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.
- This Week in Games: Imagine you wake up one morning and find, to your horror, that you are Jeff Bezos. There’s only one thing to do. Get rid of all of his money.
- Then again, if you feel like blowing a load of money on a significantly less worthy cause, you too can have a Batmobile.
- Another thing you can do with great wealth, just as an example, is give it to cats.
- I’m all for the occasional jovial theft, depending on the target (for example, if someone would like to steal all of Jeff Bezos’ money, please proceed). However, a giant inflatable colon made by the Cancer Coalition to teach people about the danger of colon cancer should probably stay put.
- Open offices are so harrowing that people are now developing horse blinders for you to wear to try to create some sense of privacy.
- There are so many cookie-cutter dinosaurs on TV and in movies that it’s worthwhile, every now and then, for paleontologists and artists to get together and make simulations using the latest research.
- Every day, moment by moment, we choose who we’re going to be. You have the ability to make each decision the way the person you want to be would. Even if you’ve faltered in the past, even if you’re a person who harrasses a neighbor for putting up a wheelchair ramp for his boyfriend, even if you’ve chosen to prioritize some cultish “curbside value” nonsense over the lives and needs of other human beings, you can choose to stop doing that. Everyone has that chance.
- A British NFL game is a festival of cross-cultural delights, including food items that the vendors at Wembley can tell customers is standard US fare, such as a two-foot-long hot dog topped with mac & cheese, which to be fair is not far off.
- Ancient peoples created constellations in the shape of figures that held meaning for them. It’s only fair for us to do the same.
- There’s been a lot of strife about public monuments that have no business remaining standing, so it’s refreshing to find one that’s right and good and proper. I give you, friends, the brass Columbo.
- The average person can recognize 5000 faces. I, who can pick out 10 to 15 on a good day, am an outlier adn should not have been counted.
- When I read that composer Michael Giacchino wrote a ballet, my ears perked up. When I read that it’s based on his score from Jupiter Ascending, my whole head perked up. It’s one of his better scores in some respects, but my MY what an interesting choice.
- Remember when news outlets laid off writers & print journalists en masse because it was time to pivot to video? About that…it kind of turns out that Facebook was massively inflating viewer counts on videos. Welp. As I saw someone point out on the Tweety, accessibility advocates were among the first Cassandras about the great video revolution, and news organizations did have the option of, y’know, listening to them.
- Time for some unalloyed good news. In LA, 90 million dollars of juvenile court debt is being voided, hopefully improving conditions for the people who’ve been laboring under all of that debt.
- If the books of the Bible were gifs. I was waiting to get to Song of Songs, and I was not disappointed when I did.
