Check out the 37 new emoji that were just approved

[frauenfelder]

Originally published at: Check out the 37 new emoji that were just approved | Boing Boing

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[theophrastus]

unforgivably lazy questioner here: What parameters are weighed as important when considering the addition of a new emoji? Because it clearly isn’t a commonly sought need, or expression of some subtlety of human emotion… or else my person in suit levitating has lied to me.

[MononymousSean]

It’s a huge time-saver to no longer have to type out “Guillermo del Toro.”

[tyroney]

the boring answer is here Guidelines for Submitting Unicode® Emoji Proposals

meanwhile we can thank microsoft for mibsl The Secret Ska History of That Weird Levitating Businessman Emoji

[Papasan]

“Cheese slowly sliding off a cracker” didn’t make the cut. Dang it.

[Jorpho]

Remember fifteen years ago when obnoxious ads were everywhere offering spyware-infested downloads that would enable fancy animated custom emojis?

See also:

The History of Unicode

(I was actually looking for this one first.)

Unicode

[HMSGoose]

For all its universality, it’s weird that “man” and “woman” are still represented by hair length of all things…

[ficuswhisperer]

@theophrastus

unforgivably lazy questioner here

You asked some great questions, which @tyroney gave great answers to.

One other thing worth noting is there’s a “Private Use Area” (PUA, not to be confused with that other kind of PUA) of Unicode code points where vendors can put whatever they want.

Private Use Areas

If you’re on a Windows machine, U+F000 will show the Windows logo, or on an Apple machine U+F8FF will show the Apple logo. These are all vendor specific

[deltaecho]

Not all that impressed by these new emojis:

By design, there is no practical way for older devices to read new emojis. I mean it should be laughably easy, right? Its just a font upgrade! But, no, by design, there is no way to upgrade: _{/System/Library/Fonts/Apple Color Emoji.ttc}

Emojis seems to be part of Apple’s plan to convince people that their otherwise functional iDevice isnt cool enough, after reading sufficiently incomprehensible text messages containing raw Unicode.

@abides

This is incorrect. New emoji are part of system updates both for Apple and Android devices. […]
[T]he oldest phone that will get the next version of iOS was released in 2015.

You contradict yourself in the space of 3 sentences.

Own a 5th generation iPod?
Own a MacBook with MacOS High Sierra?
Silly you, that is so 5 years ago!
If you want to add a font to your devices, buy a new device.

[lava]

It’s like those emoji have a different picture for everything!

[VeronicaConnor]

Adding to what @tyroney said, the weird ones like MIBSL were grandfathered in before the current submission and review process was created, basically. The early days of the Unicode Consortium were just them hoovering up images from anywhere they could find sets of easily adapted iconography. That’s part of why, for example, there are 20 kinds of obscure Japanese food but we only very recently got a taco, hot dog, and burger.

Emoji has gotten orders of magnitude better since they started taking public submissions, IMHO. They better reflect peoples’ needs, and the justifications for including new ones mostly seem pretty reasonable.

[abides]

@deltaecho

By design, there is no practical way for older devices to read new emojis.

This is incorrect. New emoji are part of system updates both for Apple and Android devices. The only way your device wouldn’t get one was if it was no longer supported by the operating system. You single out Apple in your comment, but the oldest phone that will get the next version of iOS was released in 2015.

[Tamsin_Bailey]

[awfulhorrid]

@ficuswhisperer

If you’re on a Windows machine, U+F000 will show the Windows logo, or on an Apple machine U+F8FF will show the Apple logo.

And on Linux Mint 19.2, I get missing character for F8FF in all cases, but for F000 I get either a stylized, blocky “88” or a smiling headshot of a person with feminine features depending on what font I use.

[evilkolbot]

@frauenfelder

added 37 new emoji

In a row?

[Bunbain]

@VeronicaConnor

very recently got a taco, hot dog, and burger

Oh, those were so early 2010’s. Last year we got “olive” and the year before, “garlic;” so you can be darn sure I’m ecstatic about “beans” this year!

[ficuswhisperer]

An interesting look at why emoji are hard.

Why skin tone modifiers don’t work for 🤝, explained by an emoji historian

[the_borderer]

@ficuswhisperer

One other thing worth noting is there’s a “Private Use Area” (PUA, not to be confused with that other kind of PUA ) of Unicode code points where vendors can put whatever they want.

And there is a standard for that too, for invented scripts and languages

ConScript Unicode Registry

[MikeR]

Is it just a sign of my advancing decrepitude that I have absolutely no idea what these things are for? All I know is that Apple insists on regularly pushing updates to devices to include some weird new graphics because - y’know that whole alphabet malarkey is just to easy to use.

[catsidhe]

As near as I can tell, they’re “for” the purpose of requiring updates to all the things.

The Emoji space is, IMHO, a shining example of the tragedy of the commons. There is nothing to stop the tech companies from filling this space with whatever crud they want to, beyond a bit of lobbying. So they do. Meanwhile initiatives like MUFI (The Medieval Unicode Font Initiative) have to grub around in the PUA for characters with far more reason to exist and historical impact.

I mean, why can’t we finish the super- and subscript sets for the whole basic Latin alphabet? Or some love for the combining diacriticals like the medieval German u-with-combining-e? or some of the specific IPA characters for rarer languages, like beta-with-tilde for a nasalised bilabial voiced fricative? or n-macron? But no, we get to have defined unicode points for “biting lip” and “disco ball”.