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Watching Every Vampire Movie Ever Part 1: 1800s

2025-07-06T21:52:57Z

For a while now I wanted to do something like this. Watch all of X, where X is some ridiculously big set. At the same time, I’ve been adding stuff I’ve seen over the years to my Trakt. At some point I realized that I’ve seen a lot of vampire media. Now, obviously, most of these were in my teenage years, but it’s still a lot.

It seems every couple days I remember a new thing with vampires I watched, trying to fix my obsession. And as I’m adding these to my Trakt, I realize a lot of them probably weren’t as bad as my teenage self considered them to be. I realize I kind of want to rewatch a lot of them. And hence: the match made in hell. I thought, “wouldn’t it be fun to return to my teenage years and watch all of vampire media?”

But that’s obviously foolish. All vampire media is an insane amount of media. Even if we just consider TV shows: Dark Shadows alone has more than 1,225 episodes. So instead, let’s aim for something more doable: Every Vampire Movie Ever.

This has a nice blend of being:

still really time consuming,
completely useless while still retaining some bragging rights,
a chance at becoming the next Vanity Fair Vampire Expert.

Also it’ll be really nice that I will finally have something to consistently post about!

Now of course, I probably already seen most of the actually good, and most of the actually influential stuff. But even here there are things notably missing: I’ve never seen Blade, I’ve never seen Nosferatu, I’ve never seen Coppola’s Dracula. But this time around I will have a chance to finally rectify this.

To this end, I found a list of about 1,700 movies that seems pretty comprehensive. My plan right now is to go through it and see every movie. I don’t necessarily intend to do them chronologically, but at the very least I will start with it in this post.

I’m sure my plans will change, as will the general meaning of this “challenge” for me change as I go through it, but right now I’m dedicated to watch every movie on the list that I can find on the internet that has some sort of English translation.

Together, we will see some truly terrible movies, and, perhaps, if we’re lucky, while embracing the direct-to-dvd slop, we will find some good stuff too. There’s no day like today, so let us start by visiting the 1800s.

The House of the Devil (1896)

The first of the only two vampire movies from the 1800s is The House of the Devil. It is a French movie made in 1896, directed by Georges Méliès. Méliès is notable for going on to make A Trip to the Moon in 1902, which is the famous black and white movie from which the picture of the Moon with a face that we’ve all seen comes from.

Curiously, as far as I can tell, The House of the Devil doesn’t appear on the list.

The film features some sort of a magical being that transforms in and out of a bat (this is its claim to being a vampire movie). It also summons stuff including people, and does various bunch of other tricks. At some point, 2 funnily clothed fellas enter the scene and he trolls them a bunch. Eventually they repel him using a cross. If you want more detail, read the Wikipedia article, I’d really hate to rehash it here.

At 3 minutes long, it is pretty long for a film of its time. The main attraction, more than any plot (what kind of a plot could one fit in 3 minutes?), is the visual tricks. From a modern perspective, they’re not necessarily particularly impressive or interesting.

The set piece is quite obviously a cardboard cutout (or something like it). At one point, the actors even fall backwards on it and move it.

The Haunted Castle (1897)

The Haunted Castle is a remake of The House of the Devil from 1897, also directed by Méliès. In fact, not only is it a remake, it is the first remake. Méliès was truly an inventor.

The remake is much shorter, only having 45 seconds. The sequence of events is different, the fellas are in the scene from the beginning. The set piece seems slightly different.

The plot is once again, the bat magician trolling the fellas (or in this case, mostly just one fella). This time again teaming up with a white dressed, what I presume to be a girl, that also featured in the original. Curiously, this time, the bat magician doesn’t transform from or into a bat once, which makes it questionable to put on this list.

Turns out, a “hand-colored” version of this movie exists, which is a pleasant surprise to hear, given I was afraid the version I watched was one of those AI colorized things.

Though the visual tricks are once again not particularly impressive to modern eyes, they do feel smoother than in the original.

Passing the matura exam

2025-05-23T10:52:19Z

So, on Tuesday, I actually passed the matura exam, the one I’ve been talking about in some of my previous posts. This means I officially graduated high school now. The ministry hasn’t printed my diploma yet, they will do so some time next week. When I receive it, I will send it to the university and they will finally officially accept me.

