I think it’s also beautiful and more human that emoticons are a repurposing of often otherwise purely functional symbols. I’m sure this was around before the internet but I love that once we were all communicating regularly and conveniently by text we were yearning to expand what we could do with the written language.
Another thing I’m remembering now–I’m exactly the right age where I learned how to communicate via text over the internet before emojis were implemented at all, or at least before they were in everything. So, for me, :) and :D and :3 already meant specific things that I was intending to convey. As well, when emojis were being implemented into stuff like MSN Messenger, they weren’t as of yet so cleanly separated from emoticons, and in fact, the default behaviour from what I remember was that emojis would automatically replace emoticons. So you could type :D and mean :D (who is a good natured little fellow full of jollity, all things considered) but what ended up in the message you sent was (who is a despicable narc), and again at least from my hazy memories of those days it was not easy or convenient to get it to not automatically convert emoticons into emojis, something that still kinda lingers but isn’t the standard.
So maybe some of it is still leftover resentment from that era (btw @Death_Strandicoot this is where I was at in this post when you said that lol). It kinda felt like a corporation imposing on your sense of expression and in a totally unsolicited way, “replacing” how you were trying to express yourself with something that insisted on its aesthetic and expressive superiority.
Wow! What a huge project that must have been. I love how bespoke and hand-made it is. Most ASCII art I found while googling felt very machine made and lost the personality of the classic era of ASCII. It’s a lost art.
I found that page a long time ago, on (what feels like) an internet far, far away.
Ironically whenever I see the word ascii that’s the first thing that comes to mind.
It is a lost artform, aside from guides on gamefaqs
When I used a GameFAQs walk through for Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls, I of course picked the one written by A I e x (real ones know). At the end of his guide he included a review of the game, and one of his GamePro style criteria was “Awesome Factor.” He said Final Fantasy I was not awesome, except that and I quote “you get to beat the fucking shit out of some badass pirates”
I was reading a paper about the diffusion of disinformation on social media; its primary target of analysis is the 2016 election. And even though that happened only 9 years ago, the paper feels monstrously out of date.
Although one interesting little observation is that disinformation (as they define it) decreased on Facebook at about the same rate it increased on Twitter (not yet X - The Everything App).
(who is a despicable narc), and again at least from my hazy memories of those days it was not easy or convenient to get it to not automatically convert emoticons into emojis, something that still kinda lingers but isn’t the standard.