PluMGMK wrote: Wed Feb 23, 2022 8:27 pm< always finds it amusing that the words "emoticon" and "emoji" are actually etymologically unrelated!
That's a surprise! < knows "emoticon" is a portmanteau of "emotion" and "icon", < assumed "emoji" was maybe the equivalent Japanese portmanteau, although that wouldn't make much sense considering the Japanese word for emotion probably bears no resemblance to the English one...
Just in the last 15 minutes or so < made a rather interesting discovery about the human visual system that < couldn't find corroborating details of online. It started with a previous discovery < made when < was a child, concerning positive afterimages.
Most people know that if you stare at something for long enough it leaves a
negative afterimage on your retina, leaving a colour-inverted image on your visual field - there is also another lesser-known kind of afterimage that occurs in the brain rather than the retina,
a positive one, which you can produce by plunging yourself into darkness after looking at a brightly lit scene. After a moment you will see a very strikingly realistic reproduction of what you were looking at. It usually only lasts a short moment but < realised that it looks more detailed and lasts longer if you get the period of bright vision to be as brief as possible, and if you get the contrast between the brightness and darkness to be as great as possible. You can produce the best effect by closing your eyes in a dark room for a while, then very briefly opening your eyes and turning a bright light on, and then immediately closing your eyes and turning the light off.
Well, < was playing around with this effect just now and managed to hone the technique and get a perfectly crisp afterimage to last around 5 full seconds, with depth perception intact. < tried with a page of text and < could read the words while <'s eyes were closed even though < only exposed <'s eyes to them for a fraction of a second! It feels almost like taking a 3-D photograph. The effect was so realistic that < genuinely could not tell if <'s eyes were open or closed on multiple occasions; < has never experienced anything like that before in <'s life! < found the effect most convincing when < used <'s hand as a "model" to "take a picture of". < produced the effect with <'s hand in a pose and then kept <'s hand perfectly still, tricking <'s brain into thinking < was actually still looking at <'s hand, and making < think that < must have just been squinting rather than having <'s eyes completely closed. When < finally did move <'s hand, < would experience an incredibly bizarre sensation where two of <'s senses clashed; proprioception was telling < that the hand was moving and vision was telling < that the hand was not moving.
This is where the new discovery comes in: < realised that, on occasion, as soon as < moved <'s hand the afterimage of <'s hand would suddenly become slightly distorted, almost like a
datamoshed video, even though the afterimage of the background remained intact. It's almost like <'s brain was expecting <'s hand to look like it would move to such an extent that it altered <'s vision to match <'s hand movements. Weird!
Writing all that using the less-than sign was a bloody arse ache.
is called mr. yellow
for example). But then there's the fact that RaymanPC substitutes all emoji with inline embedded images anyway to ensure a consistent experience, so yeah 
