• mech@feddit.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    37
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    Protip: If you want to avoid pesky legal issues, just place a battered bicycle next to the corpse and say “he came out of nowhere” and “should have worn a helmet”.

      • mech@feddit.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        2 months ago

        True. But here’s a fun statistics fact: Most people who sustain head injuries in traffic accidents are inside a car.
        Despite seatbelts and airbags. Yet strangely, no one ever says “Car drivers should wear helmets”.

        • scholar@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          9
          ·
          2 months ago

          There are significantly more cars on the road than bikes, so it makes perfect sense that people who sustain injuries in traffic accidents are more likely to be in a car. The latest UK stats show that 54% of road casualties were car occupants compared to 12% for cyclists.

          In order to make a proper comparison we would need to compare the accident rate to the total number of journeys for both cars and bikes. These stats from 2024 show that cycling made up only 2% or trips whereas Cars in the same period made 59% of trips.

          Which is why it is important for cyclists in particular to wear helmets: they are significantly more likely to need them.

          • mech@feddit.org
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            2 months ago

            As long as it stays completely voluntary, I’m all for helmets.
            Nothing is worse for bicycle safety and overall health of cyclists than mandatory helmet laws, since their main effect is reducing ridership. From a study showing the effects of such a law in Australia:

            The benefits of cycling, even without a helmet, have been estimated to outweigh the hazards by a factor of 20 to 1 (Hillman 1993. Cycle helmets-the case for and against. Policy Studies Institute, London). Consequently, a helmet law, whose most notable effect was to reduce cycling, may have generated a net loss of health benefits to the nation. Despite the risk of dying from head injury per hour being similar for unhelmeted cyclists and motor vehicle occupants, cyclists alone have been required to wear head protection. Helmets for motor vehicle occupants are now being marketed and a mandatory helmet law for these road users has the potential to save 17 times as many people from death by head injury as a helmet law for cyclists without the adverse effects of discouraging a healthy and pollution free mode of transport.

            https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8870773/

            • scholar@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              2 months ago

              I’m a little confused by you saying bike helmets should be optional, then immediately pasting a snippet about the benefits of a mandatory helmet law for car users. Cycling is good for you; caving your head in on a post box isn’t. People should be free to make that choice for themselves, helmets in cars is an entirely separate issue.

    • _stranger_@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      2 months ago

      zip tie a beat up bike to the front of your vehicle to save yourself the hassle, plus the corpse will have contusions consistent with a bicycle collision.

  • njm1314@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    21
    ·
    2 months ago

    And there was a Buffy the Vampire episode about something like this once. Some kind of great evil who claimed he couldn’t be killed by anything made by mortal men. Then Buffy uses a bazooka on him. Maybe not those mortal man back then, but these ones? Lockheed and Raytheon? That’ll do it.

  • the_q@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    2 months ago

    Vampires are the dumbest monster. They can’t enter a home without being invited, are repulsed by an easily drawn “t”, get burned by an aromatic and can’t go out in the sun. Just the dumbest monster.

    • MoonMelon@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      2 months ago

      I always liked the Salem’s Lot vampires for this reason.

      • Repelled by the faith in the power of good behind the symbols, not the symbols themselves. Catholic priest who is a broken man tries it with a cross but his faith fails and he gets rekt.
      • Must be invited in, but really good at hypnotizing people especially if they are asleep. Also, once they become vampires they go after their own family first, who are more suggestible (“I had a dream our boy was still alive…”).
    • Semester3383@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      2 months ago

      That has a lot to do with their origins. The fae also can’t enter your home without being invited, but they’re really, really good at getting people to invite them in.

      Interestingly, the part about mirrors is also linked to the fae. The fae were believed to be harmed by silver, and silver had a lot of ‘magical’ powers. Since mirrors were made with silver, it kinda made sense that vampires couldn’t see themselves in a mirror. But modern mirrors have aluminum backs (IIRC), so a vampire should be able to see their own reflection, no?

      Also, garlic seems to depend on the origin on the vampire. Eastern European vampires were believed to be incredibly OCD; if you dumped out a handful of mustard seeds in front of them, they would feel compelled to count all of them.

    • cassandrafatigue@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      2 months ago

      I think the point of all that is the allegory. Which is the point of the monster; linking it to real ideas in your life and personifying your fears to tell indirect stories about them.

      ‘Thing that just kills you a bunch and is scary’ is a much smaller vein of good stories to mine.

  • dumbass@piefed.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    2 months ago

    We have wood chippers now, also chainsaws and electric circular saws. See how tough vampires are when they’re mush.

      • dumbass@piefed.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        2 months ago

        So we take the vampire slurry and put them into seperate jars, so even if they could solidify, they would be in parts and we could easily secure them in seperate parts of the world, or hell, shoot the jars into space, make them another planets problem.

        • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          8
          ·
          edit-2
          2 months ago

          You’re approaching this the wrong way.

          Imagine you slurry two vampires, keep 51% each and mix the remaining 49% of both as well as you can. Now put them into a container with two membranes, the 51% each on the sides, and the mixed slurry in the middle.

          While the slurry separates, the membranes can extract energy. And as soon as the slurry has mostly separated, you can mix them up again using that energy, and start again.

          A Vampiricum Mobile!

          • dumbass@piefed.social
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            2 months ago

            Well, we can send them back with a note saying " Sorry, no thank you, we already have one of these."

    • BennyInc@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      2 months ago

      Well, that wasn’t a vampire, but The Judge, which before times could only be destroyed by a volcano. Then again in Buffy lore fire can kill Vampires, so…

  • Darohan@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    You got a fast car
    I got a blood drinkin’ monster
    Maybe we make a deal
    Maybe together we can slay the beast

    • Malgas@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      2 months ago

      Hmm. At some point werewolf media updated from silvered blades to silver bullets. Buffy used a crossbow, but what about wooden bullets?

      Might need a sabot or some kind of jacketing to protect from combustion, but could it work?