Well-
"We have filed a request with the government in the hope of launching our own petition demanding that British politicians ban the use emojis altogether."
This!
Apple has vowed to tackle the lack of racial diversity in its emojis and will work with the Unicode Consortium to make the annoying little images more politically correct. MTV Act contacted Apple to ask them to make sure the emojis were more diverse. Currently, the human emojis are mostly pinkish. This will not do, roared MTV …
Can we make it an international effort so the rest of us can sign? I think it would be better to go through the IETF rather than working through they myriad bureaucracies of the UN and member states.
We got along just fine without the various flavors of :), ;(, :P and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ when I was a kid... rods to the hogshead and all that.
Try to keep up here.
I had to look up "emoji" myself. Apparently, they're of Japanese origin (think smileys crossed with Hello Kitty). These are emoticons 3.0 -- and cover pretty much anything cute you might ever think of communicating. Especially things an 8 to 12 year old might think of.
Actually, *exclusively* things an 8 to 12 year old might think of.
Smiling Turd isn't my favorite, but it's right up there with Helpful Information Woman.
Android's default character set support is a robot pulling faces. This is humanist. We need to duplicate all robot faces with the exact same human faces and fill up more code points.
The race of the emoji depends on the font used to display the code point, not the code point itself. Apple could vary the emoji's race depending on the language or country.
That's an interesting one. The official description of that character is BLACK SMILING FACE, but BLACK doesn't actually mean "black" here; it means something like "solid" or "mostly foreground colour". So if you're using green text on an orange background then the face is mostly green. Some other characters from the same region are described as BLACK DIAMOND SUIT and BLACK CHESS PAWN. Again, BLACK means "solid" or "mostly foreground colour". The official PDF uses black text on a white background: http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2600.pdf
® is part of the enclosed alphanumerics block of Unicode. Very far from being an emoji.
Looking at the Unicode listing given in the link above:
1F638;GRINNING CAT FACE WITH SMILING EYES
1F639;CAT FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY
1F63A;SMILING CAT FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH
1F63B;SMILING CAT FACE WITH HEART-SHAPED EYES
1F63C;CAT FACE WITH WRY SMILE
1F63D;KISSING CAT FACE WITH CLOSED EYES
1F63E;POUTING CAT FACE
1F63F;CRYING CAT FACE
1F640;WEARY CAT FACE
Judge for yourself, here's the Unicode reference for the "Emoticons" range - horrors, there is one.
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F600.pdf
Not seeing a lot of colour in those sample images, and not seeing a lot of racial profiling in the descriptions either - for example, U+1F60D is described as "FACE SAVOURING DELICIOUS FOOD", not "WHITE MALE FACE SAVOURING DELICIOUS AND INHERENTLY SUPERIOR NON-ASIAN FOOD AFTER CONQUERING AN INFERIOR PEOPLE AND TAKING THEIR OIL". Probably an emoticon you'd use a lot of.
Perhaps they're still smarting from having their Apple logo banished to the private use area, or worse.
Colour me U+1F632.