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? Email Glenn!
- Legend (and continuity) says that only one who is worthy can lift Thor’s hammer…well, someone who’s worthy or someone who or someone who put a thumbprint scanner in the handle. Either/or.
- Forget ornate paintings of religious characters — populate more Renaissance paintings with auto mechanics.
- If you’re going to use one thing as a template when gamifying your life, make it Tetris. I’m still a little too proud when I manage to fit absurd amounts of stuff in available spaces, but really it’s all Tetris.
- This Week in Life Experiences: when your very name breaks databases.
- An oldie but a goodie: Star Trek TNG had a whoooooole lot of plants strewn about among the shiny blankets and thin-looking mattresses.
- How Megan Phelps-Roper left the Westboro Baptist Church. Apparently she did it partially through the power of Twitter communities, so well done there. Also, “We were making specific predictions about things without having, in my mind, sufficient scriptural support” might be the understatement of the year. (Warning: slurs, general & specific bigotry.)
- While bigots & xenohobes across the US flail endlessly about refugees, consider some actual terrorist acts that have been committed in the meantime.
- Retro game fans, come collect Tecmo Super Bowl 2016.
- People in Britain and the US swear differently, and the BBC is ON IT.
- This holiday season, mail your far-flung loved ones the greatest gift of all — yourself. But shipping rates might be variable, so get those packages in the mail right away!
- It’s easy to go after the Hobbit movies, and by this late date the meat has been gnawed off that bone anyway, but apparently the schedule got so far ahead of the production crew that they arrived at the climactic battle the third movie was named after with no pre-prep. Welp! It’s also nice to see Andy Serkis in action directing the movie, since the Lord of the Rings extras showed Jackson directing less and less as those movies wore on.
- Yesterday was World AIDS Day, and while it’s easy to think that the crisis has largely passed because of the development of good antiretrovirals, testing and treatment isn’t equally available to everyone.
