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.
- We’re starting AND ending with heartwarming animals this week, because I’m writing this on Tuesday and tensions are kind of high. When grazing animals have to be moved up or down mountains or hills at the turn of the seasons, the babies aren’t really equipped to keep up with the whole herd. Enter nanny donkeys wearing pouches filled with baby lambs.
- Hey all, Steve Wille told me something good: One family’s journey to the Sesame Street studios is so pure and good that it must lift your heart.
- Something else that’s good is Halloween, and the way it simmers throughout all of our communities. We can come together for the sake of candy if nothing else.
- You can think of the beloved Mario Mario as your prototypical Sisyphean hero, proceeding from castle to castle in search of something he may never find (I’m not quite sure how those games end), but you can also give him a more self-fulfilled ending.
- It’s possible that looking just at human studies casts a doubtful eye on many uses for medical marijuana & CBD, which casts a bit of a pall on my personal efforts over the past six months or so. Hopefully there’ll be more information as further studies are done…and hopefully the fact that CBD is regulated so lightly that consumer versions might be literally useless can be rectified at some point.
- I wonder if caffeinated consumer products are similarly unregulated, because otherwise I’m not sure how to explain caffeinated energy ham.
- Pizza Hut is building robots that make your pizza in the back of a pickup while it’s being driven to you. Domino’s is paving streets to keep pizzas from being damaged by potholes local governments are stretched too thin or budgeted too poorly to manage. Why is it that pizza chains are the vanguard of dystopian consumerism now?
- The Vikings even had their own, far more metal version of chess.
- I intend to live my life in such a way that I never have to wait for a grill to update its software.
- There’s a beautiful proliferation of mental health assistance animals, now including ponies and otters.
- RIP Danye Jones, the adult son of a black activist whom she literally found hanged from a tree, whose death the cops insist is a suicide. The internet tells me this is a legit fundraiser for his funeral expenses and an independent investigation.
- As we all probably know by now, Twitter is a cesspool of Nazis and/or techbros that’s furiously monetizing us as much as it can before the inevitable end. One must carefully curate a follow list, and find ways to actually see the people one’s following rather than whatever advertising content the site wants to offer up. But there are ways to do this, through third-party apps and such, and there are ways to demonetize your content so it’s harder for Twitter to profit off of you.
- Last week we had an article on internet history, including some of the more significant flash videos we shared in those halcyon days of, y’know, flash video. This week, we have an HD remaster of Rejected!
- I learned today that the Black Sea has so little oxygen in it that a shipwreck can sit in it for 2400 years without decaying significantly. The design was only known for being drawn on pottery, but there one is!
- New Zealand’s Bird of the Year is kereru pigeon, known for gluttony, drunkenness, clumsiness, and general buffoonery. Truly it’s an example for us all.
- Steve Wille strikes again with a perfect encapsulation of the brash anarchism of cats.