In BirdGut, you try to escape a dystopian society inside a bird’s stomach
It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.
I’ve written about a number of weird games for Short Play, but BirdGut might have the strangest premise so far. It’s about a disabled bee who is kicked out of their hive after being born. The bee manages to make its way through the world, despite not being able to fly, but eventually it’s eaten by a bird. It turns out that the bird isn’t eating insects for sustenance, but rather to brainwash them into mindless slaves who help operate and maintain the machinery inside the bird that keeps it alive. Due to the bee’s bent-over…
Apple’s abacus emoji is wrong
Apple’s abacus emoji is wrong. Or, technically not “wrong” per se, in that you can probably still use it do math if you actually know how to use an abacus (I do not). But still, that ever useful emoji — added in the Unicode 11.0 update to the emoji standards as part of iOS 12 — is apparently incorrect on Apple devices when compared to nearly any abacus used across the whole of human civilization.
The error was first spotted by Twitter user @sophophobic, who noticed that Apple’s abacus configuration appeared to be one that was never used at any point in history.
When in history was a 2:4 abacus ever used?
Greeks/Romans used 1:4 counting stones. Chinese used 2:5 (for decimal or hex). Japan adopted China’s 2:5 via Korea, then 1:5, then…
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Mena Massoud On Being ‘Aladdin’
The latest of Disney’s live-action remakes is Aladdin. NPR’s Susan Davis talks to actor Mena Massoud who plays the title character.