I sort of imagine it like waving a wooden spoon at someone: 'Oh you!'"

July 8, 2022 6:09 PM

It doesn't matter if you hate Slack or love Slack, we just need to talk about that dusty stick emoji.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (22 comments total)

It’s not too complicated…it’s intended to acknowledge a moment of whimsy. So, pretty much like the author concludes in the article. The original dusty stick was intended as a whimsical, tongue-in-cheek commemoration of a technical glitch in a computer game.
posted by darkstar at 6:23 PM on July 8, 2022

Looks like a dish mop To me. Why anyone would need that emoji is beyond me. To say “clean the dishes”?
posted by fimbulvetr at 6:24 PM on July 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I can't explain how this relates w/out severe spoilers, but basically anyone seeing this thread needs to read Calvin Kasulke's Several People Are Typing for full impact.
posted by feckless at 6:48 PM on July 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

(It's also just really good & fun, as well as very short, so no really no excuse not to)
posted by feckless at 6:49 PM on July 8, 2022

This just reminds me that I miss Glitch, even though I never once saw or knew of the existence of a dusty stick in that game.
posted by chrominance at 7:47 PM on July 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

My corporate Slack has something like 8K emojis, mostly because we keep buying small companies and combining our corporate Slacks and now we have hundreds of react icons that no one knows WTF is up with because their authors left years ago but they live on like undead cryptids.

Anyway. This was the first time I'd heard of Dusty Stick, so I have dutifully read TFA and then examined the image in its full 16-bit splendor. It looks like a torch. If you put a flame after it, it looks even more like a torch. Thus I decree that it shall forevermore mean "if you kids don't stop this arguing RIGHT NOW, I will turn this car around and then burn it to the ground."

Problem solved.
posted by Mayor West at 8:03 PM on July 8, 2022 [12 favorites]

At my last job, one of the devs created a series of emogi's using photos of my face - based on photos he found online. There ended up being about about 10-15 of them for different emotions/reactions. All of this without my consent!

Turned out, these emojis became available company-wide, and are still available now. I sometimes wonder what people in that company who never knew would think of these strange emojis...
posted by greenhornet at 10:07 PM on July 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

Mayor West is onto something. To me this looks like a whittled firestarter stick. Upon googling I find them called "feather sticks" I can't remember what the Scouts called them back in olden times.
posted by CCBC at 10:35 PM on July 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

"Fuzz sticks" -- that's what the Scout manual called them. Don't know what the emoji is intended to mean but this is a firestarter.
posted by CCBC at 3:09 AM on July 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

I miss Glitch too! Every once in a while, I’ll stumble across some bit of Ur via Slack, like its 404 page, and find an unexpected moment of saudade.

After all, “in a land where you could milk butterflies and tune bubbles, created by the imagination of 11 giants, why *wouldn’t* a magical dusty stick bring happiness to others?”
posted by KatlaDragon at 4:51 AM on July 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

One of the upsides of being old enough that no one wants to hire you is that I’ve never, ever, ever had to use Slack.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:41 AM on July 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

If ever there was a metafilter thread to mention the existence of emojifs, a FUSE filesystem for managing slack emojis, this is the one.
posted by kdar at 7:09 AM on July 9, 2022 [8 favorites]

I recently learned my spouse's face is a widely used slack emoji at his company. I was like "what does it mean when people use it?!?" and he was like "usually disapproval or sometimes it means a sort of 'that's insane, let's do it' sentiment" which I guess is pretty on brand for him
posted by potrzebie at 9:38 AM on July 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

Seconding or thirding or fourthing still missing Glitch after a decade.
posted by cacophony at 9:38 AM on July 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

I’ve barely used Slack but my first thought upon seeing the dusty stick here is that it looked like a bundle of sage that you could use to dispel bad energy. Turned out to be close to the developer’s intention, and still applicable to the author’s interpretation!

I never played Glitch but I was fascinated by the design of the Giants. Sadly this page doesn’t show the intricate and wacky ways they were animated!
posted by ejs at 10:09 AM on July 9, 2022

:(
posted by AlSweigart at 12:55 PM on July 9, 2022

Thank you for the laugh. Deep play, Vice staff - good on you for making the meaning you want to see in the world.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 9:52 PM on July 9, 2022

I'm in a film nerd Slack that has a bunch of custom emojis, and I find myself frustrated when they're not available on other platforms. Thor is missed in particular.
posted by brundlefly at 7:57 AM on July 10, 2022

This article mostly just makes working at Vice sound as insufferable as I’d have expected.

One of the the downsides of any IM tool is that firing off messages rapidly doesn’t necessarily lead to clearly-expressed communication - emojis compound this the farther they get from the standard thumbs up/smileys library. And even there there are plenty of things that can be easily misinterpreted; is the shrug emoji a shrug of resignation or exasperation? If everyone in the office has changed their emoji skin tone, is leaving the default yellow an expression of racism or lack of technical ability or objection to the idea of this space as a worthwhile venue of advocacy?

I have never seen the dusty stick emoji in the wild. I made a couple anarchy symbols for our main Slack but I’m not sure anyone else is using them.
posted by aspersioncast at 8:36 AM on July 10, 2022

I was never all that charmed by Glitch, finding it lacking the essential charm that GNE had, but maybe that's just because GNE was small and intimate. Flickr was pretty nice back when it had soul. Slack has been a service I found to be astonishingly good when compared with the truly abysmal state of the competitor tools; it's getting less good as it accretes additional Enterprise-y Software Cruft and aggressively sheds stew crew whimsy.

There are 28,978 custom emoji in the Slack workspace I administer at work. My hopes of ever having even seen a dusty stick or noticed its significance or its stewstuff lineage are nil.
posted by majick at 8:45 AM on July 10, 2022

it's pinocchio's dick

how is this even debatable

pinocchio has a big ol 70's bush of wood shavings and a broomhandle pokin out

we're looking at the same thing right?
posted by FatherDagon at 11:13 AM on July 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

I did not know Slack was Glitch. Maybe I will dislike Slack a little less.
posted by bendy at 10:35 PM on July 14, 2022