St. Remedius Radio: “Earwax: The Discovery of Social Media Among the Vampires”

Social Media: The Great Awakening or The Great Extinction?

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

At first, the spread of Internet access in the mid-1990s was a blessing among the more tech-savvy of supernatural and paranatural species. By the middle of the Twentieth Century, most of the fae susceptible to technology and its waste products had either migrated to areas free of television and radio signals or adapted to feed on their thin but nourishing energy, or took advantage of those who had. (The Seid Owlriders, famed for their massive cloud encampments and channeling of storm energies, regularly stalked the Dallas night skies on their gigantic owl mounts by taking advantage of the inevitable leakage from power webs and radio discharges that attracted their favorite prey: clock goblins that shifted over to digital.) Others rapidly evolved to utilize the waste: bronze gremlins with a taste for the rare-earth metals in discarded computers or the tremendous nightfloater colonies that hid in plain sight by becoming radar-invisible. Lycanthropes of all sorts used near-instantaneous communications for finding mates, marking territories, and threatening rivals, surprisingly leading to a decrease in hostilities. (In one case, the notorious Tsu meeting convention AgileCon in Fort Worth once stopped an impending war between werewolves and were-Gila monsters when everyone took advantage of an additional hour in the central ball pit.) No paranatural genus, though, used new developments in technology and communication with more style, more flair, and more utter destructiveness than the various species of vampire, with the advent of social media being the greatest boom in vampiric relations since the opening of the first goth club in London’s Carfax Abbey in 1980.

Of course, results varied among the various species, subspecies, hybrids, strains, and cultivars of vampire once they discovered the potential. Standard blood-drinkers rapidly discovered plenty of willing victims and familiars via MySpace and Facebook, with or without the promise of becoming a vampire themselves, and those taking advantage of annihilation fantasies had a home online since the days of Usenet. It was the days of Delphi forums and LiveJournal that psychic and emotional vampires started to operate openly, feasting on the responses to ceaseless tales of woe and financial despair with an additional hope for a nipple slip until they lay in basements like termite queens, aglow in phosphors while passively supping. The mental vampires that fed on violent emotions promptly moved to political forums, often livestreaming their own executions as infuriated posters tracked down and destroyed them on camera. The constant interweaving conflict, avoidance, shunning, and reconciliation between different individuals and groups on Facebook and Instagram delighted true immortals in a way they had never experienced before, and the explosion of video social media in the early 2020s meant that some vampires forgot to feed in the desperate addiction of response to their latest postings. Many of the innovations in cloud storage and wireless streaming technology in the early Twenty-First Century owe their existence to vampires needing more space to gather a dining and worship herd, and after a while, the difference between TikTok-dwelling Creature of the Night and Tiktok-dwelling Desperate Narcissist became hard to spot. Indeed, many vampires became rich for a time thanks to various cryptocurrency scams, as they all had familiarity with the human need to get rich off magic beans.

The culmination and subsequent destruction came when an unknown group announced an online contest to crown the Overking of the Vampires, based purely on popularity grounds. For two months, datawebs pulsed with encouragements to vote for a particular, entreaties from particulars for votes, threats against vampire groupies that declined to vote, and long and pointless disparagements of competitors. Energy vampires all over LinkedIn gave their own assessments and odds on the favorites, thereby adding to the excitement. When the votes were tabulated and the crown given to one Aysheaia, the Internet went nova, and it went supernova when Aysheaia revealed that she was already the queen of the earwax vampires. The resulting accusations and counteraccusations of vote fraud, mostly along the lines of “Of course the computer was hacked! That 286 was just sitting there!”, led some vampires to disappear from public life, some to take a long walk in the morning sun if they were so affected, and still more to move to baseball statistics, political analysis, and science fiction TV show trivia for their latest feed. Any way one looked at it, vampire society would never be the same.

And while you’re at it, the request lines are now open, complete with playlist.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

Agata Wisniewski earwax vampire St. Remedius St. Remedius Radio vampire