Fun facts!

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The shapes on a PlayStation controller's face buttons aren't just there to make the design stand out. There was an intended use for each one. Circle and cross were meant to be the primary and secondary buttons respectively (yes/no, attack/jump) but they were switched in the West as a circle apparently means "no" here and an X means "yes". Square was meant to bring up the map or menu as it looks like a document. Triangle was meant to center the camera or bring up the map (it looks like an arrow or head). Likewise, R2 and L2 were extra shoulder buttons added to aid camera control. You can see them used like this in games like Megaman Legends and Jumping Flash. When camera control was assigned to the analog sticks they evolved into triggers as you can see on later controllers.
 
If white blood cells were the size of men, men (of 6 foot height, no manlets allowed) would be 75 miles tall.

That's to give you a sense of how large a human body is at a microorganism's scale. The world of that white blood cell is to it as several Eastern US counties is to us.
 
Two of the stuntmen who worked on Orgazmo went on to create John Wick. One of those stuntmen was also Brandon Lee's double in The Crow, and after Brandon Lee died he was his body double for the scenes that weren't shot (no pun intended) prior to his death.
 
The reason why circus peanuts are orange, banana flavored, or even named "circus" peanuts has been lost to history.

They also inspired Lucky Charms.
 
Are you familiar with what it means for animals to mill/mill around?

A mill, in any general sense, is a spinning object. Mechanical mills grind things down by their spinning and are generally spun by some source of power; you mill your wheat and corn to make flour, for example, with the wheel being spun by water, wind, an engine, a mule made to walk around in circles tied to the wheel, etc.

Many social animals and superorganisms are prone to "milling" where they move about in a circle. They move as a herd, the rear always following the back. But should it come to loop around on itself, that the front is now behind the rear, that means you have a closed loop of animals following each other and so they never get anywhere.

In large animals, like cows and sheep, this is common and can be a real problem if it happens during a river crossing, resulting in tramplings and drownings. But the mill will break down at some point since creatures are capable of thinking for themselves when they get hungry/tired enough.

In ants it's much more disastrous. Ants generally don't "think" in the way we think of larger animals as doing, in some sense we are all just organic computers running algorithms, but with them it's a lot more literal, like they have actual (evolutionary) algorithms baked into their heads that tell them the exact response to any stimuli in any specific context. When moving about, ants lay pheromone trails that allow them to find their way home (not being able to reason their way through the task), and in their scouting you get something almost resembling market behavior where things like a good food source will get more traffic which means more signals which means even more traffic until it reaches an equilibrium level of activity at which the rewards of the source properly match the amount of ants that can be enticed and the trail doesn't grow or shrink in activity. (I have some interest in one day writing on a field of "natural economics," because I think a lot of the subject matter economics studies has equivalents in animal and plant behavior).

Where it breaks down completely is when they mill, because the ants are constantly covering the same ground, reinforcing the pheromone signal. Because of that, they will NEVER wander off and will march themselves, by the hundreds, to their very death by starvation/exhaustion.
 
In 1955, Charles Schultz, the creator of the Peanuts comic strip, received a letter asking for the removal of a new character, Charlotte Braun, who was basically the girl version of Charlie Brown, but with the personality of Lucy.

In response, Schultz sent the person a drawing of Charlotte with an axe in her head along with a small paragraph stating that he would, but the sender would have the "death of an innocent child on their conscious", and further asked if they were prepared to handle that.
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In WW2 a US heavy cruiser, USS Indianapolis, was sunk in the Pacific. It went down in shark infested waters and the thrashing of the men attracted a horde of hundreds of sharks that ate anywhere from several dozen to 150 men set adrift. It would serve as part of the inspiration for, and is mentioned in, Jaws.

A direct equivalent exists in the Wars of the Diadochi. After Alexander's death his military junta was dissolving and the generals went to war with each other. One, the regent and douchebag Perdiccas, sent his army from Mesopotamia against Ptolemy's army in Egypt. At the Nile he tried to ford a shallow in the river, but the heavy feet of his elephants disrupted the sediment, and caused the waters to rise. When his men began to loose their footing, the thrashing attracted crocodiles and hippopotami. Many hundreds of soldiers were eaten alive on that day floating in the river and Perdiccas was smote mightily.
 
Bunny Tracks said:
In response, Schultz sent the person a drawing of Charlotte with an axe in her head along with a small paragraph stating that he would, but the sender would have the "death of an innocent child on their conscious", and further asked if they were prepared to handle that.
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He clearly said "conscience," not "conscious." Do not accuse that man of illiteracy.
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Many hundreds of soldiers were eaten alive on that day floating in the river and Perdiccas was smote mightily.
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Human idiocy is such that when we get together and really collaborate at it, millions of us can manage to fuck up so badly that mindless animals like sharks, that is to say, fish, can eat us alive, along with reptiles and other mammals like crocodiles and hippopotami.

