emoji hieroglyphics
plus humidifiers, geronimo stilton, etc. 🌝
opening remarks
new year, new rupaul
A no spoilers synopsis for the season 16 premiere:
Dawn, Q, and Sapphira Cristál were my favs! When I asked Jackson, my resident RuPaul expert/person who originally gave me his personal season viewing order when I started watching the show, he highlighted Dawn and Morphine Love Dion, whose live Miami shows are apparently really good! Super excited to meet the next batch of queens next week yay!!!
emojiology 101 🌝
I am always talking out of my ass about higher education. Grad school this, grad school that, realistically we know that’s not really in the budget at present. But theoretically, if I were to dedicate my life to the academic study of anything, it would be emojis. PhD in Emoji Studies. I’d be defending my thesis with Unicode boxing gloves 🥊
It’s because to me, they’re kind of the perfect thing—their design and aesthetics, their subjective, idiolectic, and culturally-specific meanings, the predictive behavior we exhibit when you’re texting or whatever and your brain is like “hahaha ok now type ‘😵💫’” just like it would be for words. I bring this up mostly because of an Atlantic article I saw the headline graphic for on Instagram this week but was unable to read the whole article because obviously (as someone who thinks a movie should be 90 minutes long, a TV episode 15 minutes long, and a video 1 second long) an Atlantic subscription is beyond my patience:
The gist seems to be that in courts across the country, the legal definitions of emojis are becoming points of contention. In this particular case, Bed Bath & Beyond shareholders are suing Ryan Cohen (who was apparently a key player in the GameStop stock fiasco despite him not being a listed character in Dumb Money; also he founded Chewy, the online pet food retailer/second-most-common cardboard box to find on the street after an Amazon box) for securities fraud, claiming that his use of the 🌝 emoji misled them into thinking the stock was gonna go “to the moon.”
So what does 🌝 mean? Grab your British court wig—let’s solve this case ourselves.
According to Emojipedia, THE ultimate resource on emoji meanings and use, 🌝 “may be used to represent the moon more generally. Commonly used [as] a smiley. Occasionally used for irony and sarcasm.” Irony and sarcasm… interesting. WikiHow, which, thanks for playing, WikiHow, inexplicably also has a moonmoji usage guide article, and outlines three potential uses for 🌝 in text message convos. First, they suggest that it can be a substitute for a typical smiley face, which I couldn’t agree with less, no offense but that’s got an awful vibe. I’m a particular fan of the old school :) for my smiley face needs.
Second and third, however, they hit the nail on the head 🔨
Personally, I think 🌝 kind of has similar vibes to 🙃, 🫥, and 🧍♀️—it’s like a little self-deprecating emphasis on the sender’s presence in the message. I don’t know if any of these things scream “stock value in publicly struggling Bed Bath & Beyond is going to exponentially increase,” but that’s just me… what do you think?
camera roll museum
reco
The Secret Life of Dancing Dogs
If you’re looking for some heartwarming, casual, but emotional docuseries watching for these cold winter months, boy do I have the show for you. An ABC News Studios production by way of Hulu (please bear with me), The Secret Life of Dancing Dogs, or “The Dog Show,” as Ivan and I call it, tells the story of five dancing duos of invariably intense but otherwise very distinct middle-aged women and their dogs on the road to Crufts, the biggest dog dancing competition of the year.
The real-life characters feature every archetype you could think of—the retired previous winner training an anxious new protégé, the scorned silver medalist who thinks she should’ve won last year and is out for blood, a dark horse competitor whose dog is fighting for his life against a terminal heart condition, and even an Elizabeth Moss-esque Hungarian woman who constantly asks her two young daughters for advice about her routine. The stand-out for me was the shy, soft-spoken Marianne Elise Methi from Norway, whose victory in the 2022 Crufts finals was outshone by the hate she got from the second-place contestant’s vitriolic TikToks. Plus, it has dogs doing adorable dances so what’s not to love?
