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 Copyright Abuse: Someone made a Grand Theft Auto mod with exploding Samsung phones, because this is what happens on the internet, and Samsung decided that complaints about copyright infringement are the way to get it taken down, somehow.
- When you walk into your voting place, a great big smile on your face, keep in mind these handy lines, so that you can vote on time.
- This Week in Things That Turn Out to Be Useless: You need spend none of your time on butterfly boxes, unless you like all of the things that use them instead of butterflies.
- Richard Sherman: great football player, or greatest football player?
- This Week in Cooking: It took me until the last couple of years to become well and truly enamored with my slow cooker; I tend to pick up habits in waves in the effort to make more fresh food than frozen/fast stuff, and the easiest way to avoid stopping for drive-through on the way home from work is to have a stew waiting at home. Now, it seems, I may have to get a pressure cooker too. Someday, when I have more counters. (The latest habit I’ve picked up: tossing a fistful of fresh spinach into nearly everything, so I can say I ate a damn vegetable and try to feel good about something I’m eating for once in my life. Scrambled eggs, soups, pasta sauces, sauteed mushrooms…y’know, the basics. And yes, it makes a fine salad on the rare occasions that I both remember and force myself to make a salad.)
- Bats with hee-yuge ears and/or noses don’t care for your petty standards of bodily beauty. Also: bonus wind tunnel analysis of the effects of such huge ears on flying animals!
- The economics of rotisserie chickens versus home-cooked chickend get a little muddled depending on how you compile the costs. It seems more cost-effective, on a technical level, to cook a chicken at home as long as you can do so reliably and you disregard your time — and isn’t it always that way with your own labor?
- Facial expressions are dependant on culture and not innate or universal.
- Fifty years ago, a human-made disaster in a Welsh mining town wiped out almost all of the town’s small children along with other residents. (This is a heavy one. Child death, trauma, PTSD, the whole lot…plus fraud and other economic monstrosities regarding the globally-funded charity donations following the disaster.)
- Via podcast guest Alanna: Christmas is coming to (mostly) everyone from Stranger Things.
- The Standing Rock Syllabus is a good introduction to Native issues, specifically the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline.
- Also in introductions to deeper issues, Ask a Korean has a detailed and somewhat lurid guide to the ongoing downfall of the South Korean President, ranging from shamanistic rituals to ghostly visitations to more traditional political corruption.
- Boaty McBoatface may not have been accepted as the name for the boat it was supposed to be, but Boaty is still contributing to the advancement of science, which is of course what really counts.
- So, Vine is being discontinued (yeah yeah, the archives are sticking around — on the Internet Archive, in time, to protect against the corporate folks deciding to pull the plug later), a fate that particularly sucks given all of the young people of color who thrived there while Twitter is increasingly consumed by harrassers and trolls.
- Meanwhile, in Canada, exhausted geese are falling out of the sky along their migratory route. That’s rather frightfully reminiscent of the polar bears that drown because their seas have become too warm to support enough ice for them to climb onto.
- Research into hormonal birth control for (cis) men is ongoing, so that’s heartening. Apparently it’s hit the snag of causing unpleasant side effects for some test subjects…which, to be fair, more common hormonal contraception does too.
- Come with me, if you will, on a journey that draws its thread through They Live, communist propaganda, Andre the Giant, dinosaurs, and the Mozilla logo. It’s a hell of a yarn.
- This Week in Leaving on a Calming Note: a dog might have the best day of their life when their owner shows up dressed as their favorite toy. (These might not always be pet stuff, but…y’know, they’ll probably be pet stuff.)