months ago

You know what else is far-seeing? A creature that has been alive for centuries.

Well, hello there!

sgt2• 5 months ago

Yeah, that does sound pretty AI-ish / marketing-bloggy. It’s not wrong, but it has a few classic “AI vibes”. If you want, I can........oh no!!!!!!

NO CARRIER

throwaway1737382• 5 months ago

Oh my gosh I’m so sorry about that. Let me correct my earlier post and assert with certainty that this post was not at all written by an AI.

prime_ursid• 5 months ago

I felt the same way and came to the comments to see if anyone else smelled it. It's either AI-assisted writing or people are genuinely starting to write like how ChatGPT sounds.

First, the structure of this satirical post is headings and bullet points. Fine, whatever, a lot of people write this way.

Then there's the exhausting litany of super short sentence fragments.

He published this. Openly. In a book. As a priest.

This is how airport novels and LinkedIn "thought leadership" clickbait is written, so ok, fine, I'll let it pass.

Then I started to notice a lot of: "It's not X. It's Y" or "this isn't just A. It's B."

Feeding isn’t nutrition. It’s dialysis.

Before LLMs, people weren't writing this way. At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon: it's insulting to read, like the reader is a 5-year-old.

When several of these smells pile up, I close the tab immediately and try to forget about it. This one was so egregious that I had to read the whole thing and then come to the comments to rant a bit.

archagon• 5 months ago

The author has a bunch of AI stuff in their bio, so I assume this is partially or fully generated unless otherwise disclaimed.

But hey, maybe someone can get an AI to read it.

normie3000• 5 months ago

it's insulting to read, like the reader is a 5-year-old.

It's not ELI5. It's ELY5.

keyle• 5 months ago

It had me at "The Twist".

avereveard• 5 months ago

This is a critical narrative shift.

also this, having done a number of ai conspiracy for funsies, that's always the mid point

however I don't mind ai slop, if it's creative and well thought out (and editorialized, as this seem to be)

stared• 5 months ago

Increased sun exposure was associated with an older appearance and accelerated with age (p 0.015), as was a history of outdoor activities and lack of sunscreen use.

Bahman Guyuron et al., "Factors Contributing to the Facial Aging of Identical Twins" (2009) https://gwern.net/doc/longevity/2009-guyuron.pdf

cushpush• 5 months ago

Fantastic. Several halloweens ago I wore vampire fangs and told a beautiful girl at a concert that I worked at the local blood bank. She said "yeah?" and I followed up with, "would you like to make a donation?"

mannanj• 5 months ago

Did she make a donation?

koakuma-chan5• 5 months ago

Smooth

koakuma-chan5• 5 months ago

The Suspects Peter Thiel

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.

groby_b• 5 months ago

I don't think this [ed:periodical dilution] makes sense. Our bodies do not use the same blood forever.

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.

smegger001• 5 months ago

as someone that donates plasma twice weekly I wonder what health effects of removing and filtering the blood regularly has if accumulation of byproducts is a major issue

glitchc2• 5 months ago

Not the same blood, but dead cell matter does accumulate in plasma over time. The body has active mechanisms that perform cleaning: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7392086/

sgt2• 5 months ago

Imagine showing up to a meeting with Thiel wearing a huge garlic and onion necklace.

koakuma-chan5• 5 months ago

"What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"

"Garlic"

0x4e• 5 months ago

Maybe garlic alludes to the working class.

maerF0x0• 5 months ago

The replication process makes worse and worse copies over time. Plus the cleanup crew gets confused and weak. Each bit of aging makes the process of keeping you young work less well, and hence you age more + faster.

ASalazarMX• 5 months ago

Who knew we could coexist with vampires if we give each some kind of dialysis machine? Imagine the kind of cultural works someone with centuries of experience could create. Imagine a vampire historian!

_carbyau_• 5 months ago

If they haven't recorded it in some way then it doesn't matter. And if they have, then it's what a human historian could do too.

Can you recall well what you did ten years ago to the day? How much is a vampire is going to accurately recall from a hundred years ago?

At best, the vampire has bragging rights like "I hung out with Gandhi."

