We went to see Children of Men tonight. It was really good, but so bleak and horrible and haunting that I don’t know if I could see it again.

It’s also the first time movie a movie reminded me of a video game. It wasn’t merely the dystopian/post-apocalyptic story and setting, which is common to video games like Half Life, Fear, and many others. It was the look and feel, the way we were given little clues to the back story, and the feeling of both engagement and inevitability.

The thing is, at least some of what made it remind me of a video game are things which made video games remind me of movies when I saw them in the first installment of Half Life a decade ago. I’m not really that big a gamer, I might play a game or two a year, and I’m not a big movie goer anymore, so it’s interesting that my frame of reference seems to have shifted.

Amazon has launced Endless.com, a new brand & website focused on shoes and handbags. Over on TechCrunch, Steve Poland is puzzled about the Endless, wondering

“did Amazon really need to launch an entirely new brand for this new shoes/handbags shopping experience? I understand people are use to the consistency of the standard Amazon.com shopping experience, but what about launching an enhanced shopping experience option in each product category on Amazon.com ?”

Handbags and shoes are major fashion items. As such, identity is everything, and shopping for a high-end fashion item at Amazon is a bit like shopping for it at Wallmart. The purchaser is going to feel that it’s tainted by tacky.

There is something larger at work too. Amazon has built a lot scale in the past decade. But to do so, they’ve had to offerer a pretty narrow range of shopping experiences. That’s served them well to this point, just as Henry Ford did well offering one model of car in one color. To hold onto their position now, and continue advancing, they need to start offering differentiated experiences, like GM did by offering different colors, models, and ultimately, brands.

Endless is Amazon’s first foray in that direction, and in time, i’d expect that they’ll start offering white-label e-commerce services that can allow a similar degree of customization.

Saddam Hussein was executed today (good riddance). I doubt it’ll mark a big change for the prospects for the future of Iraq, or the remainder of the Bush administration, but it conveniently allows the US as a whole to avoid consideration of the way his full list of crimes are entangled with the history of US foreign policy (particularly with respect to anything related to the long, bloody, and ultimately indecisive Iran-Iraq war).

Yesterday my wife decided to turn on comments on her blog and this morning, she had her first comment. The content of the comment was kind of trivial, but it was on the subject of the blog post, it also contained a link to a post on another blog. The linked post was also relevant, but I was still suspicious. A little later, I was checking the traffic stats for her blog and noticed that the only visitor to her post in the past day was from India, which seemed odd, since the commenter was purportedly in North Carolina.

We went back and looked at his blog more closely, and then looked at some of the comments he’d left on other blogs. They were starting to seem a little spammy, so we decided to unlink the text in his comment.

I’ve since done a little more digging, I searched on “static96-217.staticcal.vsnl.net.in” which is the name from the reverse DNS lookup on the host that left the comment. It shows up a lot, mostly for sites that have their web traffic stats crawlable, but I found a few where it is clearly associated with script generated spam comments. I suspect that it’s either an open proxy, a compromised machine, or someone doing link spamming to make a little money who has started to offer a bit of a human touch.