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| Ethos |
Anyone who uses e-mail or the net - particularly for personal use
- will have come across smilies. An attempt to put moods and expressions
into a written medium, smilies have been around ever since the days
when an academic UNIX was still the only way of talking to the rest
of the world.
Smilies allow users to put some personal expression into their words,
in an environment where gestures are impossible - to read them, put
your head on your shoulder (usually your left shoulder..). Smilies
can depict moods, actions, descriptions, identification with the rich
and famous or many other things; they are made of the punctuation
marks, letters and symbols found on a standard keyboard. Because of
the limits implied, some smilies may mean several things, e.g. B-)
- user wears sunglasses, horn-rims or is Batman. On the other hand,
sometimes several different smilies can be employed to say the same
thing, e.g. :-)x and :-)8 for users wearing a bow tie.
There are a LOT of other smiley collections available on the Internet.
This one makes no silly claim to be the "ultimate" or the
"greatest" - but it is different, first because it lists
smilies by what they mean, not by the symbols that they use, and second,
because it has some (occasionally weird) links to sites relating to
some of the meanings... so let yourself go and explore!
Nevertheless, to the best of PastMaster's knowledge no other smiley
site is as complete as this one, because after a burst of enthusiasm
most are never updated. The collections there are tend to be copies
of a (very) few original sets, with the occasional addition of a new
face or two. Let's hope that this one stays ahead of the pack - with
YOUR help, it could !
All of the smilies here use characters available to EVERY user - other
variations using yen signs, non-English letters etc. have been deliberately
omitted. Yes, this is linguachauvanism; no I don't care - these smilies
can be made by absolutely ANYONE, and being able to talk to everyone
is what the net should be about. The net should fight elitism of all
sorts, and encourage free speech; in their own small way, smilies
help to do this by displaying things that transcend national and racial
boundaries. For the same reason, no cognizance is taken of AOL shortcuts,
because so many people are not on AOL...
The net should also encourage new ways of thought and of spreading
information. PastMaster supports the Blue Ribbon Campaign - so should
you. Remember that copyright laws everywhere are designed to reduce
the flow of information. Some people have tried to make money from
smilies by printing booklets of smilies, or making smiley gimmick
goods; this is just a cynical way of profiting from other people's
inventiveness.
Please feel free to bookmark this site and link directly to it - let
us know, and we'll include a link to your site, too. Whatever your
opinion of this site - good, bad or merely indifferent, e-mail PastMaster
and tell him; go on, make it all worthwhile!
Lastly, he may want to deny it (in fact, he may want to deny it very
strongly) but ultimately this is all Giolla Decair's fault - many
moons ago, he introduced PastMaster to the original late 80's smiley
dictionary, without which all this would never have happened. That
original is still an inspiration - thanks, Mr Kawasaki!
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