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.
- Okay, I KNOW supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony, but efforts to get a mandate from the masses haven’t exactly been going great, meanwhile a girl literally named Saga literally pulled a literal ancient sword from a literal lake, and I’m thinking we could all use the little bit of hope we might be able to get under her rule.
- It’s always possible, of course, that Saga might take inspiration from Olga of Kiev.
- This Week in My Generation’s Childhood: The writer and performer of the Animaniacs Nations of the World song are back with a new verse covering the countries that’ve sprung up in the last 25 years. Also, apparently they’re doing Animaniacs again in a couple of years??
- It really is a scary time for men right now.
- Teen-aged dolphins don’t respect their elders; they just hang around getting high on puffer fish toxins. Soon they’ll be off to have fun with some dead fish, no doubt.
- Now, dolphins having their fun is one thing, forcibly dosing lobsters may be another. Of course, go down that road and you might arrive at veganism.
- When I saw a header saying that An American Tail was made into a terrible video game I assumed, sure, everything was made into a terrible Nintendo game in the 80s. No no, dear reader, the terrible American Tail video game was made in the year of our lord Janelle Monae two thousand and seven, for the PS2. And it really is quite bad.
- Meanwhile, if you want to relive other PS2-era memories, turn on the retro skins for Tomb Raider.
- Speaking of video games, it seems KFC isn’t just in the new WWE games, it’s a whole branding division now, apparently including Fortnite. I can’t wait until the Duncan family gets their hands on the Colonel.
- This thread is pretty insightful about the ways that our setups affect our gaming experiences even aside from in-game cultural issues.
- Also in video games, it’s nice that Steam decided to commemorate Columbus Day earlier this week.
- There are legitimate reasons for some people to want to use those newfangled digital assistants, but there have to be ways to do so without giving your whole life to a corporate surveillance device. Especially freakin’ Facebook, come ON now. (Except for your Google phone and your Amazon streaming device and your smart TV and everything you install on your laptop…you know what, one thing at a time.)
- Speaking of forking over your information, one cafe near Brown University will give students coffee in a direct one-for-one trade for personal information and consent to be advertised to. Which I guess is maybe more honest than asking everyone to sign up for a store card and selling the data anyway?
- The Alternative Limb Project highlights some tantalizing artistic possibilities for prosthetic limbs.
- In Michigan, a citizen recently discovered that the stone he was using as a doorstop for decades is actually a meteorite. I think I speak for the whole PTBN family when I congratulate the Duncans for this amazing discovery.
- This Week in Historical Predictions of the Future: The only thing we’re missing from this vision of the future from 1906 is the antenna coming from our hats, which some folks might actually have for mobile hotspots anyway.
- I need to renew my library card if they’re going to start stocking books of cheese.
- I’m not planning to see the Venom movie film for theaters, but after reading this history of the character, I just hope the movie conveys Venom’s inherent horniness and the thirst people have for it.
- PTBN Grand Poobah Brad Hindscrooge brings us our traditional animal finale with his discovery of every cat’s favorite Sega CD game.
