7 ms·
Why the trans flag emoji is the 5-codepoint sequence it is
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- gerdesj 10mo agoBlimey! After I engaged reader mode, all was revealed 8) The "spider" and the wandering particles are funky but everything else in gthe presentation conspires to exclude granddad (who has rather shite eyesight these days). On the bright side, you didn't go for a dark theme. I'm happy to sort out my very minor accessibility "problems" but it might be nice to cater for all, as much as you can. I love how you have considered so many ways to ensure that it will degrade gracefully, as far as is possible for certain glyph handling capabilities. Good skills ... how on earth does this work? I pasted your glyph quite a lot and found that backspace changes it into the other flag: EDIT: Oh dear, HN strips out funky glyphs so this post looks a bit odd.
- isodev 10mo agoThis is so cool! Written like this, emojis look a bit like stargate addresses [1F3F3 FE0F 200D 26A7 FE0]. I knew that emoji symbols have a way of using modifiers but this is the first time I’m getting a glimpse into the process of iterating on a proposal. Thanks for sharing!
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago[flagged]
- iamkonstantin 10mo ago[flagged]
- F3nd0 10mo ago[flagged]
- SchemaLoad 10mo agoFurries have an emoji?
- seabass-labrax 10mo agoI'm not aware of any single furry emoji, but I've noticed a lot of furry communities on the Fediverse using custom (non-Unicode) emoji packs; see [1] for how that might work. Also an example of the feature in use[2]. [1]: https://misskey-hub.net/en/docs/for-users/features/custom-emoji/ https://misskey-hub.net/en/docs/for-users/features/custom-em... [2]: https://thegayagenda.fans/notes/ah5imm41r1ru05a7 https://thegayagenda.fans/notes/ah5imm41r1ru05a7
- F3nd0 10mo agoNot a single dedicated, representative furry emoji that I'm aware of (unless we count 1F43E – paw prints), but there are a couple emoji which happen to be furry. In addition to the plethora of animal emoji (which aren't furry, but likely to be appreciated by furries), there are several emoji of cats with expressive faces (which do technically classify as furry), such as: 1F638 – grinning cat face with smiling eyes; 1F63B – smiling cat face with heart-shaped eyes; 1F63C – cat face with wry smile; 1F640 – weary cat face. There was also the unofficial and very narrowly supported combination of ‘hacker cat’ and a few others: https://emojipedia.org/hacker-cat https://emojipedia.org/hacker-cat
- homeonthemtn 10mo ago[flagged]
- DonHopkins 10mo agoThe Internet.
- timnetworks 10mo ago[flagged]
- Analemma_ 10mo agoYou're getting a bunch of joking shitpost replies, but a useful answer is that it's very common for people to become furries first and then later realize they are trans, presumably because the feelings of body dysmorphia convince you that something is mismatched between your felt sense and outward appearance, but you only nail it down as gender dysphoria later.
- RebeccaTheDev 10mo agoTo add on to this: if you're a "guy" still trying to feel out some really confusing feelings, playing a vixen online allows you to explore those feelings without it impacting your real life. It's the same reason it's pretty common for trans people to report preferring to play characters of their true gender in video games. It gives you a safe, low-stakes way to explore gender. With furry especially, that particular fandom has for decades been openly and loudly supportive of LGBTQ+ people and a very very significant percentage are queer. It's a very, very safe place for exploration.
- OhioMan2943 10mo ago[flagged]
- shakna 10mo agoIf you experience gender dysmorphia, being forced to adopt the norms of the disconnected gender is far more psychologically damaging than exploration of something else. Cognitive restructuring, aka adopting a new norm, is the DSM recommendation, because it usually works. Exploration is healthy.
- tbrownaw 10mo agoOne good way to make screen time (online; video games) slightly less unhealthy is a standing desk.
- periodjet 10mo agoI mean, it’s quite obviously not to anyone with even a tiny modicum of common sense, and I say this as a trans person (although not a furry). Modern psychology has built up an incredible memeplex that is accepted unquestioningly despite being an enormous load of bullshit / giant house of cards. All relativist extremists fall back on it and use it to justify their detachments from and disdain for the shared reality we all inhabit together. Sad to witness, and only growing stronger, it seems.