It was a grueling 2 months. Unfortunately, the next day, I came to find out, I will need to quickly find around $3000 to fund myself for the next year, because my parents are officially “broke af.” So uhh, yeah. I went from trying not to fail the exam, to trying to find a job. Yuck.

Renaming things and actually adding slugs

2025-04-04T02:51:03Z

So, up until now I just this crappy naming scheme of rough_type-number.md for naming article on this site. This worked fine and even good for sorting them, but trying to find any without remembering their number was always a pain. The slugs were also extremely unuseful. So now I adopted the apparently Zola approved naming scheme of YYYY-mm-dd_name.md, which, it seems, will serve me much better!

As you can see, all the files are so nicely sorted… Wait! What’s that? The directories are misplaced! Yea, that’s still a problem with this. Directories always place before files in VS code, and in just about every sane code editor. I don’t really know what to do about this since it’s not like I want directories to ever sort amidst files in any other circumstance. Right now I have a workspace config setting fixing this, and I guess that’s fine enough.

The second issue is that posts made in the same day mis-sort also. There’s not much I can do about that either other than naming them with the full datetime timestamp but that would be way too long I think.

Oh and by the way, sorry if I broke any links!

Preparatory Math Course Week however many and Bus shenenigans

2025-04-03T23:10:51Z

So I was at the math course again yesterday (actually the day before that now coz I’m writing this after midnight, oh how typical!). The course was something about uhhh vectors? And points? And adding them together? Never really cared for geometry.

What is more interesting is the bus ride there and back. I got matura essays coming up, so I felt like I need to practice essay writing. I can’t ever really get myself to practice when I’m home, so I figured I will try it on the bus.

And so I was there, on the bus, standing in the chairless space intended for strollers, writing with a pen quickly running out of ink into my crappy middle-school looking notebook perched against the window. There, I got my best solution for writer’s block: Just write the first thing that comes to mind.

It sounds like a really bad advice, and it feels wrong, but looking at my essays it really wasn’t. The result of this exercise? I wrote two(2), in my opinion really pretty, 250 word essays in two(2) hours. Now, that’s for someone who usually needs 2 months to write a 30 word blog post.

Now of course, this means that the real problem when writing those essays for real will be gramatical mistakes. Which are probably going to be pretty bad for real on god no cap.

Preparatory Math Course: All the other weeks I was too lazy to write

2025-03-25T19:25:37Z

I don’t really remember anything from the second trig except that I’m kinda cooked. This was followed by two weeks of complex numbers which were actually identical and were only repeated because the first one was during holidays. Complex numbers were kinda boring. Not as boring as what came next though: combinatorics. Literally the most trivial shit. I remember people were leaving in droves. Then there were some planimetrics, which I don’t remember anything about again. Then I skipped one. Then stereometry, which made me ask myself:

“is high school math actually that simple? am I just that simple?”

Posts-Thoughts merger & new look

2025-01-30T15:44:04Z

Looking around I noticed that the posts-thoughts dichotomy barely makes sense. Even though thoughts were intended to be shorter less effort content I would only ever ended up making them, and one of them, was actually the longest post on the whole site!

Hence I merged these two into a single directory.

I changed the way the site is layed out. The posts are now entirely readable from the listing (since they’re so short anyway). CSS is new. There are those tiny cute dots at the bottom of each post indicating the post number.

Preparatory Math Course Week 3: Trigonometry

2025-01-29T18:10:00Z

This week the subject was Trigonometry. This week the lecture was theoretical, next week we’ll be solving trigonometry problems. Lecturer (different lecturer this time from the previous weeks) had a whole story from history prepared with how trigonometry came to be, how the functions sinus and tangens were originally named, much fun.

His story described trigonometry as first solving problems of ancient astronomers. He described the trigonometric functions as coming from India, through the Islamic world, before finally being named in the Christian world, where sinus conceptually referred to a fold on one’s clothes, and tangens referred to something related to dancing.

Rust tooling woes

2025-01-28T02:42:00Z

So the bozos at Rust tooling are back with a new feature! Did they fix the “rust-analyzer randomly giving up on life” issue or rust-fmt doing the same? Nope! Instead they added a new, brand new, hardcoded logic for iterators. Where the godforsaken first suggestion is always into_iter() followed by the actual suggestion, even if the snippet already contains into_iter() right before!

