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. Do you have a link you want to see featured in next week’s Walk? Comment on the Walk post at the Place to Be Nation Facebook page, or find Glenn on the social media platform of your choice!
- RIP Carrie Fisher. General, Senator, Jewish space princess, script savior, highlight of Blues Brothers, you name it. There’ll be a lot of articles flying around about how this happens such-and-so-long after she “beat her demons,” when she actually reached a point where she could have a stable long-term relationship with her demons. What was amazing about her was her openness and accessibility about bipolar disorder and what it took for her to live with it, from “stay afraid but do it anyway” to all of the photos of her service dog Gary following her around on talk shows and red carpets. How to make Carrie Fisher proud: age without apologies; don’t let your mental illness define you but don’t be ashamed of it either; fight fascism; strangle perverts. May her name be a blessing.
- RIP Vera Rubin, whose work confirmed the existence of dark matter.
- This Week in Poop: Wombats are unique in the animal kingdom for leaving square-shaped shit behind them, because of the shape of their intestines and the length of their digestive process.
- This Week in Surprising Finds: In Roopkund, India, there’s a frozen lake full of 1200-year-old skeletons. I hope everyone’s getting ready for the skeleton war.
- This Week in the Spreading of Human Misery: Malware peddlers of the sort who encrypt your data and make ransom demands have managed to merge their business model with the time-honored pyramid scheme, offering to spare your files if you get your friends to pay up.
- From friend of the Walk Steve Wille comes Rolling Stone’s list of the best lists of 2016. There’s always time for lists of lists, right? Follow through for lists of jokes, the most embarrassing things Chris Long has done, Australian animals that won’t kill you, sandwiches, and more. (Note: the article mentions Kobe Bryant without noting that he’s a rapist.)
- All of our wishes are coming true: R. Kelly (speaking of rapists) is adding new chapters to his epic hip-hopera Trapped in the Closet, at long last.
- Optical illusion rooms are specially built to look great in photos but not make me want to actually step foot in any.
- If you ever wanted a portrait of Sonic the Hedgehog in the style of the Mona Lisa, the internet is the place for you.
- Challenger Deep, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, is the lowest point on the surface of the Earth — almost seven miles beneath the Pacific Ocean. Oceanographers have recorded sounds from the trench to see what’s calling to us from the depths.
- This Week in Good Ideas: Google Docs shared by an entire class for their notes, built simultaneously by all of the students over the course of a semester into a massive resource for everyone.
- Also in class notes, The Infinite Farm is an MS Paint Lovecraftian nightmare that’s supposedly also educational in some way.
- This Week in Medical Advancement: An ebola vaccine is here. Maybe there’s still some measure of hope in the world.
- Learn a little more about vowels, will you?
- The designers at Blind Ltd have put up a gallery of their work on Rogue One, a beautiful collection building off of 70’s-era analogue designs to fill the demands of a 21st-century action blockbuster.
- This Week in Perfect Symbolism: A Confederate time capsule buried in 1895 as a memorial to the supposed greatness of the treason-in-defense-of-slavery movement was opened recently. It was found that, much like the non-country it represented, it’s now just a bunch of soggy garbage.
- This Week in Animal Live Feeds: Lots of people have had stressful holiday seasons so far; lots of people have stressful lives, period. So let’s try to relax, do some deep breathing exercises, and watch the reindeer relax after their task is done. See you in the new year, Walkers.
