So in lore, vampires have this trait that I’ve almost never seen used, and that’s the fact that vampires are OBSESSED with counting things. Like, the Count on Sesame Street was almost certainly created specifically as a vampire because of this piece of lore.
Like, I read this vampire book years and years ago that explained that a surefire way to protect yourself from vampires getting into your house was to spread a ton of seeds on your doorstep–poppy and mustard seeds were particularly recommended for the purpose. Basically, if you suspected someone to be a vampire, all you had to do was drop a sackful of seeds on the ground in front of them.
If they didn’t immediately start counting them, they were not a vampire. However, if they WERE a vampire, they’d be seized with the urge to count all the seeds and they would not budge from that spot until they knew how many seeds there were in total. The point was to keep them there until the sun came up and killed them, because if they hadn’t counted all the seeds by sunrise they wouldn’t be able to leave. Presumably you could just go about the rest of your evening as normal, though no word on whether it’s possible to make them lose count and start over.
Having remembered this piece of lore, I want fewer stories about brooding tortured Edward Cullen-esque vampires. I want to start seeing more stories about math nerd vampires.
Vampire accountants who are an honest company’s best asset and a corrupt company’s bane because they are frighteningly accurate with the accounts and will not hesitate to blow the whistle on a CEO scamming money because fuck you for making the numbers wrong.
Vampire cashiers that don’t need to look at the register screen because they already mentally calculated your total. 10-items-or-less vampires who know goddamn well you have 20 items in that basket and NO, you cannot just slip in with the rest.
Vampire math tutors who are constantly in high demand and have to hold lotteries to see who gets to be tutored by them.
MATH NERD VAMPIRES
If anyone would like the term for this, it’s arithmomania.
“But sir, he’s a vampire!!!”
“Vampire or not, he’s the best damn accountant we have here, and i’d let him drink my blood before i fire him!”
“still less of a leech than Matt in legal. Fuck matt”
Okay but also, vampires as drug dealers- a profession that requires extremely quick, extremely accurate counting. “You’re 5 dollars short.” “There’s 50,000 dollars in there at least, how the fuck did you count that fast-” “Pay up or I will drink you like a slurpee.”
WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME ABOUT PRO WRITING AID BEFORE?! THIS THING IS FUCKING GLORIOUS. HOLY SHIT. LOOK AT THIS.
IT GIVES YOU A WHOLE DAMN REPORT ON YOUR WRITING AND WALKS YOU THROUGH HOW TO MAKE IT BETTER AND WHY IT IS SUGGESTING CHANGES. THIS IS JUST A TINY CHUNK OF THE HUGE REPORT IT GAVE ME ON THE FIRST CHAPTER OF ONE OF MY PROJECTS. I AM IN LOVE.
AND IT WORKS WITH SCRIVENER. AND IT IS AFFORDABLE.
WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME?!
Seriously, a couple hours with this and my first chapter is so much better. It helped me see problems I KNEW I had (passive voice, showing vs. telling, adverbs) but was having a hard time sussing out. It has made editing so much more fun and easy because now I know what the hell I’m doing and what to look for instead of stumbling around blind shouting “adverbs? adverbs?” like a town crier. I can already tell I’m getting better at seeing things without the program having to show me too.
No one ever mentions in discussions and arguments about anti-intellectualism/”out of touch elitism” etc. etc. that colleges and universities operate on the back of one of the lowest, most exploited, most underpaid, and most insecure labor pools in the U.S. Just as an example after graduate school I was offered & turned down a job at a state university for 18k dollars a year and no benefits, which is pretty typical. This is just slightly more than I made teaching a 2/3 course load as a graduate student. Yes, I was lucky that I got funding etc. etc. but its also true that I was working a full time job for like $7.00 an hour. I know a lot of adjunct professors & PhD and other students who are basically living in poverty. There’s this weird cultural assumption that people should just be grateful/the work is not real? This particular labor crisis is absolutely invisible to most people and completely absent from infuriating conversations on both the left and right about how universities are “bubbles” or intellectualism is somehow classist or w/e when a significant portion of people standing in front of the classroom are living below the poverty line.
The most grossly overpaid employees at a uni are ALWAYS those who have the least to do with teaching. It’s probably not an overpaid snobby elite teaching your daughter’s gender studies or other subject you find useless (those “useless” subjects in humanities and the arts are often underfunded and taught exclusively by starving adjuncts btw!), but the president, the president’s staff, heads of any department (not just academic deans; the head of HR or the CIO make BANK but aren’t writing the syllabi), and coaches for the teams she might not even attend games for.
i like to imagine gimli getting soaked in water and looking like a wet cat (and acting as such) and then legolas dries him off with a towel and he goes POOF
Death By Catchphrase 