We'd need some evidence the vampire has super-recall AND is somehow trustworthy enough to not change the story depending on motivations of the day.

observationist• 5 months ago

This is actually one of the mechanisms behind "blood swaps" done by the rich and weird. Donating blood frequently also reduces various accumulated "factors" that reduce kidney stress, encourage healthy new blood, and is overall beneficial to health.

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?

password4321• 5 months ago

20161027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12809722#12810990 Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

20170113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13395478 Questionable “Young Blood” Transfusions Offered in U.S. As Anti-Aging Remedy

20170421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14163395#14164470 Mice treated with a protein from umbilical cord plasma showed improved memory

20170521 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBA0AH-LSbo Silicon Valley S04E05 The Blood Boy

20170602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14470314 An anti-ageing startup is offering transfusions of blood from young people

20170825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15102304 Some wealthy people are injecting blood from teenagers to gain ‘immortality’

20180120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16194413 Clinical trial finds blood-plasma infusions for Alzheimer’s safe, promising

20180907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17929462 Startups Flock to Turn Young Blood into an Elixir of Youth

20190117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18929943 Blood transfusion startup Ambrosia is now up and running

20190221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19213938 FDA warning brings young-blood transfusion company to a halt

20191108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21484203 Ambrosia, the Young Blood Transfusion Startup, Is Quietly Back in Business (0 comments)

20230817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37163684#37164170 Older mouse brains rejuvenated by protein found in young blood

jimnotgym• 5 months ago

Has anyone tried garlic on him?

Or indeed daylight

I was going to suggest some other vampire remedies, but I was worried Palantir will scan this and tell ICE.

boutell• 5 months ago

Flawless logic!

I have a spoiler-tastic fan theory about the movie Marty Supreme that is apropos here.

stuaxo• 5 months ago

Early chatgpt really did not like it when I asked if Peter Thiel was a vampire.

mystraline• 5 months ago

It got very "mad" at me. It was funniest thing all day.

Thanks for the recommended chuckle.

firefoxd• 5 months ago

I was hoping he would provide some insight about why they avoid the sun. From observation, thiel looks like he is getting too much sun, or at least his skin has been reengineered like Alucard. While Johnson is just cake [0].

Side note: for once, I'm enjoying a heavily AI assisted article.

[0]: you'll have to find that reference on your own.

prometheus762• 5 months ago

Interesting that the author didn't mention anything about stem cell injections. Those have been in vogue among the elite for decades (millennia?).

dylan6042• 5 months ago

How could it be millenia? Have we been able to isolate stem cells that long, or are you suggesting feasting on placenta as suitable?

jamilton2• 5 months ago

The joke is presumably ancient vampires doing it in secret to be alive for millennia.

FarmerPotato7• 5 months ago

Yeah… and anytime the narrative switches from transfusion to blood-sucking, I object “but what about stomach acid?” Bodies break stuff down first.

lbrito3• 5 months ago

Fun read but I stopped after detecting AI:

"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

doodpants• 5 months ago

The flaw in trying to detect AI by its use of particular idioms is that it would have learned these idioms from its training corpus, which consists of writings from actual human beings.

In other words, some people actually write like this.

johnmwilkinson• 5 months ago

It’s not that people don’t write like this, it’s the over-usage and general tone.

lbrito3• 5 months ago

You're absolutely right!

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.

therobots927• 5 months ago

Key word here being “some” people. Not nearly at high enough frequency that this way of talking was noticeable before. AI uses this pattern CONSTANTLY and it’s very fucking irritating.

machielrey2• 5 months ago

Thank you for your feedback - I will pass it on to my ghostwriter.

downboots• 5 months ago

It isn't an idiom. It's antithesis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure_of_speech

FarmerPotato7• 5 months ago

It is/was common in scam newsletters. My trained scam alert now matches AI output…

xutopia• 5 months ago

Hemingway writes like that. Hemingway editor encourages that kind of style.

ceayo• 5 months ago

I'm not really sure if the author (i.e. generative language model) is being serious or being sarcastic...

gpderetta• 5 months ago

Time to break the Masquerade it seems.

amarant2• 5 months ago

I think we're witnessing a schism within the vampire community. By the end of the article, the author is less than subtle about being Dracula, and is trying to use the respect his name no doubt commands among vampires to get the unruly youth(relatively speaking) to get their shit together. This article is a warning to Thiel and Johnson. Dracula sees you, and he does not approve of what he sees.

hoherd• 5 months ago

The only question I have is "how far are you willing to go, Machiel?"

mctt• 5 months ago

I got that reference

mac3n• 5 months ago

see also Floyd Kemske, "Human Resources: A Corporate Nightmare"

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.

