Every story on OPS is a story a contributor heard from someone else. These stories have been overheard and misheard, told and re-told and sometimes refined over time.
"Our interests extend to the wondrous, the curious, the singular, the esoteric, the arcane, and the sometimes hazy frontier between the plausible and the implausible." a whacky collection
"Historiophoty" is Robert Rosentstone's term for our representing history visually and filmically; in contrast, according to White, is "historiography," representing history verbally, in prose.
"Time-lapse photography allows us to easily see the movements of plants and clearly demonstrates that plants are living organisms capable of some extraordinary things." various phases of plant life, both on cellular and external level
narrative+history+pictures+encyclopedia; "safe, fast and fun way to learn the real story behind historic events, famous people, heroic exploits, legends, disasters, movies, plus topics of current and general interest"
a science game: "a virtual Darwinian aquarium .. you initiate a primordial soup, and .. check up on what Virtual Mother Nature is up to - about every 15 min. (or every few days)"
how-to videos or, more commonly, audio/slideshows; useful rhetorically for both technical writing and instructional video learning; web2.0 sharing of video that is perhaps instructionally more useful than YouTube.
a very large historical archive, often from advertising, "to provide for all levels of possible viewer a visually orientated taxonomy of the ways in which pictures are used to tell stories." unique collection, also useful for many other purposes