No emoticons, failing fast

[afuna]

It looks like the best I can do is to avoid emoticons in public channels. In PM conversations with friends, where I'm too relaxed to stop and analyze what I'm saying, emoticons just come too naturally.

I suppose this means the experiment is a failure.

(Also, my exclamation points have been breeding like bunnies throughout all this. Hah)

Comments

[nova]

You didn't use any emoticons or exclamation points in this post! \o/

[afuna]

It was an effort. So hard. I am nearly at the point where I replace any would-be emoticons (and exclamation points) with a swear word.

[baggyeyes]

You could type: *angry face* or *smiley face* *confused* *afuna happy yay*

instead of smilies. Have a txt document with your alternatives and annoy your reading list and irc mates. I'm fond of *afuna angries smash!*

Re: No emoticons, failing fast

[piranha]

i don't know what half the emoticons mean. :) especially all the ^^ cat ear ones. i had to look up o/ when i first saw you use it. \o/ is prety self-explanatory, as is :), but many of them have be scratching my head.

i can do simple smileys, but most of the time i use enclosing asterisks instead, like *grin*, because that means most people will get it (also because that's how i've done it for the last 30 years, *snrk*).

Re: No emoticons, failing fast

[afuna]

*grins* To confuse things even further, the cat ear ones, are sometimes smiley eyes!

o/ is waving (though I think it's more an us-IRC, and not something everyone uses).

[raingirl26.livejournal.com]

i'm not sure what your experiment was - just to not use emoticons? sounds like a challenge more than an experiment. as an experiment you just view the results and see if you can make a statement about it - and that you've done. besides, some of the best things have come from failed experiments - think chocolate chip cookies.

[afuna]

Hey, chocolate chip cookies came from failed experiments? What were they trying to make?

(The challenge was not to use emoticons; I had a vague idea of trying to summarize what coping mechanisms I'd come up with / how my speech patterns would be affected, but I'm having a hard time figuring out a good way to explain it!)

[raingirl26.livejournal.com]

They were trying to make chocolate cookies but had run out of chocolate powder. The maker decided that they would just use chunks of chocolate, making them quite small, assuming that it would melt into the batter to become chocolate cookies! Yeah assumptions!!

(I'd probably have to experiment with actually using emoticons to see what it would do to my communications.)

[afuna]

Man, I wish I could make more failures like those. I would be happy to fail if it meant I got to have/invent chocolate chip cookies!

(It was interesting, actually! But so much more freeing to be able to use emoticotns)