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. Do you have a link you want to see featured in next week’s Wednesday Walk? Email Glenn!
- This Week in Phrases that Lighten Your Day: museum sleepover. Oh yeah.
- Human beings, in our great might, have created an internet-connected tectonic plate, for constant monitoring of and research into the ocean’s floor.
- In Good Night Darth Vader, li’l Luke & Leia have too much darned energy to get to bed, and demand a story from daddy Darth. Watch out for the upcoming announcement from Disney that this book is not canon.
- Arthur Miller’s reflections on New York before air conditioning paint a vivid picture.
- What does one do about stink bugs? Work up your best Mr. Burns voice: RELEASE THE WASPS!
- The Chinese water deer has moveable teeth, to make the rest of us jealous.
- In the US Civil War, soldiers ran on coffee.
- I, for one, deeply admire a well-designed ampersand.
- AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
- Culture and genetics interact more than you may think.
- Do you want to see some stark black-and-white photos of children’s nightmares? Of course you do. Unless you don’t. You do you.
- Joseph Lee provides what would be a sure-fire AAAAAAAAAAAAAA link if we didn’t already have an AAAAAAAAAAAAAA link already this week, so here goes. Wednesday Walk Top Tip: don’t leave your contacts in for months at a time. Just don’t. Please, don’t.
- This integration of Instagram into art theory makes the fascinating point that Instagram and things like it have replaced genres of Western art — food porn for still-lifes, selfies for self-portraits, vacation photos for landscapes — and democratized them by taking image-making power that used to belong to aristocrats and their hired artists and putting it in the palms of our hands. (Slightly NSFW: there’re a few topless women. It’s art.)
- Apparently the Nazis dispatched more than a few U-boats to the Gulf of Mexico during World War II. Welp, didn’t know that.
- This Week in Stop-Motion Videos, Sort Of: grab a fine sander, take half a millimeter off of various objects at a time, and make a video, and you have something pretty interesting.
- Hey, electric shocks hurt, but they’re better than confronting yourself in the long dark tea-time of the soul.
- Futurama looks pretty spiffy in 3D.
- I have a new crowdfunding project for us. Email me!
- Trace some of the history of Nintendo, with five stops.
- In the United States in the first half of 2014, nothing entered the public domain.
- In a five-thousand-year-old archaeological site in Iran, there lies a six-foot-tall woman who had a gold-plated prosthetic eye carved to look like the sun. And you thought you were cool.
- We have all, perhaps, been using the wrong salts at the wrong times. Maybe I should speak for myself.
- You don’t really want to run away from home. But sometimes it’s your only choice. (Contains descriptions of child abuse and other forms of violence.)
- This Week in Bad Ideas: loving The Bible so much that you eat it.
- Never Forget: if you’re a moon-landing conspiracy theorist, Buzz Aldrin might punch you.
- In our PTB Nation Link of the week, once again, I hope you’ve been keeping up with the Movies of the Generation.
