Unicode went woke
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New emojis are coming in 2021, including a heart on fire, a woman with a beard and over 200 mixed-skin-tone options for couples | CNN Business
In a bit of good news, there will be new emojis in 2021 after all.
Another major addition is an attempt at creating a gender-neutral person with a beard, rather than just allowing a seemingly male option, as is currently the case. The attempted gender-inclusive design offers three variants of the beard: a "person" with a beard, a "woman" with a beard and a "man" with a beard -- with the "person" option meant to be the gender-neutral one
When one would think Unicode couldn't sink any lower after adding thousands of useless emoji to pollute the Unicode encoding, they added a bearded woman. What circus freak emoji are they going to add next?
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Ok, boomer.
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The codepoints
U+1F9D4 BEARDED PERSON,U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER,U+2640 FEMALE SIGNandU+FE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16have all existed for at least three years.So no new codepoints are expanding the hyperfield of emoji by 0.0002%, it’s just a change in recommended rendering or whatever the pendant terminology is, and doesn’t affect unicode encoding in literally any way.
In fact, it seems the entirety of Emoji 13.1 only assigns meaning to existing sequences, without sucking up any new codepoints.
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@magnusmaster said in Unicode went woke:
In a bit of good news, there will be new emojis in 2021 after all.
That's... not actually good news.
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Looks more "dirty hippie" than "woman with a beard."
long hair ≠ woman
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@magnusmaster said in Unicode went woke:
bearded woman. What circus freak
Dial that shit back a notch, thanks.
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Is the Bengali thing still an issue, I wonder?
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Is there any font (display system, software, whatever...) that can actually correctly show 100% of unicode? Is that even possible or does it contain contradictory/impossible things? Is unicode Turing-complete?
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@remi said in Unicode went woke:
contradictory/impossible things
Since I don't think anyone is rendering a bearded pile of poo correctly…
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These things are kind of ridiculous, but it's pretty harmless.
I don't understand why we need lots of skin tones in emojis, though. The default is yellow - precisely because that's nobody's real skin tone so it's race agnostic. (You're 'happy' or 'crying' or whatever, the point is the emotion, not your skin colour.)
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@error said in Unicode went woke:
Looks more "dirty hippie" than "woman with a beard."
long hair ≠ woman
Yeah, based on such criteria: I have long hair and no beard ('coz I shave), ergo I am a woman. Yet, I identify as male (and my wife concurs)...
Wow, I suddenly discovered I am probably oppressed and deserving of reparations, or something. Where do I apply for my check?
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@GOG
Nowhere, you are just appropriating Female culture with your long hair. GUILTY!
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@Luhmann Error 418
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@dkf said in Unicode went woke:
@remi said in Unicode went woke:
contradictory/impossible things
Since I don't think anyone is rendering a bearded pile of poo correctly…
Obligatory
@error_bot xkcd vomiting emoji
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I feel like the impossible combinatorial explosion of emoji modifiers could be solved with AI.
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@bobjanova said in Unicode went woke:
I don't understand why we need lots of skin tones in emojis, though.
Agreed. If we started out with "there's only emojis for white people" or something like that, it'd be an issue. But we started with something that was race agnostic and had to add dozens of skin tones to make it, um, neutral?!
On the other hand, that was back when there were only a few emoji. Now that we have an emoji for basically everything, might as well have emojis with different skin colors. Not for neutrality but just because it's at least more useful to have than:cucumber_salad_with_eggs_in_steamy_room:.
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@topspin said in Unicode went woke:
Agreed. If we started out with "there's only emojis for white people" or something like that, it'd be an issue. But we started with something that was race agnostic and had to add dozens of skin tones to make it, um, neutral?!
It's hard to reply to that without making it garage-worthy, but I share your sentiment. The idea that equality is no longer enough and that you need to celebrate separate, arbitrarily defined and delineated identities, all in the name of visibility, to combat racism and inequality, is crazy to me. The current trend to artificially stress differences and even take what I perceive to be far-right-wing ideas (separations of cultures) and try and twist them into something positive and "progressive" seems like a big step in the exact wrong direction.
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@dfdub said in Unicode went woke:
The idea that equality is no longer enough and that you need to celebrate separate, arbitrarily defined and delineated identities, all in the name of visibility, to combat racism and inequality, is crazy to me. The current trend to artificially stress differences and even take what I perceive to be far-right-wing ideas (separations of cultures) into something positive and "progressive" seems like a big step in the exact wrong direction.
I think the idea is that bigotry is caused by lack of representation. That is to say, we mock and fear things that we find weird. We find things weird because we're not exposed to them. We're not exposed to them because they're not depicted adequately in popular culture.
If we start seeing more women with beards, maybe we can stop calling them "circus freaks."
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@error said in Unicode went woke:
I think the idea is that bigotry is caused by lack of representation.
