jam_brand's Shortform

Emoji: Minor Gripe Edition 👺🤡🐉

(I thought to append an even gaudier headlining tag, but don't have the heart—if though, by the way, you don't know what's so gaudy about it [and/or already don't reckon you much care about such a gripe] and simultaneously also don't love that I've surreptitiously stolen the focus of your eyeballs for such a matter, well... maybe we're in more agreement than you think! ♥)

A couple things I think I'd enjoy seeing regarding mini-ideogram usage here, though happy to know others' opinions as well:

I'd love if the default text-color was also used as the default for emoji (especially for posts, though maybe shortforms [and/or the approximately-two-tweets-worth of initial characters also visible in mouseover previews, though admittedly that's perhaps too burdensome] since those are visible when scrolling All Posts without an additional click); IANAE, though for at least a subset of emoji it seems this might be accomplished simply by affixing the Unicode combining character U+FE0E VARIATION SELECTOR-15 (VS15) to switch them to their text-representation, though alternatively there are open monochrome fonts that instead cover the full spectrum like the one found here: https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Emoji

Don't get me wrong, although I think I prefer some initial friction for its use, I'm not actually anti-color in general (e.g. I've largely felt ok about the images people have decided to insert within their writings).

Anyway, one last thing (maybe even the most important): as hypocritically-hinted at the outset, I also don't love them in post titles (at least when on display untruncated, anyway), though admit a bit more tolerance when confining such flourishes to personal blogs (which—I confess, yes—this post technically isn't). I agree with a recent commenter from a few days back mentioning such headline usage is usually unpleasantly attention-hijacking, though since their downvote of disapproval was met with much disagreement, I guess the next-best option for trying to maintain a tasteful garden could be actually disimplementing them outright since mere disincentivization seems frowned upon.

Looking back in closing, I think I could've condensed this considerable whinge to a fraction of the footprint given more time (or merely mightier 'moji-mojo, maybe), though with so rarely putting pinkies to keyboard, perhaps you'll excuse the rare semi-ramble indulgence. Sure sure... shortform, schmortform... yet nicely tiny, this isn't (and I try to keep [real] tidy, y'see?), though guess that goes with only minor explication too, so fine... further thoughts, colorfully-embellished or otherwise? 🎤