Mutant Standard Blog

This is a backburner thought, but I’ve contemplated shaping Mutant Standard’s encoding standard over the long term to somehow prevent easy use (and thus cooption) by corporate entities.

Continue reading “Cooption thoughts”

Continuing with my tradition of making blog posts about why certain emoji that are in the Unicode Standard are not and will never be in Mutant Standard, I have decided to talk about the very first few emoji I decided to exclude – police and border patrol.

With police, I’m mainly bullet pointing this because it’s really depressing and I only have enough emotional energy for one of them, and borders seemed like the better choice because I have my own long personal story.

This is quite a long post and it’s going to go to some dark places.

 

Continue reading “Police and Border Patrol emoji – The Mutant Standard view”

CW: the generic state of world politics, violence, a degree of pessimism.

Continue reading “Permanence, negligence, IDK”

I often hear a particular undercurrent of attitudes or beliefs when I hear various discussions about Unicode codepoints and Unicode emoji symbols, and to me, as an illustrator and a designer (ie. a visual communicator), and someone who is trying to navigate their place in the world of languages, I find that these attitudes usually come from a place of privilege, and/or a lack of knowledge about how graphic communication actually works.

I think the notion that Unicode Emoji is something that can be permanent, stable and reliable, doesn’t make sense and isn’t realistic. And even if you could make it that way, that’s not a situation anyone should actually want.

 

Continue reading “Why Unicode emoji isn’t (and shouldn’t be) a reliable communication mechanism”