- OhioMan2943 10mo ago[flagged]
- jaimsam 10mo ago[dead]
- holly01 10mo agoThe connection is there because furries are mostly gay, and by extension there are also lot of trans furries. Both furries and trans people skew younger, so it's becoming more and more of a trans thing along with being a gay thing. There's also a huge overlap with autism with both being trans and a furry. Why lgbt people are attracted to being a furry, I don't know. Maybe Disney made the male animals too sexy and a bunch of gay people latched on to that hard in childhood. Maybe its because lgbt are more online then normal and got exposed to this stuff when they were 13 and they developed a strong interest in this stuff. My feel on it as someone who's been around a ton of furries its a gay thing because its always been a gay thing. As a trans woman it's been pretty impossible to not interact with the furry community when I'm around other gay or trans people. It's extremely common especially the younger or more online you go.
- Gigachad 10mo agoI’ve been a furry for forever now. Way back when I was a teenager I used to hang out in a lot of tech spaces online and there just happened to be lots of furries in them. I just ended up becoming one too. Then shortly after I realised I was gay and furry spaces also happened to be an incredible place to meet other gay people my age with similar interests.
- NedF 10mo ago[dead]
- DonHopkins 10mo ago[flagged]
- decremental 10mo ago[dead]
- throwawayk7h 10mo agothere is already a swastika unicode glyph. As for the Confederate Flag, they will probably be confused as, if added to unicode, it would likely be rendered as one of the actual confederate flag designs rather than the one which has become popular in recent decades.
- koito17 10mo ago> there is already a swastika unicode glyph It's a Chinese character and there are two variants. The left-hand variant (卍) represents 和 (peace) in religious contexts, whereas the right-hand variant represents 力 (power). The specific glyph the Nazis co-opted is the right-hand variant, and it is considered inappropriate to use in the West (for this reason, I am not reproducing the character here). The glyph appears in texts predating the existence of Nazi Germany, and I assume that is the reason the Unicode Consortium has not removed the glyph yet. Note that I am not defending this decision (nor the usage of the glyph today). One could argue that historians should use a special font that can render these two glyphs, but the problem is likely a lot more subtle than I am thinking. As an aside: the left-hand variant is used in Japanese maps to mark the location of Buddhist temples.
- api 10mo agoYou’d be surprised how many people don’t know the Nazis ripped off that symbol.
- tbrownaw 10mo ago> Note that I am not defending this decision (nor the usage of the glyph today). One could argue that historians should use a special font that can render these two glyphs, but the problem is likely a lot more subtle than I am thinking. Having a deliberate policy of granting bad people permanent sole ownership of whatever symbols they use seems less than ideal.
- ok_computer 10mo agoI’m having a really hard time reading with the background particles.
- makeitdouble 10mo agoHitting the reader mode of your favorite browser will help. Usually it sounds like a weird advice and we'd want site owners to aim for readability...but TBH, blaming a site on a .pink domain on a page explaining the codepoints of an emoji flag to not be universally accessible seems beside the point.
- corndoge 10mo ago> all javascript on this website is optional (light/dark theme, particles background, and image lightboxing) and resides outside of the document body. localstorage is used to persist light/dark theme and mono/sans font state while surfing, as well as handle an over-18 check. https://hecate.pink/about/ https://hecate.pink/about/
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- mkl 10mo agoRun this in the JavaScript console: document.querySelector('#particles').remove()
- aizk 10mo agoYou really need to add a toggle for the effects, it makes it hard to read.
- corndoge 10mo agoNo they don't, it's their website.
- LAC-Tech 10mo agoJust don't read the article and comment based on the headline.
- octoberfranklin 10mo agoTurning off javascript gets rid of the crazy.
- zamadatix 10mo agoAnd reading mode can be a good option too. Particularly if it's more about the styling/contrast.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- prmoustache 10mo ago[flagged]
- JCattheATM 10mo agoSome I think just have an aversion to effects, not because it's hard to read, that is often just the excuse, but because they just don't like them.