I get that, and there is some truth in that, but it goes a lot further than just demanding representation. See the endless discussions about and hyper-moralization of "cultural appropriation", the exact definition of which seems to be constantly changing. Once you try to define and delineate different cultures and tell people what they're allowed to do based on factors outside their control (heritage), you're entering dangerous territory, because you're legitimizing the arguments of nationalists, xenophobes and racists.
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@error said in Unicode went woke:
@dfdub said in Unicode went woke:
The idea that equality is no longer enough and that you need to celebrate separate, arbitrarily defined and delineated identities, all in the name of visibility, to combat racism and inequality, is crazy to me. The current trend to artificially stress differences and even take what I perceive to be far-right-wing ideas (separations of cultures) into something positive and "progressive" seems like a big step in the exact wrong direction.
I think the idea is that bigotry is caused by lack of representation. That is to say, we mock and fear things that we find weird. We find things weird because we're not exposed to them. We're not exposed to them because they're not depicted adequately in popular culture.
If we start seeing more women with beards, maybe we can stop calling them "circus freaks."
Yeah, the problem with this approach is that people aren't quite that stupid and they can usually see when representation is forced (as in: we're being exposed to unusual people for the sole purpose of exposure). Do it often enough and people go from not caring either way to active resentment.
Need I add that anyone who already had a negative attitude when you started will simply consider it completely vindicated?
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@GOG said in Unicode went woke:
we're being exposed to unusual people for the sole purpose of exposure
That's tokenization.
I'm explaining the intent, not defending it. It's tricky to get right and even well-intentioned people fuck it up.
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@error said in Unicode went woke:
@GOG said in Unicode went woke:
we're being exposed to unusual people for the sole purpose of exposure
That's tokenization.
I'm explaining the intent, not defending it. It's tricky to get right and even well-intentioned people fuck it up.
Problem is: you can't actually get it it right. The artifice is what gives the game away.
Essentially, the thing to do is... nothing. We can stop state oppression and we can come down hard on private violence (much as we do in less contentious cases), but other than that we just have to let matters sort themselves out.
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@topspin said in Unicode went woke:
Not for neutrality but just because it's at least more useful to have than :cucumber_salad_with_eggs_in_steamy_room:.
Seems to be much more about defining random combinations with zero width joiners these days. So, I think you meant
:cucumber::zwj::green_salad::zwj::egg::zwj::room::zwj::steam:.Writing this, I realize that what Unicode really needs is a method for grouping. I.e., is the above an egg-room with steam, or an egg and a room-with-steam?
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@cvi said in Unicode went woke:
Writing this, I realize that what Unicode really needs is a method for grouping. I.e., is the above an egg-room with steam, or an egg and a room-with-steam?
Yes, what's missing here is complexity.
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@error said in Unicode went woke:
Yes, what's missing here is complexity.
The let's-keep-it-simple train left the station some time ago. Might as well go all in at this point.
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@cvi said in Unicode went woke:
Writing this, I realize that what Unicode really needs is a method for grouping. I.e., is the above an egg-room with steam, or an egg and a room-with-steam?
Two types of zero width joiner: left-ass joiner and right ass-joiner
@error_bot xkcd intensifier donkeys
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@hungrier said in Unicode went woke:
intensifier donkeys
Did you just search for seemingly unique words on the explain-xkcd page or what magic is this?
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@topspin That's pretty much what I do: Find the page for the comic I want, look for a couple words that might work, and manually check by searching for them.
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@hungrier said in Unicode went woke:
@topspin That's pretty much what I do: Find the page for the comic I want, look for a couple words that might work, and manually check by searching for them.
You can DM the bot to preview the results.
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@error I don't think it would save any time, since I would still need to know what words appear in the explainxkcd article.
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so a 
would spell spetterpoep?
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@Luhmann said in Unicode went woke:
spetterpoep
Now I'm glad I don't have to search for the translation of this word (I can recommend an image search if you want to know
)
I'm sad though that it recalls images I'd rather would have forgotten...
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@GOG said in Unicode went woke:
@error said in Unicode went woke:
Looks more "dirty hippie" than "woman with a beard."
long hair ≠ woman
Yeah, based on such criteria: I have long hair and no beard ('coz I shave), ergo I am a woman.
There’s a joke about that in one of the Leisure Suit Larry games. I can’t find a screenshot of it, though.
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@bobjanova said in Unicode went woke:
These things are kind of ridiculous, but it's pretty harmless.
I don't understand why we need lots of skin tones in emojis, though. The default is yellow - precisely because that's nobody's real skin tone so it's race agnostic. (You're 'happy' or 'crying' or whatever, the point is the emotion, not your skin colour.)That's also what I thought, but AFAIK before the modifiers the default was not yellow, but a white skin, at least in the commonly used renderings.
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@Grunnen It may be that I didn’t pay overly much attention to them (I’m old-fashioned: I prefer
:)to🙂) but I only ever recall seeing them as yellow until the colour modifiers got added in.
