Digital Lands Unknown

Aug 01, 2025

Today’s post is a little different. Unfortunately, there will be no story, essay, or poem. Instead, I have three announcements. Let’s start with the good news. . .

1. The Curious Platypus is now on YouTube!

That’s right folks! The Curious Platypus is spreading his flippers and venturing to digital lands unknown. Diving into my archives, I’ll be going back to the very beginning to read out many of the pieces I’ve shared here in the last two and a half years. So, if you’re a new subscriber this would be a great way to check out some of the stories you might’ve missed. And if you’re one of my long-time homies, then this could be a great way for you to listen to my beautiful Aussie accent accentuate some of your old favorites.

The Curious Platypus YouTube is - here.

I’ll be posting a new audio piece each week for the foreseeable future, and I would absolutely love it if you could like, subscribe, and do all that other good stuff. The first piece is up now!

2. Platypus Emoji Update

A few months ago, I shared a piece campaigning to get a platypus emoji created – the necessity and importance of this is so obvious it needs no explaining. Well, unfortunately, I have bad news. . .

After looking into it, I discovered that there is actually a governing body that approves or denies all emojis, (who knew?!). And like all bureaucracies, there is a shocking amount of red tape that goes into getting any emoji across the line. There are rules and guidelines. An application process. And even a four year wait after an application has been denied before another application can be lodged. That, my platypus-loving-friends, is where the platypus emoji finds itself – trapped in bureaucratic perpetuity.

As the screenshot above shows, in 2022 some noble soul tried to get the platypus emoji across the line, but for whatever hellish reason, the application was denied. Which means another application cannot be lodged until 6/4/2026. And so, this is my promise to you – when that fateful date arrives, I will be the one lodging that application. Until then, however, we will all have to do our best to get by in a world without a platypus emoji. I know, I know, it’s horrible, but we must stay strong.

3. The Great Substack Glitch of 2025

As some of you already know, (since I’ve been DMing you poor bastards behind the scenes), my Substack publication has been plagued with some sort of technical glitch. Several things have been affected, but by far the worst, was that some of my subscribers stopped receiving my posts. The posts didn’t show up in their inboxes, their spam folders, and nor did they appear in their Substack feed. Poof! They just disappeared.

I don’t know how long this has been happening, but I suspect it started sometime in late 2024. In fact, I only found out about it because some of my awesome subscribers, who’d stopped receiving posts from me, were diligent enough to click over to my page to discover that I’d been posting the whole damn time!

Anyways, thanks to some of my wonderful Substack friends, I’ve figured out that the only way to correct this glitch is for those affected to follow the steps below.

To test whether your email delivery is working for a publication:

1. Navigate to, https://publicationname.substack.com/account/email-test

2. Sign into the publication and select, "Send test email".

3. If you see a "You have disabled email delivery for this account" message when testing the email delivery, this means that you've unsubscribed from the publication. To receive emails again, you'll need to re-subscribe to the publication.

If you were affected by this glitch, you won’t need to re-subscribe, somehow, just receiving the tester email seems to resolve whatever issue was causing the glitch.

Here’s the wrinkle, though – anyone who is still affected won’t receive this post. (Yay for technology!) So, because I don’t know what else to do, I’ve decided to tag all of you. I figure that way, if you are affected then hopefully, you’ll be notified about this post and be able to resolve the issue. And if you aren’t affected, then this little glitch-resolution-technique can just act as a sort of public service announcement in case any such thing ever happens to your publication.