Ever since I got an eReader last year, I have been reading a LOT. I mean, a couple of hours a day now, especially since I now commune to work every day. I also find myself reading a lot of books I would never normally bother with, some of which I have thoroughly enjoyed, some have been some brainless fluff to pass the time and the occasional e-book has been totally awful. I’m not trying to sell eReaders to anyone (though they ARE great!!!) but rather I wanted to discuss a discovery I have been made by a genre of books I never knew much about before and how much I don’t like it.
Paranormal romance.
Those two words together make me cringe, probably because I thoroughly enjoy picking on Twilight. For the record, I have read all of the books and didn’t hate them. In fact I kind of slightly enjoyed them, to an extent. But they are jolly good fun to tease and hate on. But Twilight isn’t it as far as paranormal romance is concerned. Oh no, there’s a LOT of it these days. And I thought I might enjoy some of it since I enjoy the paranormal and I’m not opposed to a bit of the ol’ romance and surely there are better authors out there than Stephanie Meyer! Oh how wrong I was.
Basically the “romance” in a lot of these books is just erotica. In other words, it’s Mills & Boon but with vampires, werewolves and all those trendy creatures. I’m not a prude at all, but I find this sort of erotica annoying and embarrassing. And overdone. When I read a book, I like to be swept away with the story, I don’t need sex scenes interrupting the narrative or halting the action. I don’t find it sexy, I find it off-putting and wonder if I didn’t just grab a Mills & Boon book by accident (or in my case, download one in error). Basically, sex scenes don’t appeal to me in books. Maybe it stems from that uncomfortable moment in a movie you’re watching with say, your parents, when a sex scene comes on *cringe*
And then I found out about a new book called Fifty Shades of Grey. A friend heard it was really good and asked if I’d read it, and since I hadn’t I quickly started reading up on it. And let’s just say, I was not impressed. Naturally, I was instantly repulsed by the fact it started off as Twilight fanfiction. I have never been into fan fiction, as I find most of it tacky and dull. So to hear about a book that’s become a best seller that was originally a fan fiction… ugh, my mind boggles! Then there is the subject matter. Check this out:
The plot traces the relationship between recent college graduate Anastasia Steele and manipulative billionaire Christian Grey. Steele is required by Grey to sign a contract allowing him complete control over her life. As she gets to know him she learns that his sexual tastes involve bondage, domination and sadism, and that childhood abuse left him a deeply damaged individual. In order to be his partner she agrees to experiment with BDSM, but struggles to reconcile who she is (a virgin who has never previously had a boyfriend) with whom Christian wants her to be: his submissive, to-do-with-as-he-pleases partner in his “Red Room of Pleasure.”
WHAT. THE. FUCK?!
OK so maybe it’s the feminist in me who objects to this, but I really find the whole concept appalling. People keep claiming it’s “empowering” to women who want to take control of their sex lives. I’m sorry, but at what point does a book about a girl who is completely dominated by her horrible MALE boss empowering to any woman, ever? Fucking hell, what a crock of shit. I was considering reading the book to just make sure I wasn’t over reacting, but screw it, I’m not wasting my time with any of that clap trap.
So in retaliation to this nonsense, and to all of the nonsense that’s getting printed as books these days and somehow become best sellers, I have finally decided to live out a dream of mine from back when I was in high school. I am going to write a book! I actually used to be a fabulous fiction writer and I’m sad that I seemed to grow out of it. Probably because I never had something to motivate or inspire me. Well I’m bloody well motivated now! It will NOT be a paranormal romance, it won’t be inspired by another paranormal romance nor will it have irrelevant, vividly/whimsically detailed sex scenes. It will take me ages as I’m hopeless with time management but it was be an adventure and I am VERY excited! So…stay tuned, I guess!
Now, back to finishing the Hunger Games trilogy which, by the way, is one of the most amazing series of books I have read since Harry Potter!
About Ruby
My name is Cara (but you can call me Ruby) and I like the colour pink, swearing, fist shaking, daggy dancing and 90s RnB music. Often all at once. I live in Brisbane which is always warm and is famous for its zombies.
On Tuesday night I read an article by Samantha Brick called “Why women hate me for being beautiful”. I actually found it after seeing VICE magazine has written a parody of it and I had to see what the fuss was about. I was curious based on the title, and thought it might prove insightful because I do think women can be rude and awful to other women out of jealousy. But then I started reading the article and couldn’t work out whether to laugh or fly into a furious rage. It took me about three attempts to finish the article because I’d get so bad tempered with it and had to look away.
