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.
- This Week in Nightmare Fuel: What’s the scariest story you know is true? (Content warnings: all of them)
- Electronic traffic signs are often easy to access by anyone who knows how to program them, including this hero without a cape. Or maybe with a cape — who knows!
- This Week in Video Games: If you’re feeling some nostalgia for the original Civilization, you can now play it in the universal cross-platform environment of Microsoft Excel.
- This visualization of web browser usage share highlights the near total dominance of Internet Explorer, until Firefox finally overtook it…a few years ago, by which time everyone was already just fighting for Chrome’s scraps.
- If you happen to have a Commodore 64 or an IBM PC or an Apple ][e banging around your house, get that thing on the internet already.
- If you’ve ever looked at your pet and wondered how many hit points it has, the Polygon YouTube channel is here for you.
- As the millennial generation reaches our mid-thirties, the nostalgic thinkpieces about everything we liked when we were kids will keep rolling in. Personally, I’m just fine with more celebrations of neo-dadaist absurdity like Homestar Runner or Badger Badger Badger as a refreshing contrast to previous generations’ childhood obsessions like, y’know, The Beatles and such.
- Of course, if you go back a century or so, you’ll find that extremely intricate taxidermy used to be a much more valuable hobby than it is with the kids these days.
- The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the attack on the Or L’Simcha synagogue. After some debate over what to do with the $15 thousand award, the staff decided to donate it to the synagogue.
- Dark Shadows, Place to Be Nation Dot Com’s very favorite supernatural soap, is BACK baby!
- I learned this week that Barry Manilow wasn’t only a pop sensation, he also wrote a lot of commercial jingles, and even performed some of them at concerts. He wrote the songs, he wrote the songs!
- Hurricane season can be a logistical and existential nightmare for lots of people in the path of the most powerful storms, but every issue is magnified for people who can’t afford to evacuate.
- This Week in Word Games: Kangaroo words contain within them their own synonyms.
- Full disclosure, science journalism has its issues, including overemphasizing one person’s or one study’s or one discovery’s implications — and now you, dear reader, are getting this third- or fourth-hand — but “our universe exists within a black hole” is a doozy.
