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Emojis in Unicode may have been massive scope creep, but I don’t think the poop emoji or love hotel emoji represent it. Love hotels are a legitimate phenomenon

by jchw 5y ago

Emojis in Unicode may have been massive scope creep, but I don’t think the poop emoji or love hotel emoji represent it. Love hotels are a legitimate phenomenon in Japan, where emoji originate (heck, even the word emoji is Japanese.) It fits in well alongside other map icons, even if the cultural clashes can be amusing. And the poop emoji may be silly, but it’s hard to deny its application for expression. Now what I find is less practical and more ridiculous is the sheer number of ways you can combine various codepoints to get different emoji representing families. On one hand, it’s impressive dedication to trying to be neutral and encompassing, on the other hand it is nightmarish just how many possibilities exist.

foepys 5y ago
> It fits in well alongside other map icons, even if the cultural clashes can be amusing. Another example is the omission of the middle finger emoji in earlier Unicode versions but inclusion of various different hand emojis that insult people in East Asia or the Middle East. E.g. OK Hand Sign and Call me hand, which are both completely mislabeled when used in other cultures.
chriswarbo 5y ago
> Now what I find is less practical and more ridiculous is the sheer number of ways you can combine various codepoints to get different emoji representing families. On one hand, it’s impressive dedication to trying to be neutral and encompassing, on the other hand it is nightmarish just how many possibilities exist. My problem with this is that it's trying to solve a font-level problem at the alphabet-level. For example, it's fair to ask why a male-looking construction worker appears on some particular emoji keyboard, whilst a female-looking construction worker doesn't; yet that bias exists in the choice of font, not in the Unicode standard (where U+1F477 simply defines 'construction worker'). Vendors like Apple created this problem when they moved away from simple silhouettes and (AFAIK) neutral 'smiley faces', to more detailed images which required a bunch of arbitrary choices to be made (gender, skin tone, etc.). Rather than making a bunch of alternative fonts, akin to light/bold/serif/monospace/etc. those choices were instead shoehorned into Unicode's modifier-character system :(

by jchw 5y ago

foepys 5y ago

> It fits in well alongside other map icons, even if the cultural clashes can be amusing. Another example is the omission of the middle finger emoji in earlier Unicode versions but inclusion of various different hand emojis that insult people in East Asia or the Middle East. E.g. OK Hand Sign and Call me hand, which are both completely mislabeled when used in other cultures.

chriswarbo 5y ago

> Now what I find is less practical and more ridiculous is the sheer number of ways you can combine various codepoints to get different emoji representing families. On one hand, it’s impressive dedication to trying to be neutral and encompassing, on the other hand it is nightmarish just how many possibilities exist. My problem with this is that it's trying to solve a font-level problem at the alphabet-level. For example, it's fair to ask why a male-looking construction worker appears on some particular emoji keyboard, whilst a female-looking construction worker doesn't; yet that bias exists in the choice of font, not in the Unicode standard (where U+1F477 simply defines 'construction worker'). Vendors like Apple created this problem when they moved away from simple silhouettes and (AFAIK) neutral 'smiley faces', to more detailed images which required a bunch of arbitrary choices to be made (gender, skin tone, etc.). Rather than making a bunch of alternative fonts, akin to light/bold/serif/monospace/etc. those choices were instead shoehorned into Unicode's modifier-character system :(