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 informative.
- RIP George Floyd, murdered by cops.
- The COVID movie is inevitable. Every book and TV series and gimmick Twitter account and TikTok will eventually be adapted for the silver screen, should the operation of movie theaters ever become possible again. The COVID movie is so inevitable, in fact that production is set to begin before the lockdown is even over. It’s set in the far-flung future world of 2022, in a world where nations and municipalities lifted lockdowns prematurely and the virus was allowed to periodically reinfect large populations — in other words, the movie isn’t ripped from the headlines, future headlines are going to be ripped from this movie.
- This Week in Lockdown Pick-Me-Ups: The cast of Into the Woods is here for you, now more than ever.
- I am very glad that there are people who can experience the feeling of ebullience. I think the closest I get is when I see such joyful images as these promotional posters for the Hong Kong ballet.
- This Week in Advertising: Faux-inspirational ads about How Much Women Are Changing Things Now and how Young Girls Will Solve Everything, made by companies with more than sixty-percent-male executive boards and multiple pending sexual harassment lawsuits, seem even more insulting than the rest of the faux-inspirational ads floating around about every other subject. As an exercise, dear reader, please watch the first 90 seconds of this video and guess what the last twenty seconds will reveal. No cheating now. Let me know what you guessed!
- An exciting new small-town locally-oriented farm-to-table pizza restaurant is making its way onto the fine dining scene: Chuck E. Cheese.
- Nostalgia is, as John Hodgman says, a toxic impulse. But I think there are some things worth bringing back, like some good old-fashioned phone phreaking.
- We all know that The History Channel has turned into (perhaps always was, to some extent) an unceasing train of silly, schlockey nonsense. But when you lay the pieces of that nonsense next to each other and consider their totality you really gain some perspective on just how terrible it is.
- If you’ve ever wondered whether standard digital and/or analogue connectors can be repurposed to run electronic thrusting sex machines — and really, who among us hasn’t — boy have I got the detailed exploration for you. Like all of Foone’s threads, it’s a real deep dive, with a firm grasp on the topic at hand.
- This Week in Tech: An artificial taste transmitter is…not required. We can probably do without this one. Especially if they adapt it to the form factor of a friggin’ vape.