FarmerPotato7• 5 months ago

Future: Peter Thiel takes lead to rebrand VC as Vampire Capital…

mlsu2• 5 months ago

Love this concrete interpretation. The symbolic one is maybe more interesting:

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)

OkayPhysicist• 5 months ago

Yeah. Vampires were conceived as analogies to nobility, and the billionaire class is our new nobility.

mlsu2• 5 months ago

Same as it ever was!

austinjp• 5 months ago

Stoker, a theatre manager with no medical background, somehow described the basic mechanism of heterochronic parabiosis

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-...

btilly• 5 months ago

It is worthy of note that John Polidori's model for a vampire was, in fact, Lord Byron.

Lord Byron's death was a result of what the medical profession then thought that they knew about blood. Namely that blood-letting was a worthwhile medical treatment.

maleldil2• 5 months ago

Bloodletting is still a worthwhile treatment for certain conditions

https://www.southtees.nhs.uk/resources/having-a-therapeutic-...

giraffe_lady• 5 months ago

Something I've wondered for a long time: Can a vampire enter your home uninvited if they are a cop with a warrant?

FarmerPotato7• 5 months ago

I first read that as “cop without a warrant”. Sign of the times.

bullebak• 5 months ago

"I don't know, can they?"

sgt1013• 5 months ago

The novels Blindsight & Echopraxis by Peter Watts have a nice vampire sub-plot... basically his world has vampires which have been revived from the fossil record. They are posited to have gone extinct in recent times, but before then were human's key predator, keeping our populations strongly in check and then having to hibernate for decades to allow the breeding to provide new meat!

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.

vict7• 5 months ago

I have not read Echopraxis yet, but I thoroughly enjoyed Blindsight. Some very thought-provoking concepts in that book.

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.

Baeocystin2• 5 months ago

Just a heads up, don't go in to Echopraxia expecting it to feel like Blindsight. When I first read it, I was actually pretty disappointed overall, and a few of my friends had similar reactions.

Over a couple of years a few re-reads, though, I've come to enjoy it perhaps even more that Blindsight, but in a completely different way. It fills out a lot of the posits opened in the first novel, without coming to specific conclusions, but it gives you a lot to think about.

atombender• 5 months ago

Echopraxia is great. I never understood those who thought it was disappointing. Blindsight is wonderful, but Echopraxia is possibly the more inventive one. It certainly pulls the narrative in a different direction.

I also really, really recommend The Freeze-Frame Revolution. It's about the crew on an starship trying to stop the rogue (sort of) AI that runs everything, the twist being that the crew is constantly under surveillance and must periodically hibernate in shifts for months or years at a time. It's a novella plus a handful of short stories set before and after the novel (all available for free on Peter Watts' website). Be warned, it's one bleak, dark universe.

Also, don't miss out on "The Colonel" (also on his website), a standalone short story that also happens to be a direct sequel to Blindsight.

red75prime• 5 months ago

I can't believe I haven't seen this yet: https://blindsight.space/memories/

sgt1013• 5 months ago

It never occurred to me to see if there was a film!

Mind you even more amazing I was on youtube yesterday and a short film showing the first chapter of the brand new book (published really recently) that I was reading popped up.

Now I see that there is not only that film (in the DUST series) but also a miniseries someone has made...

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=antimemetics+di...

ceejayoz2• 5 months ago

He even did a full academic-style presentation about the vampires that's on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEOUaJW05bU

hobofan• 5 months ago

The Darren Shan novels also have a lot of interesting vampire world-building, with in parts a similar dillema of vampires losing their dominant position in the food chain due to humans advancing technology, and different sects in the vampire society having different approaches of how to tackle it.

bazillion• 5 months ago

"But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be." (Matthew 24:37)

More and more, you are seeing what occurred in the time of Noah become commonplace to talk about under the guise of technology. In Noah's day, there was a hybridization program to dilute the blood of man to prevent the coming of the Messiah, but Noah was "perfect in his generations", or not part of the hybrid lines branching off of humanity. And now, what is old has become new again.

