Do We Need More Emojis? 264
mikejuk writes to note that the Unicode Consortium has accepted 38 new emoji characters as candidates for Unicode 9.0, including characters depicting bacon and a duck."Why could we possibly need a duck? Many of the new characters are the 'other half' of gender-matched pairs, so the Dancer emoji (which is usually rendered as Apple's salsa dancing woman) gets a Man Dancing emoji, who frankly looks like a cross between John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever and your dad at the wedding disco. ... Other additions include carrot, cucumber, and avocado, and bacon. ... The list of additions is rounded off with new animal emojis. Some are the 'missing' zodiac symbols (lion and crab). Others are as baffling as ever – is there *really* a demand for a mallard duck? Sorry: it's in fact a drake!
couldn't hurt (Score:5, Funny)
the long slow death of literacy could not possibly be harmed by more emjois.
Re:couldn't hurt (Score:5, Funny)
I chuckle when people frequenting the site that invented "RTFA" complain about other people using shorter sentences.
Re:couldn't hurt (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:couldn't hurt (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but now there's bacon...
Re:couldn't hurt (Score:4, Funny)
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We're moving back to dumb terminals anyhow. What's another aspect of life making the slow march towards regression?
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That is just a standard fluctuation in the computing market. It moves back in forth from centralized to de-centralized systems. Normally based technologies available, and how we use the data available to us.
Re:couldn't hurt (Score:5, Insightful)
We moved on from hieroglyphs since writing by hand was so tedious anyone bothering could be assumed to be serious in unclear cases. Since writing and sending messages has moved on to an everyday form of personal communication, it also requires a concise way to express tone and emotion a non-professional writer can manage. And in practice that means some form of smileys, so we can as well optimize them.
Technology exists to serve people's needs, after all.
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Since writing and sending messages has moved on to an everyday form of personal communication, it also requires a concise way to express tone and emotion a non-professional writer can manage.
You mean an idiot? Instead of expecting people to exercise their language skills, we're just enabling stupid people to be more stupid. Their last motivation to learn to speak properly was to communicate with other idiots like themselves, and emoji shits on that.
Meanwhile, they're actually a really shitty way to communicate, because they are far more difficult to tell apart on a small screen than are words. Emoji are stupid, and people who use them are stupid by extension. But we knew that, because if they w
Re:couldn't hurt (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Why would you think I did? Apart as a rhetorical prelude to your following tirade, of course, but surely an expert communicator like you you could launch into one without having to twist other people's words into a springboard?
And believing that you of course used a telnet client to read this discussion and post your message, since a "browser" makes the process easier, thus letting even you manage it? Or does it only apply to skills you already (mistakenly think you) are good at, thus completely coincidentally maximizing the chance that you have an unfair advantage in any interaction?
Grammar and spelling exist to faciliate efficient communication. Trying to use them as a barrier to silence people you dislike for whatever reason means you not only missed the mark, but somehow managed to get a bullseye on your own asshole. Though judging by your attitude, that's easier for you than most.
Smileys are only relevant to written text, not spoken word. Furthermore, unless it's one specific emoji you're concerned about, it's "emojis shit", not "emoji shits".
This is the first and only relevant or even remotely intelligent point you've made in your own sad attempt to communicate. And if you insist on using a mobile device which lacks a zoom function yet supports less-used unicode characters, and use this device for the type of communication where it's critical to be able to tell a smiley from a frowney, it might actually make sense to ask people to take this into account when messaging you. But frankly, that sounds like a very specific corner case that has little if any relevant to designing technical standards for common use.
And yet your message would had been improved by replacing most of its content with oral bestiality. At least then you could had blamed it on a computer virus rather than whatever is infecting your central nervous system, and even if you'd failed you'd come across as a mere pervert rather than an arrogant shithead who wants to make life more difficult to other people for the mere reason that you think it should be. It would also have provided more value to this discussion, or any discussion.
Re:couldn't hurt (Score:5, Insightful)
But did you? Y'know, to practice your skills?
So your convenience matters, but other people should "exercise their language skills". How utterly unsurprising.
