Live Last read · last published · next check
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, https://hvrd.art/o/312043 . I write in The Book about John James Audubon’s The Birds of America , a massive artistic,…
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 great deal for companies like these. In hindsight, I probably should have begun my email subject lines with the word “ AI…
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 place. (Keith Houston) If you use an Android phone, there’s a decent chance you’re also using Google’s “Gboard” keyboard…
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. Oskari looks into the meaning and use of ‘🤠’, along with emoji in general; I talked to him as part of his research, and he…
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 admit that I’ve been working on this for almost four years (!), and things have changed a bit since then. My wife and I had…
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 identical to the current version. That said, a few things will change: Comments will be handled by email . When you…
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 trip. Cairo We arrived at Cairo airport after dark, with two tired but wakeful kids in tow, and, eventually, found our…
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 https://staging.shadycharacters.co.uk , if you want to take a look; everything should look and work much as it does at the moment, although…
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 never imagined I’d still be doing this (and still taking pleasure from it!) a decade and a half after I started. Nor did I…
🙏 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
