Welcome to the Wednesday Walk Around the Web, where we weave & wind through weblinks weekly. Hopefully you will find the links on offer amusing, interesting, or informative.
- I woke up on Tuesday and remembered that the Iowa caucuses had happened the night before and I didn’t know what happened. As it turned out, no one else did either, despite the caucuses looking like they always do from the perspective of the people doing the caucusing.
- If all of this is a little too stressful, I get it — my catchphrase these days is “overwhelmed and struggling.” Might I suggest having someone stand on you while chopping you with meat cleavers?
- If there’s one thing I know about gamers, it’s that they’ve had a years-long temper tantrum that quickly lapsed into acts of harassment and launched a domestic terrorist movement about the fact that sometimes women play and/or create and/or have thoughts about video games. If I know two things about gamers, it’s that they did all of those things and they appear to have an innate need to plaster RGB lighting all over everything from their computer peripherals to their computers’ internal components to their gaming chairs to their freakin’ toasters.
- The generation I grew up with must really be starting to edge into cultural hegemony when we can bring back such marginal products as Dunkaroos. This is the same cultural power our parents used to fuel a long-lasting obsession with The Beatles and our older siblings used to fuel a similar obsession with Nirvana, so we must use this power for good. Let’s get round three of Crystal Pepsi too while we’re at it.
- Now that we’re in the year of our lord Beyoncé 2020 and officially living in the future, one wonders whether we’ve already reached peak “look at this TV news puff piece about what wondrous things we’ll have inn the year we’ve managed to shamble into.” Let’s enjoy it while it lasts, at any rate.
- Google uses tracking data from phones to gauge traffic jams. When Google senses a traffic jam it adjusts the directions it gives to other people using Google Maps to send them on alternate routes. Ergo, if you want to clear out a street of all Google Maps users, all you have to do is walk a cheery red wagon full of phones down the street.
- NFL owners want so badly to wring another week’s worth of cash out of the bodies and lives of the players who work for them that they might offer the players almost anything in return.
- Behold the award for the year’s worst sex scenes in literature, a collection of some of the most spectacularly un-sexy (anti-sexy even) writing yet produced. A large percentage of this horrible sex writing probably got that way because the authors thought that writing something that’s actually sexy would be “lowering” themselves to the “inferior” form of literature in the romance section.
- This Week in Art: Eli Minaya’s selection of ghosts are totally mesmerizing.
- Amazon bars its employees from commenting on their jobs and their employers without prior corporate authorization; Amazon Employees for Climate Justice is a group formed by some of those employees who feel that what the company is doing is too grievous to stay silent.