Really? Because this is what you actually wrote: "Instead of expecting people to exercise their language skills, we're just enabling stupid people to be more stupid. Their last motivation to learn to speak properly was to communicate with other idiots like themselves, and emoji shits on that. [slashdot.org]"
So tell me: if smileys enable "stupid people" (to use your elitist terminology) to express the thoughts they wish, which is the logical requirement for them to replace some other form of communication, such as written text, in what way would disabling them "empower" said people? All it does is make communication less convenient and thus less frequent. Of course, if that's your actual goal, your means make perfect sense.
I assure you, my dislike of your ideas and attitude is quite sincere. Also, perhaps you shouldn't call people "idiots" and expect a polite response. Douchebags exist to deal with shit, after all.
Such as? And in any case, if they can render modern fonts, which are vector graphics, making said smileys part of the font should actually solve this problem. Or at least let you read the HTML source, which you above imply you're capable of doing.
Because malevolent bullcrap like yours is slowing down progress everywhere I look. If you want to communicate solely through six-page hand-bound letters written in calligraphed Oxford English, that is certainly your right. And if someone else chooses to use pornographic smileys to imply that getting a blowjob from a duck turned out to be a bad idea, that's theirs. But no - you insist on having a say on how they may or may not communicate, for their own good of course.
Re:couldn't hurt (Score:5, Interesting)
We moved on from hieroglyphs since writing by hand was so tedious anyone bothering could be assumed to be serious in unclear cases. Since writing and sending messages has moved on to an everyday form of personal communication, it also requires a concise way to express tone and emotion a non-professional writer can manage.
Excuse me if the following sounds a bit exasperated, but you do realize that people actually communicated informal messages to each other written form BEFORE texting, right?
People wrote letters and postcards, and they've been doing this for centuries. People wrote office memos and short notes to loved ones, either left in a box for someone to pick up or perhaps carried by courier to the recipient. Once the telegraph was developed, people sent telegrams and paid by the length of the message, so they often managed to communicate extraordinary emotions in a few lines of text. (I have the telegrams sent between my grandmother and grandfather when my mother was born during WWII and my grandfather was overseas. You can easily get the emotions they were experiencing from the short texts; it's quite moving, actually.)
I don't think you realize the extent that people used memos and couriers in the days before telephones, or the extent that people wrote informal postcards to each other or short letters on a regular basis to keep relatives and friends abreast of ongoing events. Mail used to even be delivered multiple times per day in many places in the U.S.
While handwritten notes sometimes could include graphical symbols, most people didn't make a lot of use of them, because text is so efficient at conveying ideas.
And we already have symbols to express written emotion and tone -- they're called punctuation. Even a "non-professional writer can manage" to use them. The main ones are ! and ?, but you can also convey quite a variety of emotions through combinations: !! vs. !? vs. ?! vs. ??, or even things like (?) or (!), etc.
A little personal anecdote: a few years back, I happened upon some letters sent between my grandparents during WWII. Actually, both of my grandfathers served overseas during WWII, and I have letters from both of them. A few things to note:
(1) They didn't seem to need emojis to express a considerable range of thoughts, ideas, and emotions. (It's very moving to read some of their letters.)
(2) They possessed a better grasp of written grammar, usage, and style than most college undergraduates I've taught. They still made errors, but I assume the fluidity of their writing is due to lots of practice in casual written communication (as was incredibly common back then).
(3) They weren't professional writers. In fact, one had attended school to 6th grade and the other had attended only until 4th. (This was also fairly common in the U.S. before WWII.) Yet they somehow got enough out of "grammar school" back then to be able to communicate in writing on a level comparable to at least a high-school graduate today.
I've seen enough examples of letters written by other relatively lower-class soldiers in wars (in documentaries, etc.) to know that my grandfathers weren't outliers either.
And in practice that means some form of smileys, so we can as well optimize them.
"Smileys" are/were somewhat different. Most "smileys" were used in place of actual facial expressions: a grin, frown, wide-eyed look of surprise, wink, etc. There's no direct verbal equivalent to these facial expressions, but they could of course be simply represented as *wink* or [grin] or whatever too, utilizing only a couple more characters.
