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A couple of the people deciding the fate of new emojis in the Unicode standards are upset over the latest pile of crap:
The argument over the emoji is between developers working with the Emoji Subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit corporation that develops, maintains and promotes software internationalization standards. The committee is currently considering implementing a number of new emojis next year, but the frowning poo emoji alone has caused some members to become rather upset.
According to documents obtained by Buzzfeed, objections have been made on the grounds that the proposed emoji is a poor choice. "Organic waste isn't cute ... It is bad enough that the [Emoji Subcommittee] came up with it, but it beggars belief that the [Unicode Technical Committee] actually approved it ... The idea that our 5 committees would sanction further cute graphic characters based on this should embarrass absolutely everyone who votes yes on such an excrescence," one person wrote. "Will we have a CRYING PILE OF POO next? PILE OF POO WITH TONGUE STICKING OUT? PILE OF POO WITH QUESTION MARKS FOR EYES? PILE OF POO WITH KARAOKE MIC?"
Another person wrote, "I'm concerned that this character will open the floodgates for an open-ended set of PILE OF POO emoji with emotions, such as CRYING PILE OF POO, PILE OF POO WITH LOOK OF TRIUMPH, PILE OF POO SCREAMING IN FEAR, etc. Is there really any need to add a range of emotions to PILE OF POO? I personally think that changing PILE OF POO to a de facto SMILING PILE OF POO was wrong, but adding F|FROWNING PILE OF POO as a counterpart is even worse. If this is accepted then there will be no neutral, expressionless PILE OF POO, so at least a PILE OF POO WITH NO FACE would be required to be encoded to restore some balance."
I linked the Unicode 11 emoji candidates last time, but did not notice Frowning Pile Of Poo. This could be solved if they allowed any emoji to be used as a modifier for another emoji. Bar Of Soap + Frowning Pile Of Poo = Frowning Clean Pile of Poo or Frowning Poo-Covered Bar of Soap.
Also at Boing Boing.
Previously: Apple's New iPhone X will let You Control the Poo Emoji with Your Face
Google CEO Drops Everything to Fix Cheeseburger Emoji
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Monday November 06 2017, @11:15AM (13 children)
"...should embarrass absolutely everyone..."
I agree, definitely. Emoji should embarrass the entire committee, not just poop-emoji, but all of them. They should not exist in Unicode, period.
Get off my lawn.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @11:37AM
Something something convert documents to and from unicode lovelessly.
Something mumble extant documents using such characters something something definition of language?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @01:14PM (5 children)
I blame APL, the worst programming language.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @01:51PM (4 children)
Someone just has to make an esoteric programming language from emojis. Where the compiler refuses to compile if you don't have enough ethnic diversity (that is, if the distribution of skin tones of the used emojis are not sufficiently uniform), or if you used too many male emojis.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @01:54PM (2 children)
Actually I already know the perfect name for this: APCPL (A Politically Correct Programming Language).
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @05:19PM (1 child)
You all done being idiots yet?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday November 07 2017, @08:08PM
What are you, parent, some kind of idiotphobe? if so, how did you survive the presidential debate?
Back to topic, will the language be released with a license or a blood signed COC will be required for developers, users, users of object code, anybody whose cat saw somebody who read about the language somewhere?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday November 06 2017, @05:46PM
This sounds like INTERCAL 2.0
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Monday November 06 2017, @01:28PM (4 children)
I can see the argument for the original emoji set: there is a legacy Japanese character set used for text messaging that included them and one goal for unicode is to support all existing character sets. They should then have been marked as legacy and not intended for use for anything other than backwards compatibility.
There is absolutely no justification for new emoji and they completely miss the point of a character set. Unicode defines a set of codepoints, not a set of glyphs. It is intended that fonts be able to represent characters using different glyphs and still convey their original meanings. This is the case with things like letters, even in an ideographic language such as Chinese, because there are historical well-defined properties that the characters must have to be recognisable and rules for how you translate from the glyph to meaning.
In contrast, Emoji are pictures. This is not the 1980s, we already have well-supported mechanisms for embedding images in text. IM protocols all support embedding images, and it's easy for users of the same IM program to have a pre-shared set of images that can be indexed by a table. There are also simple protocols that allow images to be named by a hash and fetched from the sender if and only if the receiver doesn't have a copy. Emoji solve a nonexistent problem in a bad way.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Monday November 06 2017, @01:54PM (3 children)
I think they're great and I hope we continue to see new emojis.
