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, occasionally, profound. Views expressed in the Wednesday Walk do not necessarily reflect those of anyone but the writer. Do you have a link you want to see featured in next week’s Walk? Comment on the Walk post at the Place to Be Nation Facebook page, or find Glenn on the social media platform of your choice!
- Typically when you hear people talking about the Right to Repair, they’re referring to things like cell phone cases that aren’t designed to be opened, batteries not designed to be swapped out, jailbreaking operating systems, &c. Now it also refers to farmers who can’t fix their tractors, because they operate using proprietary John Deere software protected under the DMCA.
- The US navy’s real-life USS Enterprise is being decommissioned.
- Last Week, on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day (set in January to mark the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army), it seemed very important to consider people who could’ve been saved if the US had admitted them as refugees. Never Again isn’t just a slogan — it means never again anywhere, to anyone.
- By the way, the new US administration’s statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day neglected to mention Jews or antisemitism at any point, supposedly because there were non-Jews who suffered too…which is absolutely true, but to literally All-Lives-Matter the fucking Holocaust is almost unimaginable. Surely it can’t be because the administration is riddled with and supported by real-deal neo-Nazis moving up from dog-whistling to whatever this is.
- In British Columbia, a person who became enraged at someone else’s parking failures attempted to slash their tires but accidentally stabbed himself as well. I mean, I’ve been angry enough to stab myself, and may have done so in extremely light ways a few times, but not because of a lack of physics comprehension.
- There’s a new promo video teasing Star Trek: Discovery, the series that started filming last week and was supposed to air last month. When we’ll actually get to see it, nobody quite knows. Ah well. They’re actually filming, with actors and sets and costumes and licensing deals; it has to show up on my screen at some point. Hope it’s good!
- If you’re going to drink, and that’s a decision you have to make for yourself, you should drink something magical.
- PTBN head honcho JT Rozzero sends word of the discovery of humans’ oldest known evolutionary ancestor, a friendly fellow who’d like to make your acquaintance. “The researchers were unable to find any evidence that the animal had an anus, which suggests that it consumed food and excreted from the same orifice,” so it’s bound to be a hit at parties.
- Coming to Japan: the soap-and-water-proof phone, fully washable so you can clean off everything your grubby fingers left on there.
- This Week in Street Art: Ecuadorian graffiti is being corrected for unclear or downright incomprehensible grammar by some people of good heart and sound mind.
- There is so much more to disco than you know.
- AIs are getting better and better at poker. I bet they have great poker faces.
- This Week in Good News: The Boy Scouts have decided to allow boys to enroll.
- If you ever want to find your ol’ reliable Wednesday Walker, just get on the train going to DHCP config and follow it to the end of the line. There you will find me.
- It’s impossible to catalogue all of the intersecting horrors of the present moment. The last week has seen attacks on mosques in Quebec and Texas, surely among others, following the president’s Islamophobic tirades. The acting Attorney General who resisted the move as illegal was summarily dismissed, while court orders in New York City and Boston lightened the restrictions at their airports, for now (long enough, at least, for many of those detained on the day of the order to be released, thanks in part to the work of lawyers who showed up at airports to work pro bono, to the great exultation of the people affected and protestors who’d showed up). (Meanwhile, the NYC taxi union went on strike in solidarity with the demonstrators while Uber and Lyft kept on merrily operating their independent-contractor schemes, so fuck ’em.) Also, three waves of bomb threats against Jewish community centers have come in the last month. This is a tiny, tiny snapshot of the multifaceted fuckery afoot in these times. I trust you’ve all heard about the press secretary tweeting what seemed to be his Twitter password…thrice.
- Hard as it may be to believe right now, sometimes celebrities get elected to political office and it’s not a terrifying bigoted garbage disaster, such as when it’s a masked wrestler getting elected.
- This Week in Animal-Based Relaxation: When zoos get into a Tweet-fight about which baby animal is the cutest, we all win.