Honestly, only read this if you’re in the market for a humidifier, cause otherwise it’s kinda a snooze. Anyway—it’s been a DRY ass winter. And my skin is not having it. So I did what I usually do—I complained about it to Sofia, who suggested we get a humidifier. Into the Reddit rabbit hole I went, and I quickly discovered that this particular rabbit hole had no floor. I’d naively assumed this would all be a matter of seeing which humidifier models most frequently cropped up on the trifecta of Wirecutter, The Strategist, and Reddit recommendations. But after learning about ultrasonic, evaporative, vaporizer, cool mist, warm mist, top-loading, bottom-loading humidifiers… I ended up with way more questions than I’d begun with.
I was also quite intimidated by the fact that humidifiers need to run on distilled water, otherwise they coat everything the room in a fine white dust, clog up their mechanisms, and potentially create carcinogens (?) because of the metals present in hard water. Where am I gonna get the money for distilled water? Luckily, there’s a wealth of information online about how to make distilled water at home, thanks to the CPAP/hydroponic gardening/fancy homemade espresso/DIY shrimp farming communities. So I bought a water distilling machine… yeah. We’re gonna see how this goes.
da studio
influences
I want to introduce a new section that probably will not run every week where I talk about how my current animation project is going and share little behind the scenes bits and pieces or whatever. A quick gloss is that I’m developing a series of shorts that takes place in a futuristic single-city world where they’ve developed a scientific procedure to “uplift” some animals to human sapience. This week, I want to talk about some of the biggest reference points and influences on the world of Big City.
Geromino Stilton
I am sooooo nostalgic for the chapter books era, something I’ll def eventually cover in more detail in this blog. The Geronimo Stilton books changed my brain chemistry with their delicious alternate font choices for emphasis, like I literally wrote my diary in this format for years (prob between the ages of like 7 and 9) because of that. Honestly, there’s probably something in here that connects to emojis somehow, in the way they both visually embellish plain text and add a depth and flavor only possible in cartoons.
Also, the complex world of New Mouse City and Mouse Island detailed in the series of maps in the back of every book—chef’s kiss! Immaculate world-building!
Lisa Hanawalt
Bojack Horseman is probably THE most defining show in the modern anthropomorphic animals genre but I’m specifically mentioning its production designer Lisa Hanawalt instead of the show in general for this because have you READ her comics? Have you SEEN her illustrations? Tuca & Bertie? Coyote Doggirl???? Her work is weird and horny and funny and sad and her attention to detail and texture is super inspiring to me.
Richard Scarry’s Busytown
Ummmmm duh!!! Who would I be if I was drawing little animals living in a big city and not paying my respects to Busytown! Scarry’s character design skills are in a league of their absolute own, he completely reinvented the wheel with every single pig wearing a hat he ever put to paper.
After seeing my work, sometimes people ask me if I would ever do children’s picture books and unforch the answer is currently no—not because I don’t think they’re some of the most important and valuable forms of literature because they literally introduce new generations to a lifelong love of reading—but because I’m 24 and a lot of the scenarios my brain comes up with are not suitable for children, and why can’t anthropomorphic animals be fucking, sucking, and ripping bong? Just because they’re cute doesn’t mean they’re for kids, but I do believe that sometimes the best things can be universally appreciated by people of all ages.
current consumption
Watching: Ferrari (2023), Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023), The Secret Life of Dancing Dogs, assorted episodes of Lego Masters, RuPaul’s Drag Race s16e1
Reading: nothing :0
enrichment activity
Make a personal Emojipedia to think about the idiolectic meanings of your most-used emojis. Like this:
😭: hahahahahhahaha, thank you, sorry, omg, sad
🤝: deal, same
💀: hahahahahhaa, omg, sorry, yikes
🫡: you got it, i’ll remember, I’m off to go do something
🎯: correct!
🥺: thank you, aww, sorry
💐🐛: thank you, playful
Then, brainstorm some Potential Future Emoji Uses. Like this:
🤸♀️: horny, sexually available
🪤: I think this is a trap
🐩: bro that’s beautiful
🎧: squidward the truck’s coming. oh my god he has headphones on. he can’t hear us. oh my god
lisa hanawalt <3