The UI elements and flags alone are plenty useful for me.
🇸🇦 🇸🇪
♲ ⚒ ⚓ ⚔ ☢ ☮ ☯ ☪ ☭ ⚡ 🌀 ❖ 💰 💡 🔃 💽 💾 📁 📂 📅 🔔 🔒 🔓 🔑 🔞 ⏩ ⏯ ⏸ 🔀
Makes it even easier to make self-contained "web apps" (single HTML file with embedded scripts) without having to include a bunch of inline SVG.
The emoji can also be defined by their code points. For example, it was very easy for my userscript/extension to add large amounts of emojis by defining a range, such as [128509,128565], and looping through them.
The fight over new emojis is perennially amusing to me. Hence all the subs about it.
There is probably no excuse for Unicode to not include neglected character sets when it is pumping out emoji every year.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by shortscreen on Monday November 06 2017, @06:59PM
What UI elements? Do you mean those 17 squares in your post?
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday November 07 2017, @04:15AM (1 child)
So instead of including inline SVG, you include a 4MB font because most fonts do not support emoji and even if the user's font supports emoji, you have no idea what their font looks like. That doesn't really solve the problem.
Every web app I have to use now is completely unusable without allowing their large custom font resources because every button has a blank box character otherwise. Fuck you and modern web UI design and emoji in Unicode.
Play and Pause render practically everywhere for almost no resource cost, ⏯ and ⏸ do not.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday November 07 2017, @04:33AM
Use the right browser and there's no need for a custom font.
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by DannyB on Monday November 06 2017, @06:49PM
Yes. That.
They have no argument against different variants of a poo emoji. They opened that floodgate once they decided to accept emojis.
I'm waiting for the upgrade from UTF-8 to UTF-256 where character codes are big enough for anyone! An entire sub committee could reserve a space for every possible 8x8 pixel graphic. That would take only 2^64 characters of the huge 2^256 character space. Then I could really draw anything I want in a terminal over SSH. For a plain 24x80 character terminal, with UTF-256, including the 8x8 pixel graphic characters, that would give me 640x192 pixels on a terminal. But UTF-8 would have room for Klingon and a language for every other sci-fi universe.
If that were not enough, they could double the space by upgrading to UTF-257. Oh, what the heck, just increase to UTF-512 encoding.
What doesn't kill me makes me weaker for next time.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @11:16AM
who the hell is giving money to these people?
If I do give money to the EFF and GNU this year, I will first check whether or not they are part of this unicode consortium.
if they are, I will not be giving them any money.
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Monday November 06 2017, @11:16AM (2 children)
I want to see a "grave pile of poo" and an "acute pile of poo"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday November 06 2017, @05:48PM (1 child)
Oh that's easy, just lift one or the other leg onto the TP holder while you're, er, downloading...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Monday November 06 2017, @10:31PM
One thing is sure, I'm not gonna try an inverted circumflex pile of poo based on the suggestions so far. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @11:32AM (4 children)
Will it have racial specific colors? A single piece of poo doesn't represent all races, it's racist!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @11:39AM
For whites, there's no poo, there's only trash.
You need to eat first to be able to poo and the whites haven't had a job to feed themselves for ages.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday November 06 2017, @12:22PM (2 children)
There are already Fitzpatrick modifiers for adding skin tone [emojipedia.org] to emojis. All you have to do to extend emojis is add another modifier [xkcd.com]. Or allow the existing racial ones to apply to poo piles.
Heheh:
Why White People Don’t Use White Emoji [theatlantic.com]
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(Score: 1) by toddestan on Wednesday November 08 2017, @02:35AM (1 child)
That article is hilarious.
"While I saw plenty of [yellow] and [brown], almost no one I knew used the lightest skin tone, or even the second-lightest."
... the very next paragraph...
"It didn’t take long to build up a dataset of 18,000 tweets. Of that set, only 19 percent used an emoji with the lightest skin tone. Another 30 percent used the second-lightest."
