I think kaomoji have been a thing in Japan even before unicode was invented. The Japanese encodings and IME (input method esitors) allowed them to type a wide variety of characters, punctuation and symbols that aren’t available in most western encodings, so I feel like the Japanese folks had a head start on creative use of typography.

For example, if you want an eyeball you can just type “do” (degrees), and the IME will pull up °, and “omega” gives you ω, so it’s pretty easy to make (°ω°).

I don’t know what technically constitutes the most troublesome username, but surely some of the kaomoji Japanese folks have come up with are up there. Good luck trying to type these.

ଘ(੭ˊᵕˋ)੭ ੈ♡‧₊˚

I think the first person to use an obfuscated name like lIiḷ|ḷiIl was pretty clever.

I felt like a wizard as a kid because I knew how to defrag the hard drive and degauss the CRT.

Smullyan would be proud.

Thank you for introducing me to Your Name. I just finished watching it. Absolutely wonderful film.

They should have sent a poet.

Dragostea Din Tei by O-Zone, though I think I heard it on NicoNico Douga before it became known as the NumaNuma Song.

Came here to say this. If you haven’t heard this remix yet do check it out!

https://youtu.be/oJhayhBh5JM

That is really cool. I would love to implement that in a VR world, but I’m guessing the dithering might not line up for both eyes and it would be annoying.

I’m so used to seeing difficult to read text in captchas that my brain didn’t even register the giant “79” at first and started with the squished characters. Guys, I think my model is overfitted…

Squid: “Nobody at home’s ever gonna believe this.”

First I just want to say, that is a damn beautiful website. No ads, no popups, just pure information.

And second, as a former back end developer who has spent a huge amount of time working on input sanitization and building database schemas, that list gave me mild PTSD for a job I have never even had.

Somethin’ like a fish.

I feel like even AI will be able to emulate this kind of speech, but the upside is people with dementia won’t feel so alienated anymore.

Randall Munroe has joined the conversation

That headline got me really excited before I realized they meant “in an app”.