Zagorath @ Zagorath @aussie.zone

Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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Why only ICE vehicles? EVs might be marginally better, but cars are still cars, and they kill hundreds of people every year, cost billions of dollars in direct infrastructure costs (in the huge subsidies that roads get), and untold amounts more in indirect infrastructure costs (because of how inefficient low-density car-centric sprawl is wrt things like sewerage and other municipal infrastructure). Over about 20 km/h the noise pollution is roughly equally bad, and the plastic pollution from tyres is just as bad if not worse on EVs.

What's needed isn't to push people from ICE vehicles onto EVs, it's to encourage people to use (and more importantly, governments to support) active transport like walking and cycling first and foremost, with public transport for longer journeys.

I'm also not a big fan of that sort of indiscriminate vandalism anyway. I'm not gonna bat an eye if you're doing it to all yank tanks, but people's sedans and hatchbacks? That's a bit much, IMO.

A little more context for anyone not aware. Epistolary just means it's like the book equivalent of the Blair Witch Project. It claims to be written not by some outside author like most books, but to be the literal transcriptions of the characters' diary entries, letters, news articles, and phonograph recordings. All of these are of course dated in-universe, with the first of Jonathan Harker's diary entries taking place on 3rd May. So we're reading through it as it happens.

Days 1 and 2 are very short, and there isn't any entry on 6 May, so you've got plenty of time to catch up if you want to join in on 7th May.

Minor correction: the days don't actually match up to "chapters" of the book. Chapter 1 is made up of 3, 4, and half of 5 May. Chapter 2 is the 2nd half of 5 May, 7 May, and the 1st half of 8 May. I'm not 100% sure as I've never read the book this way before, but I believe later on, doing it this way will actually mean we read it slightly out of the normal reading order, too, especially as relates to the news articles and shifting POVs.

you mean FOR cats not OF cats, right? … RIGHT?!?

Yes. The endnotes in my copy specify that it's mostly made of horse meat.

Burger’s “Lenore”

The notes say that the line mentioned here is never actually uttered. Instead, what is actually said is "the dead ride fast". Several times.

Of old the Hospadars would not repair them

Yes, it was the name of the rulers of Wallachia and Moldavia from the 15th century to 1866.

The "Servians" is just an old term for Serbians.

What do you mean other extinct groups? That implies dinosaurs are extinct.

Connections
Puzzle #694
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Skill 97/99
Uniqueness 1 in 115

It took me waaay too long to get purple. Especially considering

I've started a Dracula Daily–inspired read-through and book club over on !vampires@lemmy.zip, if you, @Walican132@lemmy.today, or @PDFuego@lemmy.world are interested in joining.

Is this a problem in Australia too?

Yup. Not to quite the same extent as America...you're much less likely to get shot by an Australian cop, and cops who do provably wrong as an individual (as opposed to institutional problems like the one in this story) are much more likely to get charged here. But by and large it's exactly the same problem.

The first really lengthy day. And also perhaps the first time the epistolary conceit shows its cracks. It works well enough if you don't think about it, but are we really supposed to believe he wrote in this much detail in his diary?

No explanation is ever given for how Dracula (when posing as the carriage driver) knew that the man driving Harker's carriage intended to carry on, with Harker, to Bukovina. Just a mysterious otherworldly power he possesses, I guess.

Stoker's writing of the atmosphere and how Harker feels during the carriage trip is absolutely sublime. It's the sort of mood setting that makes it impossible not to feel exactly what he wants you to feel. I only wish I could set a mood as effectively as this in my Curse of Strahd Pathfinder game. Frank Wildhorn does a pretty good job of capturing the feel in the Prologue of Dracula: The Musical.

Traps is, according to editor Maurice Hindle in my Revised Edition, an archaic term for "belongings". Used twice on this date, and only marginally inferrable by context if you don't otherwise know it.

A reminder that the British (as well as my own Australian) pronunciation of "clerk" is like "clark", as in Superman's alter-ego's first name.

Ah yes, wine. So inexorably linked to vampires ever since this book's publishing in 1897. What could be more perfect than serving your guest a blood-red drink in a dark goblet, while telling them yourself "I don't drink...wine"? And yet the wine we see served here is Tokay. A sweet amber-coloured dessert wine.

Physiognomy... Once again, we have a book so determined to be progressive and in which the embrace of modern science versus tradition & superstition is a major theme, and yet it unfortunately misses the mark completely to the modern reader because it presents as science something we today know to be complete pseudoscience and more than a little bit racist.

There's no chapter tomorrow, as Harker doesn't journal on the 6th of May. Except that it seems likely, given midway through the chapter 1 portion of his 5th May entry he states it's close to midnight, that at least some of the 5th May entry was actually written after midnight on the 6th. No matter.

Not exactly. Everything counted on election night gets recounted later. All the counts done on the night are basically unofficial counts for the media and the convenience of the politicians. They're a little more official than that makes it sounds, but only a little.

