and strangers will frequently “fill in the blanks” with their own assumptions

Yes, but a large number of strangers with different life experiences can help cancel out any one person’s personal baggage.

Wait, what happens in Acre?

Oh, I see. That seems…very non-obvious, given it only refers to “ICE vehicles”, and a certain subset of ICE vehicles are a popular target for vandalism because of their association with the kind of person likely to be a fan of the ICE government department (and because of their even greater overall societal harm than regular vehicles).

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.

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

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

In Australia, one way you can apply for a postal vote is by sending an application form by mail to the Australian Electoral Commission—the nonpartisan government agency responsible for overseeing federal elections.

Political parties like our centre-right–to–far-right LNP and centre-left–to–centre-right Labor will often send you a letter, in the lead-up to an election. Inside that letter will be an application form, and a reply-paid envelope addressed to the party headquarters. But the address doesn’t say “LNP party headquarters”, it says something like “postal vote centre”.

If you fill out the form, I believe the parties are obligated to send it on to the AEC. But there is no law preventing them from harvesting your data to use for marketing purposes before they do so. Because political parties have exempted themselves from a lot of the usual privacy laws.

There have also been accusations that they might delay sending your details on by a few days if you’re from an area less likely to vote for them. Increasing the chances your postal vote doesn’t arrive in time for you to actually use it. Not sure how founded that is, and I doubt it would be legal, but it also may be difficult to prove.

Political parties sending you a reply-paid envelope that says it’ll enrol you to vote postal ballot, with a return address that sends your information to that party, so long as they eventually do forward your info on to the Electoral Commission to register you for a postal vote.

Transylvania at the time of Dracula? It was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so it would be Franz Joseph I (yes, that Emperor Franz Joseph). Romania has a very tumultuous history, having been stuck on the frontier between Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans for most of the modern era. In Vlad III “Dracula” 's life alone it switched sides multiple times, and he was made Voivode of Wallachia and deposed at least 3 times. Voivode being roughly equivalent to Prince.

I’d regularly see near-militant comments to anything even remotely suggesting cars had a place

That tends to be pushback against anyone saying their specific use case requires a car, rather than saying nobody should be allowed to like cars as a hobby.

Who are which King/Queen? Dracula is set mostly in England in 1897, so it would be Queen Victoria. But I’m guessing that might not be what you meant?

Does !dragonsfuckingcars exist here?

the r*ddit fuckcars certainly took the name literally

But it didn’t? It would regularly get people who are into their project cars or whatever come in and people would be quite friendly. Because the vast majority of that subreddit understood that the point of the movement is about systemic change and car culture, not about individual cars.

Well, it’s a little more than just “bike or scooter is way better downtown”. It’s that car-centric infrastructure as a whole makes biking or walking dangerous and inconvenient, and public transport expensive and inconvenient. It’s that the sharp divide between “downtown” and “the suburbs” which means that a statement like @Godric@lemmy.world’s, which sort of implies “bikes are great downtown, but cars are better elsewhere” (even if godric didn’t intend that, it’s certainly a valid way to interpret their comment) is making an allowance for cars that things should be designed for them elsewhere, when actually trams and bikes worked great in small towns before we started designing everything for cars.

it’s just that they’ve taken over

Like a lot of movements, fuck cars is named partly to grab attention. If you take the name literally, you get a misleading impression. A more accurate name would be “fuck car culture” or “fuck car-centric design” or “fuck motornormativity”. But those aren’t nearly as catchy.

!fuckcars@lemmy.world

Yeh that’s right. But if we go off the idea that Dracula is meant to be Vlad III (which, I’ll admit, is actually something Stoker tacked on right before publication), well…he was royal.

That’s what inspired me!

I decided to do that, and then when someone started the vampires community I thought…why not see if anyone wants to chat about it with me.

Before John Polidori—Lord Byron’s doctor—wrote The Vampyre (incidentally, it began at the same retreat where Mary Shelly conceived of Frankenstein), the idea of vampires as nobles who can pass among humans basically didn’t exist. They were more akin to zombies or werewolves, prior to that. Polidori’s Lord Ruthven was a British nobleman based in no small part on Lord Byron. Then a few decades later you get Carmilla, another upper class vampire, this time female. And then just a couple of decades after that, on the cusp of the 20th century, Bram Stoker writes Dracula, the first time we get a vampire who is not just noble but royal, and we get the full furnishings we associate with vampires today. The foreign accent, the castle, the wine (though interestingly, the wine Dracula serves is actually a white wine, not the blood-red we usually think of).

Also fun note: this Saturday marks the start date of Dracula. Over in !vampires@lemmy.zip I’m planning a read-through in real-time, if anyone wants to join me.

Oh I see, that’s a snowflake. I was reading it as (literal) ice. Which was weird, since I was pretty sure (the drug) ice doesn’t leave people behaving like OP’s dad in the image.