- napkinartist 10mo agoI work in accessibility. I'm non binary and queer AF. The particles are a problem for some sensory processing disorders that cannot tune out motion. This is why the prefer reduced motion attribute exists. I appreciate that you and I probably agree that some people with anti-LGBTQ sentiments will pick on anything atypical about a website like this to claim some notional moral high ground to punch down, but in the case of the particles specifically there are disability accommodation reasons to consider them something toggleable. (Though using reader mode is probably sufficient for those users, as the site is developed to support it well.)
- worldmerge 10mo agoThat's cool thank you. I hope they add the bi flag one day.
- LoganDark 10mo agoWaiting for the day when Vampire BPD flag
- OhioMan2943 10mo ago[flagged]
- jrockway 10mo agoI like how the Unicode Consortium really doesn't want to accept any more flags, but you can still probably shoehorn them in if you're Apple or Google and you have a glyph sequence that is backwards compatible. One way of getting things done -- just do it. I knew the details behind this because Windows 10 didn't include font with the trans flag by default, and so it always rendered as flag + trans symbol. I eventually installed the emoji font from the Windows 11 betas and found much of what I read to suddenly be a lot nicer looking. P.S. I love the effects on this website :3
- octoberfranklin 10mo agoChina really doesn't want to accept more flag emojis. For fairly obvious reasons.
- bawolff 10mo agoI dont really think that makes sense as Taiwan flag is already there.
- gnabgib 10mo agoThere are no country flags in UTF. The flag you're seeing is the interpretation of a 2 character ISO country code by your OS. > Although they can be displayed as Roman letters, it is intended that implementations may choose to display them in other ways, such as by using national flags. The Unicode FAQ indicates that this mechanism should be used and that symbols for national flags will not be directly encoded. This allows the Unicode consortium to avoid any issues surrounding which countries to include (and, de facto, recognize), instead leaving it entirely to the system implementation as to which flags to include (see: partially recognized state). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_indicator_symbol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_indicator_symbol
- bawolff 10mo agoSure. My point still stands, you can already encode Taiwan's flag, so what is China allegedly objecting to?
- lambdaphagy 10mo agoInspiring to see women getting into the far weeds of the unicode technical standard.
- locopati 10mo agowelcome to 2025?
- blell 10mo agoI have bad news for you.
- efilife 10mo agowhat do you mean?
- JCattheATM 10mo agoHe's just showing his bigotry.
- LAC-Tech 10mo agoWhy are flags part of unicode? I thought the point of unicode was to add something for every glyph ever written in every text so they can be stored digitally as plain text. Flags are... not text. And who decides what sorts of flags and valid which aren't? I mean... we know who.. .but humour me. (didn't read the article because the website is deliberately unreadable. zero guilt)
- Analemma_ 10mo agoThe point of Unicode is to try and be the One True Encoding and remove the need for all other language encoding standards, so there's never any more "mojibake" or cross-border compatibility issues. In order to do this, every feature that has existed in other encoding standards has to be supported in Unicode, or else people will stick to that other encoding in some circumstances. With emoji specifically, they were popular in Japan dating all the way back to the 90s, via carrier-specific encoding standards. The lack of emoji support in messaging was a reason that the iPhone and Android were slower than expected to take off in Japan, and so Apple and Google asked the Unicode Consortium to add emoji support, so they could have this feature on their phones while sticking to a universal encoding standard. IIRC, the Unicode Consortium was actually hesitant to do this and didn't want to be involved with standardizing pictograms into Unicode, but eventually relented.
- SchemaLoad 10mo agoThe reason I've heard is because Japanese phone companies had invented their own version of emojis on their own encoding scheme pre unicode, and to switch over, they needed unicode to also include support for these emoji, which is why a lot of them are very Japan specific. Emojis then blew up with the rest of the world once people worked out how to enable them on the iphone. And since unicode has unlimited space for new emoji, there is little reason to deny any widely used symbol an emoji representation.
- bawolff 10mo agoThe part i dont like is that country flags are encoded via country code, so if the regime changes (and adopts a new flag) all the flags in your document retroactively change. This could have very different meaning. E.g. flag of Afghanistan before vs after the Taliban took over.
