I played it on Wii, but you can play it on your phone or computer too:
Personally speaking, I consider it anti-zoomer discrimination of the highest order!! ;) XD <3
More on topic: the new emoji range from “finally!!” (Sasquatch) to “huh?” (Landslide), as usual. The skin tone improvements are welcome, of course! If we’re gonna abandon the Simpsons monotone aesthetic, we should go all the way. Props to the (unpaid…?) people who made this happen.
I’ve done a bit of climbing, and I guess I’m just struggling to imagine using it… rocks falling is either not a big enough deal to text about (cause we’re all following safety guidelines by wearing helmets, right?), or way too big of a deal to make light of with an emoji. The latter case applies even more so in cases where the rocks hit buildings.
The only situations I can imagine are a) “im gonna be late, the road is blocked by rockfall” and b) “couldn’t go skiing this weekend, an avalanche closed the slope”. But maybe two is enough! And who knows, maybe it’ll be interpreted as “collapse” in general, which is broadly useful obviously.
Otherwise can't you just write :emoticon:
* https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/block/U+1F300
The original emojis were (AIUI) there to support Japanese carrier characters. They've now grown to including seemingly 'everything' for some value of everything.
What is the process for adding them? Are there examples of emojis being rejected?
I don’t think Unicode.org has a nice list of rejected proposals, but examples are easily googled, for example https://charlottebuff.com/unicode/misc/rejected-emoji-propos...
The list of past proposals is here: https://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-proposals-status.html Most have been declined.
Perhaps too much for many HNers. But not nearly enough for anyone who's had a stalker.
Even if you got rid of emojis, people would find a way.
Even on Hacker News.
I don't see a Heart with Tip On the Right to complement Heart with Tip On the Left:
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F394
...seems like a notable oversight. And what if you were pregnant with twins? Then it seems like you'd want one big heart with two little hearts, instead of being just stuck with one big heart and one little heart.
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F495
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/search?q=heart#characters
I have a Boomer opinion when it comes to emojis: there are just too many.
At some point we need to cut a lot of emojis or come up with a better way to insert them into conversations.
We are at nearly 4,000 emojis. Scrolling through a list is bad UX, remembering or trying to think of keywords to pull one up is bad UX.
I think we could cut it down to 2,000 easily, no one would notice. I would venture to guess that 98% of all emoji usage is contained to 200 emojis with these very esoteric emojis getting no usage outside of accidental or emoji spam/copy-pasta.
Here's _my_ proposal: We have a list of deletions. Every year, if an emoji is not used above a certain threshold, it's deleted permanently and the concept of the emoji is banned for 5 years.
This would be like deleting kanji, and would also require perfect surveillance of everyone's devices.
If you want Chat Control you don't have to hide behind weird recommendations about emoji
Them being defined is only a benefit to me if I do happen to need to use them, say to copy-paste Sanskrit to translate it, or if I want to make a joke about bigfoot with an emoji punchline.
It's awkwardly personal in a way I don't want to think about at work.
It's inappropriate to broadcast my skintone so i can confirm "taco bell sounds good" in a thumbs up, or announce gender to say I'm investigating something with the manly/girly detective emoji, which then others click on, scowl, unclick, then must manually go find the other one if they want to join in...
When in professional settings (like Slack), "everyone's just a bright yellow smiley face" is much more professional and cohesive. (As professional as emojis can be, I suppose.)
The fact that the most enthusiastic adopters of non-yellow emojis seem to be non-white people, while white people tend to be more on the ‘I was fine being yellow’ side… just suck it up and pick a color.
> When a human emoji is not immediately followed by an emoji modifier character, it should use a generic, non-realistic skin tone, such as RGB #FFCC22 (one of the colors typically used for the smiley faces).
Yellow minifigs aren't “white”—they're “LEGO people”.
Any other interpretation is post-hoc historical revisionism imagining past racial bias in domains where it was never present.
Yellow LEGO minifigs (1978) predate The Simpsons (1987). There is no evidence to my knowledge that the latter was directly influenced by the former, such that the “yellow minifigs = white” line of reasoning makes any sense at all.
When Wal-Mart used it as their logo, was that an attempt to market toward white people specifically?
When a Japanese guy drew the first widely-used set of emoji, do you think he was doing so under the auspices of white supremacy (so strongly that he didn't even notice the “yellow = Asian” racist stereotype he was obviously participating in)?
Nobody is saying that yellow emoji are white supremacist propaganda.
The point is that white people (and yes East Asians too) are more readily able to identify with a yellow smiley face than black or other dark skinned people are. And when dark skinned people choose to use skin tone emoji for themselves it is just a bit kind of weird (just weird; not racist, not white supremacist) for white people to carry on using the yellow version.
And then it’s especially weird to continue to insist that it’s racially neutral in the face of the evidence that it really isn’t.
A citation is needed for this extraordinary claim.
> The yellow emoji is not perceived as neutral by either Black or White readers. On average, both groups perceive it as more likely to index a White identity, and we find this effect to be stronger among White readers.
And really, when you're talking about perceived racial overtones of emojis, "in their perception" is what matters, isn't it? There's no objective, 2+2=4 truth that we can point to in this particular argument, as there is in some arguments, because it's all about what subtext different people are reading into things. The objective truth is that those pixels are a certain color; the perception of them is subjective, varying from person to person.