Why??? Who has asked for this??? Even if it worked it’s not like anybody cares!!! The amount of rage that fills me whenever I use iterators now is insane. I hate this so much.

Preparatory Math Course Week 2: Quadratic equations

2025-01-22T18:10:00Z

This lecture was on Quadratic equations. Same lecturer as last time. I was always a bit dumb when it came to these so not much for me to comment on I guess.

Masks in PayDay

2025-01-17T01:33:00Z

In PayDay 1 and 2 heisters start heists in “casing mode” (ie. without their masks on). They cannot do anything sus in casing mode, such as interacting with any objectives, or running, or anything like that. Once they mask up the game actually begins.

In PayDay 3, most of the heists can be stealthed (partially or completely) without putting the mask on. Which offers the benefit of not being detected by civilians.

The trouble is, that doesn’t make any sense. Canonically and logically everybody knows the heisters, they’re infamous, especially in PayDay 2. They can get their pictures, banks would certainly have them.

What even is the point of the mask? How can you stealth anything when they can just look at you and the cover is blown.

Preparatory Math Course Week 1: Linear equations

2025-01-15T18:10:00Z

So because I was always kinda trash at math and I plan to attend a literal Mathematical Faculty, I signed up for a Preparatory Math Course at CUNI. Today was the first lecture. It was on Linear equations. Great lecturer, amazing insights.

My mom mentioned she was, in her 3rd year of high school, taught by someone who looks and sounds just like her (the lecturer) (so it was quite possibly her).

Scuffed rewrite (of this)

2024-11-24T14:21:19Z

Okay so TL;DR: I found Hugo limiting/annoying and so I tried to write a custom SSG in Rust. But then I decided hated making SSGs, found out there’s basically nothing I would want to add to one, and then switched to Zola instead. Expect the site to barely change.

Architecture of North Korean Internet Sites

2024-08-06T02:49:29Z

This was supposed to be a full blog post but I can’t handle that much work so it’s a thought, take it or leave it.

It seems they’re all built in one huge monorepo. They all use relatively the same tech:

JQuery
Bootstrap
PHP 5.6.2
Apache 2.4.25 or nginx/1.18.0
OpenSSL/1.0.1e-fips
Red Star 4.0 (!!!)

all relatively the same versions, all stuck in (early) 2010s.

The only exceptions to this stack are sdprk.org.kp and pyongyangtimes.com.kp which use Next.JS with Webpack, though still on the same Apache/PHP server.

Displaying complex information on retroconsoles

2024-07-23T01:26:39Z

… You can’t do it, the screens are just too goddamn small!!!

Way back when, when I had a little bit less experience, I tried making a roguelike game thing for the original Game Boy… But the goddamn thing has only 160x144 pixels! Combine that with the fact you have to use 8x8 tiles, that means 20x18 tiles OR 20x18 character tiles. There’s literally just not enough space to display all the information. You pretty much have to use one screen tile per map tile otherwise you’ll end up with pitful 10x9 map tiles per screen (without any text). Making 8x8 sprites look like literally anything quite a challange on its own, but ignoring that, you still only got 360 map tiles per screen, minus however much text you want to put on it. On even the original Rogue you’d have that many times over. In the original Rogue at any given time about 100-200 characters of the screen were reserved just for the HUD text information, while still only taking up negligible amount of space. If you used up 200 tiles of the Game Boy screen for HUD you’d only get enough space for about a 12x12 view of the map, some rooms in Rogue are larger than that.

PayDay 2: Vampire the Masquerade Overhaul

2024-07-23T00:59:51Z

The latest of my VTM mod ideas and project tryings. The idea was it’d be based on a weird mix of V20 & V5. Originally I thought I’d just add some skill trees & perk decks but then I of course had to go full deranged and eventually ended up wanting to do a whole overhaul of just about every mechanic out there. I don’t think it’s in the stars anymore as I can be a very lazy person and PayDay 2’s codebase is not exactly welcoming, but still, for whoever might find this interesting, here is what was the plan.