I’m not even going to go into the fact she’s not nearly as beautiful as she proclaims to be. Beauty can be perceived in many differemt ways and I’m sure a lot of men, and probably women, find her extremely attractive (though I will admit I did wonder if it was all a joke after reading the first paragraph and seeing the first photo because neither really matched each other). Even if she had have been the most gorgeous women on Earth, if she looked like a beautiful combination of Megan Fox, Charlize Theron and Catherine Zeta Jones (all of whom i consider good examples of classic beauty), her article was the most self-deluded and condescending piece of rubbish I’ve ever wasted my time on.
Men apparently buy her things and fawn all over her for her “lovely smile”. Ok well you can’t hate her for that. I assume she’s just not very photogenic and actually does have a radiant smile, so her getting free things from admiring men isn’t so big a deal. But then she goes on to explain that women everywhere hate her for her stunning good looks, that she’s lost jobs over it, lost friends and made enemies, all because other women are so overwhelmed by jealousy and can’t bare the thought of their husbands meeting her because clearly she’ll knock them off their feet and they will leave them for her. Right.
She also wrote a follow up article detailing how terrible the 24 hours were since that article went live and how we’ve all basically proved her point that we’re all a bunch of jealous skanks who hate her for being too attractive. WTF? She does make a few good points, I’ll reluctantly admit. Women do act like jealous cows and hate on attractive women for no apparent reason. It’s a superficial thing though and almost always short-lived. I don’t know any woman who hates another female solely because she’s extremely attractive. Sure we might mutter “bloody bitch” when we see how amazing their figure is, how lovely their hair looks or how flawless their complexion is, but it’s a joke and it’s our weird way of paying a compliment to a woman who we perceive as very attractive.
Let’s face facts, love. Women do not hate you because you’re beautiful. They hate you for your abysmal personality. Women ARE daunted by beauty, but they’re able to get over it very quickly. I’ve met a lot of beautiful women and have noticed how men react to them within the first few minutes of meeting them and instantly felt threatened. But in most cases they prove themselves to be nice, down-to-earth and generally lovely women and that first pang of jealousy that deep down made me feel like there was some sort of good-looks contest going on, disappeared. If any of them were stuck-up or aloof with me, I’d get me back up and instantly dislike them, and it would take a little bit of coercion before I could change my opinion. Basically, if you’re up yourself or act better than me, I will not like you on first contact. You don’t even have to be beautiful, women tend to base their opinions of personalities and we’re actually more likely to feel threatened by an extremely self-confident woman than a beautiful one.
Which is Samantha’s problem, I guess. She has way too much self-confidence and absolutely no comprehension of what modesty is. i’m not saying women can’t acknowledge their good looks, but everyone prefers someone who’s humble in the good fortune than one who makes a big ol’ fuss about it. I would suggest it’s not her “good looks” that women dislike about her, it’s the fact she has a huge ego and projects her feelings that all women hate her for being attractive onto other women, and that’s what they sense and instantly dislike. Or maybe she has really terrible self-confidence and over compensates for it by being an obnoxious tart. After all, her previous articles about how her (revolting) husband will divorce her if she gets fat, how she blew all her money on an addiction to using psychics or how she’s flirted her way to the top of her profession, seem to convey someone who is insecure as hell. but maybe that’s just me, and I’m misinterpreting her shoddy journalism.
Like the old saying says, beauty is skin deep. There is absolutely no point primping and preening on the outside if you’re a horrible beast of a person on the inside. People, women especially, can see through your makeup and nice hairdo and see what kind of person you are and use that to decide if you’re truly beautiful. While we women can be a bitchy lot, for the most part we do not hate a person simply because of how they look, and use a lot of other factor to come to that conclusion. Sorry sam, but you’re an ugly moll on the inside and out and women don’t like you because you’re not worth liking. Soz!
A couple of amusing parodies that I’ve read (feel free to share any that you’ve found):
I got this in the post yesterday. A friend got a similar one for her electorate which she posted on Facebook, which gave me extreme rage. And then I discovered it had been sent to me too. I am beyond enraged. In case you weren’t aware, Queensland has a state election this Saturday. I have been appalled for weeks now at the horrible slandering the political parties have done to one another in their campaigns. I’ll be honest, what I don’t know about politics could fill a warehouse. I am just not very well informed on political happenings beyond who our premiere is, who the opposition is and the latest things happening in the news. But I do know what I hate, and that is having political smear campaigns slammed down my throat on TV, radio and everywhere else, about how dreadful one person is vs the terrible things this MP supports or did. It’s nasty and makes me want to draw a giant cock on my ballot paper on Saturday just to show them how I feel about the whole thing.
But this flyer takes the cake. It doesn’t even say which political party to vote for, just that Wayne Wendt is clearly an AWFUL man for daring to support such DREADFUL things as gay surrogacy and same-sex civil unions. GASP! The way it’s been written, you’d think he’d also supported lowering the age of consent to 5 or something that might actually be damaging to a child. Bu no, he just happens to support gay rights, which in the eyes of these people (obviously Christians with too much time on their hands who hate gay people for no apparent reason) is WRONG!
