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.
- This Week in Holiday Pranks: This series of Ferrero Rocher tricks & goofs truly takes the cake. There’s keeping your dad on his toes and there’s undermining the idea of sweet comfort.
- Atlantropa was an ambitious if misguided scheme to drain the Mediterranean Sea for the sake of…throwing the shipping economies and border politics of every country in southern Europe and northern Africa into complete chaos? Because that sounds like a great way to throw the shipping economies and border politics of every country in southern Europe and northern Africa into complete chaos.
- After seeing the Green Book trailer I thought it seemed dated but inoffensive, but it seems that it’s actually dated and rather offensive.
- This Week in Cannibalism: Shipwreck survival cannibalism, of the sort you read about in stories of drawn lots and gruesome murder in lifeboats, was completely accepted in British society until one case in 1884 when two people ran afoul of the complex legal loopholes surrounding it.
- Whooooooooooooooooooooooooooooops!
- This Week in Intellectual Property: In Australia, court orders against piracy are also targeting subtitling sites, alleging that creating a subtitle track for a movie qualifies as pirating the screenplay. Because why should it be easier for folks who are hard of hearing to watch movies anyway.
- Reporters Without Borders maintains a list of the deadliest countries for journalists, which after a particularly disturbing year now includes the US. Happy New Year, everyone!
- RIP Felipe Alonzo-Gomez, who died on Christmas Day in the custody of US broder patrol.
- This Week in Video Game History: In 2017, we here at the Wednesday Walk noted the first leaks of the prototype ROM for Nintendo’s 16-bit SimCity. Almost two years later, there’s more in-depth information about the game available, including a page at the Internet Archive where you can download the ROM.
- This Week in Space: Saturn’s rings are degrading, and will eventually be gone. If there are beings on this planet in 300 million years looking around at the other planets, they may never know the rings were even there. What wonders did we come along too late to see?
- For the Into the Spider-Verse score, some orchestral parts were recorded, transferred to vinyl, and manually scratched to mix the final tracks. I’m pretty sure I haven’t heard that in a major motion picture before. (Also the movie is exciting and heartwarming and funny, and you should check it out if it’s remotely adjacent to your interests.)
- This Week in Infographics: When a movie is Based on a True Story, how true is it really?