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@Gurth I also don't remember it, and it might also have depended on the vendor.
But my GF, who has an iPhone, insists that she doesn't use the 'default yellow' emoji's because the default before the modifiers was white-with-black-hair (Japanese?) according to her. Makes sense somehow, since emoji originally contained unproportionally many Japanese things.
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@Grunnen That would be because they originate in Japan:
A highly influential early set of 176 cellular emoji was created by Shigetaka Kurita in 1999,[21][22] and deployed on NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, a Mobile web platform.[23] They were intended to help facilitate electronic communication, and to serve as a distinguishing feature from other services.
Of course, far older smileys appear in IBM codepage 437, in both black and white (or whatever colour combination your monitor had at the time):
… which apparently took them from the character set of Wang word processors.
I could fire up a 2008 iPod touch running iOS 3 to see what colour the
smileysemojis are there, but
to digging it out from the cupboard it’s in.
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@Grunnen said in Unicode went woke:
AFAIK before the modifiers the default was not yellow, but a white skin
Maybe on some mobile platforms? I used a lot of forums and similar websites when they were coming popular, and some messager apps, and the standard set of icons was always yellow in those.
The answer would still be to change the default rendering to some non-race-specific colour, not to create a stack of identical-apart-from-colour versions.
Colour shouldn't be part of a text glyph anyway. What do I get if I do <font color="black">[pale-skin-tone-emoji]</font>?
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@bobjanova said in Unicode went woke:
What do I get if I do <font color="black">[pale-skin-tone-emoji]</font>?
If you want, you can get a text version by appending variation selector 15 (FE0E), which solves your problem. In theory, at least. Now you just have to find a font that actually supports that.
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@Grunnen said in Unicode went woke:
@Gurth I also don't remember it, and it might also have depended on the vendor.
But my GF, who has an iPhone, insists that she doesn't use the 'default yellow' emoji's because the default before the modifiers was white-with-black-hair (Japanese?) according to her. Makes sense somehow, since emoji originally contained unproportionally many Japanese things.
On my iPhones, they were yellow.
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@Gurth said in Unicode went woke:
I could fire up a 2008 iPod touch running iOS 3 to see what colour the
smileysemojis are there, but to digging it out from the cupboard it’s in.Probably not that different from iPhone OS 2.2 and/or iOS 4
https://emojipedia-us.s3.dualstack.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/thumbs/72/apple/124/smiling-face-with-open-mouth_1f603.png
https://emojipedia-us.s3.dualstack.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/thumbs/72/apple/124/person-with-blond-hair_1f471.png
🍏 Apple Emoji List — Emojis for iPhone, iPad and macOS [Updated: 2024]
![🍏 Apple Emoji List — Emojis for iPhone, iPad and macOS [Updated: 2024]](https://em-content.zobj.net/social/emoji_set/apple/iphone-os-2.2.png)
Full list of emojis supported on Apple platforms including new 2024 emojis in iOS 17.4 (iPhone), iPadOS, macOS Big Sur, watchOS and tvOS. New emojis, and emoji ...
https://emojipedia-us.s3.dualstack.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/thumbs/72/apple/125/smiling-face-with-open-mouth_1f603.png
https://emojipedia-us.s3.dualstack.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/thumbs/72/apple/125/person-with-blond-hair_1f471.png
🍏 Apple Emoji List — Emojis for iPhone, iPad and macOS [Updated: 2024]
![🍏 Apple Emoji List — Emojis for iPhone, iPad and macOS [Updated: 2024]](https://em-content.zobj.net/social/emoji_set/apple/ios-4.0.png)
Full list of emojis supported on Apple platforms including new 2024 emojis in iOS 17.4 (iPhone), iPadOS, macOS Big Sur, watchOS and tvOS. New emojis, and emoji ...
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@magnusmaster said in Unicode went woke:
What circus freak emoji are they going to add next?
Please let it be wrestling midgets. Please let it be wrestling midgets. Please let it be wrestling midgets.
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@dkf said in Unicode went woke:
Since I don't think anyone is rendering a bearded pile of poo correctly…
I changed my mind.
Please let it be a pile of shit with a beard. Please let it be a pile of shit with a beard. Please let it be a pile of shit with a beard. I have some @boomzilla forum memes in mind.
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@error said in Unicode went woke:
I think the idea is that bigotry is caused by lack of representation. That is to say, we mock and fear things that we find weird. We find things weird because we're not exposed to them. We're not exposed to them because they're not depicted adequately in popular culture.
That doesn't really work. There were more blacks than whites in the south of the USA at the exact times that people were most bigoted towards blacks.
Sure, it applies sometimes. But you have to ignore the massive number of times that the exact opposite is true.
@error said in Unicode went woke:
If we start seeing more women with beards, maybe we can stop calling them "circus freaks."
I certainly hope not.
1813: Vomiting Emoji - explain xkcd
Emoji - Wikipedia
