Day 10, and it's the final day of the 2025 Shady Characters advent calendar. Thank you for sticking with me! And on the subject of gratitude, here's my final post for the year, on PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS (🙏): shadycharacters.co.u.... Check out shadycharacters.co.u... for all previous entries!

Day 9! Home stretch, and you would be forgiven for being a little tired of the Christmas rush by now. A good time, then, to examine FACE WITH BAGS UNDER EYES (🫩): shadycharacters.co.u.... Check out shadycharacters.co.u... to see previous entries, including '😂', '👍', '✨' and '🕴️'!

Day 6 of the Shady Characters advent calendar! Time is flying. Today's entry looks at RAINBOW FLAG (🏳️‍🌈) - an emoji so potent it once left crashed iPhones in its wake: shadycharacters.co.u... Check out shadycharacters.co.u... to see previous entries, including '😂', '♨️', '🍔', '👍' and ''✨!

It's day 5 of the ✨Shady Characters✨ advent calendar! And what better way to mark the occasion than to take a look at the SPARKLES emoji's controversial new job? Read more at shadycharacters.co.u.... Check out shadycharacters.co.u... to see previous entries, including '😂', '♨️', '🍔' and '👍'!

Day 3 of the Shady Characters advent calendar! An unassuming emoji today, in the form of the HAMBURGER (🍔), but one which can teach us a surprising amount about how the emoji sausage is made, so to speak: shadycharacters.co.u.... If you missed day 1 or day 2, check out shadycharacters.co.u...!

Ten years ago, the OED’s word of the year was “😂”. If this is a word, is ‘emoji’ a language? @keithhouston.bsky.social’s interesting exploration of the question takes us along a literary translation (Emoji Dick), the challenge of universality and more: buff.ly/D00WGXr

If you're a cyclist in West Lothian, do yourself a favour and lay your hands on Spokes' excellent cycling map: www.spokes.org.uk/2025/08/spok.... There's a new edition out soon, so the current one is going for a song.

CAE 53's great reads include: - @royinori.bsky.social on worm hunters in S. Ontario - @keithhouston.bsky.social on emoji language - @clearwing3.bsky.social on the history of @theonion.com - @birdhistory.bsky.social on feather beds of the 1800s & more! jodiettenberg.substack.com/p/fifty-three

“Empire of the Sum” in paperback is my third book this year! 🤯 Read more about it here: shadycharacters.co.uk/books/empire...

Do emoji constitute a language? If so, what are its rules of grammar? @keithhouston.bsky.social dives into the linguistics of the pictograms that decorate our digital conversations in a new book, excerpted at @longreads.com longreads.com/2025/07/01/e...

Keeping track of numbers has always been part of what makes us human. So at some point along the way, we created a tool to help us keep count, and then we gave that tool a name. We called it: a calculator. 99pi's Lasha Madan has the story 99percentinvisible.org/episode/empi...

Lastly, some credit where it is due: Keith Broni at the mighty https://emojipedia.org/ reviewed the site, and Zach Leat’s 11ty (https://www.11ty.dev/) made it a pleasure to build. Thank you both! #emojipedia #11ty 4/4

If you want to learn even more about emoji, you can pre-order my book, “Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji” (shadycharacters.co.u...), which will be published next month. Not long now at all! 3/4

I really enjoyed making the site. Some programming, some thinking about emoji, some website design; I’m happy with how it came together! If you agree, please share emoji.shadycharacter... here or elsewhere. You can also reply here with your thoughts or leave a comment at shadycharacters.co.u.... 2/4

I have made a thing! Visit emoji.shadycharacter... to see the Shady Characters Periodic Table of Emoji and read about how it came together. There’s a lot of detail in there, although you can read shadycharacters.co.u... to get a shorter intro. 1/4

Why does the percent sign (%) look the way it does? It’s probably not why you think. Learn more in this post from the Shady Characters archive: shadycharacters.co.u... (Public domain image from archive.org/stream/r....)

From the Shady Characters archive: scribbled or scrawled, how do we write ampersands, and is there room for a new ampersand design? Designer Rebecca Kirch dives into the unregulated world of the handwritten "&". shadycharacters.co.u.... (Image courtesy of Rebecca Kirch.)

Read more at shadycharacters.co.u..., listen to the episode at 99percentinvisible.o..., and follow 99PI at @99pi.org. 2/2

If you've enjoyed any of my books, it's a fair bet you'd enjoy “99% Invisible” too. It's a smart and wide-ranging podcast with a focus on design, and this week it looks at emoji in the courts. I tag along to talk to host Roman Mars about the ‘💩’! 1/2

Anyway! Pre-orders are very welcome (the paperback will be published on the 29th of April), and you can find all the details at shadycharacters.co.u.... 3/3

Either way, Sarah Bibel's new cover looks amazing (www.sarahbibel.com/), and Judith Abbate's elegant, full-colour interior design is reproduced just as faithfully in this new edition. I find myself wanting to re-read one of my own books just for the physical experience of it. 2/3

A parcel arrived today from W. W. Norton: a box full of paperbacks of “The Book”! This is the first time I've seen the paperback itself, rather than only PDFs, and honestly, it looks great. Maybe even better than the hardback? (But that would be tantamount to picking a favourite child.) 1/3

They got 2 or 3 of mine too. Frustrating.

"Oppenheimer" got me thinking about nuclear power, as I'm sure it did many of you too. Appropriately enough, then, I recently spoke to Alan Lowe of the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, TN, for an episode of the museum's AMSEcast podcast: shadycharacters.co.u....

Why did I start Shady Characters? How does the blog work? What's the future for Shady Characters? These and other questions answered in today's post! shadycharacters.co.u... #blogquestionschallenge

A belated happy new year to all Shady Characters reader! I hope 2025 is treating you as well as it can. Here to ease the pain are a few links on the usual subjects of punctuation, typography and emoji: shadycharacters.co.u.... Enjoy!

It's the 2024 Shady Characters gift guide! Which calculator should you buy your loved ones, and why is the £360 Casio S100X? Answers here: shadycharacters.co.uk/2024/12/2024...

It's lovely to see this exhibition by Cate Gillon, an old friend of mine, make the local paper where we grew up together. And it's a pleasant surprise for her picture of me to be featured in the article (even if I'm not the headline image 😅)! www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/fife...

Bombs, books and generative AI! A new post at Shady Characters, and one that takes a look at how this AI malarkey intersects with a rather older information technology: shadycharacters.co.uk/2024/11/bomb....

Get your annual punctuation journey started today by diving into the Contents (shadycharacters.co.uk/contents/), and let us know: what's your favourite mark of punctuation?

It's national punctuation day! Only, uh, the NPD website seems to have gone dark: www.nationalpunctuationday.com. But we at Shady Characters do not yield to unpaid domain fees, and punctuation is to be celebrated every day of the year!

I guested on Alan Alda' Clear + Vivid podcast recently, on the subjects of punctuation and counting: clear-vivid-with-alan-alda.simplecast.com/episodes/kei.... What a treat, and what an honour! Have a listen and let me know what you think.