Shady Characters
- Website
- shadycharacters.co.uk · all feeds from this site
- Feed URL
https://shadycharacters.co.uk/feed/
Read it in your FeedListing reader
Or add to: Feedly Inoreader Raw feed
Latest posts
-
Miscellany № 113: an Asterisk without an asterisk
More links! Who knew the internet was going to be so busy ? Roel Nieskens, who writes at Pixel Ambacht , has taken a look at what it takes to render every character in the Unicode standard and what we can learn if we do that. I won’t steal Roel’s thunder, but the headlines are,…
-
Shady Characters × Because Language !
I was very, very pleased to join Daniel Midgley and Ben Ainslie for the latest episode of their Because Language podcast. It wasn’t the easiest to plan – Daniel and Ben are in Australia and I’m in the UK , so this was recorded at 10pm for me and 5am (!) for them – but I’m really…
-
Miscellany № 112: books!
It’s been a while since I crossed off some of the book-related items on my to-do list, so here are a few recent links worth talking about. “Brazilian Caracara Eagle (Robert Havell Jr.) (After John James Audubon), M10298,” Harvard Art Museums collections online, Jul 24, 2026,…
-
An interview with Ollie Wagner, Apple emoji designer
It was impossible, I found, when writing Face with Tears of Joy , to get a response to questions or interview requests out of Google, Apple, Meta and the other big emoji vendors. (A lone author writing a book on a twenty-year-old technology probably doesn’t move the PR needle a…
-
Miscellany № 111: do the evolution
As we saw last time round, emoji is young and still changing. And while punctuation may be much older, it, too, is still very much subject to change. Here are a few recent links to bear that out. Google’s Gboard keyboard, as of May 2026, with comma and full stop keys still in…
-
Miscellany № 110: do the revolution
A bumper emoji miscellany this week to celebrate Shady Characters ’ new platform ! I’ll be publishing miscellany on other subjects in the coming weeks, but for now, let’s get started. First, Finnish readers might be interested in this article about emoji by Oskari Onninen.…
-
The new Shady Characters is now live!
I’ve been telegraphing this for a while now , but the new Shady Characters is out of its beta phase. What you see now at shadycharacters.co.uk is, I hope, faster and more accessible version of the site that preserves the appearance and content of the old one. It pains me to…
-
A reminder: the new/old Shady Characters will be launching soon
As I wrote last month , I’ll soon be launching a new version of Shady Characters . Specifically, I will be replacing the current version on or around Friday 17th April. You can preview the new site at https://staging.shadycharacters.co.uk ; with luck, it should look more or less…
-
Cairo: a Shady Characters field trip
This February my family and I visited Egypt for the first time. We were fortunate to be able to go; it was an amazing trip to a fascinating country, and, of course, there was more than a little of interest for Shady Characters readers. Here are a few words and pictures about the…
-
Testing the new/old Shady Characters
As I mentioned last time , I’ve been working on a new version of blog that doesn’t rely on WordPress. That new version is just about ready to go, and I’d love to get your thoughts on it before I switch over to it permanently. A preview is available at…
-
New year's resolutions
Look: I am just a blogger. I can write about punctuation, or emoji, or books, or calculators, and I can hope that my readers will enjoy it. I can post about interesting things I’ve read or watched and hope that someone else will find them interesting too. And that’s great! I…
-
Shady Characters advent calendar 2025: PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS
🙏 PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS, aka Unicode code point 0x1F64F . Day 10, and we are at the end of this year’s Shady Characters advent calendar! Today, to answer, belatedly, a question asked by Larry Hosken , we’re looking at PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS (🙏). Read more →
-
Shady Characters advent calendar 2025: FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES
FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES, aka Unicode code point 0x1FAE9 . This emoji (), which may or may not appear correctly on your device, * is called FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES. It’s a relative newcomer, gaining the Unicode stamp of approval only in 2024, 1 and has been rolling out…
-
Shady Characters advent calendar 2025: PISTOL
🔫 PISTOL, aka Unicode code point 0x1F52B . Ho ho ho! Nothing says Christmas like a water pistol, am I right? I will admit that as I sat down to write this post a good eight to ten months after first planning it out, it had not occurred to me at the time just how jarring the…
-
Shady Characters advent calendar 2025: PERSON IN SUIT LEVITATING
🕴️ PERSON IN SUIT LEVITATING, aka Unicode code point 0x1F574 . Every now and again an emoji appears that makes the reader say “What is this? Why is it here? Who thought this was a good idea?” It is in the spirit of both asking and answering such questions that I give you ‘🕴️’,…
-
Shady Characters advent calendar 2025: RAINBOW FLAG
🏳️🌈 RAINBOW FLAG, aka Unicode code points (deep breath now) 0x1F3F3 0xFE0F 0x200D and 0x1F308 . RAINBOW FLAG contains multitudes. Multitudes of Unicode characters, that is, because ‘🏳️🌈’ is conjured into existence only if four other characters are placed in order, one after…
-
Shady Characters advent calendar 2025: SPARKLES
✨ SPARKLES, aka Unicode code point 0x2728 . If you spend even a modest proportion of your time online, you have almost certainly come across the SPARKLES emoji (✨). It’s a cheery and versatile symbol, and it is increasing found outside emoji’s usual habitat of text messages and…
-
Shady Characters advent calendar 2025: THUMBS UP
👍 THUMBS UP, aka Unicode code point 0x1F44D . If the onsen emoji (♨️) and the hamburger (🍔) show us the nuts and bolts of how emoji work, THUMBS UP (👍) shows us how we, emoji’s users, put our own stamp on them. That’s because ‘👍’ is a chameleon and a provocateur, with meanings…
-
Shady Characters advent calendar 2025: HAMBURGER
🍔 HAMBURGER, aka Unicode code point 0x1F354 . In most ways, the HAMBURGER emoji is quite boring. It’s been around since emoji’s Japanese heyday, when it appeared on phones from all of Japan’s big cellphone networks, and it was one of the first emoji to be adopted for use in the…
-
Shady Characters advent calendar 2025: HOT SPRINGS
♨️ HOT SPRINGS, aka Unicode code points 0x2668 and 0xFE0F . You would be forgiven for wondering what, exactly, this emoji (♨️) is meant to represent. Well, if the title has not already given the game away, I will tell you: this is the HOT SPRINGS emoji, 1 and in emoji terms at…