Skills and XP progression

It was going to be somewhat inspired from VTM - Bloodlines. I was going to scrap the entirity of PayDay 2 skill and perk systems and replace it with one more similar to Bloodlines CRPG skills thing. There was going to be an entirely new menu with the character sheet and the dots. 0-5 dots, influencing just about every action. Melee, gun combat, throwing bags, interaction speed, stealth, everything.

Mechanics

The idea was to keep faithul to the TTRPG mechanics. That meant throwing out virtually all mechanics and systems and starting from scratch. We probably wouldn’t roll dice pools for where it didn’t make sense (like interactions), but could’ve for elsewhere (like combat).

Difficulty

Difficulties were going to be all scrapped and only 1 difficulty would exist. However, to balance out the fact you were going to be a (relatively) powerful kindred against just a bunch of kine, there would be permadeath with no restarts. You had to play the heist how it is or leave it (in universe run away). There would be penalties in the form of lost Favours.

All apart from the somewhat reasonable cop units would be scrapped (dozers, tasers, cloakers, etc.). There was an idea for a ghoul unit or something of the sort.

Currencies

Offshore and Spending money would be merged into one. Contracts would now be purchased using Favours. You would get favours in return for completing heists successfully, amount perhaps in relation to how well you did. You would lose favours for failing heists. Continental coins would be removed.

There was going some focus on the financial and sorta social aspect of this. Such as Skills that would improve heist payouts for the team. Similarly there would probably be some sort of Masquerade mechanic.

State

I did write code for some of this, but frankly I kind of lost interest in PayDay 2, the codebase is pretty cancerous (especially without documentation), the UI code is particularly bad, and I am very lazy, so the chances of a mod like this seeing the light of day (or the dark of night) are very small.

Introducing: Thoughts

2024-07-23T00:50:09Z

As alluded to in my previous post, I haven’t been posting very much. This, I think, is at least in part due to the effort that needs to be expensed to write one of these posts, plus also me rarely finishing anything to the extent it where it ought to have a post. To this end, I am introducing: Thoughts, short form content consisting mostly of sporadic thoughts that didn’t warrant an actual blog post.

Thought 1

2024-07-23T00:26:23Z

In my first post on this blog, I wrote “I mean, that’s not the reason” … I don’t remember what was the actual reason. I need to start writing more of this stuff down.

... Moving to Hugo

2024-07-22T10:38:21Z

And as I (kinda) foretold, 2 months (and 0 posts) later, I am running into limitations of Cobalt. Cobalt, as far as i can tell, is entirely an SSG for blogs, which I guess is what attracted me to it at first and stuff, but now I wanted to do stuff past that and I find that I cannot. So hopefully Hugo will be more accommodating. It is certainly more uh… “featureful.” This just speaks to the reality of ever changing requirements I guess.

Making This

2024-04-20T00:00:00Z

For the longest time, I didn’t really care to make a blog, but what’s the point of misadventures if there’s nobody to see them? I mean, that’s not the reason I’m making this blog, but that’s a nice idea.

So on the tech in this thing, it’s very simple, it’s very basic, a generated static site on gitlab pages (f u github). I thought about using one of the more established generators, like Jekyll or Hugo or whatever is the Python one but then I didn’t really feel like going down the Ruby legacy lane, or installing Go (f u google, also all of Go’s technical issues), or going to Python’s slugfest (though Python would probably still be faster than Ruby).

I am then forced to look to the one language I don’t hold much grudge against, Rust. What Rust static site generators are there you ask? It seems there are mainly two: Zola and Cobalt (and mdBook, but that isn’t very flexible and I feel if I opened up somebody’s blog and it looked like Rust library documentation I’d die on the spot). I first tried Zola, it had lotsa stars and seemed okay, however after using it for a bit (about 2 minutes) I came to the conclusion it was overcomplicated and actually too flexible (if you came here from a newer blog post where I say this was a grave mistake, sorry future me), so I went with Cobalt in the end, which seems to be much more blog focused.

For the CSS, I ended up straight up just using Tufte CSS umodified, perhaps I’ll mod it later, but frankly, I’m not a web developer and it doesn’t interest me much.

Also I might just end up scrapping all of this once (or if) typst gets an HTML backend, so that’s fun.