My Best Friend is a Vampire!

Well hey, it’s a holiday weekend. Probably time for an After Dark update, huh?

I was pleasantly surprised to see My Best Friend is a Vampire available on YouTube, totally free. I’ve long had a soft spot for this 1987 horror-comedy, which I guess lands somewhere between Deadly Friend and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Enjoy!

Kind of a wash of a summer, huh? As I’ve been telling friends, I think it’ll still be a long time before anything resembles “normal” again. Between what’s already going on and all of the combustible elements yet to come, the rest of 2020 will probably live up to all of those memes about 2020.

In brighter news, we just upgraded some backend stuff on the site which greatly improved Dino Drac’s speed, especially on mobile. So if you’re a regular commenter, there should now be less of a lag!

Oh, and to help stir up some discussion after such a long break between After Dark updates, let’s add a survey!

In the comments, name three random memories about your childhood summer vacations.

I’ll start:

1) On one of the many Wildwood vacations of my youth, we stopped for zeppoles, as we always did. (I don’t think you’re supposed to pluralize ’em like that, but old habits die hard.) My aunt, who was and is a smart woman, told me that zeppoles were made from chicken. She wasn’t pulling a fast one. She actually believed that, and for a year, so did I.

2) The summer of 1989 was the summer of Batman. One neat side effect was the renewed interest in the 1960s series. I watched it endlessly that summer, because IIRC, it was the only “Batman thing” available on television at that point. WPIX ran at least two episodes a day, and I’m sure it wasn’t much different anywhere else in the country. It’s a big reason why people my age — old, but not quite that old — have such nostalgia for the show.

3) On separate occasions, I ate Jumpin’ Jack Doritos and Apple Cinnamon Cheerios while swimming in our old pool. I left them on the little deck that led into the pool, and would swim up for handfuls whenever the mood struck. I was alone both times, and have no idea what led me to bring food out to the pool. In any event, to this day, I cannot hear about either food without immediately remembering the times I ate them while swimming.