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.
- This Week in Lockdown Hobbies: The Boardgame Remix Kit takes common board games most people probably have and tweaks them in ways large and small to create new games to keep you occupied. My favorite is the Trivial Pursuit variation that has the players guess the question that goes with a given answer. I’ll start — Little Anthony and the Imperials.
- Look, during this time of strife and risk and danger, it’s important to concentrate on what we can do to help our loved ones, our communities, and our societies. It’s time to come together (not literally, literally quite the opposite of that). It’s time to herd every baseball team into a shared quarantine so they have no choice but to play baseball. It’s egregious enough that that’s already happening with pro wrestling.
- Many people have been showing off their home-baked lockdown bread. But fewer people took it to the next level and made that lockdown bread using lovingly-revived 4500-year-old Egyptian yeast.
- This Week in Recontextualization: If you’ve ever wondered how much national anthems can be improved by transposing them into ragtime, your questions are now answered and the answer is extremely. It should be noted that almost all national anthems are not good (the US national anthem in particular is terrible), but Russia’s and Germany’s are among the best.
- This Week in Oral Histories of Everything: MySpace burned brightly for a time as it morphed from a social network to a music-sharing site to a music-sharing site whose enormous cultural archives got dumped by uncaring admins. There are still, however, some intrepid folks using the site to this day.
- In a far better and more cheerful nostalgia hit for millennials, a treasure trove of music from Homestar Runner is available for your perusal right now.
- Spectacular Scott brings word of the US Army’s development program for a surveillance drone fired from a grenade launcher, or as he calls it, dystopia mad libs.
- If you could unearth any lost treasure in human history, what would it be?
- Every story about the 1904 Olympic games is worth the time, it is such a historically-bad disaster.
- Fashion icons painted as vibrantly-colored skeletons is the aesthetic I’ve always wanted.