Vampire Boys in a new Prius: An Alaskan Romance (Movie, car, book)
Three topics, one subject line.
* I had high hopes for Vampire Boys. A gay romance spoof of Twilight sounded like it would be mighty funny. And failing that, the eye candy!
Turns out it was really bad. Not even funny-bad, just bad-bad. Between the acting and the full frontal nudity, for a brief time I thought it might be porn, but after that one scene not much more skin was shown. It was really odd to go from two totally naked men kissing to the next scene were two different men were kissing, fade into and out of black and the one guy says to the other "Bet you didn't think I'd be so easy" or something like that. Jarring.
I actually didn't see the whole movie. 45 minutes in there was a glitch and I couldn't restart it at that point again. Only thing to do would be to watch the whole thing over to continue on, and in no way was it worth rewatching 45 minutes.
* I went into the Toyota dealership today to do all the paperwork for my new car. It took nearly two hours. I can't say it was boring as I kept panicking every other minute and second-guessing myself. I don't NEED a new car. My current car works. But it's 15 years old and has a blue book value of under $1,000 and needs work on the brakes. Last time I got brakes done it cost a couple hundred. My reasoning is it doesn't make sense putting a lot of money into a car that's worth so little. (But what if I do the brakes and then it needs nothing else for years? All that free driving in a car that works fine!)
It's very odd, but they would have let me pay for the car with a personal check. Not only that, they would have held the check days if I wanted them to. A personal check! For a new car! That seems insane to me. They really, really wanted me to drive it off the lot today, but I wasn't ready to. Instead I came home and got my insurance policy changed. Monday I'll go to the bank and shift funds around so I can get a check for them, then I'll pick it up Monday afternoon. This isn't mine, but it's this color/model:
All my previous cars have been black, this is my first non-black one, but the blue is so deep and pretty I decided to change.
* Book #14 of 2013 should have been The Iron Trail: An Alaskan Romance by Rex Ellingwood Beach, but I doubt I'll be finishing it. I've been reading it for a week now, and I'm only 10% into it. The biggest issue is that it's a very old book translated by machine into ebook form, so it's full of errors. I mean one word in four has an error. Everything from periods showing up as "o"s to the fact that every fifth word has an extra space in it because it was at the end of the line in the original text, to things like "N" being translated as "/\/", to dialogue tags being replaced by * or ^ or @ or other characters... It's nearly unreadable. Example section of the text, all other quotes in this post I edited:
The reaction following a sle epless night of anxiety had repla ced the first feelings of thankfulnerss at de-, and i t was not a hap y cargo of humanit 26
THE IRISH PRINCE
the rescui ng boat bore with her as the SUB peeped over the hillso
Unlike the other two 1914 books, this one was full of racism and sexism. I had been interested in what a romance book was like in 1914, but in the 10% I read, this is the only thing that might be considered romantic:
Involuntarily he turned his eyes away, for he felt shame at profaning her with his gaze. She was very soft and white, a fragile thing utterly unfit to cope with the night air.
The women in the book were treated as children. (So romantic?)
"Now, my dear child," he told her, "you must do exactly as I tell you. Come! Calm yourself or I won't take you any farther."
And about the main character's love interest:
Miss Gerard's frank delight showed that she was indeed no more than a child.
And:
"With the creepy water all about, and big black mountains frowning at you!"
"Oh fiddle!" she exclaimed. "You'll be there if I get frightened!"
Recall in White Fang how London went on and on and on about how perfect the main character was? And in that other 1914 book about a wolf-dog they did the same thing? I saw something similar in An Alaskan Romance. I wonder if it was some theme of the time or if everyone copied White Fang? The main character's ship just sank:
Several times he gave up and floated quietly, but courage was ingrained in him; deep down beneath his consciousness was a vitality, an inherited stubborn resistance to death, of which he knew nothing. It was an unidentified quality of mind which supports one man through a great sickness or a long period of privation, while another of more robust physique succumbs. It was the same quality which brings one man out from desert wastes, or the white silence of polar ice, while the bodies of his fellows remain to mark the trail. This innate power of supreme resistance is found in chosen individuals throughout the animal kingdom.
There were lots of comment about "non-white" peoples.
"If I was a Jap I'd split myself open with a bread knife."
I marked so many more sections to use, but this post has gotten long enough. I'll end with this final one:
"My God!" he ejaculated. "You were not on the ship?"
