Viewing the Honest Trailer for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (featuring Michael Bolton) reminded me just how creepy the adult-child interactions are in that movie.

That got the song Pure Imagination running through my head, and things went downhill from there…

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶
Come with me and you’ll see
what it’s like to live by child predation.
What you’ll find in their hearts
is fear, shame, and degradation.

To begin, take a spin
on one of my deviant creations.
Here your sins won’t require expiation.

If you want to do little kids,
I will teach you how to find them.
You can sneak up right behind them,
drag them to your van, then gag and bind them.

There’s a place you can go
to wallow in pure degeneration.
In my lair you’ll be free
to commit atrocities.
🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Scott reports, you decide:

My gaming laptop started getting really flaky (first one USB port went, then two more, then the wireless and HDMI out, etc) a couple of weeks ago, so I ordered a brand new Alienware 15. It arrived on Wednesday and I started the process of downloading and installing Windows updates, Steam, Fallout 4, etc. The only problem was that it kept going to sleep during the downloads. No matter what I changed in the power settings, it kept going to sleep.

As it turns out, some idiot at Dell thought it would be a good idea to install and enable by default eyeball tracking software that puts the laptop to sleep if you look away from it for “too long”. (Where “too long” is no more than a minute or two.) Needless to say, that package has been removed from the machine.

There’s a short story just begging to be written here, where an enterprising hacker releases ransomware that, instead of asking for bitcoins, hijacks the eye-tracking software and demands that you watch ads all day. Or just shouts “show your tits!” whenever it detects a college girl using a laptop.

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This showed up on Takitumblr today, after being spotted on Twitter. It turns up in a lot of “wacky Japan” roundups going back years, and of course I immediately ID’d the color printer as Miki Fujimoto, a graduate of the Hello!Project School of Fashion. Seriously, who else are you going to hire to dress up like this?

Your recent announcement that 32-bit iOS apps will stop working in iOS 11 means that 58 of the apps on my iPhone won’t work. This includes all of my Japanese dictionaries, the best dice-roller app, quite a few paid games where your store policies give them no reason to do the upgrade work for free, the only decent barcode scanner (that is, it is both accurate and doesn’t auto-open store web pages to try to sell me what I just scanned), Google Earth, Hyperdia, all of AAA’s apps, and, perhaps most importantly, BrianAlarm, which wakes me with the gentle sound of Brian Blessed.

If I have to choose between iOS 11 and !!BRIAN!!BLESSED!!, guess who wins? 😏

There is a partial workaround, at least…

“Former hotel chef” Aoi Gotō is the latest in tasty dishes served up fresh by Japan’s gravure magazine/DVD industry. Age 22, so “chef” may be a bit of a stretch, but her bikini credentials are excellent.

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Ongoing MasterCook molesting now up on github. I took advantage of the very restricted formatting of their XML-ish MX2 format to write cat/grep/ls tools, as well as a quick-fix for a common format issue in files imported from MXP format. It would be trivial to write those sort of tools for the XML versions, but working in MX2 is handy for things you plan to re-import to MasterCook (since I haven’t written an xmltomx2 converter yet…).

Worth seeing on the big screen, which is something I haven’t said about a DC movie in many years. For that matter, I can’t remember the last one I said was worth seeing at all.

Apart from some shots that were ruined by being designed for 3D (which I never bother with; I’m a Monday-morning-matinee cheapskate), I thought everything looked great. Gal Gadot gives an excellent fish out of water, coming of age performance, and the rest of the cast holds it together nicely. I even liked the child actors.

Amusing note: one of the previews for this film was Atomic Blonde, which was absolutely filled with ridiculous chick-fu combat scenes that required more strength, speed, and stamina than James Bond and Jason Bourne put together. Wonder Woman can fight against men that way; human women cannot, and I don’t see anything about her being a cyborg. Also amusing was the “fight like a girl” trailer for the new Transformers movie, which carried a message of grrrl power and nice tits, which is always important when you’re watching giant robots bash each other into scrap metal.

Update: The BluRay pre-release is currently #11 on Amazon. I think it’s a hit…