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X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

blog.emojipedia.org

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Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#201

Post by forgotpwd16 »

aquova wrote: post #158
delichon wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. If the cat emoji becomes a dog, it isn't OK if it's the same everywhere. I don't think it's much different to turn the poo emoji into flowers, the bomb emoji into a kiss, or the pistol emoji into a water pistol.

The bizarre state of this emoji was that it already faced this change. One vendor (Apple I believe) decided to make it a water gun, slowly the rest of the industry followed, officially changing its name to "water pistol". Now the old battles are new again.

The official name still is just "pistol" (and even more the latest Unicode standard specifies it as handgun, revolver). Not sure how Emojipedia decides on used name (seems to follow Apple) but (in this case at least) isn't using the standard one.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#202

Post by DaSHacka »

edwinjm wrote: post #97
DaSHacka wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, because changing it to a "water gun" fixes that problem

Yes. Try making a death threat with a water gun

The amount of jokes, memes, and legitimate threats I've seen with the "water gun" emoji far outnumber the number of people using it to represent an actual water gun.

In fact, I can't recall a single time I've seen it used in the context of water guns.

People posting "" on Twitter/TikTok/whatever are just doing the emoji equivalent of saying "I'm gonna shoot this guy, in Minecraft."

Is it really better that the emoji is technically not an actual pistol? Is that gonna be the thing that stops people from making threats online?

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#203

Post by baggy_trough »

theultdev wrote: post #25
soupbowl wrote: post #13

The fact that the emoji was "censored" to begin with is weird to me. But the internet is weird and now people will be getting banned from X for using gun emojis to promote political violence.

I found it alarming that the meaning of previous texts between many people could be altered by simply changing the glyph of an emote. And noone voted for it, all companies effectively in charge of these emojis (Google, Apple, etc.) decided for everyone that it was for the best. What will they change next, who initiated and coordinated that effort, and why, are all important questions. I'm very much against it. It's t…

Tim Cook can definitely fuck off with that water pistol nonsense.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#204

Post by llm_trw »

xg15 wrote: post #172
llm_trw wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bunch of busy bodies decided to change the meaning of a unicode character: https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f52b/index.ht... This is a problem since unicode characters are meant to be unchanging and rendered to the same glyph forever.

Exactly, so then it would be wise not to add to the damage already done by changing it again .

The unicode spec has always, and will always, have it as a pistol.

Stop destroying standards because they hurt your feelings.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#205

Post by yamazakiwi »

theultdev wrote: post #122
qual wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Not the person you were replying to) I'm curious what/how you define "woke culture", because the only definitions of "woke" I've ever heard are basically "thing I don't like" or "the left". Neither of those definitions have helped me understand what you are so vehemently against. Can you help me understand what woke culture is to you? This is a genuine question.

It's definitely an umbrella term and we'd be here for a while discussing all facets of it, but in this case in particular it's the movement to censor speech under the guise of anti-gun rhetoric (like an emoji will cause gun violence). That is no different than Christians trying to ban violent video games. Note that I am not the one who brought up the term to the conversation. I did want to avoid the labels as there's…

Umbrella Term is a optimistic description for something so nebulous and used so frivolously. It is more commonly used as "anything I don't like is woke" and "any opinion that doesn't match mine is censoring me."

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#206

Post by archagon »

wmeredith wrote: post #112
wongarsu wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter barely changes -> why do they have so many employees if they barely do anything. 80% get fired -> this is the end of twitter. Employee changes emoji -> why are they making such unimportant changes. Whatever happens at twitter, someone on the internet will complain about it.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown.

What crown?

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#207

Post by bsimpson »

bombcar wrote: post #74
theultdev wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it alarming that the meaning of previous texts between many people could be altered by simply changing the glyph of an emote. And noone voted for it, all companies effectively in charge of these emojis (Google, Apple, etc.) decided for everyone that it was for the best. What will they change next, who initiated and coordinated that effort, and why, are all important questions. I'm very much against it. It's t…

There was a famous case where emojis didn't line up between iPhone and Android, if I remember correctly - http://grouplens.org/blog/investigating-the-potential-for-mi... or similar Some were really bad and would change the meaning of a message, things like showing a broken heart instead of a heart.

The original colored Google emoji (known as flour sacks, blobs, or gumdrops) had personality! Something like 7 years ago, they were neutered in favor of something much more generic; presumably, to make them more closely connote the meaning imparted by iPhone senders.

The only one I can think of that's visibly different now is the melting face. I wonder at what point it too will be changed to match Apple.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#208

Post by sph »

falcor84 wrote: post #177
listless wrote: post #147

This from a guy who unveils his new data center at exactly 420 and has a line of cars intentionally named to spell out “s3xy” and the reason we’re all forced to say “space sex” out loud every time we talk about a rocket launch. We are trapped in a meme.

In what dialect does SpaceX sound exactly like "space sex"? Sounds like a stretch to me.

space ex -> space sex? It's literally one consonant sound away, not a "stretch" in any dialect of English.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#209

Post by ploxiln »

qsort wrote: post #146
xg15 wrote: post #124

This seems like approximately the dumbest possible place to have political battles. Isn't the entire purpose of having a standard set of emojis as part of Unicode to enable reliable communication of the concepts and emotions associated with them? In that sense it's perfectly fine if it was a water pistol, a real gun or whatever else as long as it's the same thing everywhere . But the same codepoint showing up as a wa…

This is why I believe including emoji in unicode was a blunder. A capital "A" is the same in any font; I can write a message in monospace and my interlocutor can read it in sans-serif, or tap in morse code and have it rendered in hand- writing, in all cases the difference is immaterial. On the other hand we don't use pictures in the same way, the meaning of the message depends on the exact picture used as part of the…

Even more, fonts having multiple colors in a glyph was a huge complexity explosion for font rendering, for terminals, and more. You can see a very quick technical summary of different ways of encoding colors in fonts here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenType#Color_fonts

But anyway, images should have remained separate things, png or whatever. Fonts rendering is complex enough with complex scripts e.g. Arabic, but that is the domain of fonts/shaping/rendering.

Such a hugely expensive technical mess because people want their stupid color emojis.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#210

Post by Muromec »

xg15 wrote: post #159
delichon wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. If the cat emoji becomes a dog, it isn't OK if it's the same everywhere. I don't think it's much different to turn the poo emoji into flowers, the bomb emoji into a kiss, or the pistol emoji into a water pistol.

I would extend "the same thing everywhere" through time as well, i.e. it's a bad thing to ever change the meaning of an emoji after it's been published, for the obvious reason that this messes with old texts and all other locations where the emoji has been used with the old meaning. This means that the move back then to change the gun to a water pistol was an extremely bad move, no question here. But moving it back t…

It will keep happening the same way languages gradually change and for exactly the same reasons. Being in flux isn’t a bug, it’s the content of culture.

Doing the stuff differently compared to /the other group/ to know you belong to /this group/ is everybody’s favorite game.

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