The set of easily recognizable facial expressions is relatively small. Even if we include common and nearly universal body language gestures like nodding, shaking the head, and "thumbs up," we might only need a dozen or so such representations to convey expression/gesture.
But as you say, emojis are no lo
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When they moved off hieroglyphs, I expect the reasoning was more political than an actual analysis of the benefits of changing.
You know that getting taken over by Rome stuff. Having the population and demographics shifts where people from other cultures gets integrated in the culture where some of their ideals and values get moved in.
Now there was probably some level of communication loss by leaving the hieroglyphs, that its alternatives never really did pick up. Now as time goes on perhaps we should allow
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Re:couldn't hurt (Score:5, Funny)
The real reason Slashdotters don't like emoji is that this site, in 2015, still can't properly display Unicode anyway.
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Re:couldn't hurt (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd like to be able to use Chinese in my sig.
And no, we do not need fucking emoji in the standard. Especially not when there are still actual *writing* systems that haven't been properly handled yet.
Re:couldn't hurt (Score:4, Insightful)
The Chinese, and to a lesser extent other Oriental and east Asian cultures, are what are driving the adoption of these new emoji. As you probably know, Chinese characters are ideograms, little pictures representing things and concepts. It's hard to describe just how influential this has been on Chinese culture... I guess it's kind of like a emoji of a carrot is sort of pun, almost.
So yeah, while I agree that there are huge problems with Chinese in Unicode and other issues that need addressing, these emojis are already in use in China (special software support on phones and in IM apps like QQ) so they should be supported. The goal is to support all forms of written communication, and these characters are in common use.
The ones added for completeness, e.g. male counterparts to female emoji, are obviously important for other reasons.
Re:couldn't hurt (Score:4, Interesting)
The Chinese, and to a lesser extent other Oriental and east Asian cultures, are what are driving the adoption of these new emoji.
No, just stupid ones. It takes a real idiot to think "this picture-writing system that we've got has been a stone around our neck limiting our ability to express complex thoughts for two thousand years... what we really need is another picture-writing system".
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There are plenty of loanwords in English which still retain diacritics, as well as a few personal names. Everywhere else I just type them: on Slashdot I catch them in preview and have to replace them with HTML entities. So yes, there's a workaround, but it's not a good user experience.
Re:couldn't hurt (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't edit them away. Let them stay in all their misrendered ugliness.
Slashdot should be fixing their bugs, not us working around them.
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this site, in 2015, still can't properly display Unicode
I don't think that's really the problem. A web site with UTF-8 encoding does not have much to do to get unicode to be displayed correctly. The site merely just has to let the characters go, any recent browser then displays the codes appropriately. The reason slashdot does not show unicode (first byte above 0x7F) is because the characters are filtered out, either when being recorded within /. database, or during the transmission up to the browsers.
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I consider that a feature, not a bug.
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And now, for the first time, I'm happy that it doesn't.
If they ever add it, please, please, please also add a "rate all posts using emojis at -5" filter at the same time.
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Clearly that terminology didn't exist, since that derives from the boxes printers kept their type in. However the concept did, as can clearly be seen here: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmh... [bbc.co.uk] Perhaps you're thinking of the Romans?
I never saw much sense in referring to things that don't p
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If emojis are supposed to convey emotion, hopefully in a standardized fashion, what's the emoji for sarcasm, universally agreed to and understood?
emojis are supposed to convey emotions, which is not to say emotions are all represented by an amoji. Do you eat bananas? Are you a chimp?
Betteridge's law of headlines (Score:2)
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Is wrong.
This update is very critical. Finally we have a facepalm emoji!!!!!!
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You just did. Just sayin'.
Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no (Score:3)
We got enough glyphs -- we don't need a fucking symbol for every idea / concept / etc.
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If the Japanese were able to modernize their language in 46 Hiragana glyph I don't see why we should tolerate that Chinese non-sense in unicode
The Japanese language has over 2000 standard characters, and even more in common use.
Anyway, Chinese is a beautiful language, you should learn it some time.
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But only 46 Hiragana characters. You can write anything in Japanese using only hiragana if you wish, with the exception of loanwords, though native speakers may look down on you as semi-literate if you do so.
