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That is the question, or so Shakespeare would have us believe. Some among us may think it's what do you get if you multiply nine by six. Anyway, I digress. We're continuing the discussion on emojis being top of mind after converting the site to accommodate them in all postings. Did you know there is a committee that approves all emojis?

Yes, it's the Unicode Consortium. Honestly, what they do is pretty important as they set standards for what characters use each unicode code (probably just unicode rather than unicode code). Basically each "character" is now stored as a block with a number that corresponds to a character. It's not like ASCII that ran out after 128 characters was then extended to double it to a whopping 256 characters. Unicode takes it to just over 1.1 million characters. They didn't fuck about this time. Now, they have to accommodate all the languages that use symbols, but they still have space to spare, so they've started putting emojis in there. This is how you can have an Apple device or an Android or Windows browser or ... [you get the drift, anything] interpret a code and display the intended emoji. Because there's a standard. There may be a slight variation on how each platform displays it, but a smiley face will be a smiley face, a race car will be a race car etc.

But how cool is that? They approve new emojis on an annual basis. I honestly hadn't thought about it before now. When I retire, I know what job I'm going after. Can you imagine the conversation though as I really don't think any of mine would get approved. Clearly we'd need a pair of breasts - how else do you emoji that things have gone tits up. We'd also need to build on the original set of emojis and have a smiley face with a penis on it's forehead - obviously to use when pointing out someone is a dickhead. I can see that these would be considered offensive, but be honest - they'd get a lot of use wouldn't they?