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X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

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Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#251

Post by relaxing »

plorg wrote: post #249
retrocryptid wrote: post #53

Is it me or does that emoji look a little more like a Ruger SR9 than a Colt M1911? I mean... it's not exactly a SR9 either, but it's definitely not a 1911 as the twitterrer implied.

It's also, contra the twitterer, not reverting to the ur-glyph, which, in it's original form at the 6 major mentioned companies, was a revolver. None of those vendors have previously depicted the pistol emoji as a contemporary handgun.

It copies the reference standard, which you are specifically not supposed to copy.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#252

Post by JohnFen »

xg15 wrote: post #229
Alupis wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Does anyone see what's happened here? A small group of people made a political decision and force changed the pistol emoji into a water gun. Then... later on, someone else…

I can't speak for everyone, but as far as I'm concerned, the initial change to a water gun was just as stupid and damaging as this one. My point is just that changing it back now is not undoing the damage, it's creating even more damage.

I agree.

One of the reasons why I hesitate to use emojis is that there isn't enough standardization of what they look like. I've seen texts I've written that include them on other devices and have been pretty dismayed that that even relatively minor visual differences can make a huge difference in the meaning I intended vs the meaning that was actually received.

The water pistol/gun thing is this taken to an extreme. The initial change was bad because it introduced a huge amount of uncertainty in meaning. The change back is bad for exactly the same reason.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#253

Post by anonfordays »

xg15 wrote: post #229
Alupis wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Does anyone see what's happened here? A small group of people made a political decision and force changed the pistol emoji into a water gun. Then... later on, someone else…

I can't speak for everyone, but as far as I'm concerned, the initial change to a water gun was just as stupid and damaging as this one. My point is just that changing it back now is not undoing the damage, it's creating even more damage.

>My point is just that changing it back now is not undoing the damage, it's creating even more damage

That's just like, your opinion man! Some of us view it as the Internet healing.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#254

Post by JohnFen »

relaxing wrote: post #244
qsort wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unicode is definitely a prescriptive standard. Code point 65 is a capital A because Unicode says so -- any such standard is necessarily prescriptive. > Which means that some ephemeral undocumented proprietary encoding might be used instead I'm not arguing against the need of some standard for representing those, I'm just objecting to the technical decision of incorporating them as code points, because they don't serv…

It’s literally there in the standard: “The shapes of the reference glyphs used in these code charts are not prescriptive.” The standard says “pistol”, what a pistol looks like is left to the implementer.

It's exactly this that makes Unicode the wrong place to define emojis.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#255

Post by Gormo »

Muromec wrote: post #210
xg15 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I don't think that applies here. Languages evolve and new terminology enters the lexicon all of the time, but that absolutely does not retrospectively change the rendering of pre-existing expressions of language.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#256

Post by whywhywhywhy »

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…

Speaking objectively it’s either dumb or it matters.

There’s no reality that exists where it was dumb so you shouldn’t care it was changed but it’s dumb so it shouldn’t be changed back because it’s dumb right so it doesn’t matter what it is…

The people who changed it thought it mattered, the people changing it back do too so as dumb as it is, I guess it matters to both these groups, even if it is kinda dumb.

These dumbest of political battlegrounds are entirely the problem caused by the people who demanded the initial change, no one cared about this till someone cared about it.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#257

Post by superkuh »

xg15 wrote: post #229
Alupis wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Does anyone see what's happened here? A small group of people made a political decision and force changed the pistol emoji into a water gun. Then... later on, someone else…

I can't speak for everyone, but as far as I'm concerned, the initial change to a water gun was just as stupid and damaging as this one. My point is just that changing it back now is not undoing the damage, it's creating even more damage.

You're assuming everyone is using the same version of unicode and the same fonts. Even this premise isn't true. For example, for me, it never changed because I do most of my typing/etc on an older system without modern unicode extensions post-v6. It was and is always a mess. There's no stability like you say. But if we want to measure something objective: the majority of unicode versions have been the firearm, not the water pistol.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#259

Post by Gormo »

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 .

It's a potential deterrent to future attempts to change the meaning/rendering of existing characters.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#260

Post by Gormo »

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 .

I'm not sure that's necessarily wise, since the underlying takeaway is that it's fine to attempt to change the meaning or rendering of pre-existing symbols as long as you get away with it. The threat of having the change you are attempting to force be contested over a long period of time should, hopefully, act as a deterrent to such behavior.
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