Finland Releases National Emoji Collection (theguardian.com) 93
jones_supa writes: Finland has rolled out images of a couple in a sauna, a legendary Nokia phone (the 3310) and a heavy metal music fan as part of a set of official national emojis to be used in communication. Billing the use of national symbols for themed emojis as a world first, the government plans to publish the full set in December – for anyone in the world to download on its promotional website. "The Finland emojis were designed with a tongue in cheek approach, but I hope that they will tell the world not only about our special features but also something about our strengths," said Petra Theman, director for public diplomacy at the foreign ministry.
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Being your rebuttal contained no substance, I'm inclined to believe the OP
Or you could take 5 seconds to Google the answer. Finland's taxes are 44% of GDP. America's taxes are 27% of GDP.
List of countries by tax revenue as a percent of GDP. [wikipedia.org]
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Being your rebuttal contained no substance...
I pointed out that you are uninformed. What you choose to do with that substance is up to you.
... I'm inclined to believe the OP until someone presents a more informative reply than yours.
There's a third option: Do some research on your own. It involves more work, and it's not as fun as spitting pre-digested arguments that you really don't understand with anonymous people on-line, but you'll end up being far less prone to Sheepism than you are right now.
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My new drinking game for Fridays is that every time someone mentions "SJWs" in a post, I have to take a drink.
I think we're off to a good start here.
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You're gonna die from alcohol poisoning. SJWs SJWs SJWs SJWs
Thank me later.
So along those lines ... (Score:2)
Is there a proper 'tongue-in-cheek' emoji?
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Maybe if the locals were freed to make a vote on ceding from Russia and rejoining Finland. It worked for Crimea didn't it?
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Did the Rooskies ever return the land they took from Finland before WWII?
Did you know that WWII started in September 1939? The "Winter War" took place in 1940
I know some people on slashdot think that WWII started Dec 7, 1941
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I think you'll find that others eg inhabitants of the Sudetenland from the time will tell you their WW2 started in 1938. Being a Brit, I was brought up on the '39-'45 timescale but that obviously neglects the before and after that sears the national consciousness of many other countries.
"I know some people on slashdot think that WWII started Dec 7, 1941"
I've been to the war museum in NOLA (it bills itself as the National Museum I recall) and it doesn't represent WW2 in quite the same way as war museums I h
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If you're Chinese you may say that it started even sooner.
your code is bad, you should feel bad (Score:1)
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The Japanese have far more culture than you'll ever have. "riffraff"? "low class"? Japan is a nation where there's virtually no petty crimes. Finland probably isn't much worse. America OTOH is full of crime and poverty by comparison.
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and by culture you mean the chikan culture or the vomiting porn.
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Why is it that when something bad is said about a nation, the automatic reaction is to compare it to the US like the US is the gold standard of everything.
I would tend to say that the US has high crime rates mostly because we have multiple cultures living in one country. Finland and Japan are pretty much homogeneous.
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Yes yes, but where is the source code?
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Well, since numerous sources have indicated that they think you are malware, perhaps you should release the source code to demonstrate your trustworthiness, unless you really do distribute malware, in which case, feel free to not publish the source code.
http://www.spywaredb.com/remov... [spywaredb.com]
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
Here are numerous experts marking a piece of your software as malware, prove them wrong.
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Why is it that when something bad is said about a nation, the automatic reaction is to compare it to the US like the US is the gold standard of everything.
It's definitely not, but the reason I compared to the US is because, in all likelihood, the anti-emoji poster above is American, so comparing to his own fucked-up country is entirely relevant. He's most likely American for simple reasons: this is an American site, and the majority of its users are American. He also writes like an American, and his obnox
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"Finland and Japan are pretty much homogeneous."
Attempting to describe any country as homogenous is not a very good idea. I (possibly) understand where you are coming from but even within notional national boundaries there are other identities. For example (somewhere I do know about) within the UKoGB&NI, there are at least four national identities (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales) then there are the other - relatively - nationalistic movements such as Cornwall (Kernow) and others that ar
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My point was that no matter what culture you name, we have it in the US. The cities are mixes of numerous cultures, Chinatown, the Italian district, the Irish quarter etc etc. Japan and Sweden, and even UK don't have the variety that any of the thousands of US cities has. This culture clash causes many of the issues the US has. Because of the culture clashes, any gang or mafia, or other criminal organization has a presence in the US, so we look violent mainly due to the numerous cultures.
I was refuting
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Yeah, the rape of Nanking is high culture, indeed. On the other hand, the Finn's are awesome, generally. They stand up against USSR and doesn't afraid of anything.
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I call your rape of Nanking and raise you a Trail of Tears, Jim Crow, slavery until the 1860s, lynchings until the 1960s or so, and police that shoot black men in the back in the 2010s.
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Meh, those don't even come close to the total number of dead due to Japanese atrocities. Hell, you can even include all the natives wiped out by the various diseases in that number and it's still not even close. Shit, just in China they killed more and raped more. That's a mighty fine culture you've got there. Don't you still worship dead war criminals?
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Well you're still murdering black people left and right in 2015 so I don't think you have much of a leg to stand on with your shitty "culture".
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There's a huge difference between a country doing it to itself and a country invading another and committing atrocities up to and including medical experiments on life human beings. That you somehow think pointing to another country and claiming that they did something bad too is kind of unusual. I'm not actually sure what you're trying to prove. They pointed out that Japan has a rich cultural heritage and I pointed out that they do, indeed, have such a thing - albeit an immoral one. Hell, not even moral re
Official? Hah. (Score:3)
They're not official until they get their own Unicode block.