I’ll tell you what’s WRONG, motherfuckers! WRONG is denying any person the right to love whomever they want, regardless of their gender. WRONG is believing AND accusing gay people of being inferior parents to heterosexual couples. WRONG is suggesting that every child must have a mother and that two men do not equal one female when raising a child (I’m sure a lot of single-fathers out there would be thrilled by that). WRONG is using that fucking font for the word “threaten”!!!
I am so incensed by this, I can’t even articulate how angry and sad it makes me. It’s like we’ve slipped back to the 80s when everyone was terrified of gays spreading AIDS and killing the population. I’d expect to see this in the USA, but never here in Australia.
At 6pm there is a protest against some religious nut-jobs who have a big old truck covered in homopobic messages that’s been cruising around the City all day today. I will be there, shaking my first and demanding every person in Australia has the same rights, gay or otherwise.
Check it out! A new vlog. I so rarely feel to urge to vlog these days but sometimes you just gotta say what you have to say on video, and not just as text.
Basically it’s my reaction to being told that any girls who are over the age of 20 and like Hello Kitty are immature and stupid. Obviously I disagree and call bullshit on such a statement.
Please note: These comments weren’t directed at me personally, and so my response in vlog form is not directed back at the person who made the original anti-Hello Kitty comments. Also, I am aware some women probably take the Hello Kitty, kawaii, cutesy-poo thing to far and look a bit dumb. But I know I don’t and I know plenty of other girls who indulge in the same and look super cute and not-at-all immature or lame in doing so.
I’ve decided to do this rant in a few parts as I have far too much to say. Please enjoy part One of how NOT to dress up.
My latest rage is about dressing up in costume. This was inspired both before, during and after the recent Supanova convention here in Brisbane. A huge part of the convention is the dressing up as a favourite fictional character, the more obscure, geeky or nostalgic the better. I’ve only started dressing up for Supanova’s kind of recently and this year was the first that I dressed up on both the Saturday and Sunday. I LOVE dressing up, I always get carried away for fancy dress parties (which I like to throw as often as possible) and I am a BIG believer in making a worthwhile effort, or else not dressing up at all.
Unfortunately a lot of people do not share this sentiment.
I feel that unless you’re going to do it properly, you shouldn’t do it at all (in everything, but particularly dressing in costume). Half arsed costumes just serve to confuse and irritate those who can’t work out what you’re dressed as and those who actually did put in a lot of effort with their costumes. Just because it’s a comic book convention (sorry, “pop culture” convention) doesn’t mean you can dig up some bits and pieces from your wardrobe and claim you dressed up. It’s not a prerequisite for people to dress up for these sorts of conventions but people do because it’s fun.
I will share with you two of the examples I found:
Steampunk
I planned to dress Steampunk on the Saturday and so Googled pictures of steampunk girls for inspiration (even though I have a kick-arse costume already). I discovered a few Tumblr’s dedicated to Steampunk girls and while some were amazing, most were atrocious. I was given a pamphlet on what Steampunk is at a gamers convention a couple of months ago and laughed at how they said that if you want to be Steampunk you can technically just paint something brown and put a cog on it but people (in-the-know) will probably laugh at you for it. But unfortunately it seems to be what a lot of people assume Steampunk is! The genre IS very broad and there’s no exact look to achieve when dressing steampunk and it can vary so, so much. But there are some basic elements, colour combinations and accessories to be aware of which can turn your brown, coggy outfit into something sublimely Steampunk.
Some of the dreadful examples I found are as follows:
Look, Steampunk is not just a Victorian style outfit with a few cogs or clocks added. Nor do you transform an outfit into Steampunk just by wearing some old-fashioned-looking goggles and carrying a lantern or holding a wrist watch. It’s kind of hard to describe, but basically it ain’t this (purple, ill-fitting corsets, brown leather straps and a black leather choker ain’t steampunk, love. Sorry).
So naturally this will be a sore spot for me since I am a massive Harry Potter geek. I just don’t see how people get this so wrong but they absolutely desecrated the basic HP school uniform costume at Supanova this year. I don’t know why so many people attempted to dress like HP character this time, hardly any did when Tom Felton (aka Draco Malfoy) was appearing earlier this year. Maybe I am missing something, but when I think of a Harry Potter school uniform I think of something like this:
Yep, they’re damn good costumes! So what the hell gave these people the idea that this was in any way WHATSOEVER event remotely Harry Potter:
Unfortunately I couldn’t find a lot of examples, only these “paparazzi” style ones since their costumes are so slack, no one would want to take proper photos of them. But this was basically it. White shirt, black skirt or pants and a red or green tie and a wand. There was the occasional striped tie but aside from that it was so completely half arsed, I was beside myself with rage. This is a perfect example of doing it properly or NOT AT ALL. If you were a genuine fan of HP, you’d probably have a red and gold striped tie, a grey skirt and an actual long-sleeved white school/business shirt. I mean, my Gryffindor tie was yellow which I painted red stripes on. It don’t get much easier than that! Back when the movies were just coming out, I couldn’t get a grey pleated skirt anywhere so I had one made. THESE are things you do to make a costume remotely half decent, guys! Look at how much better it looks with a proper tie, patch and grey vest! My god, it seems so simple!
