Shady Characters

More links!

I was very, very pleased to join Daniel Midgley and Ben Ainslie for the latest episode of their Because Language podcast.

It’s been a while since I crossed off some of the book-related items on my to-do list, so here are a few recent links worth talking about.

It was impossible, I found, when writing Face with Tears of Joy, to get a response to questions or interview requests out of Google, Apple, Meta and the other big emoji vendors.

As we saw last time round, emoji is young and still changing.

A bumper emoji miscellany this week to celebrate Shady Characters’ new platform!

I’ve been telegraphing this for a while now, but the new Shady Characters is out of its beta phase.

As I wrote last month, I’ll soon be launching a new version of Shady Characters.

This February my family and I visited Egypt for the first time.

As I mentioned last time, I’ve been working on a new version of blog that doesn’t rely on WordPress.

Look: I am just a blogger.

🙏 PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS, aka Unicode code point 0x1F64F.

🫩 FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES, aka Unicode code point 0x1FAE9.

🔫 PISTOL, aka Unicode code point 0x1F52B.

🕴️ PERSON IN SUIT LEVITATING, aka Unicode code point 0x1F574.

🏳️‍🌈 RAINBOW FLAG, aka Unicode code points (deep breath now) 0x1F3F3 0xFE0F 0x200D and 0x1F308.

✨ SPARKLES, aka Unicode code point 0x2728.

👍 THUMBS UP, aka Unicode code point 0x1F44D.

🍔 HAMBURGER, aka Unicode code point 0x1F354.

♨️ HOT SPRINGS, aka Unicode code points 0x2668 and 0xFE0F.

😂 FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY, aka Unicode code point 0x1F602.

Image courtesy of Mignon Fogarty.

There is a new AI controversy in town: chatbots are ruining the em dash.

Face with Tears of Joy.

Face with Tears of Joy.

Face with Tears of Joy.

It has been a busy few weeks!

Back in the mists of time, I wrote about a peculiar property of words called Zipf’s Law.

Face with Tears of Joy.

Face with Tears of Joy.

Face with Tears of Joy.

Face with Tears of Joy.

First: can I interest you in a periodic table of emoji?

I have made a thing!

Face with Tears of Joy.

I’ve always really enjoyed 99% Invisible, Roman Mars’ long-running podcast about design, which makes it all the more special to have appeared on three different episode in the past – on the octothorpe (#), the interrobang (‽), and pocket calculators respe…

Please allow me to introduce the cover of my next book, Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji!

Emoji have been in the news recently for a host of reasons, most of them bad – but all of them, I would submit, worthy of our attention.

The Book paperback.

I’m almost ashamed to say it, but I never really gave the backslash a second thought.

I came across a post last July on Emojipedia, in which Keith Broni* noted that Twitter, or X, had redesigned its PISTOL emoji.

In October 2023, the UK government passed into law the Online Safety Act, a set of regulations intended to make online services more responsible for the content they carry.

I’ve had nuclear energy on the mind recently – a product of watching Oppenheimer, perhaps, and also the UK government’s newfound interest in nuclear power in the interest of combatting climate change.

There is something interesting happening with blogging.

Hello, and welcome to 2025.

It’s that time of the year again!

I know, I know; these days, everyone and their five-legged, three-eyed dog is writing a piece about AI.

Having dispatched punctuation and book news, we’re on to pocket calculators!

In the second of this miniseries of post-deadline catch-ups (the first dealt with punctuation), I’ve collected some links on the subject of books.

And you’re back in the room!