The use and abuse of Unicode

[jobbautista9]

"Unicorn shit" is something I could also call the new emojis coming out of Unicode every year these days, lol.

[ownedbywuigi]

"Unicorn shit" is something I could also call the new emojis coming out of Unicode every year these days, lol.

Some of them are okay, like the pregnant man emoji, and that weird new exploding blush emoji

[Moonchild]

"Unicorn shit" is something I could also call the new emojis coming out of Unicode every year these days, lol.

You mean the emoji like one for every possible combination of two people wrestling, between gender and all skin tones? Yeah, that shit is completely unnecessary.

[ownedbywuigi]

"Unicorn shit" is something I could also call the new emojis coming out of Unicode every year these days, lol.

You mean the emoji like one for every possible combination of two people wrestling, between gender and all skin tones? Yeah, that shit is completely unnecessary.

awh man, I wanted my yellow skinned one man one woman wrestling emoji!

[Octopuss]

"Unicorn shit" is something I could also call the new emojis coming out of Unicode every year these days, lol.

You mean the emoji like one for every possible combination of two people wrestling, between gender and all skin tones? Yeah, that shit is completely unnecessary.

Maybe it's unnecessary but also a nice option for someone who cares. I am sure lots of black people would eventually be somewhat annoyed if all they could ever use on ALL platforms were white people emojis, avatars and shit. Same with the gender stuff. Yes it's minor. No it's not going to kill anyone if that option doesn't exist. Yes it IS nice to have when it applies to you.

[UCyborg]

^I agree.

Does Lennart Poettering ever get peace?

[wmlive]

Not sure what to think about this but either way it's hilarious

You know what i am missing in this forum? A "Like" button!

[Gemmaugr]

Not sure what to think about this but either way it's hilarious

You know what i am missing in this forum? A "Like" button!

To quote a wise acquaintance:

"I have seen a whole lot of rep systems in my time on the 'netz and all of them have been bad. A normal rep system where it keeps a total of all the rep you earned leads to reputation spam. A thanks system where it only keeps track of the thanks given to each post is hardly better.

When we're talking about a normal upvote/downvote system or anything in between though, such a system has been shown repeatedly to lead to friends upvoting each other just because they're friends, funny posts getting upvoted instead of the more smart and thoughtful posts, posts getting upvoted because it tells people what they want to hear instead of what they should be hearing, posts getting downvoted because it tells people what they should be hearing instead of what they want to be hearing, the entire system getting gamed by paid clickers and/or bots, and posts deserving of upvotes not getting them simply because they're on the last page of posts and some users TL;DRing all posts past the first or second pages or initial replies. Not to mention the small amounts of drama it causes when someone gets a lot of or all the upvotes and another doesn't, no matter how intelligent or well they conduct themselves simply because of something that happened in the past and people are holding a grudge...

TL;DR - Tyranny of the majority."

Reddit itself is a perfect example of this. Very cliquish, facts being downvoted for not being popular, hiding posts below negative votes, two similar comments having very different vote counts, and many of the aforementioned behavior leading to revenge voting in an anti-social punishments manner (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X5RyaED ... punishment).

[vannilla]

I like emojis and would appreciate even more of them because often I cannot always express my state of being with the current set.

TL;DR - Tyranny of the majority."

Off-topic:
I generally agree but as someone who occasionally "reacts" to posts on platform allowing it, I found that a system having at least these three characteristics: strictly chronological order of posts that cannot be changed by any setting; a wide range of "reactions" to express more than just "agreement" or "disagreement"; no concept of "react score" or as a concession no negative score, to fare a lot better in keeping things civil and avoid common pitfalls. It's a tall order, but these places exist and even though almost all of them really only feature two of them, they work reasonably well and the biggest issue is not posts getting hidden (they can't get hidden) but rather that not everyone wants to read 10 pages, which is true even for places without "reactions" like this.

[Mæstro]

I hate emoji characters also; I much prefer emoticons or traditional smilies like on this board. I cope by uninstalling emoji fonts and pretending the Basic Multilingual Plane is all that exists. Call me a Unicode Flatlander.

[BenFenner]

Off-topic:

emojis

emojis

emojis

https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.ph ... 23#p264723

[BenFenner]

I am sure lots of black people would eventually be somewhat annoyed if all they could ever use on ALL platforms were white people emojis, avatars and shit.

No one said they had to be white. They were yellow for decades. They could all be purple and solve that problem without going nuts.

[Mæstro]

The topic of emoji skin tone can only fare better the more it is discussed.

On the plural of emoji, it annoys me in German when I see Manga, Anime and similar words treated as if they were borrowings from English and pluralised with -s, when lots of native words take plurals identical to the singular. Even if the Duden insists that it passed through English and the plural is Animes, I insist with equal vigour that one ought to borrow it direct and the plural is Anime.

