Previous “Emoji” posts

New Emoji and My Favorite Radar

Tuesday, February 24th, 2015

2014 was a big year for emoji. In the spring, Twitter implemented emoji on their website. In June, the emoji standard was extended to include around 250 new images. With the release of iOS 8 in the fall, Apple turned the emoji keyboard on by default. A great deal of progress was made.

After hearing about the new glyphs last summer, I took the opportunity to discuss the rise of emoji. You may recall my eagerness to see one particular new emoji added to the available options: “Reversed Hand With Middle Finger Extended”.

Reversed Hand With Middle Finger Extended
[Image credit: Emoji Blog]

But eight months later, those new emoji are very poorly supported. Apple has yet to update their platforms with any of the recently-added emoji, and each new version of Mac OS X and iOS has led only to repeated disappointment.

Recent news seemed to offer hope of a change. Hearing that Apple would be updating emoji on both their major platforms led to renewed optimism on my part. After reading a post touting “300 new, diverse emoji”, I felt sure that our glorious, obscene future had finally arrived. I updated a machine to the Mac OS X 10.10.3 beta to check it out.

There are some truly new emoji in the form of additional flags. Welcome, Belgium.

Face Massages
Now in alphabeticalish order!

There are also multiple pigments for many of the people emoji, so you can get a face massage in any skin tone you like:

Face Massages
That left-most yellow is intended to mean “cartoonishly unhuman”, not racist “Asian”.

However, after much searching I realized I was to be let down once again. None of the emoji from the updated Unicode 7 spec are included. Apple continues to flip us the figurative bird by refusing to provide us with a literal middle finger. Diversity of races is surely a good thing, but where is the diversity for people who wish to communicate with widely recognized hand gestures? We deserve satisfaction!

After some time sitting in a soggy pile of my own dashed hopes, I resolved to take action. Reasoning that perhaps Apple is simply unaware of the wondrous world of new emoji which awaits us all, I logged on to Apple’s Bug Reporter and filed an enhancement request.1

Radar #19925942
This is probably my favorite radar ever.

If you too dream of a future where we can use emoji to adequately express our contempt, add your support by duping Radar #19925942. Depending on your general feelings toward Apple and their bug reporting system, you may or may not choose to include an image of the desired emoji as I did. For reference, of course.

At times, I am haunted by the thought that Apple will never implement the new emoji. However, I have one fear even deeper than that, which I originally expressed on John Gruber’s “The Talk Show” last year2. My worry is that Apple may update their emoji set with most of the new glyphs, while opting to ignore the one fingered salute. For now though, I wait with bated breath and hope that the folks in Cupertino will do what’s right. C’mon guys — I really don’t want to have to switch to Android.

Footnotes:

  1. Using Safari® 1.0 or better, of course ↩︎

  2. For a non-timestamped, but more canonical link, see here. ↩︎

Pile of Poo Is the Anti-Like

Monday, November 24th, 2014

Oh, yeah, like this site was going to miss a history of the poop emoji? Come on!

Fast Company’s look at the origins of emoji in America is a great read. It’s particularly amusing to realize that despite Google’s role in bringing emoji to the US, their own browser Chrome still doesn’t properly display them on Mac OS X or Windows.

Perhaps the most interesting idea, however, is how the pile of poo can solve a problem in modern society. If you’re at all familiar with Facebook, you know about its culture of Likes. However, one has only the option to “Like” a post, or do nothing. There is no “Dislike” option, which can be problematic in the case of bad news. When a friend loses a job, for instance, you may wish to succinctly express sympathy and solidarity. A “Like” is clearly all wrong for this. But now, there is a solution:

You can do all kinds of funny things with [pile of poo] and use it with skill, but I guess the most common use is probably “that’s unfortunate, and I would like to punctuate my comment with a reiteration that I am displeased at what has just been expressed.” It’s the anti-like.

Yes, the good old pile of poo emoji (💩) is the perfect response, the perfect way to say “Dislike!” with just a single character. So let it be known, the pile of poo emoji is the anti-like. As with Autocorrupt before it, I urge you to pass it on.

Sympathy Emoji

Wednesday, October 8th, 2014

As the emoji character set gains cultural prominence, the world is still navigating its use as a communications medium. Recently, I saw emoji used in response to the passing of a loved one. Some friends messaged simple, encouraging smiley faces (“Keep your chin up! 😃”), while others offered virtual flowers (💐). These digital pictures may not the most appropriate tool for use in conveying sympathy, but I appreciated the gesture nonetheless. However, it certainly would be possible to truly offend with emoji. So, allow me to present:

An Incomplete List of the Least Appropriate Emoji to Send in a Sympathy Text, Which Probably Should Not Be a Thing Anyway, But That’s The Age In Which We Live

  • Skull emoji Skull (💀) – It should be fairly obvious why this is no good.

  • Ghost emoji Ghost (👻) – This emoji is just called “ghost”, but I’ve always thought of it as the happy ghost. He may also be flipping the Double Deuce, and that’ll hurt a guy’s feelings.

  • Astonished Face emoji Astonished Face (😲) and Dizzy Face emoji Dizzy Face (😵) – The double X’ed out eyes, often used to indicate a dead cartoon character, are truly problematic.