Fun fact: one of the deadliest battles in all history was in Korea.

It's currently called the "Battle of Salsu" although they probably had another name for it. It occurred during the second Goguryeo-Sui War, as it's currently called.

At least as legend and wikipedia articles and such goes, it involved the vastly superior Chinese forces being routed by the Koreans because they charged into a dammed-off area to attack their numerically inferior foes, only for them to open the floodgate and wash away most of their army, followed by the Goguryeo (Korean) side charging the survivors.

This is a great story. But every time I think about it I notice how close to Pyongyang all these events were.

So fun maybe fact I guess?
 
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The saying "May you live in interesting times." is often touted as an ancient Chinese proverb (or curse, depending on the source) when in reality, it's not.

The saying, and variants like it such as "May you in living in an interesting age." are all Western, and date from in the last 150 years.

The closest saying that actually comes from China, and could be considered old (though certainly not "ancient") was written in 1627 in the book Stories to Awaken the World by Feng Menglong, which instead goes "Better to be a dog in days of peace than a human in times of chaos."
 
The Empirical Bogey said:
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The shapes on a PlayStation controller's face buttons aren't just there to make the design stand out. There was an intended use for each one. Circle and cross were meant to be the primary and secondary buttons respectively (yes/no, attack/jump) but they were switched in the West as a circle apparently means "no" here and an X means "yes". Square was meant to bring up the map or menu as it looks like a document. Triangle was meant to center the camera or bring up the map (it looks like an arrow or head). Likewise, R2 and L2 were extra shoulder buttons added to aid camera control. You can see them used like this in games like Megaman Legends and Jumping Flash. When camera control was assigned to the analog sticks they evolved into triggers as you can see on later controllers.
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The entire story behind the Playstation's creation is really interesting.
  • Pretty much everyone knows at this point it came about due to disagreements with Nintendo, with the latter getting cold feet at the same event it was presented at. 200 demonstration units were made, and all were presumed to have been destroyed, other than the model owned by former Sony President Olaf Olafsson, which was found as part of his estate decades later and was saved from the landfill.
  • Until that point, no-one knew for sure if the infamous "Nintendo Playstation" image that had been circulating around the internet for decades was real, a forgery, or just another mockup. Olafsson's prototype confirmed the veracity of the original images, with only a few minor differences (greyscale text instead of rainbow-coloured text).
  • We also know what the development kit for the Nintendo/Sony Playstation looked like; its name was the MSF-1 and manufactured by a company called Pulstec, who are known for making X-Ray machines. Only one of these still exist, and it worked by putting the whole machine on top of the SNES' cartridge slot.
  • The Playstation controller is a direct evolution of the SNES controller in the most literal sense, just with shoulder buttons and handles to reduce strain. Around 50 different prototypes were made, including some very weird looking asymmetrical designs.
  • The Playstation logo was created by Manabu Sakamoto because he wanted it to reflect the fact it was oriented towards 3D. Around 30 different designs were drawn up, Google them if you're interested.
  • The Playstation font is Zrnic Regular, created by Ray Larabie.
  • Development on Gran Turismo, the game that became its highest-selling title, started in 1992. It took 5 years to develop and in order to convince Sony that Polyphony were capable of delivering such a title, they were obligated to make Motor Toon Grand Prix. This game included a hidden minigame, "Motor Toon GP R", which featured two realistic-looking vehicles and if you ever played the original GT, you'll recognise the handling immediately.
 
Becky McDonald said:
  • Development on Gran Turismo, the game that became its highest-selling title, started in 1992. It took 5 years to develop and in order to convince Sony that Polyphony were capable of delivering such a title, they were obligated to make Motor Toon Grand Prix. This game included a hidden minigame, "Motor Toon GP R", which featured two realistic-looking vehicles and if you ever played the original GT, you'll recognise the handling immediately.
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That game had the playstation link support and at least in Japan it came with two disks to make multiplayer easy.

Sony had also been on a spending spree buying up studios before the PS1 was released even in Japan(
Another thing people might not know is that when released in Japan, almost a year before the western relese, it was priced the same as the Saturn, equivalent to $499, and they were both released within weeks of each other. Kutaragi also had ideas about releasing a DOS type of thing for it to make it into a functional computer of sorts. It launched with, then later removed, some computer oriented ports that had no use for a console and as far as I know was never used for anything. There was a similar thing going on with the PS2, it had KB/mouse support via USB and the ability to write programs in basic, but only in Europe and that was for tax reasons!
 
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