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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

#261

Post by srid »

pnathan wrote: post #215

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 definit…

| it reverts a Newspeakism back to normal meaning

Indeed, this is the key point that everybody should be focusing on.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#262

Post by whywhywhywhy »

nebula8804 wrote: post #183
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…

I wonder if there was a way for other clients to detect apple and translate their 'watergun' into a new emoji while keeping backwards compatibility on all other clients. Or another way for all vendors to push back against Apple is for all agree to not render the new emoji from Apple devices. Its too late now but one of these two would have been a good solution in 2016 to push back against Apple's nonsense. I guess si…

It’s just a typeface and a Unicode character the client decides how it’s displayed

An iPhone 1 would display a gun still.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#263

Post by Gormo »

sph wrote: post #208
falcor84 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lots of totally different and distinguishable words are one consonant sound away from each other.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#264

Post by PostOnce »

JohnFen wrote: post #252
xg15 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

In my experience, the water pistol was still used to denote violence, it was just dressed up to somehow make big tech feel less culpable for violent(ly emotional) social media.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#265

Post by catapart »

wongarsu wrote: post #245
catapart wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying that a water pistol is not a "handgun"? Or that you could not make a water pistol that could also be a "revolver"? Does "revolver" include revolver action rifles, so long as you can use them with one hand (sawed offs, etc). If not, why not? If so, would that be a "more" appropriate emoji for some reason? I'm not saying they're further out of spec. But I disagree with your implication that they are so…

> Are you implying that a water pistol is not a "handgun" Yes. If I asked you to bring me a gun (or a handgun) I don't think anyone would argue I might have meant a water pistol. A water pistol is a gun-shaped object, or an object that imitates a gun, but it isn't a gun.

It fits the Webster definition: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gun

If I ask you to bring me a gun, and there is a water gun right next to you and you argue that "I might have meant water pistol" (colloquially: refusing to assess the water gun as a "gun"), I would assume you were ignorant, dishonest, or both.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#266

Post by anal_reactor »

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.

The most humane CEO, instead of another corporate bot

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#267

Post by AdamH12113 »

gruez wrote: post #76
AdamH12113 wrote: post #60

A hundred years from now people are going to have a very... interesting time trying to figure out what meaning was intended by the use of these characters at the time a text was written. Personally, I think putting a huge set of pictograms into the Universal Character Set was a mistake and that emojis should be deprecated immediately, and this is the #1 reason why: the meaning of a text should not normally change bas…

>A hundred years from now people are going to have a very... interesting time trying to figure out what meaning was intended by the use of these characters at the time a text was written. Is this any different than for words? "Retarded" used used to be the polite way to convey intellectual disability, until it slowly turned into a pejorative. Same word, different meaning. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#L…

Sure, meaning always depends on context, but this is a lower-level difference. If I copy an English sentence from a hundred-year-old book into Microsoft Word, it doesn't change the meaning of the sentence. If I write a sentence containing emojis on e.g. an Android phone and read that exact bitwise-equivalent text string on an Apple phone on the same day, it could have a wildly different meaning because of the font. This has already happened -- a few years ago Apple updated their font to have colored foot emojis, which sparked some controversy[1] because the version of the feet for black skin tones (incorrectly) depicted the sole of the foot as black. There was a thread on Twitter (can't find a link, sadly) where someone was confused by the posts talking about this because their Android phone's version of the emoji showed a side view of a foot instead of a bottom view. The original tweet was unintelligible to this reader because they were using a different font than the writer.

One of the advantages of written language is that it's based on a discrete set of symbols that are used to form discrete words. This allows writing to last much longer than many other forms of communication. Emojis are a weird semi-discrete hybrid form of communication, which means they're bound to cause problems as time goes on.

[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6347073/People-ou...

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#269

Post by whatindaheck »

I’m so tired of these culture wars.

The whole censorship of the original emoji was incredibly pointless and stupid. Now we have to rehash this all over again and I’ll have to hear about it.

And this time, with Elon behind it, people are going to be even more uppity about whichever position you take. It’s insane to even feel pressured to take a position on a friggin hieroglyph. And both sides will argue that it’s the other side making it political.

No wonder I’m on Prozac.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#270

Post by philistine »

superkuh wrote: post #257
xg15 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> the majority of unicode versions

Objective, but deeply flawed. Most people around the world are running code updated past a version released in 2018.

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