The smiley and I go way back. :) I knew him before he got all uppity and wanted to be known as an "emoticon." So I've been disappointed that the old-fashioned, up-cycled punctuation smiley is so often replaced by little graphic smiles in e-mail and texting programs. It's fine if they use the simple, classic, "have a nice day" smiling face, but too often they have a garish thing with a giant smile and blushing cheeks and tuft of hair - they're just trying too hard.
That's why I'm happy to see that some people are taking it upon themselves to make a new generation of smileys. For those of you less familiar with computers, it used to be that pretty much all computers used a code called ASCII to communicate text. But it had the shortcoming that it could only handle the Roman alphabet (that is, this alphabet.). So now they use a new standard called Unicode, which can handle all the letters in all the world's alphabets, plus hundreds of symbols used in math, publishing, linguistics and more. All these thousands of symbols have been a boon for anyone interested in making pictures out of letters. Already we have this extra smirky smiley, which is really just a Japanese character:
Here are some other ones I liked (which may not work on your computer. Good luck!):
On the other hand, they also made a couple of smiling characters, which is nice, but makes it a little too easy:
That's why I'm happy to see that some people are taking it upon themselves to make a new generation of smileys. For those of you less familiar with computers, it used to be that pretty much all computers used a code called ASCII to communicate text. But it had the shortcoming that it could only handle the Roman alphabet (that is, this alphabet.). So now they use a new standard called Unicode, which can handle all the letters in all the world's alphabets, plus hundreds of symbols used in math, publishing, linguistics and more. All these thousands of symbols have been a boon for anyone interested in making pictures out of letters. Already we have this extra smirky smiley, which is really just a Japanese character:
ツ
Here are some other ones I liked (which may not work on your computer. Good luck!):
Ꙩ_Ꙩ
⊂(◉‿◉)つ
◔ᴗ◔
◉︵◉
(´・ω・｀)
ಠ‿ಠ
On the other hand, they also made a couple of smiling characters, which is nice, but makes it a little too easy:
☺☻
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