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How the Platypus and a Quarter of Fishes Lost Their Stomachs. The platypus is an anthology of weirdness. It has a leathery duck-like bill, a flattened tail and webbed feet. The males have a venomous claw on their hind feet, and the females lay eggs. And if you look inside a platypus, you’ll find another weird feature: its gullet connects directly to its intestines. There’s no sac in the middle that secretes powerful acids and digestive enzymes. In other words, the platypus has no stomach.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:01 PM PST - 27 comments

Still mourning the death of Flash, and with it an entire era of online gaming? Enter ooooooooo.ooo (9o3o), the new searchable (and playable!) web frontend for the incredible Flashpoint preservation project. Browse over 145,000 preserved Flash games powered by the Ruffle emulator, and share your favorites with a simple link. Highlights: DICEWARS - Fly Guy - Alien Hominid - Samorost - Crimson Room - Nanaca Crash! - Line Rider - Don't Shoot the Puppy - Bloxorz - Gimme Friction Baby - The Impossible Quiz - Portal: The Flash Version - Feed the Head - Sprout - Achievement Unlocked - QWOP - Cursor*10 - Dino Run - Grid16 - Meat Boy - SHIFT - You Have to Burn the Rope - 6 Differences - Canabalt - Don't Shit Your Pants! - Nevermore 3 - Small Worlds - Don't Look Back - Redder - VVVVVV (demo) - Synopsis Quest - The Room Tribute - The Scale of the Universe - Mitoza - Wonderputt - Bullet Bill 3 - Frog Fractions - Dys4ia - Snakes on a Cartesian Plane - Want (gulp) more? Download Flashpoint Infinity to stream over 156,000 games from 70+ platforms (including Shockwave, Java, and Unity) plus over 27,000 animations... or clear some space for the monster 1.76 terabyte Flashpoint Ultimate to store every single file locally. So much more inside! [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:04 PM PST - 71 comments

Greek and Roman epitaphs can be touching. They can also, in the case of Allia Potestas, even be risqué. But they can also be horribly, incredibly embarrassing-- as in the case of Aphrodisios of Alexandria Troas, as seen in this short by the great Stefan Milo. This tombstone at the Louvre, recently translated into English by Chaniotis and posted on Twitter by Roko Rumora, has to be seen to be believed. [more inside]
posted by suburbanbeatnik at 11:46 AM PST - 59 comments

You are Atlas. You hold up the sky. A (very silly) not-really-a-game by Aidan Strong, who also has a blog with interesting thoughts on gaming.
posted by AndrewStephens at 11:38 AM PST - 15 comments

Welcome to my [Robert Reich's] final UC Berkeley course on Wealth and Poverty. [YT playlist, 14 lectures, ~1h30m each] Drawing on my 40+ years in politics, including my time as secretary of labor, I offer a deeper look at why inequalities of income and wealth have widened significantly since the late 1970s in the United States, and why this poses dangerous risks to our society. Class 1: “What’s Happened to Income & Wealth” [1h30m] Each class page has a link to a syllabus of notes and readings in the "more inside" of the description.
posted by hippybear at 11:27 AM PST - 43 comments

xAI is a new company founded by Elon Musk that sets out to Understand the Universe. [more inside]
posted by flabdablet at 8:56 AM PST - 101 comments

... when it was live back in 2020, but I've just found these photographs online. "What started as only one phone reaching across the square, ended in an invitation to all neighbours to connect via a string phone. We installed 16 phones criss crossing the square spanning up to 60 meters. We played string phone whispers, watched artist Rubie Green perform a sound piece through one of the phones and cut the strings a the end at the count of three." [more inside]
posted by Paul Slade at 8:07 AM PST - 7 comments

Historians at the Movies is a community building and public history project run by Jason Herbert, Ph.D. Started as a social media Sunday movie watch party in 2018, HATM celebrates its 5th anniversary this weekend with a viewing of Titantic. [more inside]
posted by the primroses were over at 7:44 AM PST - 6 comments

“I play fiddle and banjo music from black and Native American musicians, mostly in the Southeastern United States, which is not a genre, but a sentence.” Jake Blount has been reinterpreting Black folk music through a modern lens, producing what he terms “Afrofuturist folklore”. [more inside]
posted by adamsc at 6:59 AM PST - 9 comments

Cat-Scan.com is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why.
posted by Melismata at 6:44 AM PST - 76 comments

Is Troye Sivan’s ‘Rush’ Sexy Fun or Gay Detritus? "We decided to get one gay who remembers the release of Kylie Minogue’s 'Locomotion' and another gay who is too young to remember the release of 'Can’t Get You Out of My Head' to debate whether this track is actually a Bop or Flop."
posted by mittens at 6:23 AM PST - 22 comments

Video Game Fashion Week 2023 [Polygon]: We’re digging into all sorts of angles on how games and fashion converge, from the evolution of Link’s hairstyles to the ruthless nature of Style Savvy to game-themed makeup tutorials and what it’s like to live a week as Mario. If you want to learn, reminisce, or simply appreciate the lengths people go to style your favorite characters, you’ll find plenty to love here. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:16 AM PST - 20 comments

But the full story of boiled peanuts, and peanuts in general, is far from celebratory, as it is also the story of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. When the Spanish colonized the Americas, starting at the end of the 15th century, they brought peanuts back to Europe, and the heat-loving legume was later brought to Africa by the Portuguese. According to Robert Deen's The Boiled Peanut Book, the peanut’s nickname, goober, is said to come from the word nguba, or peanut, in the Kongo and Kimbundi languages. The plants thrived, and the peanuts returned to the Americas alongside people who would never see their homelands again. So while the peanut itself is indigenous to the Americas, the cooking process is African, and this process has spread around the world, the result of intercontinental trade, colonization, slavery, and immigration. from The Global Love of Boiled Peanuts
posted by chavenet at 12:02 AM PST - 23 comments