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This part - “ Horwich says Wittgenstein imagined everyone sketching individual faces to convey meaning, rather than relying on standardized faces as we do today

This part - “ Horwich says Wittgenstein imagined everyone sketching individual faces to convey meaning, rather than relying on standardized faces as we do today. “I don’t think we get the variety and the flexibility unless you’re drawing them yourself,” says Horwich. “You’re shoveling ‘sad’ into one particular face. [Wittgenstein’s] idea was different degrees and shades of sadness come from ways of drawing it.” ” - made me wonder if we could do with parametric smileys. edit - just thought, making parametric smileys is somewhat linked to the fictional technology for expression that Juanita worked on in Snowcrash.

evincarofautumn 8y ago
This is why I don’t like when emoticons are automatically replaced with emoji or graphical emoticons. If I had wanted a standard face I’d’ve used one! It’s definitely a hack, but you can illustrate a lot of nuance with textual emoticons/kaomoji that you don’t get from standardised emoji. Unfortunately, emoticons also suffer because systems weren’t designed for them—for example, I use :P in a sans-serif typeface to express exasperation, irony, “oh come on”, that kind of thing, but in a serif typeface it looks like it’s smiling, which changes the tone completely—and sadly, this has become the standard way of rendering it as an emoji. If there were an easy way to embed small images in digital “plain text” we could do this kind of inline illustration with much more reliable conveyance of tone & intent.
- OrganicMSG 8y ago
  Presumably one could simply work out the required degrees of freedom for eyes nose and mouth and assign each one a float and make something workable with metafont. I may put some time aside to have a play with this.
mercer 8y ago
It also reminds me of the 'live smiley' stuff Apple weirdly put front-and-center in their unveiling of the FaceID features.

evincarofautumn 8y ago

This is why I don’t like when emoticons are automatically replaced with emoji or graphical emoticons. If I had wanted a standard face I’d’ve used one! It’s definitely a hack, but you can illustrate a lot of nuance with textual emoticons/kaomoji that you don’t get from standardised emoji. Unfortunately, emoticons also suffer because systems weren’t designed for them—for example, I use :P in a sans-serif typeface to express exasperation, irony, “oh come on”, that kind of thing, but in a serif typeface it looks like it’s smiling, which changes the tone completely—and sadly, this has become the standard way of rendering it as an emoji. If there were an easy way to embed small images in digital “plain text” we could do this kind of inline illustration with much more reliable conveyance of tone & intent.

OrganicMSG 8y ago
Presumably one could simply work out the required degrees of freedom for eyes nose and mouth and assign each one a float and make something workable with metafont. I may put some time aside to have a play with this.

mercer 8y ago

It also reminds me of the 'live smiley' stuff Apple weirdly put front-and-center in their unveiling of the FaceID features.