I guess it is a romance story after all!
* I had high hopes for Vampire Boys. A gay romance spoof of Twilight sounded like it would be mighty funny. And failing that, the eye candy!
Turns out it was really bad. Not even funny-bad, just bad-bad. Between the acting and the full frontal nudity, for a brief time I thought it might be porn, but after that one scene not much more skin was shown. It was really odd to go from two totally naked men kissing to the next scene were two different men were kissing, fade into and out of black and the one guy says to the other "Bet you didn't think I'd be so easy" or something like that. Jarring.
I actually didn't see the whole movie. 45 minutes in there was a glitch and I couldn't restart it at that point again. Only thing to do would be to watch the whole thing over to continue on, and in no way was it worth rewatching 45 minutes.
* I went into the Toyota dealership today to do all the paperwork for my new car. It took nearly two hours. I can't say it was boring as I kept panicking every other minute and second-guessing myself. I don't NEED a new car. My current car works. But it's 15 years old and has a blue book value of under $1,000 and needs work on the brakes. Last time I got brakes done it cost a couple hundred. My reasoning is it doesn't make sense putting a lot of money into a car that's worth so little. (But what if I do the brakes and then it needs nothing else for years? All that free driving in a car that works fine!)
It's very odd, but they would have let me pay for the car with a personal check. Not only that, they would have held the check days if I wanted them to. A personal check! For a new car! That seems insane to me. They really, really wanted me to drive it off the lot today, but I wasn't ready to. Instead I came home and got my insurance policy changed. Monday I'll go to the bank and shift funds around so I can get a check for them, then I'll pick it up Monday afternoon. This isn't mine, but it's this color/model:
All my previous cars have been black, this is my first non-black one, but the blue is so deep and pretty I decided to change.
* Book #14 of 2013 should have been The Iron Trail: An Alaskan Romance by Rex Ellingwood Beach, but I doubt I'll be finishing it. I've been reading it for a week now, and I'm only 10% into it. The biggest issue is that it's a very old book translated by machine into ebook form, so it's full of errors. I mean one word in four has an error. Everything from periods showing up as "o"s to the fact that every fifth word has an extra space in it because it was at the end of the line in the original text, to things like "N" being translated as "/\/", to dialogue tags being replaced by * or ^ or @ or other characters... It's nearly unreadable. Example section of the text, all other quotes in this post I edited:
The reaction following a sle epless night of anxiety had repla ced the first feelings of thankfulnerss at de-, and i t was not a hap y cargo of humanit 26
THE IRISH PRINCE
the rescui ng boat bore with her as the SUB peeped over the hillso
Unlike the other two 1914 books, this one was full of racism and sexism. I had been interested in what a romance book was like in 1914, but in the 10% I read, this is the only thing that might be considered romantic:
Involuntarily he turned his eyes away, for he felt shame at profaning her with his gaze. She was very soft and white, a fragile thing utterly unfit to cope with the night air.
The women in the book were treated as children. (So romantic?)
"Now, my dear child," he told her, "you must do exactly as I tell you. Come! Calm yourself or I won't take you any farther."
And about the main character's love interest:
Miss Gerard's frank delight showed that she was indeed no more than a child.
And:
"With the creepy water all about, and big black mountains frowning at you!"
"Oh fiddle!" she exclaimed. "You'll be there if I get frightened!"
Recall in White Fang how London went on and on and on about how perfect the main character was? And in that other 1914 book about a wolf-dog they did the same thing? I saw something similar in An Alaskan Romance. I wonder if it was some theme of the time or if everyone copied White Fang? The main character's ship just sank:
Several times he gave up and floated quietly, but courage was ingrained in him; deep down beneath his consciousness was a vitality, an inherited stubborn resistance to death, of which he knew nothing. It was an unidentified quality of mind which supports one man through a great sickness or a long period of privation, while another of more robust physique succumbs. It was the same quality which brings one man out from desert wastes, or the white silence of polar ice, while the bodies of his fellows remain to mark the trail. This innate power of supreme resistance is found in chosen individuals throughout the animal kingdom.
There were lots of comment about "non-white" peoples.
"If I was a Jap I'd split myself open with a bread knife."
I marked so many more sections to use, but this post has gotten long enough. I'll end with this final one:
"My God!" he ejaculated. "You were not on the ship?"
I guess it is a romance story after all!