sweet emoji

I have no emojis and I must :(

WordPress supports emojis. Behold: 🙂

However, there are two types of emojis:

  1. Emojis that are converted from emoticon text such as :) turning into a happy face
  2. Emojis that are entered using an emoji picker, such as the one in Windows 11:

The former work fine on this blog, but because the database goes all the way back to the ancient internet time of 2005, it uses an old type of character encoding that can’t handle emojis and turns them into question marks instead, like so: ??

This means creolened.com can never show the full and resplendent range of emojis.

🙁

I could convert the database over to accommodate this, but that risks mucking things up on a sitewide scale. And as much as I’d <31WordPress support suggest this should auto-convert to a heart emoji, but alas it does not appear to do so. to have a full array of emojis to draw from, as I am a silly person, I am also at least a little practical.

😳

I am weirdly fascinated by Microsoft’s 3D emoji

To be accurate, the emoji are not actually 3D, they’re just shaded to give a 3D appearance. Microsoft recently made them open source via Github for anyone to use. And I want to use them (okay, maybe not all of them) because they’re just so adorable, odd or both.

Ars Technica story
Github link

Admittedly, some of them veer toward nightmare-inducing. Observe the pseudo-3D clown:

But this cow face is so dang cute!

Someone in the comments of the Ars story said the surprised face emoji “looks like someone got kicked in the nuts” and I can’t really argue otherwise:

I wonder how easy it would be to add these to WordPress? I wonder how much I would abuse them if I did?

Who needs emojis? I do!

I admit it, I like emojis. But I use them in that hipster, post-ironic “I’m too cool for you” way, sort of the same way I use “lol.”

This probably makes me a horrible, petty person in some way, but it’s balanced out by how adorable I find kittens.

I installed the Super Emoji+ plugin for the blog. How is it? Let me sum it up:

If you look carefully, you can see the crying emoji above appears to be an actual severed head as the tears are pooling directly under it. No wonder it’s so sad. Poor body-less little guy.

EDIT: The plugin doesn’t seem to work with the current version of WordPress. Just pretend that giant question mark above is crying.

EDIT, The Sequel: I’ve removed giant question mark and added an image that captures the essence of the missing emoji. My work here is done.