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!
- This Week in Art: One artist’s depictions of mental illness from the inside are rather frightfully accurate.
- (Warning: Very NSFW.) This Week in Art: Alexandra Rubinstein has created a series of paintings of celebrities going down on vulvae in an effort to center (cishet) women’s sexuality more. (This returns to an occasional running theme of the ol’ Walk: if you have a sweetums who wants cunnilingus from you and you don’t give it a good solid try, what are you even doing with your life?)
- Let’s try to concentrate on some good news: Chelsea Manning’s sentence was commuted yesterday; she’ll be released from prison this May, rather than in 2045, for revealing US war crimes. She’ll need a great deal of support to deal with the grievous mistreatment she’s suffered, but it’s a start, and it’s one of the most decent things President Obama could’ve done in his last week in office.
- Women’s struggle to get to pray at the Wailing Wall in Israel has been going on about as long as there’s been a Wailing Wall, and finally there’s progress.
- This Week in Movies: What makes the end credits sequence stand out, and how can it be used to help a film?
- Also in movies: Back in the days of silent pictures, special effects had to be achieved practically. (Unless you were Buster Keaton, in which case you usually just did the damn thing.
- If you’re looking for some nice earrings, or looking to buy earrings for someone special, might I suggest a set of human ear earrings? They’re even available in a wide variety of skin tones!
- This Week in Crowdfunding Initiatives: We in the US need to come together to buy our presidents and first ladies. I’ll take a Dolly Madison in my home office any time.
- Neuroscientists are working on explaining why my grandma called me by my brother’s name at least half of the time, and sometimes my mom did too.
- Students of US religious history and viewers of The New Yankee Workshop will recall the Shakers, who are now dangerously close to dying out, with two remaining members.
- Recycling wind turbine blades is one difficulty presented by increasing development of wind as an energy resource. (Compare, though, to the difficulties of recycling, say, smog.)
- Translate any squiggle you care to draw into equivalent shapes in satellite images.
- It turns out that it’s pretty hard for machines to understand Scottish and Irish accents.
- Try to crush a dictionary with a hydraulic press and you may get a very nice explosion.
- This Week in Animal Relaxation: Do some good ol’ breathing exercises while watching a man use his breath to save a bird frozen onto a rail. There you go, little birdie.