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The real issue with those idographic languages isn't character count, it's staying current. New characters are introduced over time, which means the unicode standard needs constant revision to add them, and fonts need regular updates to add the new characters too.
Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no (Score:4, Informative)
The Chinese wouldn't add more kanji. They might add more hanzi, though.
You are aware that the Japanese still use several thousand kanji in addition to hiragana and katakana, right?
Oh, and the Chinese do have at least two systems for phonetic representation--zhuyin and pinyin.
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Yet Emoji actually came from Japan.
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Yet Emoji actually came from Japan.
The name did. The Emoji signs actually developed in parallel, and we still mainly use the emoji native to the West. For instance, Japan: ^_^ West: :-) The icons are just graphical representations already establish systems of emotional tags in chat.
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The choice of symbol can even be a signature of subculture affiliation. It's not uncommon in the furry community for those playing birds to use the :>, :>- or /:> symbols. They correspond to the standard smiley, 'silly' and 'questioning' respectively.
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Re: Fuck the Chinese (Score:2, Funny)
Don't flame me for posting anonymously. My job at strategic defence command forbids identifiable posts.
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Disagree, if you're going to do emojis at all, you need to do every possible concept, most of them several times for nuances of expression.
Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no (Score:5, Insightful)
Several of these really need to be generalized. We're getting male/female/black/white/asian/etc. variants of everything, needlessly complicating the system. Unicode has inflection support - just mark that 'male' or 'female' is an inflection, like an accent mark. Combined characters, for one glyph.
And yes, that means the 'standard' is gender and race neutral. People might make assumptions; deal with it. It's better than doing 'this is a smiley, and this is a female smiley'.
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Agreed, but this is the bitter price of incremental improvement: backward compatibility.
Maybe it's time to open a new "expanded emoji" section with inflection dimensions and leave the old ones where they are for backward compatibility.
But, how many varieties of avocado will we need? http://ucavo.ucr.edu/avocadova... [ucr.edu]
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Already done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Hopefully one day people will stop making jokes about this sort of thing and just accept that gender isn't binary or simple.
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We already have a pig emoji for that.
Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no (Score:5, Funny)
And yes, that means the 'standard' is gender and race neutral. People might make assumptions; deal with it. It's better than doing 'this is a smiley, and this is a female smiley'.
This is exactly what we would expect a man to say.
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And yes, that means the 'standard' is gender and race neutral. People might make assumptions; deal with it. It's better than doing 'this is a smiley, and this is a female smiley'.
This is exactly what we would expect a man to say.
How can you tell the gender of the generic smiley? You are the sexist person if you assume it is male. It has no male markers.
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Would you smile if you were being repressed? No, you wouldn't. So clearly it's male, and you're a rapist.
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Is it just me, or does every article become an MRA self-pity fest nowadays? Honestly, this crap makes me miss the creationists....
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We got enough glyphs -- we don't need a fucking symbol for every idea / concept / etc.
I would agree with you, but not before they introduct an emoji for "Ah fsck, I know I went out to pick up some more nappies and baby formula but they had a discount on beer right next to the entrance and after I got that I forgot about the baby stuff because they had beer nuts as well, those little crunchy ones where you can eat a ton of them without them making you feel sick, and then I ran into Joe, you remember Joe, we were at school together, and what with one thing and another I completely forgot the n
Who proposed tem? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Who proposed tem? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are people out there who want new for new's sake. They are desperately bored with their lives and demand novelty. Long-term thinking is alien as well as boring. They're going to demand the mallard duck and the avocado, cheer when they are approved, and then never use them. Next round of Unicode, they'll have more dumb ideas to include.
Coming up: Unicode 16, when the committee gets fed up with all these dumb symbols that nobody uses and purges the list.
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I read that the point of these food emojis was to be able to universally indicate allergies/intolerance/diets on restaurant menus. Which seems like a good reason.
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There are people out there who want new for new's sake. They are desperately bored with their lives and demand novelty. Long-term thinking is alien as well as boring. They're going to demand the mallard duck and the avocado, cheer when they are approved, and then never use them. Next round of Unicode, they'll have more dumb ideas to include.