  • Face with Tears of Joy emoji Face With Tears of Joy (😂) – “Crying Face” (😢) might be alright to use, and at first glance, this may seem to be an extra sad version of that. However, the name and larger version make it clear that those are actually tears of joy, so this emoji is right out.

  • Crying Cat Face emoji Crying Cat Face (😿) – Even if the aforementioned “Crying Face” is OK, adding a cat to the mix just wrecks it.

  • Weary Cat Face emoji Weary Cat Face (🙀) – This cat is even worse. It’s unclear what exactly makes it “weary”. It looks far more like Munch’s “The Scream”, with its depiction of agony. Even so, it’s just not appropriate.

  • Pile of Poo emoji Pile of Poo (💩) – “Pile of Poo” is a tremendously versatile symbol to convey many different things. While it’s functional in many different situations, it’s best left out in these circumstances.

Ultimately, you’ll be best served by using real words to express your condolences. If you must use emoji, however, at least be sure to avoid the worst offenders.

The Rise of Emoji

Tuesday, June 24th, 2014

If you’re not currently aware of emoji, you’re missing out.1 In fact, you’ve already missed out when it comes to this site. For those who’ve thus far remained unaware, emoji are a set of ideograms available on most current computer platforms. They originated in Japan, but have since spread to the world at large. Think of them as the next evolution of smiley faces made out of punctuation. Using emoji, it’s possible to move beyond relatively simplistic textual representations of faces like :), :(, or even ~(_8^(|)2, to real pictures like 😃 (smiling face with open mouth) and 😬 (grimacing face3).

But if all emoji provided were colorful emoticons, they wouldn’t be doing much for us. After all, chat programs have optionally translated text faces into smiley pictures for years. No, the real power of emoji is seen in the rest of the character set. With these additional symbols, it’s possible to use a single picture to convey entire ideas. For instance, the 🌊 “water wave” emoji represents One Foot Tsunami well4:

Water Wave
Really, it’s most appropriate in its tiny form.

And of course, 💩 “pile of poo” is both popular and appropriate for almost all scenarios:

Pile of Poo
Gosh he’s friendly.

Emoji can even stretch the mind. Thanks to emoji’s large but still limited set of characters, coming up with emoji sentences can be a fun challenge. For instance, you may be able to decipher this idiom: 🍎 🚫 👇           🌳

Red Apple No Entry Sign White Down Pointing Backhand Index                                     Deciduous Tree
That’d be “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”.

Emoji have become popular particularly on mobile devices, as Apple and Google have included them in their respective OSes. Here are simple instructions for activating and using emoji on iOS and Android. The popularity of emoji has grown so much that the emoji keyboard is enabled by default in Apple’s forthcoming iOS 8. That’s big news.

For those who are already fans of emoji, even bigger news arrived last week with the announcement that the emoji standard is being extended. Approximately 250 new emoji are now part of the standard, and soon your devices will allow you to select such useful gems as a “White Hard Shell Floppy Disk” or a “Black Hard Shell Floppy Disk”. The most excitement, however, has definitely been generated by a single new symbol:

Reversed Hand With Middle Finger Extended
[Image credit: Emoji Blog]

My fellow Earthlings, our long international emoji-middle-finger-less nightmare is (almost) over. Yes, the new emoji set includes “Reversed Hand With Middle Finger Extended”. With it, I think our “alphabet” may finally be complete. Hell, you could probably boil at least 30% of my communication down to this single emoji. Forget “Yo”. An app that just sends the emoji middle finger is what we really need.

Footnotes:

  1. And if you’re currently using Google’s Chrome brower, I’m afraid you’re going to miss out when it comes to this post too. ↩︎

  2. For reasons beyond my understanding, I still know how to type out a detailed Homer Simpson emoticon. Thanks for that useful trip down the memory lane of mid-90’s AOL, brain. Now I’m off to sketch the Stussy S on my Trapper Keeper folders, because I can still do that via muscle memory too. ↩︎

  3. I use this little guy to indicate a tooth suck, as a response to an awkward situation, particularly one that’s amusing or the result of comical misunderstanding. ↩︎

  4. That’s particularly true on Apple devices, where the emoji character is patterned after Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”, just as this site’s imagery is. If you really want to get into emoji minutia, you should be aware that emoji will actually look different on different platforms. For example, the following image shows how the “Airplane” emoji appears on Apple devices, Android devices, and Twitter, respectively:

    Assorted Airplane Emoji
    Shirley there should be a twisted-up airplane in here.

    While each platform draws their own picture set for emoji, they all follow the guidelines for what the set should contain. ↩︎

The Barvd Emoji

Monday, February 10th, 2014

Recently, Barvd made a triumphant disgusting return to these pages. One “winner”, @ems, asked what the icon would be for a Barvd. I hadn’t thought of it before, but emoji definitely seem like the way to go here. They’re widely available, and full of all manner of pictures. So I took the time to scan through the emoji offered by iOS 7, and I’m pleased to present the Official Barvd Emoji:

Barvd Emoji
The Official Barvd Emoji

This is technically called the “speak-no-evil monkey”, and it comes in a set with the see-no-evil and hear-no-evil monkeys: 🙈 🙉 🙊. However, on its own, this little simian definitely looks like it could be holding in some puke. Probably after reading a disgusting tweet someone posted.

So when someone says something disgusting, and you want to let them know, just send them a Barvd Monkey. They’ll get the message.

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