The article might address the topic in satire, but there is a truth that is being touched on in it that is hard to look at -- the use [devouring of, injection of, swapping out of, ritualization of, etc.] human blood and tissue is happening right under our noses, and it's nothing new. The vampires lore did not just come out of some sort of novel work of fiction or a novelization of a fable, but is rooted in something that is very, very real. Vampire-like beings existed in the pre-flood (antediluvian) days, but now only exist in spirit after their bodies were destroyed by the flood. The spirits, desiring to be embodied, now go about the rituals of what once created them all over again, so that we might have a new generation of their brand of evil come forth.

What you're witnessing on a large scale through global politics is the public-facing humiliation ritual of mankind being carried out by the fallen angels and those under them that long sought our destruction:

   1) The epstein file information showing all sorts of satanic/luciferian references, as well as possible cannibalism
   2) Xi and Putin discussing organ harvesting benefits (implying an underlying focus on it)
   3) Congressional disclosure of inter-dimensional beings existing and being unexplainable.
   4) The saturation of things that would have been considered unabased debauchery in generations past being put into every facet of culture as if coordinated

If you even give credence to one of the things I listed, then you're keenly aware that it's nearly impossible to talk to anyone about that topic unless they've self-selected into a social group that already believes that that thing is wrong. Others embrace one or more of the topics as a positive thing, such as welcoming the idea of inter-dimensional beings, or furthering human lifespans through genomic editing, or even just promoting the type of debauchery that would have had entire cities leveled in Old Testament times.

But, this has all been prophesied to happen, and is happening exactly as it is spoken of. The truth is being suppressed, even within ones own mind, because a person of the world of today does not love the truth. There is only one way to enter in to the truth, which is to begin seeking the person whose very name is Faithful and True (Revelation 19:11). According to the following verses, to not do so would lead one into a delusion from which there is no escape:

"The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness." (2 Thessalonians 2:9-12)

otikik• 5 months ago

Nicely put, I hope you have very potent solar lamps at home

sandworm101• 5 months ago

Vampire therapy is real. Give an old person an infusion from a closely-matched teenager and they improve by almost every metric. This isnt speculation. It is a noted side effect of any treatment invovling transfusion. (It also helps that older immune systems are less active and react less dramatically to forgien blood.)

rbanffy7• 5 months ago

As a member of a prominent Transylvanian family, I am appalled, and profoundly offended, by the idea of someone even as much as suspecting Peter Thiel could be a vampire. He might be an evil bloodsucking parasite, but he lacks the sophistication mortals have come to associate with vampires over the centuries. It's shocking, really, that some people might confuse him with one.

bloomingeek• 5 months ago

Hisss...I mean, amen! I bet that scumbag has never eaten a bowl of Count Chocula either.

irishcoffee• 5 months ago

Oh, it applies to sama perfectly, except for the sophisticated bit, or empathy.

Are all vampires sociopaths or just some of them?

almosthere• 5 months ago

Most unless they dated a vampire slayer...

rbanffy7• 5 months ago

Are all vampires sociopaths or just some of them?

That’s anti-vampire propaganda. Sociopaths have well above average representation among billionaires, not vampires.

reactordev• 5 months ago

He’s an imposter, using blood infusions from young victims of his digital entrapments.

dmonitor• 5 months ago

Vampires are parasites. They're only as polite as they need to be to extract resources from potential hosts. The facade of sophistication only lasts as long as it needs to

margalabargala• 5 months ago

Depends on the canon.

Plenty show vampires being sophisticated among themselves as well.

Highly recommend reading/watching Interview With The Vampire. The recent TV show was excellent.

rbanffy7• 5 months ago

Vampires are parasites.

A parasite has a long-term abusive relationship with the organism they feed from, much like Thiel. Vampires don't.

Please stop with the anti-vampire propaganda.

jhanschoo• 5 months ago

It's OK, we understand that they're the difficult ones that never really cared for the family rules.

rbanffy7• 5 months ago

No sane vampire would turn a billionaire tech bro into one.

glouwbug• 5 months ago

Peter Thiel may not be but Peter Steele was

Acrobatic_Road• 5 months ago

I had these guy's names in my head at the same time yesterday and was brainstorming a joke...

lo_zamoyski• 5 months ago

Which is ironic, given his recent preoccupation with the Antichrist, as the vampire is an antichrist archetype. Christ gives his blood so that others may live; the vampire takes the blood of others so that he may live.

an-allen• 5 months ago

Oh there are vampires. They are very old. But they are mostly illusions of light. Once the veil is removed the disappointment of hell sets in. Smoke, mirrors, DNA, sound.

