If you grew up around the plain-text internet and pre-smartphone texting, you may be aware of the distinction between emoticons and emojis. The latter are separate unicode characters that are increasingly-detailed artistic renderings of various faces and items, like a Ferris wheel: 🎡. The former are clever constructions of non-emoji characters, which provide some intangible level of whimsy and cleverness that never fails to delight.1Thanks to Doug Merritt for pointing out that my original sentence here—that these were all actually made of ASCII characters—was incorrect. Many require Unicode in their current constructions, but really the fun part is that they give the feeling of plain text more so than the tiny image that is an emoji can do.
Consider this shrug: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Or someone flipping a table in frustration: (ノ ゜Д゜)ノ ︵ ┻━┻
If you enjoy this and want to add some flair to your writing, consider the wonderful ASCIImoji site. It has a near-complete table of these emoticons from which you can copy, a Chrome extension, and a .plist file you can import to macOS to create text replacement shortcuts which subsequently sync to your iPhone if desired.
Every time I see one of these, or recognize an opportunity to use one myself, I find myself grinning. It’s a simple joy of playing on a computer, and I’m glad I finally got these replacements working.
(•_•) ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■)
- 1Thanks to Doug Merritt for pointing out that my original sentence here—that these were all actually made of ASCII characters—was incorrect. Many require Unicode in their current constructions, but really the fun part is that they give the feeling of plain text more so than the tiny image that is an emoji can do.