As you might imagine, given my current situation, I’ve been kind of scatterbrained. I was in the middle of working on some emoji that are quite close to ready a day or so ago, but then I realised that I had lost track of what I already made (which is unusual for me, but this has been a much longer release cycle than usual), so I’ve decided to get everything I’ve already done locked in place with a new release before I continue finishing more emoji.
Aside from personal things, this release is quite a bit smaller than usual because a lot of stuff in this release was quite intensive (like extra hands, new colours and extended colours). I also just had to go with what I had the spoons to create, so the kinds of emoji I’ve made isn’t necessarily what was planned, and it’s going to be that way for quite a while atm.
This is going to be very wordy because I don’t have the spoons to make diagrams explaining the CM system at the moment, so bear with me.
I’d like to thank everyone for being so patient and supportive during this really shitty time in my life. I’ve been hoping that I’d reach the end of this tunnel sooner but as usual, my spoons are in much shorter supply than I would like u∆∆u, but I am on it as much as I can be in my present capacity. 💚
What’s in 0.1.0
Instead of Orxporter, which is what this milestone was originally going to be for, 0.1.0 represents smaller internal changes, as well as an improved colour modifier system so that all hand types have access to all shared colour modifiers.
New CMs, more structured CMs
So, CMs (colour modifiers – I don’t use the term ‘skin colour’ because I’m colouring things which aren’t necessarily skin here) are the different colour options you have on certain emoji, like hand and body expressions. They’re normally skin colours and there are normally 6 of them (yellow, and 5 human skin tones) but I’m making emoji for furries and critters of the cyberspace so there are way way more in Mutant Standard.
Figuring out how to deliver people lots of customisation options without making a system that is incredibly complicated is not an easy task because I’m trying to condense the infiniteness of online personas into a few categories and options. It’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit as I’ve been working on stuff over the last few months.
This is what I’ve come up with most recently, and the system that’s in place right now:
- Shared CMs – general use CMs that can be used with any colour-modifiable emoji. These are typically unnatural colours like G3, B1, P2, etc. I plan for there to be between 32 and 48 of them in total whenever this is set in stone (which it definitely is not right now).
- Restricted CMs – CMs that are designed for certain contexts and can only be used within those contexts. These will be few in number. Human CMs (H1-5) as well as fur CMs (Fx) are examples of these, which are restricted to human hands and paw hands respectively.
So this new update features 6 new shared CMs: B3, G3, G4, P2, Y2, V2 and X30. Also, finally every paw hand emoji has versions in all Shared CMs, giving furries access to way more colour options than there were before.
Other stuff
New Rainbow Flag
Mutant Standard is no stranger to adopting new symbolism (see the gender-neutral toilet symbol and new wheelchair symbol), and this will be another example. Mutant Standard’s Rainbow Flag will be adding a black and a brown stripe, such as the one originally created by Tierney ad agency with the City of Philadelphia.
This feels like it might be a big one to some. The rainbow flag has had many historical changes, but this one has been the longest-standing version, so for a lot of young gay and queer folk like myself, (until I learned more about it) this feels like some kind of forever symbol, but in the grand scheme of things, symbols should always be open to necessary changes, and this seems like a good one to make.
You can find more information at https://morecolormorepride.com/.
(Thank you @cq@cybre.space for informing me about this.)
Even more pride flags
Demiguy and demigirl are now on the roster. Thanks to Siphonay for pointing these out to me with his original edit of some other pride flags I did.
We also now have Quoiromantic/WTFromantic.
New Paw and Claw Hands
I feel like getting more out the door is often requested, and I wanted to do it too so furries and scalies can have the full set of the hands as humans do. It’s still not 100%, but we’re getting pretty close now. Paw hands have 23/31, Claw hands have 27/31.
(31 cuz I’m still going by 2016’s Unicode spec rather than 2017’s, which included 2 new hand expressions)
Some breaking edits
This is because I’ve been restructuring the CM (colour modifier) system.
All human CM codes are now reversed in order from what they used to be.
This means that H1 is now darkest and H5 is lightest.
I wanted to do this to remove extra white-defaultness from the emoji system and because in any hypothetical emoji picker, I’d order it this way anyway. This shouldn’t ever change anymore.
Some CMs have been removed.
Paw CMs FO1 and FX40 have been removed because of overlap from the ‘Shared’ CMs. Use Y2 and X30 respectively to get basically the same result.
Metadata
I try to keep metadata as minimal as possible to keep the filesize of every emoji down, but I felt this one was more than warranted. I’ve added a Dublin Core Title to each emoji with the name of the project ‘Mutant Standard’ and the version number ‘0.1.0’ to make the fact that they are Mutant Standard emoji more visible and so you know what version they are from!