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!
- The 21 Best Def Jam Releases revisits some popular classics.
- Found: the next super-duper gadget for cooking shows.
- Kurt Cobain’s Montage of Heck sure is…uh…interesting?
- Twitter serves many purposes, among them offboard memory.
- The Internet Arcade is a massive, and growing, collection of old-school games playable in your browser.
- AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
- Make your online presence a little more secure. Tell a server who you bit in preschool.
- 25 years after it came down, The Atlantic’s photojournalism section takes a look at the Berlin Wall.
- The Dutch are finally starting to move away from their horiffically racist blackface Christmas crap, replacing the blackface with…yellowface? Yeah. Baby steps dismantle racist traditions, I guess.
- The US Potato Board would like to get the humble and yummy potato more deeply involved in the lives of millennials. Hey, I know, make an app!
- Steve Wille, about whom I cannot say enough good things in this life or the next, brings news of a war machine straight out of the suburbs.
- From the repository of all human knowledge: Deleted articles with freaky titles. I’d like to see that list of people without names. (To sidestep the joke a bit, the fact that the repository of all human knowledge deletes anything other than vandalism is, itself, pretty daft.)
- Speaking of the repository of all human knowledge, Listen to Wikipedia translates additions, deletions, and new user accounts into impromptu machine music. It’s oddly nice to have on in the background at work, one Wednesday Walker alleges.
- Archaeological digs come up with the most wondrous things.
- The guy who got arrested for feeding the homeless in Florida is back at it.
- If you’re a copy editor, or a writer of any kind, welcome to your nightmare.
- Everybody sexts, sometimes. (NSFW, obvs.)
- This Week in Things the Human Race Is Doing: landing a probe on a comet. Today!
- This Week in Product Placement: a writer I like is doing a long-term project to analyze the DCAU episode by episode, and he’s using Patreon for it. The essay on “On Leather Wings” just went up yesterday, so if this falls within your wheelhouse you can still get in on the ground floor.
- Why Innocent People Plead Guilty — basically, because prosecutors are comparatively more powerful than defense lawyers, and so people with limited resources to pay for their defense are prone to take a plea bargain rather than go to trial. This is somewhat reminiscent of unrelated articels I’ve seen pointing out that if everyone charged with a crime in the US insisted on excercising their right to a jury trial, the system would crash from overload.
- You probably have five minutes to learn a little about strawberries.
- It seems pretty much definite that an HIV-positive person with an undetectable viral load thanks to treatment can’t transmit the disease to a partner.
- An informal survey of college football fandom (using Facebook likes as data) finds that the five counties with the lowest rates of college football fandom are the five boroughs of New York City. Most of the rest of the northeast follows suit, barring the areas right around Syracuse and UConn.