I applaud the idea as a jab against the many emoji that are specific to Japan that got through Unicode's standardization process (*cough*U+1F5FF*cough*). Because if Japan could do it, why Finland can't?
Re:Official? Hah. (Score:4, Insightful)
Are emojis even characters? Or just graphics?
Occasionally I'll know someone who wants to send me a text using their stupid custom emojis. It comes into my phone as blank, mostly because the whole fucking point it to make me download their shit, and probably track me.
As far as I can tell, most emojis are just graphic files, and used in such a way that I am supposed to give a shit you wanted to send "champagne champagne monkey poop rhinoceros" like that's some form of language.
Except for old school text-driven emojis, I generally find the prevalence of emojis is inversely proportional to my giving a damn about what is being said.
Like that one lady in the office who always insists on changing the background and font of her emails so they all look like they were sent by a 12 year old.
I see "official national emojis" and I want to shoot someone.
Re:Official? Hah.FTFY (Score:2)
and I want to "gun skull" someone.
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They're just binary data strings, 16-bits per "character" instead of 7- or 8-bits like regular SMS text. Your phone (or rather, the SMS app) has to have the graphics which correspond to the Unicode emojis though (64k possible on
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Are emojis even characters? Or just graphics?
What's the difference between a character and a graphic?
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A character can typically be represented by a font, while graphics tend to allow multiple colors.
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I suspect that GP typoed U+1F5FE (SILHOUETTE OF JAPAN).
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Hahaha. I'm from Chile, of course I know about Moai. But let me tell you about U+1F5FF.
$ grep --after-context=1 '^1F5FF' NamesList.txt
1F5FF MOYAI
* Japanese stone statue like Moai on Easter Island
Specifically, it refers to the Statue of Moyai, a gift from the people of Niijima island, which is located at the south exit of Shibuya Station in Shinjuku, Tokyo.
The fact that the character is often rendered as an Easter Island moai doesn't change the fact that the original emoji ref
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I typed that in. WTF is that emoji supposed to be? I don't think it will work here but... Nope, preview says it doesn't work. WTF is that?
For official communcations? (Score:3)
Another sign Idiocracy is the way we are going: the government feels using cutsy pictograms is an alternative to real sentences.
Finland's strengths ... (Score:3)
but I hope that they will tell the world not only about our special features but also something about our strengths
Finland's strength is in abandoning modern human languages and reverting to a hieroglyphic method of communication similar to the ancient Egyptians. Their strength is also in eliminating the need for language or spelling classes in their educational system, thereby saving tons of money. 0xffe3 0xf329 0x3f87!
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Have you met any Finns?
Their primary form of communication is to not.
Their secondary form of communication is blunt.
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And their third form of communication is to drunkenly cry and hug and kiss you.
I'm serious. I have Finnish friends. They drink a lot. Maybe it's because it starts to get dark there at like 10 in the morning. One of the ways you can tell Finns are approaching the point of alcohol poisoning is when they start crying and hugging and kissing you.
Also, for some reason I have not been able to fa
Coat of arms 'special' lion (Score:2)
Is it going to have satwcomic's 'special' lion with a sword thru the forehead?
Collection? (Score:1)
This is offensive (Score:2)
The emoji of the people in the sauna shows them as being naked. This is highly offensive to most religious people.
In highly related news, the following articles were linked in the story from TFA:
http://www.theguardian.com/wor... [theguardian.com]
http://www.theguardian.com/wor... [theguardian.com]
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The emoji of the people in the sauna shows them as being naked. This is highly offensive to most religious people.
I don't think Finns really give a shit. If you're worried about seeing naked people then you probably shouldn't go to Finland [facebook.com].
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Your sarcasm detector is broken. Did you not check the other links in my post there?
As for your linked photo there, I sure hope that was taken in the summertime. It gets really cold in Finland.
"Holier than thou." (Score:2)
The western world has enjoyed adding a bit of color and play to simple text messaging by mixing words and pictures for centuries. Rebus [usf.edu]
The geek of course has his emoticons with their roots in the IRC chat and telegraphy. How to Type Emoticons [wikihow.com] ASCII art is as old as the typewriter.
The geek's distaste for emoji is irrational. The use of pictographs to supplement and enrich terse messages sent over low bandwidth connections makes perfect sense, as does building a strong visual as well as verbal vocabulary.
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The western world has enjoyed adding a bit of color and play to simple text messaging by mixing words and pictures for centuries. Rebus
Dufus.
Which took less time to type and was easier for you to understand? Which used a standard 101 key keyboard versus a huge keyboard that takes an hour to find the right character?
The geek's distaste for emoji is irrational. The use of pictographs to supplement and enrich terse messages sent over low bandwidth connections
Why yes, sending an image instead of five or ten one byte characters is soo much more efficient. Or using a 3,000 element character set instead of 128.
If you didn't get it at all: "duck" - ck
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The distaste is rational. They are inefficient to use and inefficient to render an idea. Having an official list is amazingly irrational. If your ideas are correct then having an official list (like the unicode emojis) is highly counterproductive compared to just drawing your own pictograph.
Sure, *some* pictographs are fine. The exclamation point and question mark are essentially symbols to represent something not easily rendered in words. A smiley face is a very simple clue to the writer's emotions (a
Windows Phone (Score:1)
I have a Nokia 635 so I'll be able to use these!
Not really new (Score:5, Funny)
Egyptians had emojis like over 4000 years ago. The rest of us are just now catching up.
and here is the entire collection: :-| (Score:2)
Finns will understand