It's a history of emoji. Quickly moves past early pictographic writing on up to little pictures on early Japanese pagers and smartphones. I was kinda familiar with a lot of this history. For a few years, Unicode emoji changes would make the news; I remember reading about such things at the time. But reading about them all together shows some trends that weren't so obvious year-by-year.
Reading the first couple of chapters, I was kinda worried. I read this as an e-book. The first few bits talk about ancient pictographic writing systems. The book talks about various specific characters… which my e-book reader's font apparently doesn't support. So the book would say something like "The ancient Sumerian squiqqle Π which evolved into a similar Hebrew character () and as well as an Egyptian glyph (β»)" and I couldn't make sense of it until I realized it was failing to display not-often-used-and-thus-omitted-from-the-font symbols. On the one hand, it's kind of a shame: I bet the author had to do an hour of research to figure out each of those symbols, and I couldn't see the result on that research. OTOH, what are the chances that I'd actually retain memory of those specific symbols a day after reading about them? (darned low) Can I imagine a Hebrew character that could have evolved from a kinda-arch-looking symbol? Sure.
Kinda sad to learn that lately many apps have been so eager to expand their choices of emoji, stickers, etc, that they've largely left the Unicode set behind. On the one hand, it's nice when a Discord lets me react with a little "thank you" graphic instead of an ambiguous π. (Did he mean "thanks" or "praying for you" orβ¦?) On the other hand, it's a pity that there's no way to copy-paste that little "thank you" graphic from Discord to anywhere else, instead just leaving around little unsupported-character graphics (β»).
Now I wonder if I keep using the phrase "on the one handβ¦on the other hand because I was thinking about the π emoji. Anyhow.
