Too Much Headspace

If you were there, you know what it means...

Trying to keep my other blog "professional", something I'd be comfortable showing potential employers, but I do occasionally have thoughts that don't quite fit that category, and I wanted a place to put them. For instance...

Why do we think of vampires as "dead"? I realize it's mainly just the mythology that's grown around them, but consider the conventional definition of life:

-Homeostasis
-Cellular Organization
-Metabolism
-Growth
-Adaptation
-Response to Stimuli
-Reproduction

Vampires are capable of all of these in most every version I've seen. By these standards, vampires qualify as alive. We only think of them as "undead" because of that whole "risen from the grave" thing. But there are other examples of organisms "dying", or entering a torpor state, and emerging in a changed state.

Caterpillars.

Intriguing mental model, humans as the pre-metamorphosis vampires. I'm not sure if I'm more interested in exploring the vampires as a living, viable "final form" of humanity or a horror story from the perspective of the caterpillar seeing its friends disappear one by one, only to be replaced by these strange, colorful beings that chase it through the air...

Probably the second one.