Coming up: Unicode 16, when the committee gets fed up with all these dumb symbols that nobody uses and purges the list.
Everyone wants to lift their leg and etch their mark on the Monolith. For example, I have my very own IANA-allocated SNMP Community Enterprise Number [iana.org]. It has four digits in the mid-5000s allocated some 20 years ago and since they're up to ~46,000 now that makes me an Internet alpha male. When I'm drinking at bars late at night I rehearse pickup lines in my head, you know, let's get out of here and I'll show you my private IANA SNMP CEN. Over the years it's really paid off and I'm now well rehearsed, able
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I call this the "Greenpeace syndrome". After having achieved ones goal, the organisations' continued existence becomes the new, unspoken goal.
For Greenpeace this meant taking on new targets which had nothing to do with (or were almost opposed to) the original goals (which is why Patrick Moore left).
For the Unicode Consortium, having come close to including every existing character, this means inventing new ones to include and grasping for straws.
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You really live in a fantasy world if you think the world has stopped polluting and destroying the worlds ancient natural environments.
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Greenpeace wasn't founded to stop pollution or preserving old nature. It was founded to stop nuclear testing.
Those other goals might well be good goals for an environmental group and this is not a criticism of going after these goals.
I'm just using Greenpeace as an example of an organisation that could have been the breeding ground for new groups, but instead chose to justify it's own continued existence by drastically altering it's own purpose.
Likewise, standardization of smileys might be a good goal, but
oh, why bother? (Score:4, Funny)
"Other additions include carrot, cucumber, and avocado"
can't we be honest and just put a long skinny dick, a thick dick, and a stubby thick dick, so that people don't have to use vegetable analogues?
otoh, this way we can text shopping lists and sexual encounters/anxieties with the same symbols, so i guess it makes some sense.
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Also flipping the bird/giving the bird. :P I just use an online/1 liner ASCII art: ..!..
eh? drakes are ducks, male ones (Score:2)
you know what's scary, drake penises
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I don't find them scary at all. I find them absolutely fascinating. Biology Gone Wild, basically. Really neat stuff going on there.
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New meaning to cork screw.
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I'm not sure what you are implying there, but I just did a google image search for drake penises, and there were many pictures of black guys.
These emoji selections are so random! (Score:2)
At least they should try to come with "thematically complete" sets!
We already got a burger emoji and fries emoji... where is the soda emoji? Instead they give us redundant single/double beers emojis.
We also got a bike emoji and surf emoji, but no skate emoji. Instead you have redundant snowboard and an ski-set emojis.
Some things that usually go together are sorely missing... some other are complete bonkers.
O.o
No. (Score:2)
The Unicode Consortium (Score:3)
To me it seems like the Unicode Consortium is just trying to "justify" their continued existence, as the main job they set out to do was finished several years ago.
Re:The Unicode Consortium (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever heard of any committee anywhere voluntarily disbanding?
voluntarily disbanding (Score:2)
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Have you ever heard of any committee anywhere voluntarily disbanding?
FWIW [yale.edu],
The (informal) standardisation of Haskell 98 was an important turning point for another reason: it was the moment that the Haskell Committee disbanded. There was (and continues to be) a tremendous amount of innovation and activity in the Haskell community, including numerous proposals for language features. But rather than having a committee to choose and bless particular ones, it seemed to us that the best thing to do was to get out of the way, let a thousand flowers bloom, and see which ones survived.
Was the summary written in emoji? (Score:2)
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one emoji per Chinese character (Score:2)
I suggest just getting it over with and making one emoji for every Chinese character. We can then smoothly transition to writing in pure emoji.
I don't believe this (Score:4, Insightful)
Some of you guys are complaining about bacon? What is wrong with you people?
Fixed Headline (Score:3)
Batman (Score:2)
Batman emoji is the one I'd use the most. Surprised it wasn't isn't the original set.
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Because of silly copyright that is why.
Yes! anything to keep sites using text (Score:2)
We need unicode symbols for whatever people want to express. Otherwise sites will use clip-art or other proprietary things.
