this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
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I think it's older than that. But you'd have to search for folklore about garlic, sliver and sun, instead of a book. And Stoker kind of merged together a few Slavic wights from different countries into his Dracula
Garlic would indeed be covered in one of the precursors, Pijavica (a slovic monster caused by leading a sinful life, warded away with garlic). The albanian Striga can be warded with a silver coin coated in blood. But sunlight, hard to find any old references to that, Some forms have vampires as purely human by day, or their powers get stronger at night. Stoker's vampires in fact did walk in the sun unharmed.
Is worth noting, that a lot of vampire lore seems more or less to have been written more or less as personifications of Plagues/Diseases. Of which silver and garlic both have anti-microbial effects for, and oddly many cultures considered them as tools for fighting diseases before even understanding germ theory (Hippocrates recommended silver for treating wounds and storing food in 400 BC), Garlic was used in primitive medicine going back at least 1000 years.
Sun, while obviously modern knowledge of UV light killing virus's exists. Doesn't seem like that was particularly noted in the past, most likely because very few people lacked exposure to the sun. It seems it wasn't till around the mid 1800s that sunlights effects on microbes was discovered and tested.
I'm pretty sure that before 1800s some things had to be dried on the sun because otherwise it goes bad. And it would be more in the form of folk wisdom. There I would search for connection "sun does good" -> "kills vampires"
I mean you are welcome to do some research as well, but so far, I've done a lot of searching, as I said I found results on Silver and Garlic, but I can't find anything that predates 1922 in which vampires seem to have any kind actual death. There's a few notes of vampires that are non powered normal people around sunlight, which I guess could count as a weakness. But that wouldn't make any actual tattoos like the shower thought we're discussing here.
Sorry, tonight I can only go as far as Wikipedia
There are two citations for that sentence but digging out the sources is too much for me tonight. Maybe there is the reasoning behind changing into tar and reference to some older sources
I think there might have been also some mention of power of the sun in some Mickiewicz work. But apparently not in "Upiór". There it complains to Venus
But true, that is not exactly the express-sunburn OP wrote about
Also in general the notion that good things happen during day and those active during the night are nefarious and untrustworthy.