Mirror Ball Emoji Proposal (2018) [pdf]

https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19310-mirror-ball-emoji.pdf

by michalc • 11 months ago

53 54 11 months ago

Would be the most culturally neutral "party emoji". Party popper is not used that much outside of Anglosphere, confetti ball even less so and its emoji looks like medusa.

charcircuit2• 11 months ago

confetti ball even less so

Because it's a Japan only thing.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 11 months ago

Ah yes the super smash brothers ball

tgv2• 11 months ago

Why would you have such a thing? When you communicate, you know the receivers' culture, isn't it? Otherwise wouldn't it be a rather infrequent symbol with less practical use than e.g. "incomplete infinity"?

usrusr• 11 months ago

Do you? All I know about the readers of this post is that they either know how to read English, use some translation service or won't understand much of what I was writing.

But even when you do know exactly who you're addressing, they might be a very diverse group.

gpt5• 11 months ago

It is part of Unicode, and I've never seen it being used. I'll venture to say it didn't catch up as a party emoji.

thomascountz• 11 months ago

    The iconic decoration reflects light in all directions and transforms every room - no matter how big its size - into a glamorous space in which people can dance or dream.

I never thought about dreaming in a room with a disco ball in it. I think the informality of emoji proposals is really special!

heinrich5991• 11 months ago

U+1FAA9

deathanatos• 11 months ago

Added in Unicode 14: https://unicode.org/emoji/charts-14.0/emoji-released.html

I also appreciate melting face, dotted outline face, and face with salute. Low battery & ID card.

drno123• 11 months ago

Also the pregnant man / Bill Gates was added there :)

DonHopkins• 11 months ago

It should reflect the colors of pixels on the screen in all different directions in real time, and also cast bright spots of colored light all over the screen, while spinning. The stress test would be to fill the entire screen with many disco balls, over live video. Also a set of colored spotlight and smoke machine emojis would go well with it nicely too.

kungp• 11 months ago

Can we have hardware ray tracing for emojis?

adornKey• 11 months ago

And why is there still no standard way to embed audio tracks into fonts? Each Unicode character deserves a sound! And Rick Astley needs to be heard more often...

ygritte3• 11 months ago

Any platform that introduces hardware ray tracing for the first time will do so for the sake of emojis.

handsclean• 11 months ago

Naturally, it should also make all full body emoji start dancing, but only when proximate and with a line of sight not obstructed by a U+99385 SOLID WALL. Specific dance moves are implementation dependent, but SHOULD adapt to the user’s locale.

kookamamie• 11 months ago

Cute, but all of the example emojis look pretty poor, murky if you will.

weinzierl7• 11 months ago

Clip art is dead, long live clip art!

Unicode started with the mission to encode all characters needed for written communication in the world. This was already broad, but was not unusual for its time. Unlike Wikipedia, Unicode never went through a battle between inclusionists and deletionists. Moreover, with Han Unification it strayed from its core mission to "encode all characters needed for written communication in the world" (emphasis mine).

Instead it ended up as a fancy clip art library that every software somehow has to support, but with no way to implement the standard in its entirety.

lifthrasiir• 11 months ago

Emoji can be seen as a bait for implementations to support under-represented or ancient scripts as a side effect. In fact, emoji worked so well that we now have a universal full non-BMP support everywhere. For example, MySQL used to have the cursed BMP-only utf8 charset aka utf8mb3! It lasted until everyone started to complain about emojis.

jan_Inkepa• 11 months ago

Moreover, with Han Unification it strayed from its core mission to "encode all characters needed for written communication in the world" (emphasis mine).

Why do you say that? Because Unicode now has become balkanised between various CJK regions?

weinzierl7• 11 months ago

Because it conflates distinct characters and therefore fails its original mission to encode all characters needed for written communication.

Han Unification is just the most obvious case but the issues do not stop there. I'll give you a western example. In the sentence

«Günther a souligné l’ambigüité de son discours.»

there is an umlaut and a dieresis.

They are different things with different function. In traditional book printing they used to look differently.

With Unicode all this cultural nuance is lost. The characters necessary to communicate precisely simply have never been encoded, because Unicode forgot about its core mission.

Fixing things like that is where I want to see efforts go.

arp2427• 11 months ago

Unicode still does lots of work on language support. The notion that emoji support impedes that is simply not true.

And people were already doing emojis with phpBB, MSN Messenger, etc. The alternative to Unicode emojis would not be "no emojis", but "every platform with their own proprietary incompatible implementation".