That's enrolling to vote. This is about requesting a mail-in ballot for people who are already enrolled.

More similar to yours than one could possibly imagine.

• A centre-left incumbent that seemed on track to lose, as of February.
• Thanks in part to Trump, the incumbent saw huge swings towards them in the polls during the campaign.
• So much so that their conservative opposition lost his own seat.
• The unfortunate harm done to a real left-wing party as a by-product (in your case it was because of FPTP and strategic voting. In ours it seems likely to be an unintuitive byproduct of how IRV works).
• Your left-wing party lost his seat. We're still counting but it looks very possible that detail could be replicated here.

I'd say Dracula is to vampires what Mount Fuji is to Japanese prints, or The Lord of the Rings is to fantasy:

J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji

Records should be here: https://connect.garmin.com/modern/personal-records

Segments are much less used on Garmin than Strava, but they also exist, here: https://connect.garmin.com/modern/segments

Huh, that's weird. I view the board from your instance and I can see them. Do you have bots blocked in your account settings?

You made me panic for a second! I thought my bot had failed without my knowledge. But it's here.

Connections
Puzzle #693
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Skill 81/99
Uniqueness 1 in a Million

This would just be another parallel between us and Canada. Yes, Pierre Poilievre losing his seat, and Dutton following in his footsteps, has gotten most of the attention. But New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh also lost his seat in Canada.

I suppose "loose" in this context could also be a much nicer euphemism for "knife". As in "free him of the obligation of being party leader". But that context would be if he retains his seat, but they've decided they no longer like his leadership.

It's about time the AEC adopts a 3CP count on election night for 3-way seats.

For those unaware, on election night, AEC workers count the 1st preferences of votes, and then conduct a 2CP count to the 2 candidates the Commissioner (or the Division Returning Officer, not sure which...but it's someone high up in the permanent AEC staff) has decided are most likely to win. This is great in most cases, but if the AEC gets it wrong it can lead to wild results where the person who was believed to have won on the night has actually lost, and either the 2CP loser on the night actually wins, or even the winner can be someone who made no appearance in the 2CP on the night.

I don't know who the 2CP was between on election night in Melbourne (I was too busy doing that counting in Ryan—ours was between Greens and LNP), but the need to "re-throw" between Labor and Greens implies it was probably Greens/LNP? If so that seems strangely out of alignment with previous results so I don't understand why they did that. If they did in fact 2CP between Labor and Greens I wonder why the recount would be so far off of what was declared on the night.

Doing a 3CP count on the night, only in seats where this kind of thing is considered likely, would give a much better indication. Yes, it would be more anticlimactic because you'd lose the ability to confidently declare who did win, but it would at least mean the numbers you're seeing on the ABC (or your media source of choice) are definitely accurate and unlikely to change by large amounts over the coming week. And you can just make an estimate of how preferences will flow from the 3rd in 3CP to the other two. (Before anyone asks, it would definitely not be viable to do a 3CP and then a 2CP on the night. I didn't leave the booth until 11:30 pm last night as it was; extending it too much more than that would be unreasonable. Besides, you couldn't start a 2CP until every booth had done its 3CP, including the postal votes and prepolls. And that's just not how it works. Each booth does their own thing based on guidance set out ahead of time.)

3CP would actually speed up the result, allowing workers to get home earlier and the media to get reliable answers sooner. Each ballot would take a bit longer to count, but the number of ballots to be counted is absolutely decimated (in the modern, not Roman, sense). Instead of counting nearly 700 2CPs, we'd be counting less than 250 3CPs at my booth. The disadvantage is the potentially higher error rate. (A less important disadvantage is the lack of ability to use the 3CP to find errors in the 1st preference results...but you only lose this ability in the 1 candidate that would have undergone 2CP redistribution but is now part of the 3CP...in my booth our redistribution of the Labor candidate results meant we noticed we had undercounted her 1st preference results initially by 1.)

So in summary:

• 3CP would reduce post-election-night surprises
• 3CP would give the media accurate, if incomplete, results that can be used to make informed speculation about the final result
• 3CP would speed up the count on election night, saving the AEC money, their workers sleep, and giving the media information faster

I don't know if this would require legislative change, a directive from some Minister, or just an internal AEC policy change. But whatever it is, it needs to happen.

Ok I found the ABC liveblog from last night which said this:

the electoral commission was counting preferences between the Liberals and the Greens because they were the final two parties in 2022

I don't understand this, because the AEC Tallyroom website says the final two were Labor and Greens. But at least I now know who they were counting...unless the ABC was wrong on both points.

edit:

Ok I found the ABC liveblog from last night which said this:

the electoral commission was counting preferences between the Liberals and the Greens because they were the final two parties in 2022

I don't understand this, because the AEC Tallyroom website says the final two were Labor and Greens. But at least I now know who they were counting...unless the ABC was wrong on both points.

What did it originally say?

Btw it now says "loose", when presumably you meant to say "lose".