FAQ

Given their adjacency to vampires...ooh, well...Alright, let's put a pin in that.

Whenever they happen, but you eventually hit a ceiling with such a specific type of study.

Sometimes, it's best to think backwards. Like Ifnkovhgroghprm, or oh-oh-oy!

If you're an absolute beginner to the topic, I'd first recommend The Vampire Encyclopedia by Matthew Bunson. Encyclopaedias are very accessible because you can just kind of flip all over them. It's not too academic, the language is simple, and the structure is consistent. So if you have like learning disabilities, sensory processing conditions or if you're a bit spaced out, this will give you a push.

Yes, that's by design because they all glom onto the pre-existing sources and form this ouroboros of mediocrity. This and I frankly, hate the way a lot of contemporary essays sound. Alright, here's my issue. They all speak in this twee, faux-metropolitan tone. It's the overfamiliar, shoulder-rubbing, cloying kind of feeling, like an uninvited guest. This, I find, is unsuitable for reading. I've seen this pollute just about every topic, from the usual Waterstones pet-topics to fucking James Gillray! I know some of you find Englishness charming but I can guarantee you as a melanin-deficient native, this incessant prattling will wear you down fast.

Alright, for us anglophones, the big two are Augustin Calmet and Montague Summers. For you continentals, we’ve got Jean Marigny. I'll add more to the list as I reach out to the non-english crowd, but Jean is a full-blown expert and an emeritus no less, so he's your homme.

No, I do not enjoy reviewing things. To quote an old blog entry, every time I try, my brain conjures the image of a four-year old me deftly inhaling the fluids of a plastic bubble pipe.

I’d like to but I want to make sure that any new additions happen with sincerity. Having previously hosted a much larger version of this page for an entire group of people (yowzer!), there were a fair few entries that I was neutral to at best.

I run by them on a weekly basis.

Those are from the Dewey Decimal Classification. It was invented in 1876 as a way to track individual books in a library.

You do onto me a potent evil.

I go through old link directories such as Curlie and Marginalia!

See for yourself, if you dare.

I dream a lot of gibberish, miscellany and yes, dreams too erotic to be featured. The ones that make the cut, through sheer autistic abandon, are indeed about vampires a lot of the time. I tried to warn you I was obsessed.

Write down any old gibberish you dream, the second you wake up from them. Then your recall will improve and your dreamscapes won’t feel so foreign. Give it a few months to a year before things get really good. If you have a favourite character that you’re desperate to fornicate with, you’ll be pleased to know that with enough madness, it can happen to you.

Likely the “Garloid” meme.

In terms of emotional catharsis, Party does a lot. The sheer homeliness of a Bela Lugosi style suit, and the post-halloween haze that I stumbled into.

Though the bit where Shaggy Rogers started talking about genocide was quite insane.

Spire absolutely freaked me out. Being a User of the Internet, I am cursed with the knowledge of what it looks like when a human body hits a floor from zillions of feet in the air. This is seconded by mausoleums. I was frightened by Asylum, certainly, but not enough for me to wake myself up.

No, I don't need the money. However, I buy plenty from my best friend Lutzbug. They're a stunningly good artist; quick turn-around times, reasonable prices and the skills to make the wait worthwhile.

I am not to be reached right now. Comments are welcome in the meantime, if you're on Neocities.

It's a word I use to describe Blue Hour, which is emotionally meaningful to me. I love the night in general. I find black a blank canvas for all sorts of phantasmagoria, but Blue Hour exists with a spark of magic. When every Blue Hour happens, I become a part of the pre-dawn haze, a fantastical glittering thing. I will always love living in a Blue Hour. Even if it pours past my fingers into yet another dawn. Even if all I can do is trap it in a name, like a letter in a bottle.

I try to lead through observation as my shyness inclines me, but I especially like dungeon synth, internet archeology, old monster paraphernalia, Scooby-Doo and terrariums.

I identify with Grotesques for my love of chimères and Gothic art. I adore vampires, but I don't see myself as one. I'd say I'm an onlooker, a prop to the vampire set. Their bombastic personalities and lurid backstories, while fun to watch, clash with my own. Instead, I'm more akin to a Castlevania enemy or a creature you'd see in a 70's toy line. It's modest, and some may say overly so, but it's right for me. Also note the absence of "fursona", "furry" or even "funny animal" as I speak. Sanguine and I are furry-adjacent at most. Back when I was a furry, I couldn't relate to other furries. I felt like something else.

Ignoring honest business pursuits, I find them to be mires of thought-terminating cliches.

I’ve loved vampires ever since I was small. I was first charmed by the various vampire disguises on Scooby-Doo, the Real Draculas that appeared after and then a relative decided this was an excellent time to show us his pirated copy of The Fearless Vampire Killers and then things coffin-bobsledded from there.

I find the vampire to be an enduring tool of conversation, storytelling and self-expression. The criteria is simple; it’s an often parasitic hemophage that likes to play sommelier with the living. The ubiquitousness of an evil hungry spirit means almost any person can speak of Vampires, thus turning a seemingly-simple topic into a cultural wellspring.

A vampire can be the yearning husk of someone from times past, skin condensing in the heat of your fire. A vengeful echo of aristocracies past, desperate to keep itself glutted at all costs. In its opposite it can be a victim of circumstance, socially and spatially consumed by its elders. A human mind buckling under the implications of eternal life, only stopped by violent death or slow starvation. A slave to hunger, akin to the notion of a zombie that so many are depicted as. It can be a kitschy, neon-skinned caricature of the former groups with a thing for puns and interior design. Or it is a small, flittering thing that is eccentric at worst, and wants to be left alone to peacefully wiggle its ears and eat worms.

Admittedly I identify the most with the very, very, very last of this list. Though cartoon animal vampires like Nyanpire don’t tend to have thumbs, and I need those.

This site was made with a Kalechips layout, which according to its license, lets you do whatever the hell you want with it. So yes, of course!

No, the love for my craft keeps things warm here.

Spectral for the headers and Special Gothic for the body.

Back in 2021, I was going to write a Vampire Review blog called "Fangs a Lot!". This was exclusively for movies, but I only managed one review before the reality of Drawing A Webcomic set in. In short, Dancing with the Dead cannibalised its kin and all I could do was stand there and watch. At one point I made a webring, but I gave it to one of its members and went off to do some other things. While it's highly unlikely that you'll recall these, this bit's been on my FAQ for years and I like being transparent about these things.

When I started this project, I was most inspired by The Tower. I still love the way it looks, but its compact design works better for simpler sites. After all the redesigns, I turned my attentions to Etymonline and the Phronistery.

They're sophisticated (for their time-periods) but still very clearly dated. They genuinely strive to be readable, but the Phronistery's airbrushed logo and grainy low-contrast textures clash with its flat-coloured body section in this fascinating way. It wants to be frilly and formal, but it betrays itself with this endearingly janky graphic design. My site does strive to have more visual harmony than this, but the contrast between well-sourced information and old-web asymmetry is one I'll always hold very close to my heart.

I really don’t need the money.

I’m too busy to moderate them and even if I wasn’t, it’d be a fool’s errand.

Yes, quite.

Why not? The more codes, the merrier.

Not at this point in time.

And blast the disabled with hadean-eon frequencies and kill them? Really?

A handful of furry-ish codes and the original Geek code, of course!

Your website, of course! You do have one of those, right? Well, I guess if you're e-mailing someone you could put it in your signature too.

It's simply for identification's sake, just like the other parameters. Plus, many vampire enthusiasts tend to be some flavour of queer.