And while some people prefer to use emojis that reflect their skin tone (whether it's lighter or darker), others prefer to use the yellow emojis instead of the ones that would better reflect their skin tone. The fact that they chose that color when they had other options available suggests strongly that they are trying to communicate a "skin tone doesn't matter in the context of this communication" message.
You are arguing that the yellow color isn't inherently neutral, but I claim that you are making the perfect the enemy of the good. Even if the yellow color isn't inherently as neutral as it was intended to be, the fact that people are choosing it over colors that would more accurately reflect their skin tone means that it is neutral enough for the purpose.
Lego had already put out a number of licensed sets featuring specific ‘real people’ (Star Wars characters) using just yellow minifigs. That changed in 2003 (same year as the NBA license) when they released the Cloud City set, and evidently came to the realization that they could not continue to use yellow for all characters. That set includes yellow Han and Leia minifigs, by the way - white skin tone minifigs came later.
The point is that if the claim which, yes, Lego has made since 1978, that yellow was neutral and could represent any race – if that claim has any value, they could have proudly released 10123 Cloud City with a yellow Lando.
They didn’t. Yellow turns out not to have been as neutral as they believed. Lando proves it.
As for Lego vs the Simpsons I didn’t claim any causative influence between the two - just pointing out that Simpsons made the same choice, with yellow representing white people, and nonwhite people having different skin tones. Both Lego and the Simpsons have accidentally encoded a white default under a ‘nonrealistic color choice’.
My point is that emojis have done exactly the same thing.
I’m not ‘connecting’ this to Lego and the Simpsons as if there’s some global yellow conspiracy.
I’m pointing out that the arguments people make about yellow being ‘neutral’ when you go beyond abstract symbolism to personalization – as is happening with the co-opting of emoji to become personal ‘reactions’ – have been made before in similar circumstances and have proven to be quite weak.
It was always obvious that in a globally-connected Internet age, having universal, skintoneless glyphs that can be used to represent emotion and other shorthand (e.g. thumbs-up) was a decent idea, and that adding skin-tone modifiers was a bad idea:
- Five skin tones is insufficient to cover all possible present-day human use-cases
- Forcing users to make the decision between e.g. [thumbs up] and [thumbs up and also btw I'm white] is stupid (and possibly needlessly divisive)
- Skin-tone modifiers opened the door to all other sorts of modifiers
Now we're stuck with supporting all of this wholly unnecessary combinatorial complexity forever—awesome. What did we gain from this?
The steelman argument would be that we have provided a way for folks who felt excluded to now feel more represented.
And just repeating that yellow is abstract and inclusive doesn't address the fact that it's objectively far closer to representing people of lighter complexion than those with significantly darker complexion. The latter group has suffered centuries of oppression and exclusion, often based solely on their appearance, so it's an issue that impacts them differently.
Even "The Simpsons" has introduced characters with darker complexions alongside their yellow toned cast.
Computers are powerful. We have no shortage of computer programmers. Given all the complexity in systems just to stay current and functional, a bit of extra work for emojis is a small price to pay.
>And just repeating that yellow is abstract and inclusive doesn't address the fact that it's objectively far closer to representing people of lighter complexion than those with significantly darker complexion.
They also represent those of thinner complexion. Overwhelmingly able-bodied too. Not to mention, it was always going to be the case since facial features are going to be dark tones and as such, it's clearer to represent them on a clear skin. This was always a nonsensical, losing game. Always has been.
I don't feel represented on the basis of branding personal expression with an identification of race as a default, the idea is frankly abhorrent to me. Why am I being excluded?
They should support the "color combining code" with a 3 byte sequence so you can specify ANY of the 16,777,216 color variations.
And they should also support the gender combining code with any other emoji, in fact, any two emojis should be combinable (if you have the combination in your font, otherwise you just display both next to each other).
I'm only like 33% joking.
I suppose if Slack were open to 3P clients you could override all the tone variants to use your choice. Maybe you can make a browser extension?
May I suggest "sounds good"?
I'm glad the D forums don't allow emojis.
are you telling me I've been offending people?
If it is a personal slack, then have fun!
I'm a big fan of the rainbow thumbs up because I like rainbows.
The soldiers in my country don't wear camo uniforms, and even to us it would be clear.
There's a group of whales off the coast of Portugal who have a lot of fun fucking up boats. They'll knock the rudder off a boat, potentially sinking it, for sport.
* https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode17.0.0/
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45187274
There are some charts with the new characters available at:
* https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-17.0/
"CJK Unified Ideographs Extension J" has 4298 entries.
Just pointless madness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc...
Back then the committee was very determined not to let in more emojis – for the treasure the official response was that Unicode already had money symbols and that this should be more than enough for all use cases.
Looks like they caved in now and just adding more clobbers left and right. Half of me is happy to finally have the treasure chest, but the other half is sad, that somehow now they added it, when we could have had it 8 years ago!
iamtedd•4h ago
bbor•4h ago
Maybe I’m just showing my northern bias?
iamtedd•4h ago
Northern bias, yes. What about emoji or Unicode is tied to the weather? Why not use more universal time markers? If dates or months are truly too precise for this timeline, quarters are good enough. They could also just have a month range or "approx".
Being near the equator (whether northern side or southern), I don't have an innate sense of seasons at all, so have to remember what people are referring to when they use these terms.
mikepurvis•4h ago
chucksmash•4h ago