Keith Houston's Blog, page 2

Presenting the Shady Characters Periodic Table of Emoji

I have made a thing! Head over to emoji.shadycharacters.co.uk to peruse the Shady Characters Periodic Table of Emoji.

What do I mean by a periodic table of emoji? Well, I answer that question in some detail in the notes under the table itself, but briefly, I wanted to see if I could use a table to tell us something about how emoji are perceived. Which emoji are positive? Which are negative? Which ones convey sentiments that match their appearances, and which deviate from them?

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The reviews are in for Face with Tears of Joy

The reviews for Face with Tears of Joy have started to come in, and I am happy (and relieved) to say that reviewers seem to be enjoying the book quite a bit! Here are a few quotes:

Houston chronicles the rise of the emoji in this fun romp through the evolution of digital language…equal parts informative and delightful.

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Face with Tears of Joy on 99% Invisible

I’ve always really enjoyed 99% Invisible, Roman Mars’ long-running podcast about design, which makes it all the more special to have appeared on three different episode in the past — on the octothorpe (#), the interrobang (‽), and pocket calculators respectively. Now, to mark the publication of Face with Tears of Joy, I’m pleased to say that I’m on it again!

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Face with Tears of Joy, revealed!

Please allow me to introduce the cover of my next book, Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji!

‘😂’ will be published in July this year, and you can pre-order the paperback in the USA from Norton, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, Hudson, Powell’s, or Walmart. In the rest of the world, order from Amazon.co.uk, Bookshop.org or Waterstones.

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Miscellany № 108: emoji, for all the wrong reasons

Emoji have been in the news recently for a host of reasons, most of them bad — but all of them, I would submit, worthy of our attention.

First up is a Netflix series called Adolescence that has been garnering plaudits in the UK and elsewhere since it went on air last month. I won’t spoil the plot, but I note that Emojipedia has joined the clamour with a blog post titled “Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’, Emoji Codes & Emoji Repurposing”. In it, Keith Broni explores the programme’s use of an “emoji code”...

Miscellany № 107: old books (and a new Book)

Some big news today: The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of our Time will be published soon in paperback!

The paperback edition is updated from the hardback, with all of the various errata fixed and a number of changes made to account for the book’s paperback rather than hardcover construction. If you remember, the hardback edition had a number of references to its own physical form (“Tip the book towards you and look at the spine”, and so on) which have now been ...

Backing the backslash

I’m almost ashamed to say it, but I never really gave the backslash a second thought.

The backslash’s forward-leaning counterpart is everywhere, especially in computing. It lives in network and web addresses such as https://shadycharacters.co.uk; in file paths, such as /home/keith; and it introduces human-readable “comments” in any number of programming languages, often like /* this */ or // this.

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Miscellany № 106: pistols, punctuation and print

I came across a post last July on Emojipedia, in which Keith Broni noted that Twitter, or X, had redesigned its PISTOL emoji. PISTOL had always been controversial: most online platforms started off with PISTOLs drawn as realistic firearms, but, over the course of the mid-2010s, most of them moved to toylike renderings of water pistols instead. Twitter had followed suit.

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Complying with the Online Safety Act

In October 2023, the UK government passed into law the Online Safety Act, a set of regulations intended to make online services more responsible for the content they carry. It is a laudable aim, but unfortunately the distinctions the Act draws between large sites such as Facebook and Google and smaller sites such as this one are insufficiently well defined. The upshot is that complying with the Act places a much larger burden on the owners of sites such as Shady Characters than it does on the ow...

Shady Characters on AMSEcast: a podcast about calculators

I’ve had nuclear energy on the mind recently — a product of watching Oppenheimer, perhaps, and also the UK government’s newfound interest in nuclear power in the interest of combatting climate change. Apropos of all that, then, I was happy to appear on a recent episode of AMSEcast, the podcast of the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The episode was hosted by the museum’s director, the genial Alan Lowe, who was kind enough to let me rabbit on at length on the subject...