Did Nintendo make poker decks back then? They started out making cards for traditional Japanese card games like hanafuda because Western card games had limited presence in Japan.
So this just presents the question of why someone is playing a bridge tournament in Baltimore using what would be to them weird cards they’ve never seen anything like before made by some Orientals.
Bridge being the modern version of Russian Whist, where Whist would have been a better fit, being of the right era and eastern european origin.
And Nintendo was simply producing cards so the Japanese diplomats might better understand their Russian counterparts by understanding their passtimes in an attempt to diffuse rising tensions before they lead to war…
But alas no barge knocked down a whist anywhere recently.
That is true though anyone based on Vlad Tepij isn’t the type to get super into American beverages or East Asian games. Now show me a novel middle eastern game and a German beverage and that motherfucker is in
With a skeptical brow raised, the count begrudgingly sipped from a glass of Coca-Cola, a recently invented American beverage vastly different from the Romanian wines of his cellar. “Passable,” he muttered under his breath, with a reluctant nod, betraying centuries of noble pride. Yet, as the night unfolded, a subtle smile crept over his pale face.
He looked over to his guest, sitting opposite him on an old wooden chair. A traveler from a far away land, lost in these dark forests in this dark and stormy night, glad to have been given shelter. The man - he could not be older than thirty - had bowed profusely after his rescue from the elements.
“I could never repay you completely for you help, but may I offer you a small token of thanks for your kindness? It’s a game from my home, quite simple to play, it would be an honor to teach you. I have not seen its likeness in these lands, so it might offer you a sliver of fresh entertainment.”
Their early work was a little too new wave for my taste. But when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He’s been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor."
Wasn’t another one that Samurai, the telegraph and Lincoln were all alive in the same time period so you could have a Samurai send an electronic message to Lincoln.
If memory serves me right there were exiled samurai in California and Mexico at the same time as the Mexican-American war so its entirely feasible to have them fighting during said war. Though as I understand they were pretty universally insular and mostly stuck to themselves.
I would be happy to have an Adderall prescription. I’m afraid to ask for one though. I don’t want to get secretly listed as drug-seeking since that’ll cause problems if I ever need pain medication, which is likely considering the lifestyle I lead (lots of injuries).
Don’t worry, they assume it anyway so you might as well ask.
I went to the ER with no recent history of being on pain meds and was treated like I was seeking drugs when I told them the Tylenol wasn’t doing anything for the pain. Had to convince them to give me a catheter so they could get a urine sample to see if it was kidney stones before they gave me anything that worked. “Juat pee for us” they said to the guy who told them I came to the ER because I couldn’t pee and was in incredible pain.
Fuck the fear mongering about drug seeking behavior. Why do ERs care if somebody wants to feed their addiction more than whether someone is in actual pain?
After 1904, instead of using fresh leaves, Coca-Cola started using “spent” leaves – the leftovers of the cocaine-extraction process with trace levels of cocaine.[77] Since then (by 1929[78]), Coca-Cola has used a cocaine-free coca leaf extract. Today, that extract is prepared at a Stepan Company plant in Maywood, New Jersey, the only manufacturing plant authorized by the federal government to import and process coca leaves, which it obtains from Peru and Bolivia.[79] Stepan Company extracts cocaine from the coca leaves, which it then sells to Mallinckrodt, the only company in the United States licensed to purify cocaine for medicinal use.[80]
Isn’t Dracula canonically immortal? You could technically write him into The Expanse and be accurate. I guess the scifi people might have an issue with it.
How do vampires handle high g forces, I don’t believe it’s ever been addressed. Presumably the ability to turn into a bat would lower his mass and help.
Such a good book. The vampires seem out of place in the hard sci-fi setting at first, but I think it’s actually quite well done, and ends up being very thematically relevant in the story.
Well at what point in space does the sun just become a star and a different star become a sun? Is there a magnitude when it becomes a problem for a vampire. Or is only our sun the problem? Like no matter how little sun light a vampire is exposed to a problem even if the vampire is many many light years away.
Mmm interesting point. This means that either reflected sunlight is fine or that the loss of intensity makes it not not dangerous. I assume most people would agree that using mirrors to reflect sunlight on to a vampire is detrimental to their health and happiness. So it seems like a safe assumption that it is the intensity that matters.
Now we just have to find out if this is a property unique to the sun or if all star light at a certain intensity is unhealthy for vampires.
Time to build an interstellar space ship and fill it with vampires. Luckily they don’t need much in the way of life support systems. So we can do this on the cheap.
There’s a Dracula “sci-fi western” in development now, and it wouldn’t be the first sci-fi film to feature vampires. Blade Trinity was fairly sci-fi and featured a resurrected Vlad III. There are also a whole bunch of low-budget independent films, because the character is public domain.
So it’s been done, but I wouldn’t say it’s been done well. Technology and the ubiquity of cameras make telling vampire stories logistically complicated. Like, they always need to come up with a bunch of handwaves to explain how coffins fly on airplanes piloted by a bunch of human familiars, and how the old legends about running water and being invited in are apocryphal superstitions.
they always need to come up with a bunch of handwaves to explain how coffins fly on airplanes piloted by a bunch of human familiars
That one is easy to explain. Either the vampire is wealthy and has a private aircraft, which is likely if they’re hundreds of years old, or they can ship themselves as the remains of a loved one. I would imagine that any competent modern vampire would have a forger, and a hacker in their household.
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