The French people didn't invest the most elaborate head chopping off machine for just spectacle…

amoss• 5 months ago

Reasonable hypothesis. Supported by data. Seems legit

holografix• 5 months ago

Incredibly sad to lear that Peter Thiel owns so much land in one of the earth’s most beautiful places.

If I was a kiwi I would be livid at the government allowing this purchase to go through.

oxag3n• 5 months ago

Hard to tell if it's a sarcasm or not.

TurdF3rguson• 5 months ago

I'm convinced that those weird purple blotches on POTUS's hands are caused by transfusions from his blood boy.

nphardon• 5 months ago

That quip(?) on Attia is darrrrrrrk. It's saying you must exchange your soul.

fhdkweig• 5 months ago

This predates 2005. A 1991 Simpsons episode depicts the rejuvenation powers of young blood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Feud_(The_Simpsons)

satisfice• 5 months ago

Where do vampires put their money?

A: Biomedical startups!

kcatskcolbdi2• 5 months ago

chatgpt formatting is a scourge on humanity.

kcatskcolbdi2• 5 months ago

chatgpt formatting is a scourge on humanity

tonnydourado• 5 months ago

The fuck did I just read.

givan• 5 months ago

I repeat, just like clocks, people can be of different makes. No matter how hard a man tries, even if he is put in a glass case, when his time comes the spring runs out. And once the mechanism is dead, no matter how clean and whole it is, no matter how much you try to warm it up, blow on it—if the spiral spring is missing—the man is gone.

Yet I can do something to live longer. Thoughts have a definite length. I can unwind them very fast—then the end comes quickly, or I may unwind them slowly, and the end will come more slowly. When we live as we do we think mechanically and quite unnecessarily. We very seldom think when necessary. So we could be much more economical.

The secret is very simple. If any man really succeeds in understanding and learning to spend only as much as is necessary he will be able to economize a great deal of energy.

Now look inwards at your thinking. You will see that you think all the time, associations flow on unceasingly. Now if you begin to think intentionally, you will find that you think very slowly, whereas when thoughts run on by themselves they flow very fast.

Compare the two states: one, when our thoughts flow fast and the other when they flow slowly. For example, we are impatiently waiting for someone. We are all the time occupied with the thought—when will the person we are waiting for come? What happened to him, why isn’t he here? Has he had an accident? It seems to us we have been waiting an hour at least. We look at the watch and find it has been only five minutes.

Another example. You sit in a comfortable chair. You are resting, nothing worries you. For the moment you do not want to think of anything important. Your thoughts flow slowly. It seems to you that you have been sitting thus for five minutes, whereas you sat for a whole hour.

Time is our thoughts. We can measure time by our thinking. If we spend many thoughts, time seems long to us. If we spend few thoughts—time seems short. Time stands in direct ratio to the flow of associations.

Just as in the thinking center, associations go on in other centers also. The secret of prolonging life depends on the ability to spend the energy of our centers slowly and only intentionally. Learn to think consciously. This produces economy in the expenditure of energy. Don’t dream.

Gurdjieff's Early Talks 1914-1931

troad• 5 months ago

Isn't that conceptually incoherent?

Premise: Thinking slower makes time appear to pass faster, and thinking faster makes time appear to pass slower. (Per the two paras following "Consider")

Thesis: The secret to living longer is to alter one's perception of time, by thinking slower.

But given the premise, thinking slower would make appear to pass faster. Ergo, it would make life feel shorter, not longer.

In fact, the premise actually supports the exact opposite thesis: that the secret to long life is to think as fast as possible.

darthvaden• 5 months ago

When fuckers like theil and Johnson die the world will rejoice

xg15• 5 months ago

Silver prices just went through the roof a few weeks ago. Hmmm...

winfortheworld• 5 months ago

why do you feel the need to put as title “what x are not telling you”

this is so tiring

Why vampires live forever

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