…a young Alexis Denisof appeared in the first version of the video for a terrible earbug of a song recorded by George Harrison. I didn’t make the connection until today, because the only reason I remembered it was the tasty bit of jailbait Our Hero was angling for. And to be honest, when I watched it again after so many years, I gave little thought to the identity of the boy.

Sadly, no one seems to know who the girl was.

The latest version of Amazon’s recommendation page is built around tiles of categories, with one or more items composited as the representative image of the category. I find this less-than-useful, because I generally have no interest in the representative items, making me less likely to click and see what the other recommendations are as I skim across the page.

Also, the categories seem to be based on user-supplied tagging, so that things end up in unusual places. For instance:

The 7 “children’s books” were: Zelazny’s Madwand, four of Smith’s Lensman novels, Sabatini’s Captain Blood, and some random guy’s Sherlock Holmes story. So, the representative image is something I don’t need to buy (an $8 ebook of a novel first serialized in 1939), the category name is something I don’t want, and the actual search results are mostly things I already own.

My actual wishlist for the Amazon recommendation system is a “less like this” button, so that the first N pages of results won’t be dominated by things related to a single recent purchase, like a watch, a box of coffee pods, or (ghod forbid) a Destroyer novel (seriously; never buy a book in a lengthy series (150!) without marking it “don’t use for recommendations”).

I have no idea why Debbie Gibson’s “We could be together” has been going through my head for two days. But if I have to suffer, the world has to suffer.

Seriously, I don’t know what set it off. Maybe the disease in that last game of Plague, Inc. was a little more viral than I thought…

(NSFW)

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Same book, new edition:

(via)

Update: a link to Ian Livingstone’s twitter feed, with more revised covers, and a sample of the interior art.

Duck invasion? Have no fear, Mizuki Hoshina’s on the job.

(NSFW? With rubber ducks? Say it isn’t so.)

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I’ve been killing time with Plague, Inc on my phone recently, and after trying out a few names for my lethal creations, I think I derive the most amusement from calling it Kittens. As in “Kittens is about to wipe out the human race.”

And in the process of looking up their web site, I discovered it’s on Steam for Windows, Mac, and Linux now.

Update: “Hello!Project” makes an excellent name for a virus. As we know from my costume archives, they mutate rapidly. Unfortunately, it’s hard to get them to spread if you start in Japan. Must be the “no boyfriends” clause.

A movie that was more entertaining than its premise promised. Zero rewatch value, and about as quotable as a phone book, but a decent way to pass an evening, and free on Amazon Prime Video.

It really felt like I was watching a loud remake of Highlander. I kept quoting MacLeod and The Kurgan, and was honestly disappointed that the scientist/hostage/babe didn’t get to reenact Brenda’s bit from the final battle. I was so looking forward to Our Hero saying “what kept you?”.