- krautburglar 10mo agoI wish they stuck to languages only, instead of branching out into modern hieroglyphics. There are enough forces hacking away at literacy as it is. Flags are particularly wasteful, given that nations and movements can be highly ephemeral.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10mo agoYou'll be happy to learn that Unicode does not have one codepoint per national flag. It has 26 codepoints that form a special alphabet that two-letter country codes can be written with, and those are conventionally rendered as national flags.
- krautburglar 10mo agoI could give a shit about codepoints. Multilingual text is hard enough as it is. The icons-with-combiners were an unnecessary complication. The site we are commenting on rejects them, and rightly so.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- telotortium 10mo agoI hate to be rude, but I found the writing quite difficult to follow in its technical aspects, and the pink and black glitter formatting was the last straw. I ended up dumping it into ChatGPT to rewrite the technical content in a form that’s easier to follow, in the hopes of elevating the discussion - I hope I don’t have to do this often on HN, but the technical story was interesting enough that it’s worth rescuing: https://gist.github.com/telotortium/58fe0c16f03455721420b768d8a1f66f https://gist.github.com/telotortium/58fe0c16f03455721420b768...
- novemp 10mo ago[flagged]
- p1anecrazy 10mo agoYour take is very subjective. I found the story captivating and technically clear.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- aspele 10mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 10mo agoPlease don't post generic ideological flamebait on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- gmueckl 10mo agoAs much as I appreciate the expressiveness that comes from emojis and flags in Unicode, I am rather shocked by the growing technical complexity of decoding unicode into rwndwrable graphemes. Unicode was already worryingly complex before all of these new combinations were introduced. Properly parsing Unicode is close to obtaining this "don't roll your own" status that has has so far been reserved for the likes of networking and cryptography libraries. Unicode, even if UTF-8 encoded, is now such a far cry from the old 8 bit charsets that's still being inplicitly assumed by so many standard libraries of programming languages.
- mr_toad 10mo agoThose early software character sets had their own complexities (i.e. there was more than one), compared to the hardwired (you get one character set, and you’ll like it) set that shipped with early display adapters. Having earned thousands of dollars fixing old systems to deal with new character sets, I can’t really complain.
- WorldMaker 10mo agoRendering Unicode was always this complex. Emoji don't do anything that some other language in real use doesn't also do. What emoji does is bring that visually to the forefront among contemporary English text. The assumption that 8-bit character sets of simple bitmaps are all you need mostly only ever worked for English (and then only if you didn't need nice print-like typography, or math formulas, or…).
- gmueckl 10mo agoThis isn't exactly true. Emojis and other symbols introduced new notions like colors that were not present before. I'm no longer certain that it is feasible to handcraft a font thwt contains all the symbols for codepoints affected by color modifiers. Also, 8 bit codepages, for all their problems (a different kind of hell), didn't break the assumption that each character is encoded as one byte. In that way, they didn't break software in interesting ways like UTF-encoded and possibly decomposed Unicode is able to do. Back then, it was something of a blessing at surface level, but the proliferation of string handling code and concepts that assume this one to one mappping just don't fit well with Unicode. And UTF-8 specifically gives the illusion to English speakers that using naive 8 bit string handling works.
- renewiltord 10mo agoMan, Unicode is a complex thing. All sorts of directionality and reinterpretation to it. What a terrible beast to wrangle. Glad someone else is doing it and I can stick to ASCII. Also, this website is delightfully hilarious. It's got music. I haven't seen that since the old days. Very nostalgic. I read in Reader Mode, but enjoyed the expression of self.
- joshcsimmons 10mo agoWow - this site is incredibly designed. Makes me remember how vivid and unique the internet of my youth used to be.
- rdos 10mo agoI didn't read the blog yet because I clicked on cat pics and there weren't any!!!
- mrguyorama 10mo agoI'm waiting for Unicode to support something really fun or insane, like arbitrary 64x64 inline bitmaps, or entirely arbitrary flag support! Really, it should have a full implementation of heraldry. Unicode can only be complete when it is a full renderer. If I can't render my video game using one complete "glyph", what are we even doing in this world?