“Hillary Clinton’s 506-page memoir has come out. So much of her personality shines through, that in the end, you, too, will want to sleep with an intern.”

— Craig Kilborn

Amazon: more fun in Japanese


Today’s discoveries:

What’s the connection? “People who bought these items also bought the Queen’s Blade panty-fighter books”… :-)

Dear Hello!Project Costume Designers,


Please stop.

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Amazon S3 results


11 weeks ago, I started hosting my pictures on Amazon S3. All of the vacation stuff, and everything I’ve posted since then, adds up to a grand total of $0.40 in bandwidth fees. And the pages load a lot faster than if they were competing for my carefully-throttled bandwidth.

The Munitions archives would still be potentially very expensive to host there, but for normal stuff, this is a big win.

Downsides of joining Morning Musume, #1: Fashion Sense


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Dear Apple,


Please fix Safari’s tooltips. You’ve gotten a little better at making them go away eventually, but they still often do stupid things like this:

Safari broken tooltips

The only open tab in my browser is viewing Slashdot, but the tooltip in the tab bar still refers to a site I visited an hour ago. And it wasn’t the most recent site opened in this tab.

Who knew?


There are five Kiki novels? Thanks to Amazon’s sudden shift to Miyazaki-related recommendations, I just found out about the translated edition of the first one. The cover has that accurate-but-hideous look common to children’s books (completely different from the pen-and-ink interior illustrations), but the translation is apparently decent.

Not something I’d buy, but still interesting.

渚のデカメロン


[Update: No, I can’t figure it all out. The onomatopoeia is common in Japanese web pages, but not in anything I’ve got, and I basically gave up on the “mean-spirited trick” line. I got the gist of the “sinful whisper” verse, at least. Also, is there a word for a 1.5-entendre? Kurumu’s not exactly being subtle, here. No wonder they call it a “character song”: prehensile breasts, mesmerizing gaze, aggressive affection; yup, that’s our succubust!]

Feel free to sing along…

あなたが好きと ときめくフルーツが
ビキニから はちきれそう
ぷるん ぷるん ぽろん
 
あなたのハート ひとり占めしたくて
気づかないフルで チラリと きわどいポーズ
なのに…
 
こっちを見ないシャイネスボーイ
決めました 強引にいっちゃう!
 
やっふ やふふーっ
SUN SUN SUN パラソルの下で 髪の
星のリボンをほどいて 刺激的な 秘密あげる
NON NON NON はずかしいけれど いいの
あなたをトリコにしちゃう ちゃんと 瞳を見て
恋してる 私 渚のデカメロン
 
とくべつ甘い 真夏のスイーツは
いかがでしょ 抱きついたの
ぷにん ぷにん むぎゅん
 
あわてた顔が なんだか憎らしい
もうすこしワルイ いじわる 仕掛けちゃうから
だって…
 
恋人ライン 越せずに
好きなのに くちびるが遠いよ
 
やっふ やふふーっ
SUN SUN SUN わざとケンカして 逃げる
波打ち際で もつれて 濡れた素肌 つかまえてね
NON NON NON ふるえているけど 平気
あなたの自由にしてと そっと 吐息でいう
耳元で 罪な おしゃべりデカメロン
 
やっふ やふふーっ
SUN SUN SUN パラソルの下で 髪の
星のリボンをほどいて 刺激的な 秘密あげる
NON NON NON はずかしいけれど いいの
あなたをトリコにしちゃう ちゃんと 瞳を見て
恋してる 私 渚のデカメロン

Amazon recommends


I’ve temporarily managed to increase the sanity of my Amazon recommendations. Unfortunately, they’re still useless.

Page 1: 8 Destroyer novels, 4 Girls Bravo manga, 3 Grenadier manga.

Page 2: 2 Ai Yori Aoshi Enishi DVDs, 1 Ai Yori Aoshi manga, 2 Destroyer novels, 2 Kaleido Star New Wings DVDs, 2 UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie DVDs, 2 Nadia DVDs, Castle in the Sky DVD (which I hadn’t marked owned yet), a Hyper Police manga, and disc 1 of Magikano.

Page 3 has another half-dozen Destroyer novels, some more anime DVDs, and some more manga. Ditto page 4. And most of page 5. The first non-anime, non-manga, non-Destroyer item is a Lacie external hard drive at #72. The second is a Logitech universal remote at #79. The list ends at #85, with only three more non-anime, non-manga, non-Destroyer items. Those final three items are the ones I’d be most likely to actually buy, because I’ve already got enough anime, manga, and Destroyer novels to last me for quite a while.

Amazon Japan, on the other hand, has a completely separate database, and I’ve been careful not to over-train it. Its knowledge of my interests and possessions is much narrower, and as a result it offers me hundreds of things that I might want to buy at some point. The first few pages are heavily oriented toward Hello!Project merchandise, but that’s the bulk of what I’ve actually bought from them in the past. The big difference is that there are things I actually want on both page 1 and page 31.

The last few items on page 43 are pretty weak, but page 42 had five DVDs of pretty girls in bikinis, one of which I found rather appealing. Advantage: Amazon Japan.

The net result is that the site I’ve bought more from and rated a wider variety of items on offers me a much narrower selection of items to purchase in the future, and mixes them up poorly, so that most of its recommendations are for the items it has the most of, which are the items I’m least likely to buy that many more of. There are over 120 Destroyer novels, and the only way to keep them from dominating my list is to claim I’m not interested in any of them. Which isn’t true, in the long run, and negatively impacts future recommendations if I do it.

And, sadly, I can’t clean up my “not interested” list, because Amazon’s tools weren’t written to handle 6,000-item lists. Their official recommendation is to create a new account, which just isn’t worth it.

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”