19+30 = 49%, or almost half. He keeps on making assertions like that, even though his very own data contradicts it.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 08 2017, @02:47AM
https://youtu.be/LlhLDeZCKpw?t=12m6s [youtu.be]
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(Score: 4, Funny) by lx on Monday November 06 2017, @11:39AM
In protest I'm drawing a cock and balls.
🐓⚽⚾🏀🏐🎾
(Score: 3, Touché) by chromas on Monday November 06 2017, @11:45AM
Did they JUST ASSUME my poo's EMOTION?!
Poo glyph support is inadequate until we can use combining expression glyphs and colors. I should be able to express my poo's race just like the recent face icons.
No need to waste time completing support for East Asian languages; I need to ironically tweet my bowel status with an extra 140 characters.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Bethany.Saint on Monday November 06 2017, @11:51AM
We need animal poo emoji too! Dog poo for every day annoyances, Elephant poo for when the crap is really piling up. Monkey poo for when the shit hits the wall. We are being denied our fully formed poo related imagery.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @12:22PM (7 children)
The world is dealing with climate change, pollution, possible nuclear WW3, brexit, mass shootings, privicy concerns, corruption BUT these peoples major concern is whether the poo should be happy or sad...
Why on earth is there even a poo, why is it even being discussed.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday November 06 2017, @12:23PM (1 child)
challenge + poo = constipation
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @12:37PM
The little-alchemy game approach to emoji's
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @02:13PM
This is putting the "smart" to "smartphones"...
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @02:32PM (2 children)
You're right, we urgently need a Climate Change emoji, a Pollution emoji, a Nuclear WW3 emoji, a Brexit emoji, a Privacy Concerns emoji and a Corruption emoji.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday November 06 2017, @02:46PM
All in one: 💨
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(Score: 4, Funny) by JNCF on Monday November 06 2017, @03:40PM
🔥🌍🔥
☣
☢
🇪🇺➡🇬🇧
🕵️♂️
🇺🇸🤝💰
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @08:31PM
Why there's a poop emoji: [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @12:27PM (2 children)
I see this as an attempt of people to keep their job relevant when it is done.
In the Netherlands we also have similar committees, like to review the Dutch spelling and grammar rules every few years and make some adjustments as they seem fit (a.k.a. to keep relevant).
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @02:07PM
The entire problem is, they're not done. There's a huge amount of in-use character sets that are not working correctly or aren't included at all that the Consortium could be working on.
This is as an attempt of people to avoid doing their job.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Monday November 06 2017, @03:16PM
You think the job of making standardised pictograms to combine with written language is done?
*JNCF shits out a quizzical emoji*
I think language is about to get even weirder.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Monday November 06 2017, @01:44PM (4 children)
When it gets to the point that people need to block certain Unicode font characters, then it has gone way too far.
People, you should be using your own graphics for these sorts of things. If you want them resizable, like fonts then use SVG or extra high resolution bit-mapped graphics.
When I was a kid we had only ASCII permanently written in chargen ROMs WITH NO LOWER CASE, UPHILL BOTH WAYS WITH RESCAN SNOW, AND WE DID FINE!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday November 06 2017, @01:57PM (3 children)
This is as close as I can find: 🌱🌱🌱
There definitely needs to be a "CLUMP OF GRASS" emoji. To the Committee!
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(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @02:17PM (1 child)
No need for a committee! Here's your grass: wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
Actually, that's a bit too tall, I'll cut it down.
∧,,∧
(;`・ω・) ,
/ ｏ={=}ｏ , ', ´
､､しー-Ｊミ(.@)ｗｗｗｗｗ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @08:47PM
(;`・ω・) ,
/ ｏ={=}ｏ , ', ´
､､しー-Ｊミ(.@)ｗｗｗｗｗ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @08:44PM
"Herb" (🌿) together with "smoking" (🚬) is pretty close. Tommy Chong sells [popgoesthenews.com] an app that has the exact things as non-standard emoji.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @02:17PM
It's a waste of time money and resources.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MadTinfoilHatter on Monday November 06 2017, @02:21PM
...XKCD [xkcd.com] already has the answer.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday November 06 2017, @04:06PM
"A rat done bit my sister Nel, and Whitey's on the moon"
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stretch611 on Monday November 06 2017, @06:42PM
If my Poo emoji is happy, does it mean my shit don't stink?
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @06:57PM
so this must be what humans wi;ll do for work when the robots take over. debate over virtual poo.