Small buckets, often sported at a jaunty angle, have been standard snowman fashion for centuries. Those Shriners just stole the idea from the snowmen, and never gave them credit. The Shriners did come up with the tiny cars thing all on their own. Look! Here they come now! posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:54 PM on October 11, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]
Well, my snowman doesn't have a shriner's fez, at a jaunty angle or no. To describe the unicode snowman I see:
• big ball of snow on top of medium ball of snow.
• scarf in the middle
• smiley-face
• six big circular snowflakes, three on either side of snowman
• big ball of snow merges with snow on ground, creating an Ω(omega)-like base.
What would explain differences between my snowman and the one with the fez, which I don't see? (or: When I see blue, what color do you perceive, man?) posted by not_on_display at 5:03 PM on October 11, 2008
strike that, and reverse it... big ball of snow is on the bottom posted by not_on_display at 5:04 PM on October 11, 2008
"He looks like a shriner snowman!"
For years I was obsessed and confused by the Japanese version of the snowman: always with a red fez on top. Why in the name of Tarvu were Japanese snowmen shriners?
Eventually, after much discussion with a friend in Japan, the truth came out: that's not a fez, that's a fire bucket.
Apparently most Japanese homes and neighborhoods have red fire buckets lying around in case of.. uhh.. fire. When it's snowman time, you use the fire bucket to gather the snow to build the snowman, and as a grand finale, you plop the bucket right on top as a hat.
Go forth and let the knowledge spread.
(For the record, I own the domain ☃.net but have never pointed it to anything. Looks like now is the time!) posted by cabel at 5:07 PM on October 11, 2008 [7 favorites has favorites]
I give this thread one (1) gold star: ☆ posted by clearly at 5:08 PM on October 11, 2008
Not_on_display, it depends on your font. Most fonts don't have pictures of snowmen, in which case the system will fall back to a default font (which should be fairly complete). posted by ryanrs at 5:11 PM on October 11, 2008
Actually, I found the snowman page genuinely useful. If you view source, you can see how to "embed" Arial Unicode MS in a web page. It's always been irksome that the major OS's don't provide even one near-fully populated Unicode font out of the box. Vista and the latest Mac OS might have changed that, I don't know, but there are still plenty people out there without a big Unicode font on their system. posted by iconjack at 5:16 PM on October 11, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]
Long have I waited for Zoso to appear thus. For now, this'll do. posted by hal9k at 5:19 PM on October 11, 2008
strike that, and reverse it... big ball of snow is on the bottom
big ball of snow is on the bottom
kids make 'em like that, cause that's how we taught 'em
if they try to put the big ball up on top
we say: uh-uh, and we tell 'em to stop
we say: put that little ball there instead
and then put a bucket on his head
and no, it's not a fez
that's right, it's a bucket
(should I write any more of this song?
nah, fuck it.) posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:37 PM on October 11, 2008 [4 favorites has favorites]
How did they decide that the world needed a snowman in the Unicode standard? posted by empath at 5:38 PM on October 11, 2008
What would explain differences between my snowman and the one with the fez, which I don't see? (or: When I see blue, what color do you perceive, man?)
On Vista, I see your snowman. On Mac OS X, he has the fez.
Here is a proposal to add 186 new "Japanese TV Symbols", including SNOWMAN WITHOUT SNOW (for light snow) and BLACK SNOWMAN (for heavy snow). posted by finite at 6:02 PM on October 11, 2008
If you ask me, Hiragino Snowman looks a little sad, despite his jaunty fez, and the Apple Symbols snowman has I think been into the eggnog. posted by hattifattener at 7:28 PM on October 11, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]
Google hates unicode snowman. posted by Pants! at 7:39 PM on October 11, 2008
There's a lot of fun junk lurking in Unicode-land:
⅋ = Turned ampersand
ↂ = Roman Numeral Ten Thousand
⇰ = Rightwards White Arrow From Wall
☄ = Comet
♨ = Hot Springs
⚰ = Coffin
⁂ = Asterism
⁝ = Tricolon posted by smackfu at 8:04 PM on October 11, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]
cabel, I'm not gonna ask why you own ☃.net because that part actually makes sense to me ...but the how is something I'd like to know. posted by billyfleetwood at 8:30 PM on October 11, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]
I'm sorry to be the pooper here, but - what is this about? No, really - what makes this interesting at all? Is it something that you have to be using a particular browser or something that shows something other than boxes, or what? posted by yhbc at 8:38 PM on October 11, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]
yhbc: it's really driving me nuts, too: on some computers I'm using, the snowman and other Unicode characters come out like they should. On this PC I'm at right now, though: only boxes with numbers in them. I'm poking around to see how I can get this PC seeing unicode. In the meantime, my own post is FTW in one room, and FAIL in the other room.