No (Score:2)
Emoji to express rage over excessively Emojis (Score:2)
Emoji 2: moderate rage about Emojis
Emoji 3: oncoming rage about Emojis
Emoji 4: pure bafflement preceding rage about Emojis
The consortium needs to finish human languages (Score:4, Insightful)
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Keep adding them until he can add a picture of himself. In various different moods.
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If I was in charge of the world, unicode and my world government would support the top fifteen languages, or thereabouts. All lower-popularity languages would be documented and designated for systematic eradication via the educational system and mass-media, thus bringing us a little closer to a utopia where anyone can communicate with anyone else and access all the accumulated knowledge of civilization without being segregated by the linguistic barrier. It'd help avert wars too - hard for a country to decla
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That guy needs to get off his high horse. White people designed computers. White people designed unicode in an effort to allow non-white people to use computers. White people apparently made an honest mistake when creating the code points for a complex, and to them largely unknown language. And apparently white people must fix it, because I don't see this guy doing anything but bitching about it.
Oh, and I'm a white person whose family name contains a character that is not in ASCII either, a situation that h
Don't care (Score:2)
Emojis are supposed to be fun, don't suck the fun out of them by taking them so seriously.
Concern over emoji (Score:3, Insightful)
Not invented here. (Score:2)
It wasn't so very long ago when the geek was drawn to to the creation of intricate typographic art (aka ASCII art) and emotions.
The central idea of using of letters, numbers and symbols, dots and dashes, bits and bytes, to send simple cartoons or more complex and engaging images over low bandwidth connections is, after all, at least as old as the telegraph.
But it seems forbidden to build a full, working, global vocabulary of images at higher resolution --- in both black & white and color --- and drawin
great news! (Score:2)
This will be a boon to Duck Bacon producers everywhere!
"Why could we possibly need a duck?" (Score:2)
Why a duck? [marx-brothers.org]
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Don't forget your duck [imgur.com].
do we need emojis at all? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, I'll admit I'm not 16 anymore, but I'm not 60 either and I wonder WTF does the Unicode Consortium have to do with stupid smileys?????
This is one of the "don't they have more important things to worry about" moments. But more importantly, this is utter crap and doesn't belong into a fucking fontset. You want to have dancing teddy bears and cups of coffee and stuff, fine, make your own icon font, nobody stops you.
Until this post I didn't even realize that this crap is now official Unicode, and I still can't believe it. Solution looking for a problem, yes?
That feels so 1990's (Score:2)
The Unofficial Smilie Face Glossary (Score:3)
This was pretty much the definitive list of what later became known as Emojis - The Unofficial Smilie Face Glossary [thedarkener.com]. Even this was excessive and most weren't used besides :-) or >:-). Later on, most people dropped the nose, resulting in :) . As technology became more mainstream, for some reason some dumbasses thought it would be cool to have graphical smilies replace what people had created as an artistic expression using standard ascii, and in some cases upper-ascii and even ANSi on BBSes. BBSers used to customize smilies to try and stay away from the current "mainstream"... Perhaps they thought conveying emotions with smilies had become too standardized and didn't reflect them as an individual. Favorites of mine were :>, =), and most recently =} , all of which somehow get eaten up by my phone and turned into graphical pieces of garbage. I just want my smilies. That's it. Now get off my damn lawn.
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No, the king was quite surprised by the knowledge of the knight, Sir Bedevere, concerning the material composition of witches. The king knew about the difference between African and European swallows.
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In other words, the "eXtensible Emoji Protocol" (or XEP) that I keep joking about around the office :-)
The problem with emoji is that there are so many, but not enough to cover every possible symbol someone might want to send. As such, people see the gaps a bit too easily, and are constantly demanding "just one my symbol." (Not to mention that most people don't realize they're part of a universal standard, and not something each individual IM service decided to include/exclude.)
Eventually, you'll either w
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BTW, we need more emojis to express political ideas. A swastika and a hammer and sickle emoji are badly needed when discussing politics. To describe one's opinion about a certain politicial perhaps gallow and guillotine emojis. Now we are stuk with the much too soft middle finger emoji. :-)
At least with the new racial emojis we can now describe a white cop shooting a black guy, but the smiley face to show after that is available only in yellow.