On Emoji

I'm having hard times grasping this originally Japanese thing. The word rhymes with "emotion", and although in Japanese it had no such meaning, it apparently was intended to express a notion, feeling or emotion in a single hieroglyphic depicting some character or other. It just so happened that after some time it became a (Unicode) standard alternative to smileys and other pictographs.
 
Speaking of smileys, I may have an emotional range of a teaspoon, but I can't tell what most of those emoji faces mean. Each time I pull up the emoji palette in an application, I'm always stuck at which to pick, despite of seemingly wide choice. They don't convey any emotion I can possibly want to express. Don't get me wrong, they may be perfectly suited to express a notion of a pile of shit but this is not what I need from an emotion. And even with faces, wtf ?

For the purpose of illustration I've picked a few, but you can imagine the rest. Here, see for yourself, and mind that it is an international standard, no less.

So I believe the entire emoji thing was a designer's experiment, a hip toy, which was backed by the Unicode consortium in order to keep filling their seemingly endless code pages, and from there application developers picked it as a "standard" way smileys should be done. Quite unfortunate really.

Please, PLEASE, use something like Kolobok, or hire a designer and at least make your smileys look like Skype's.

Монти Механик

Вот так, прослушав сотню случайных групп, наткнешься на нечто выдающееся. Монти механик - группа из Челябинска (что тоже приятно - соседи), играющая музыку, так ложащуюся на душу.