💾 Archived View for paritybit.ca › arboretum › opinions › miscellaneous.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 02:57:41. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I think emoji get an undue amount of hate from certain online communities (e.g. Reddit). Sometimes it's an understandable level of derision because of how people can overuse them to the point where they lose all their meaning and become something that clutters text instead of clarifying its meaning.
Overall I think emoji are a good thing. They allow us to express the emotion or intent behind a statement in a way that emoticons (:-), :-*, :S, etc.) do not allow. An emoticon equivalent of 🥺 or 🥲 are not easily replicated in ASCII text form. They are very effective when used to this end, and can help remove a lot of the tone ambiguity from text-only forms of communication.
However, I dislike three main aspects of emojis:
1. The design is not standardized, which means emoji can look different on different systems, kind of eliminating the reason they were created in the first place
2. They are very western and Japanese society centric. The origin of emoji is Japan, and there are a lot of Japanese-specific emoji in there as well as an overabundance of western and white cultural icons and an absence of those of other cultures.
3. A lot of emoji are unnecessary. They should be limited to symbols that help express meaning more clearly, not things like 🗻, 💒, and 🍍. The Unicode Consortium is famous for not adding things like a vacuum cleaner emoji because "that function is represented in the broom emoji" (both of which I think shouldn't be in anyways) yet also add "➕" for which an identical symbol "+" exists.
Consistently high quality paper, features, and bindings with hard covers that are available in multiple colours. The paper is also some of my favourite to write on.
Excellent paper and a wide variety of sizes, prints, and form factors. My favourite are the top bound spiral notebooks with dot grid printing, orange covers, and A5 size paper, but I've also used some notebooks and other notepads from them over the years.
A fantastic, versatile, and durable calculator with many functions including: solving integrals and derivatives, linear systems of equations, and matrices. The visual equation display also makes it very easy to read what's on the screen. I prefer to always have it with me wherever I am, as I find it much nicer to use than a calculator on my PC or phone.
The only pairs of earbuds that I have ever purchased which have lasted longer than a handful of months. They are also the ones that sit most comfortably and securely in my ears, and I like the sound profile. I keep buying their ~$30 pair of wired earbuds (I have only had to buy two pairs over the past three years).
Added [awful, disgusting quality code](https://git.busybox.net/busybox/commit/?id=405095d84b1f3be17efb4e10d87d480bd054877f) to one of their utilities all to [avoid having someone's name and copyright](http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2019-April/087229.html)
associated with the project.