Han Unification has been discussed a million times already. Originally Unicode only had 2 bytes and 65k characters. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe not – I don't speak these languages and those who do often disagree on this as well. However, changing it now would probably introduce be more pain than it solves.

Insanity• 11 months ago

Going to be nitpicky, while also saying +1

MSN, Skype, etc used emoticons and not emoji, and there wasn’t a standard that I’m aware of.

throw7• 11 months ago

unicode did not magically get rid of proprietary implementations... e.g. apple's "pistol".

weinzierl7• 11 months ago

"Unicode still does lots of work on language support."

Yes, and that's a good thing.

"The notion that emoji support impedes that is simply not true."

If it does not, why are there so many unresolved issues and shortcomings lingering around for years.

It's not that the issues around Han Unification will go away by ignoring them. There are related issues in western languages, like the umlaut/trema distinction. Pushing these topics, which are core to Unicode's original mission, into OpenType is not a solution.

Why do we continue adding pictures of random every day objects, like disco balls, when not even characters common in ordinary books can be represented?

Don't you think reallocating resources from emoji work to more serious issues would make sense?

uratbastrd• 11 months ago

Humans have other purposes than satisfying stated goals.

That’s often described as a flaw, e.g. to err is human, but it’s what we do. Some degree of chaos can help for efficient problem-solving.

Based on past history, we may never get perfect encoding for historical Earthlings, e.g. what about the following list looks well-planned and coordinated for the future?: ASCII, ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1), ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2), ISO 8859-3, ISO 8859-4, ISO 8859-5 (Cyrillic), ISO 8859-6 (Arabic), ISO 8859-7 (Greek), ISO 8859-8 (Hebrew), ISO 8859-8-I, ISO 8859-10, ISO 8859-13, ISO 8859-14, ISO 8859-15, ISO 8859-16, Windows-1250, Windows-1251, Windows-1252, Windows-1253, Windows-1254, Windows-1255, Windows-1256, Windows-1257, Windows-1258, KOI8-R, KOI8-U, KOI8-RU, Shift_JIS, EUC-JP, EUC-KR, GB2312, GBK, Big5, HZ-GB-2312, TIS-620, MacRoman, MacCyrillic, UTF-8, UTF-16 (BE/LE), UTF-32 (BE/LE), CESU-8, UTF-7, IBM866, IBM437, IBM850, IBM852, IBM855, IBM857, IBM862, IBM864, IBM866, KZ1048, IBM874 (TIS-620), VNI, Windows-874, Mac Thai, Mac Central European.

cubefox3• 11 months ago

It is the year 2118. ASI is taking over the light cone. The economy grows 100% each solar year. Still no emoji support on Hacker News.

weinzierl7• 11 months ago

Hacker News supports emojis just fine, as you can see here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23659248

It's just that most people can't deal with them responsibly, so it has not been made easy.

cubefox3• 11 months ago

¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

michaelt• 11 months ago

:'(

bombcar• 11 months ago

For a glorious few hours after one of the last emoji updates hacker news did support it because they didn’t filter those ones out yet. They do not filter out some of the quasi emojis like the hieroglyphs.

𓂸 Out for harambe.

arp2427• 11 months ago

It's not a matter of not supporting it; if you can store UTF-8 (as HN does) then you can store emojis. It's that HN actively strips emojis. One of the more childish and petty aspects of the site IMO.

cubefox3• 11 months ago

Yeah. If you look at somewhat similar forums like Less Wrong, people don't even use emojis that often. So not a big loss on HN anyway. Markdown and LaTeX support however...

kingstnap• 11 months ago

Emoji filtration != lack of support.

donatj• 11 months ago

It's been in the Unicode standard as #129705 since 14.0 but I don't think I've ever sent or received one.

I'd be curious to know how the actual usage stats aligned with their expectations.

saw-lau2• 11 months ago

How do I switch to the timeline where emojis, crypto, NFTs and generative AI weren't invented?

portaouflop• 11 months ago

Lumping together emojis with these other nightmare technologies is wild.

Name 1 bad thing that came from the invention of emojis that is comparable to the others

saw-lau2• 11 months ago

Nope - you've got me on that one. I can't.

tyleo• 11 months ago

I’m convinced AI is a conspiracy by Big Emoji to get using more emoji. That’s why there are so many in its responses.

ygritte3• 11 months ago

I would love a mirror ball emoji, why can't we have nice things?

Mirror Ball Emoji Proposal (2018) [pdf]

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