Spice Up Your Lame Zoom Chat with ASCII Emojis

Erik Scholz -

Problem

You (and) me sitting in a Zoom, Team or Google Meet and beeing ultimately bored by different things like keeping awake.

Solution

Spam the chat with as much ASCII emojis as possible to describe your feelings or to visual-typographically support the ideas of the others.

Emojicombos provides a handy list of text based emojis way beyond things like :D or @_@. Ydou may find things similar to:

  • ｡◕ ‿ ◕｡
  • (̿▀̿ ̿Ĺ̯̿̿▀̿ ̿)̄
  • ಠ_ಠ
  • (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Test: which one is the table flipper?

Emoji – The Beginnings

Today, emojis have become an integral part of communication. These pictorial representations of emotions and ideas have replaced text in many situations, allowing for faster, more expressive communication. However, before the colorful emojis we know and use today, there were ASCII emojis.

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding system that assigns numeric codes to characters, including letters, numbers, and symbols. In the early days of the internet, before the widespread adoption of Unicode, ASCII was the dominant character set used for digital communication.

With the limitations of ASCII, users began to experiment with creating simple pictorial representations of emotions and objects using the characters available. These early ASCII emojis were basic, using a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols to create rudimentary images.

One of the earliest known examples of an ASCII emoji is the emoticon, which uses punctuation marks to create a sideways face, like this: :-) The emoticon was first used in a message on a bulletin board system (BBS) by Scott Fahlman in 1982, who suggested it as a way to indicate a joke.

Over time, ASCII emojis became more complex and creative. Some users created entire pictures using only ASCII characters, a practice known as ASCII art. These images ranged from simple smiley faces to intricate landscapes, and were often shared on BBSes and early internet forums.

Today, ASCII emojis continue to have a place in digital communication, especially in the world of programming and coding. The simplicity of ASCII makes it an easy way to convey information in a way that can be easily read by machines. Additionally, with the recent resurgence of retro and nostalgic aesthetics, ASCII art has become popular once again.

In conclusion, ASCII emojis may not be as widely used as their colorful, Unicode counterparts, but they played an important role in the development of online communication. Their simplicity and creativity paved the way for the expressive emojis we know today, and they continue to have a place in the world of digital communication.