[Octopuss]

Off-topic:

Off-topic:

emojis

emojis

emojis

https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.ph ... 23#p264723

You must be fun at parties. I mean seriously? Who cares.

[Gemmaugr]

I don't know if it's emoji or emote or whatever, but the only one use I use is a deliberate misprint to remove the graphics and become pure font. ,)

Anyway, they should have stayed yellow (or started out as purple) indeed. Any extra could just have been a non-standardized self-repository of actual images.

Fun fact, while most light-skinned people see the characters in anime and manga (no s or even /s), as light-skinned, tan people see tan characters, and Japanese see them as Japanese. This ought to be studied, as Japanese Moe have been..

[Moonchild]

I'm sorry I used the emoji stuff as an example. Sheesh.

[vannilla]

Off-topic:
https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.ph ... 23#p264723

Off-topic:
Emoji達

[athenian200]

"Unicorn shit" is something I could also call the new emojis coming out of Unicode every year these days, lol.

I personally don't like that emoji of any kind are included in Unicode to begin with, personally. Even the most basic ones. Like... to me Unicode should be strictly for text, and it limits what implementers would have to deal with when designing something like a minimal terminal font that's not going to be used in GUI mode. I mean... what's next, are they going to define Unicode code points for bold, italic, and underlined versions of fonts? They're practically just adding a standard for formatting at the wrong layer.

It's also just centralizing something I don't think should be centralized. They are deciding for us which icons are appropriate to have available more or less... when before each community defined its own smilies or whatever and decided what ways beyond text they were willing to allow users to express themselves. I don't necessarily love having Unicode be able to dictate that we have to see certain emojis that clash with traditional forum-defined smilies, and might differ based on whatever font was chosen by the user. It interferes with the ability of a community to define the tone of what smilies they want to allow unless they do something extreme like restrict the Unicode range of a post or something, or stick with ASCII.

Like, honestly back in the day? I wasn't even particularly happy that they were going to bloat everything beyond the simple Latin-1/CP-1252 script that worked for almost every major language, and made most characters take more room to encode... they nearly made basic English text double the size with earlier proposals like UTF-16, if you can believe it. UTF-8 was a gift, I think they really would have forced ASCII-incompatible UTF-16 or UTF-32 on us if that transition work had started a decade later. But the thing is... I did get it, they wanted to be able to represent multiple languages with one encoding, there was a legitimate need there. Shift-JIS and KOI-8 couldn't be used together in the same document. This? I don't see a need for it, it honestly sounds like the Unicode committee trying to justify their jobs by fixing things at the wrong layer because the work they existed to do was mostly finished ages ago. Something like this could be defined by simple tags and interpreted by a parser, a Unicode point isn't needed.

[BenFenner]

Off-topic:

and Japanese see them as Japanese

That's not been my understanding. Having studied the history of anime decades ago, I'd always read that most anime characters were drawn to be [exotic] American caricatures (or "Western"/non-Asian at least, hence the exaggerated gigantic eyes), and Japanese view them as such*. Maybe that's changed in the decades since and certainly many anime characters are not your typical 1970-1990s art style and some are obviously not "Western" but you get the idea. And of course I could be wrong.

*Certain people outraged over an American playing the main character in a live-action adaptation of Ghost in the Shell really highlighting how some people really missed the boat there.

[Mæstro]

I mean... what's next, are they going to define Unicode code points for bold, italic, and underlined versions of fonts?

In fact, Unicode already carries Gothic script in both ordinary and boldface varieties. This is even funnier because Unicode intends it only for mathematicians’ use, not atavistic Germans’: Gothic long S (ſ) and ligature support have been refused. It gets even better: the traditional way in German typefaces to show emphasis, as boldface does in Roman script, is by spacing the letters l i k e t h i s. To make it even more hilarious, Roman script in boldface is a conventional typographic substitute for Gothic lettering in mathematics, and newer books seem to favour this to avoid using the Gothic letters altogether.

I have already declared my wish to expunge emoji from Unicode. Although the higher planes of Unicode offer some items of interest (why do Egyptians get their old writing system, but not us?), emoji are pure folly. As a child, I used to love the different arrays of smileys different boards would offer. Today, I enjoy the same here and on Pidgin. It is good to know I am in the company of another Unicode Flatlander.

unless they do something extreme like restrict the Unicode range of a post or something, or stick with ASCII.

My bank, on its contact form, restricts users to the German alphabet, Arabic numerals, the space and the characters €&!?.:;,-/_ @. Even brackets and ASCII’s carriage return are forbidden! I discovered this the hard way when I tried to divide a recent message into paragraphs.