Here are a couple of outcomes from me thinking about stuff the past week or so…
I’d like to spend a bunch of time just to do research and planning.
Instead of focusing on emoji for Mutant Standard for now, I would like to do research and planning, especially with respects to furry/nonhuman stuff, and then just draw up a list I can publicly stick somewhere, and then work on them.
It means:
- I can spend the time I really need on these subject areas that really need time.
- People who are thinking about supporting the project could have a better idea whether they’d want to support this project or not if I have a clearer plan of what I’m doing.
- One of my biggest hurdles to being productive is being overwhelmed by the potential scale of this subject area. If I just spent time focusing on research, I could write up a big list at the end of it and then just get to work.
- I can decide what I want to encode in advance, which saves a lot of unnecessary time that would be spent thinking about encoding separately.
I’m still going to be researching and looking into new merch, and I could still do some Unicode emoji or other emoji I had already decided that I wanted to do during this time. And I’ll share snippets of this with you all as time goes on regardless of what stuff it is ($3+ patrons get it in advance as usual).
I want to structure Mutant Standard in a way that is reflective of what’s being encoded and what isn’t.
I’ve talked about this in the past, but haven’t had a reason to make it incredibly clear until I just did the first PUA encoding in 0.3.0 – not all emoji I make will be encoded.
As fun as so_gay and awoo are, these symbols rely on English, which alienate non-English and non-native English speakers (and they’re contradictory to the project’s principles somewhat), so I don’t want them to be encoded because that means people who don’t want to or can communicate in English would have to put up with them. There are also other emoji that as an idea aren’t great or they’re just silly stuff that I never intended on encoding in the first place (like Special packages).
Currently, the way that Mutant Standard’s packages are structured normally does not make this particularly obvious, and it’s going to be confusing for everyone including me going forward, so I’d like to do something about that.
This would coincide with the previous thing. If I have a clear plan and commit to it, there won’t be all the unencoded-that-may-yet-be-encoded emoji that there is atm.
I’m thinking of separating the packages into 2 groups:
- ‘Core’ set – Everything that has been encoded, shortcode and codepoint packages (and fonts if/when we get to them).
- ‘Extra’ set – Everything that is not being encoded, including special stuff (and maybe VIP stuff), shortcode packages only.
(and maybe I can do a non-verbal version of awoo/don’t awoo in the future <3)
I’m not sure when this would happen. It’s something I’m also going to be thinking about and implementing when the time is right.