Difference between revisions of "1857: Emoji Movie"

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==Explanation==
 
==Explanation==
  
[[Megan]] asks [[Cueball]] if he knows about the upcoming ''{{w|The Emoji Movie}}''. The movie, set to come out on July 28, had been widely reviled on the Internet for its lack of original plot, characters, and jokes. Cueball responds to the topic by {{w|Damning with faint praise|damning it with faint praise}}; the way in which he emphasizes that it's not the '''worst''' idea for a movie indicates that the list of concepts worse than ''The Emoji Movie'' is a fairly short one.
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[[Megan]] asks [[Cueball]] if he knows about the upcoming ''{{w|The Emoji Movie}}''. The movie, set to come out on July 28, had been widely reviled on the Internet for its lack of original plot, characters, and jokes. Cueball responds to the topic by {{w|Damning with faint praise|damning it with faint praise}}, starting with the presumption that a film has to be made about a "section of Unicode", which is probably synonymous with a "Unicode block" - one of about 280 contiguous sections of defined code points within the thousands of code points defined. Other examples of potential Unicode blocks include "Playing Cards", "Musical Symbols", "Tibetan", "Braille Patterns" – and of course "Combining diacritical marks" and "Dingbats", referred to in the comic.
  
Megan continues the conversation thread by facetiously suggesting that Hollywood should try making a movie about {{w|Combining Diacritical Marks}} (see [[1647: Diacritics]]). Cueball quips that this series would have too many characters. This is a pun on the word "character", which has the double meaning of a {{w|Character_(arts)|fictional character}}, or a {{w|Character (computing)|symbol which corresponds to a grapheme}} (e.g. letter, digit, punctuation mark).   
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There is actually no Unicode block known as "Emojis". There is {{w|Emoticons (Unicode block)}} (U+1F600..U+1F64F), which contains 80 code points, mostly of facial expressions. However it does not include all Emojis. For instance, "Baby" (👶) is U+1F476, within the {{w|Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs}} block.
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Megan responds to this presumption by facetiously suggesting that Hollywood should try making a movie about {{w|Combining Diacritical Marks}} (see [[1647: Diacritics]]), a different section of Unicode which contains 112 code points (which each represent a character).
 +
 
 +
Cueball quips that this series would have too many characters. This is a pun on the word "character", which has the double meaning of a {{w|Character_(arts)|fictional character}}, or a {{w|Character (computing)|symbol which corresponds to a grapheme}} (e.g. letter, digit, punctuation mark).   
  
 
Although part of Unicode contains emoji, Unicode is not limited to emoji and emoji are not limited to Unicode. Unicode is only a standard set in place to ensure that different devices will display any given string of graphemes or symbols in a consistent fashion; prior to the invention of Unicode, there were many vendor conventions for emoji.  
 
Although part of Unicode contains emoji, Unicode is not limited to emoji and emoji are not limited to Unicode. Unicode is only a standard set in place to ensure that different devices will display any given string of graphemes or symbols in a consistent fashion; prior to the invention of Unicode, there were many vendor conventions for emoji.  

Revision as of 06:29, 6 July 2017

Emoji Movie
Some other studio should do the Antz/A Bug's Life thing and release The Dingbats Movie at the same time.
Title text: Some other studio should do the Antz/A Bug's Life thing and release The Dingbats Movie at the same time.

Explanation

Megan asks Cueball if he knows about the upcoming The Emoji Movie. The movie, set to come out on July 28, had been widely reviled on the Internet for its lack of original plot, characters, and jokes. Cueball responds to the topic by damning it with faint praise, starting with the presumption that a film has to be made about a "section of Unicode", which is probably synonymous with a "Unicode block" - one of about 280 contiguous sections of defined code points within the thousands of code points defined. Other examples of potential Unicode blocks include "Playing Cards", "Musical Symbols", "Tibetan", "Braille Patterns" – and of course "Combining diacritical marks" and "Dingbats", referred to in the comic.

There is actually no Unicode block known as "Emojis". There is Emoticons (Unicode block) (U+1F600..U+1F64F), which contains 80 code points, mostly of facial expressions. However it does not include all Emojis. For instance, "Baby" (👶) is U+1F476, within the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block.

Megan responds to this presumption by facetiously suggesting that Hollywood should try making a movie about Combining Diacritical Marks (see 1647: Diacritics), a different section of Unicode which contains 112 code points (which each represent a character).

Cueball quips that this series would have too many characters. This is a pun on the word "character", which has the double meaning of a fictional character, or a symbol which corresponds to a grapheme (e.g. letter, digit, punctuation mark).

Although part of Unicode contains emoji, Unicode is not limited to emoji and emoji are not limited to Unicode. Unicode is only a standard set in place to ensure that different devices will display any given string of graphemes or symbols in a consistent fashion; prior to the invention of Unicode, there were many vendor conventions for emoji. The topic of emoji in Unicode also appears in 1813: Vomiting Emoji.

The "Antz/A Bug's Life thing" in the title text refers to the twin films phenomenon, in which two films with very similar (or identical) concepts are released within roughly the same timeframe. Competing studios Dreamworks and Pixar released their respective insect-oriented films in 1998, a year infamous for many other such film pairings (see the Wikipedia article for a full list). Dingbats (as opposed to the more familiar wingdings and webdings) were character sets that displayed symbols contained in square boxes.

Transcript

[Megan and Cueball are walking together while Megan is looking at her smartphone.]
Megan: Did you see there's an emoji movie?
Cueball: If they have to make a movie about a section of Unicode, it's not the worst choice...
Megan: They should do a whole series. I would watch the Combining Diacritical Marks movie.
Cueball: That series would have way too many characters.


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Discussion

I think I'd rather watch the Wingding movie. The Emoji movie looks absolutely horrible and already worthy of being on the next season of MST3K. OldCorps (talk) 18:17, 30 June 2017 (UTC)

This comic is published one day before unicode (ver 2018) emoji submission deadline. Is it worth being noticed in the explaination? Gleeee (talk) 02:48, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

I'm wondering whether there is a newer version, but for Unicode 6.0 a move does exist already: https://vimeo.com/48858289 --162.158.88.206 07:11, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

I just was on KYM, and by curiosity ran into the discussion about the movie (tl;dr: Nuke it from orbit). Decided to look up the newest xkcd to forget it quickly. Randall, I hate you. 141.101.105.30 19:26, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

Damn. Beer is not rendering. What do I need to update? -- Hkmaly (talk) 00:19, 7 July 2017 (UTC)