Really, which has more use, face-stab, or snowman? posted by Freaky at 9:31 PM on October 11, 2008
Um. You are all aware that "☃" is the mayan glyph for "dead puppies", right? The "fez" is a numeric modifier meaning "more than one thousand." You're laughing at thousands of dead puppies.
Hmm. Just boxes with numbers in them for me. The main post links to a page which, for me, is blank. Perhaps it's a snowman in a snow storm? not_on_display - if you figure it out, let me know.
Unicode, fonts, snowmen, japan, cluelessness, intellectual property arguments, wikipedia articles with hilarious discussion pages - this thread has it all. posted by mai at 12:02 AM on October 12, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]
iconjack:Actually, I found the snowman page genuinely useful. If you view source, you can see how to "embed" Arial Unicode MS in a web page. It's always been irksome that the major OS's don't provide even one near-fully populated Unicode font out of the box. Vista and the latest Mac OS might have changed that, I don't know, but there are still plenty people out there without a big Unicode font on their system.
Perhaps the reason that operating systems don't provide fully populated Unicode fonts out of the box is because people made Unicode ridiculously large and complicated by putting things like pictures of snowmen into it. posted by Mitrovarr at 12:11 AM on October 12, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]
The only character I've ever found missing is the n-umlaut. In MacOS, the combining-diaresis doesn't render correctly for n. Compare:
ä (a, combining-diaresis)
n̈ (n, combining-diaresis)
Früsträtïng. posted by ryanrs at 12:44 AM on October 12, 2008
Perhaps the reason that operating systems don't provide fully populated Unicode fonts out of the box is because people made Unicode ridiculously large and complicated by putting things like pictures of snowmen into it
That would undermine the entire point of Unicode, which is to put every character that's ever existed in any character set into one single list, such that it can directly substitute for any of them. I can only assume previous character set designers included weather symbols.
Sadly, I don't think Unicode publishes its deliberations or its sources, so we'll probably never know. posted by cillit bang at 3:50 AM on October 12, 2008
Yes, Unicode being huge is the point. Wanting a single font that covers all the code points is the silly part. posted by smackfu at 8:06 AM on October 12, 2008
Now this is just serendipitous. I spent yesterday installing about a trillion fonts into my shiny new Arch install and I see every single symbol presented. Yay! posted by Skorgu at 10:07 AM on October 12, 2008
Wanting a single font that covers all the code points is the silly part.
Why is this silly? Maybe it would be silly to require every font to cover every code point, but asking for one complete system font seems quite reasonable. posted by ryanrs at 12:05 PM on October 12, 2008
Why is this silly? Maybe it would be silly to require every font to cover every code point, but asking for one complete system font seems quite reasonable.
Making a complete font would be rather nontrivial, for one thing. The DejaVu project is working in this direction, but according to the link they have run up against problems having to do with combining characters from different scripts in a single font.
As a side note, the DejaVu fonts can be freely embededd, maybe Unicode Snowman would like to check them out. posted by ghost of a past number at 12:28 PM on October 12, 2008
(ryanrs, that's actually not a MacOS bug, that's a Firefox bug — firefox renders text in some bizarre way that prevents it from displaying composed characters that don't have a precomposed representation in Unicode. Pasting your comment into TextEdit shows a proper umlaut, though it's positioned a little lower than I think is ideal.) posted by hattifattener at 1:51 PM on October 12, 2008
I don't use Firefox, I use Safari (albeit a somewhat old version). posted by ryanrs at 6:05 PM on October 12, 2008
Yeah, I'm all frustrated in that I posted this, I LOVED it on some computers, and I get to other computers and [box with numbers].... it annoys me. I wanted all of you to get a unicode snowman. Still, thank you to those who appreciated it, and I love the way this thread has turned out.
A bit of a footnote: There's a small program squirreled away in Windows (XP, I don't know if it's in Vista) named 'eudcedit' that allows you to create a character from scratch. The file path is C:\WINDOWS\system32\eudcedit.exe posted by Kronos_to_Earth at 8:16 AM on October 13, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]
ryanrs: n-umlauts totally show up in Firefox, just check out the article on Spinal Tap. The problem appears to come up when you try to type it in. Every time I cut and paste it in, it shows up, indeed, as n̈. posted by Deathalicious at 12:48 AM on October 18, 2008
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