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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

#211

Post by miki123211 »

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 worse, the Emoji descriptions (on some platforms) don't correspond at all to what the emoji actually represents.

For example, the " " emoji, described by Unicode as "health worker" is called "non-binary doctor" by Apple.

If you send that emoji in a text to somebody, and they're e.g. using accessibility software, wearing AirPods and have notifications read out to them by Siri, or have their phone integrated with CarPlay etc, the message they'll hear is very different from what you actually intended to say.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#212

Post by maxerickson »

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…

It's not like words have unambiguous meanings, it's not a new problem.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#213

Post by londons_explore »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #18
londons_explore wrote: post #2

How do they technically implement this? Custom font? Or replace every emoji with an <img tag?

Custom font is sensible fwiw. You can have a font with a single glyph implemented and you’ll override just that glyph, falling back to other fonts for the non implemented glyphs. This is why sites often have a list of fonts and not just one in the css. It’s also how other languages are supported. No Thai chars in your font? We just fall back until we hit a font with those glyphs available (might be an os level font r…

> This is why sites often have a list of fonts

Doesn't that mean every font in the list needs to be loaded? And surely in many cases the sets of glyphs overlap and then a bunch of network bandwidth has been wasted?

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#214

Post by XMPPwocky »

miki123211 wrote: post #211
qsort wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 worse, the Emoji descriptions (on some platforms) don't correspond at all to what the emoji actually represents. For example, the " " emoji, described by Unicode as "health worker" is called "non-binary doctor" by Apple. If you send that emoji in a text to somebody, and they're e.g. using accessibility software, wearing AirPods and have notifications read out to them by Siri, or have their phone integrated with…

And for me on Firefox on Android, it renders as a blank space!

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#215

Post by pnathan »

I have always found the :pistol: -> water gun thing to be a great example of corporate NewSpeak in the service of some ideology.

If you mean a pistol, it should be a pistol.

If you mean a water gun, it should be a water gun.

Having both icons seems perfectly fine.

So I rather like this change: it reverts a Newspeakism back to normal meaning. Also, as another commentator points out, the relevant Unicode symbol definition image is an actual pistol.

anyway, a bit of a molehill to get riled up about. I have a mountain of code to climb. Ta!

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#216

Post by Lerc »

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…

As a counterpoint, imagine if there was an emoji that displayed as a swastika to the typer but as a bunch of pretty flowers to everyone else.

I think that has potential for hilarity. It would certainly soften the impact of a certain group of imbeciles.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#217

Post by sph »

kortilla wrote: post #176
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.

> forced to say “space sex” out loud Unless your spoken English isn’t very good, it’s quite clear there is no “s” sound in the second half. Say “space sex” out loud and yes you’ll hear two distinct ‘s’ sounds. Not at all the same as “space ex”.

Dude, "SpaceX" sounds more like "space sex" than it does "sausage". It is literally one IPA consonant sound away.

Of course it's not the exact same sound, but it's bloody similar and it's a throwaway tongue-in-cheek comment from GP. Are you and the sibling comment robots that don't get word play?

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#219

Post by vitaminCPP »

XMPPwocky wrote: post #214
miki123211 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse, the Emoji descriptions (on some platforms) don't correspond at all to what the emoji actually represents. For example, the " " emoji, described by Unicode as "health worker" is called "non-binary doctor" by Apple. If you send that emoji in a text to somebody, and they're e.g. using accessibility software, wearing AirPods and have notifications read out to them by Siri, or have their phone integrated with…

And for me on Firefox on Android, it renders as a blank space!

Same
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