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.
- We still need your advice questions for Steve Wille’s guest appearances on the ol’ Spectacular — big or small, we’ll consider them all! Email us or go to our Ask.fm page to send your questions today. (Your name won’t be read on the show without permission (so tell us what to call you if anything), and Ask.fm allows anonymous submissions.)
- Intel is getting ready to get into the market void left from the sputtering failure of Google Glass, this time with the stunning revelation of actually making their product look like glasses.
- This Week in Celebrity News: Richard Pryor definitely banged Marlon Brando. Sometimes history is pretty cool.
- A couple weeks ago I noted the advancement of a Polish law officially denying any responsibility or complicity in the crimes of the Holocaust. Recently I saw this article about an old Jewish cemetery that was dug up to put in a parking lot. I’m sure these are isolated events unrelated by any cultural trend.
- Water transfer painting, in which a design is placed on top of a pool of water as a thin film that then coats the surface of an object placed into the water, is really mesmerizing.
- I always appreciate a good paean to Tetris.
- The Unicode Consortium has admitted a new batch of emoji into its standard set, and here’s the skinny on which ones you’ll be using for your most important messages.
- This Week in Neural Net Processors, Learning Computers: Our robot overlords are writing messages on candy hearts now, just in time for Valentimes. STANK LOVE indeed.
- L.L. Bean is getting rid of its infinite return policy, because we’re not allowed to have anything good left in the world.
- Netflix’s new Queer Eye for the Straight Guy reboot is out, and of course Queer Eye means something a little different in 2018 than it did in 2002 in terms of how different ideas of masculinity play off each other. (The episode with the cop was seriously uncomfortable at times, though.)
- This Week in Poetic Justice: PTBN head honcho JT Rozzero brings word of a big game poacher who got eaten by the lions he was presumably poaching. Insert a standard note about not liking to gloat about anyone’s pain or death, including family, friends, &c…and also insert your favorite Nelson Muntz pic here.
- I did not know that choirs imitating thunderstorms was a thing.
- Lots of people who gather GPS tracking data from our devices say there’s nothing to worry about since the data is anonymous. Except sometimes it doesn’t matter if there isn’t a name attached to, say, fitbit data if people are carrying their fitbits at closed-down military bases and nuclear power plants.
- It’s tax season in the US, as many of us take documents our employers also send the government, write them down on forms we get from the government, and send them back. It’s more than possible to have pre-estimated tax forms that you can correct if needed, but that you can also complete in a few minutes if there’s nothing to add to what your employer already sends the IRS, except of course that might affect someone’s business model.
- Tom Hardy put a cup over his face and started spouting Bane lines at his dog. Your argument is invalid.
