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.
- Go inside the fascinating world of a modern stonecarver.
- The mellifluous Steve Wille brings us a lovely piece about friendship found in the psych ward.
- Both Steve and the auspicious Jason Greenhouse bring word of what can happen when runners go bad. Behold The Mad Pooper of Pine Creek.
- When Ta-Nehisi Coates has a new major piece, it’s a must-read.
- In a slight contrast, we’re at the point now where the latest anti-fascist allies are the juggalos. You know what, they say you have to build a big tent. Welcome aboard.
- It hasn’t even been cold yet and we’ve already achieved Peak New England Autumn, as a person plans to float across Boston Harbor in an enormous pumpkin.
- I feel like Guillermo del Toro really understands what we need to get, spiritually, from our entertainment media in these trying times.
- Let’s check in on the video games, where important information about Waluigi is finally coming to light.
- Let’s check in on comics — how’s Marvel doing with its recent jaunt into fascism?
- This Week in Linguistical Hijinks: Translate a movie from English to Chinese and back again, and you get a big improvement to the Star Wars prequels.
- Lie detectors are junk science, and always have been.
- This selection of lunchboxes from the 1870s to the 1980s does include the Return of the Jedi lunchbox that I’m pretty sure is still sitting, rusted and dented, in teh back of my pantry.
- This Week in Power Tools: There are a couple of different, competing methods for automatically stopping table saws when we jab our dumb fingers into them. One method jams a one-time-use cartridge into the blade, requiring you to replace the now-wrecked blade and the safety cartridge (and maybe your work gloves), but leaving you with your whole hand; the other method uses a different type of cartridge to push the blade down beneath the table without permanently damaging it. Obviously, the company making one of them sued the other one. There’ve been a few decisions against the second company, but it seems people who bought their saws can still get replacement cartridges for now, which is really good since the safety features are useless without them. And really, what we all want is for fewere eople to get their fingers sawed off, right? Right?
- While we’re on a woodworking kick, this butterfly illusion cutting board is bloody gorgeous, and it’s amazing to watch it come together. (I literally whispered “oh my god that’s beautiful,” and that was before he hit it with the mineral oil to make the colors really pop.) It turns out this person’s entire YouTube channel is full of awesome wood products.
- This Week in Hand Tools: It’s important for wrenches to feed their young. That way we get good healthy wrenches for the future.
- Toys R Us is in deep, deep trouble.
- PTBN overlord Brad Hindscrooge brings word of the mother of all custom D&D gaming tables.
- “If humans ever again venture past low Earth orbit and outward toward, say, Mars, someone is going to get hurt” is a little more directly threatening than you might expect from an article on the potential surgeries people might eventually need to perform in space.
- Whenever folks do set off for Mars, though, they’ll have a flag to bring with them.
- Amazon is searching for a location for new corporate headquarters, which of course means it’s searching for a city it can extort for more tax breaks than any other one will offer. One of the candidates for mayor of my hometown blurted absurdly to the local newspaper that she thinks she can get Amazon to come here; meanwhile, we already have a military contractor that doesn’t pay any tax on its facilities, so we’re good on massive corporate handouts.
- I for one welcome ice cream commercials in which the concept of narrative has wrapped up around itself.
- At least one rubber band company promises to weave graphene into its rubber bands to make them obscenely strong. That’s nice and all, and I don’t know about you fine folks, but the main killer of rubber bands in my house is sunlight.
- This Week in Music: The rise and fall of fadeouts in music is really interesting.
- Tolkien himself reads from The Hobbit. His Gollum is interesting.
