You see, since silver was the metal Judas was paid in, God promised it would never again need to deal with the wicked.
Hence silver bullets for werewolves, silver mirrors against vampires and such like.

So a vampire could shave (if a vampire needed to shave) in a polished-bronze mirror? Hmmm. That’s worth thinking about. I’ve read vampire books in which the vampire protagonists were unable to glimpse themselves even in still pools of water. What’s going on there?

I wanted to see it for that very reason, being the ’satiably curious Katt that I am.

Rule one: sarcasm on the internet doesn’t fucking work. No matter how insanely over the top “of course he’s joking” you think you’re being, someone else said it seriously.

And you should lose that partisan bitterness about Clinton. I was an alternative delegate for Obama, I’m hugely pleased at his success, but I’m hold no grudge against Clinton for putting up a damn good fight. I am still a little, uh, shall we say puzzled by her campaigning as a George Wallace Dem in West Virginia, but I’m going to put that down to desperation.

Hillary I don’t really have much of a problem with. Hillaryis44 however is a website of a bunch of crazy partisan motherfuckers who have taken to spamming superdelegates with threats that if Obama is selected they’ll be voting for McCain, among other crazy shit that you’d really expect more from hard core wingers.

karpad–hey, a fellow troper! Sweet!

yes, indeed. “Shit yes, son” would actually convey the emotion a bit better, but is unfortunately gendered. perhaps “girl, you know it.” or something. has stolen more hours of my life than any videogame published in the last several years.

I always welcome a correction in areas where I’m sketchy.

Silver Nitrate’s the mirror stuff. It’s stable and not photoreactive, thus totally useless in the film department. Film uses one of the silver halides, which IS photoreactive.

The only use of nitrates in photo technology was as cellulose nitrate, used as a backing layer for the gelatin emulsion, but it fell STRONGLY out of favor as soon as there were options. Nitrates, you see, are inflammable; quite dangerous stuff. (Photographers who ran out of flash powder or didn’t have the money used to chop bad negatives very small and ignite them instead. I actually wound up with some nitrate stock buying a job lot from an old camera store; it made a dandy firestarter and the Samhain trick-or-treaters STILL haven’t come back around….) It’s also got some aging characteristics that make it undesirable…. it tends to fog, and it becomes brittle. It also shrinks a tiny bit, which makes emulsions flake off.

Next problem is that color film still uses silver halides to capture the image; the developing process uses various chemical couplers to replace the silver halide ions with color dyes, and a later step washes out the silver the exact same way that undeveloped silver ions are washed out in developing B&W film. (The fixer I’ve used in my (B&W only) darkroom for the last several years is actually a color formulation that I took home when the color lab I worked for a while back made an ordering mistake and wound up with 50 extra and unreturnable gallons of 1+7 concentrate (400 gallons at working strength). It’s packaged and labelled “Process C41 for film.” It’s chemically the same stuff as B&W RapidFix, an ammonium thiosulfate solution. (Older “classic” fixes use sodium thiosulfate and take much longer… but don’t stink up the darkroom. Rapidfix is fast but phew.)

So NO film-based photo process is going to actually capture a vampire or, theoretically, a werewolf (though this is actually problematic as there have been numerous canonical photographs of both werewolves and vampires. It’s a bit of an anomaly.)

Digitally, of course, it SHOULD be open season….

This has been a vampire-service announcement from your local photographic darkroom maven. Carry on.

Mirrors are backed in silver. Hence they cannot reflect the soulless.

Silver Nitrate film (B&W) does not capture the soulless.

Color film? shoots just fine, soul or no.

You see, since silver was the metal Judas was paid in, God promised it would never again need to deal with the wicked.
Hence silver bullets for werewolves, silver mirrors against vampires and such like.

This has been a public service announcement from your resident vampire writer.
Now, appease me, dammit.
I don’t want Czechoslovakia, just a best-seller.

I still think “Stronghard Godcock” is the best manly name ever. Or, I suppose, if you prefer, “Rayford Steele”.

I’m genuinely not sure if you’re praising amanda sincerely, or a winger troll just trying to sound smart.

Also, that star chart stuff isn’t funny. Hillaryis44 has a resident astrologer who predicted an early downfall for Obama, and then when proven wrong, blamed it on an error in Hillary’s time of birth on her star chart and a miscalculation of the strength of Jupiter for Obama.