Emoji Poetry
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Emoji Poetry is the literature class you never had

There’s an almost magical quality about tweets by Carrie Fisher, which probably half stems from the fact that I usually have no idea what she’s saying: her tweets are almost entirely in emoji, indiscernible like some new art form that I’m not cultured enough to understand. And with the rise of emojis changing the way we communicate for various mediums, I imagine that my confusion around their growing usage isn’t going to go anywhere. In comes developer Arzamas OOO’s new smartphone app, Emoji Poetry, a literary game where you drag the “appropriate” emoji into the empty spaces of a popular…

Simulating the World
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The world’s most complex problems, now in emoji

Step into the bustling streets of Grand Theft Auto 5’s Los Santos, or one of the many sun-dappled, monster-rich forests in The Witcher 3. These worlds are so fully realized, and at their best so compellingly true-to-life, that it’s easy to forget that all games, when stripped of the bells and whistles, are only systems operating on a specific set of rules. But more than just games run on complex systems of interaction, and Nicky Case has made this point before. You might remember Case’s previous project Parable of the Polygons, the cute bit of interactive sociology about geometry and…

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Here’s a game that lets you wipe the smile off a stupid emoji’s face

Some people like smiling at strangers and saying hello to passersby. Bless their souls, those creepily friendly weirdoes! I, as you may have guessed, am not one of those people. Nothing warms the cockles of my cold, dead heart quite like strangers giving me the “Fuck right off!” look. As such, Boom!Boom!Emoji is my kind of game. It is a neon world populated with floating emojis and palm trees on islands. You try to make the smiley face emoji explode by running into them. If you succeed, they explode into firework-like constellations of flame emoji, which is really quite pleasing.…

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A professor attached emoji to selfie sticks to help us combat vanity

Selfie sticks are extensions of a person’s power more than their arms. They are tools of conquest, a way for their owners to claim dominance over a larger swath of space in the name of better self-portraiture. If you frequently give in to the siren song of thinkpieces, you’ve seen this selfie shtick before. What you have not seen is Pablo Garcia’s antiquity-inspired solution to the selfie stick scourge. An Assistant Professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices at the Art Institute of Chicago, Garcia found inspiration in the ancient Roman practice of handing out memento mori—reminders of death—to victorious…