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 still need your advice questions for Steve Wille’s guest appearances on the ol’ Spectacular — big or small, we’ll consider them all! Email us or go to our Ask.fm page to send your questions today. (Your name won’t be read on the show without permission (so tell us what to call you if anything), and Ask.fm allows anonymous submissions.)
- For instance, were you to write in asking about how best to plan your life whilst transitioning from young adulthood to adult-adulthood and looking forward to old adulthood, we’d probably tell you to follow your heart, do what feels right.
- Speaking of the Spectacular, we’ll have our yearly breakdown of the Oscar nominees for Best Score this February, and it looks like John Williams will probably be extending his record as the most-nominated living person heading into this year’s awards. Hell, he might as well keep going for a few more years and beat out Walt Disney for the most nominated overall.
- In the US, a national poll asking people’s favorite sport shows a decline in love for football and baseball, as well as an increase in people who don’t have a favorite.
- RIP Dolores O’Riordan.
- This Week in Nuclear Annihilation: Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers, was also involved in various plans that were made by the US defense department for nuclear war, and boy does he have a chilly perspective on that, including estimates of 100 million deaths in the event of a nuclear exchange.
- We all use Google constantly — hell, my phone runs Android, Google knows everything about me — but it serves us well to remember what effects their business model has on their search performance.
- This Week in Star Wars: All of our lives are lived along the rim of the gaping mouth of oblivion, but now we can fill the yawning abyss within with porgs. (That site also introduced me to MythioTaxidermy, an Etsy page dedicated to mythological taxidermy, just in case The Boyfriend is reading and wants to bookmark anything for my next birthday and/or Valentimes.)
- Also, the Last Jedi whiner brigade has its very own cut of the movie to rally around.
- This Week in Video Games: The long-lost prototype of SimCity for the NES has emerged. Like any other game I played on PC, I can’t really imagine playing it on a console, but I suppose people did it on SNES. (In the same vein, I guess you could play DooM on a console, but that must make it way harder to load WADs.)
- This Week in Nonhuman Intelligence: Dolphins are amazing creatures that maaaaaaybe we shouldn’t pen up.
- This Week in Iconography: Red and white striped canes indicate someone who is both deaf and blind.
- In the 17th century, scientist Robert Boyle (you’ve heard of his law if your high school chemistry class was anything like mine) wrote a wish list for future scientific discoveries, and may I just say, for the most part we have crushed it.
- This Week in Intellectual Property: Well done to the folks filing copyright claims on a YouTube video of white noise.