emoji & kaomoji
kaomoji
you may remember the humble emoticon from the late 90’s/early 00’s. the word kaomoji refers to Japanese emoticons made with shift-JIS characters or, more often these days, UTF characters that are possible to be typed in with most Japanese phones. The much larger library of symbols and pictographs in Japanese lends itself to some truly intricate creations compared to its humble western counterpart.
growing up, I was obsessed with Japanese culture and language beginning in around grade 2 when we had done a unit on Japan. this has persisted into my adult life, and I find myself often feeling a spark of joy when I am faced with a kaomoji in the wild. I love using them, and I love seeing them, and hopefully you’ll enjoy seeing some of my favorites collected here!
fun fact: the first kaomoji (^_^) was invented the same year I was born! coincidence? I think not!
not-so-fun fact: this section is not screen reader friendly due to the nature of kaomoji. ;v;
emoji
basically everyone knows what emoji are, but if for some reason you don’t, they are small pictographs first popularized by the Japanese telecom companies Docomo and Softbank, and now are widely available on most smartphones, having integrated themselves fully into public consciousness and modern internet usage. what follows are my favorites (i.e. the ones I find most visually appealing, whether or not I use them regularly) & most-oft-used emoji from my phone. >w<
custom emotes
as much as I hate discord as a software, most of my friends use discord to communicate, and frankly, I’d be lying if I said their customizeable emotes were not one of the main things keeping me coming back.
I’m also on the fediverse at snug.moe, and many fedi servers have their own custom emotes. so what follows are some of my favorite custom emotes, primarily from these two platforms.