Basically the only people who are allowed to slack off on the details are adorable little kids. And even then I wish their parents had have found a red tie at the very least…
COMING SOON: More rants about shit costumes that should never have left the house!
It has struck me that the greatest term ever invented, “Cara Rage” has never really been used properly on my blog! Sacrilege! So from now on, my ragey, things-that-piss-me-off posts will be called CARA RAGE!
Included in things that have enraged me this week:
OXFAM COLLECTORS
I work in the CBD of Brisbane City, so I know there are always people around collecting money for various charities and organisations. Many of them have regular hangout’s, so if I’m in a hurry I know where to avoid. I’m not a total bastard though, I do donate when I have spare change and am not feeling my usual money woes. Most of them are pretty decent and don’t harass or target you especially when it’s clear you’re in a rush.
The Oxfam ones though, oooh they drive me insane. They’re not around every day, so you have a few days or even weeks to forget about them. But then BAM, there they are, all six of them on each street corner of the intersection you need to cross, armed with compliments to disarm you and then they beg for a moment of your time to reel you in. Plus they’re all smiley and chirpy and way to pipper for a cold an overcast morning and they TARGET you from afar so you have to keep walking towards them, knowing they’re going to POUNCE.
Look, I understand that is one of the worst jobs all times (I once tried something similar when desperate in London but just couldn’t hack the rejection) but it is really fucking annoying because you either have to stop and pretend to care or else look like a total jerk and brush them off. I don’t need that while powering through the City to run errands, I already feel like a big enough twat for not buying the Big Issue from every vendor I pass so PLEASE stop ruining my day with guilt trips, Oxfam!
BRISBANE IS NOT VERY LIVABLE So the Economist Intelligence Unit revealed this week that the most livable city in the world is Melbourne. Vancouver has topped the list for a number of years but is now #3 while Melbourne takes top place. It’s not a surprise, Melbourne is a wonderful City and if it wasn’t for my family and friends being up here, I’d move down there in a flash. Sydney is also on there at #7 while Perth and Adelaide both take out the 8th position. So where’s Brisbane? NUMBER BLOODY 21, THAT’S WHERE! Considering how the slogans for Brisbane and Queensland have always been about how livable and perfect it is up here, we’re pretty shit, if you ask me.
Brisbane, you have so much work to do to make the top 10 of that list. I don’t know what criteria these guys use to rank a city’s livability but I have a fair idea of where Brisbane let everyone down. How about the high cost of living we have up here vs the lack of entertainment available most days of the week. How about how all of our restaurants close by about 9pm so if you want to go out for a meal after 10pm, it’s greasy fast food or cheap Asian or nothing. What about the fact the Valley, our entertainment district, is a smelly, dirty hell hole by day and a drunken, noisy mess on Friday and Saturday nights? There’s plenty of bitch about, but the bottom line is, we’re still a big Country Town that isn’t coping with how many people keep moving up here from the southern states so rent is ridiculous and the average salary does not reflect our high cost of living! Well…in my case anyway.
I am very fond of Brisbane and love living here, but it needs to get its act together. The only thing we have to boast about to other states is the Worlds’s Biggest Zombie Walk (which will be official after the walk in October, just so you know)!
COLD SEASON
This is my 2nd cold of the season and I’VE HAD IT. Life is too short to spend 2-3 weeks of the year feeling like a snot monster, coughing and sneezing everywhere and being unable to function properly. I also miss having makeup on/around my nose :(
WHITE RUNNERS WITH JEANS/SUITS
I just saw a few examples of this during my walk through the City yesterday, much to my horror. Firstly, let’s be honest, you haven’t actually ever worn those shoes for their intended purpose (ie. running) before, have you ? Secondly, have you NO TASTE? I admit I occasionally wear my ugly, white walking shoes to and from work with my work clothes but it is with great shame and literally because it hurts my back to wear my usual flats for such a long distance. I actually realised how dreadful the look was after a short while though and now wear my wicked-cool Vans instead. Not as comfy, but so much better looking.
I see people wearing their graying, out-of-style runners as actual fashion staples and it makes me want to die. If you’re that obsessed with comfort, get a pair of something colourful and fashionable (like these magnificent specimens). Never, ever wear white running shoes out in public unless you are exercising!
