So, just a quick and long-overdue note to let you know what is going on with me and why I haven’t posted in such a long time. Basically, I’m neck-deep in a big project with a rather urgent deadline and I just haven’t had time to focus on the blog. I will get back to it as soon as I can, but I’m not quite sure yet when that will be. My apologies! And I’ll try to keep you all updated in a somewhat more timely fashion as this thing progresses.
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@ Elaine
Good luck on your date!
Some years back a friend was on a first date. She’d done the ‘meet somewhere public’ thing. I was drafted to keep an eye on things. So I was discretely seated at a table across the way. I kept getting bombarded by texts from her girlfriends “Is he good looking? What are they doing? Have they kissed yet?” I was so busy answering that when I looked up they’d vanished. Luckily just for a walk on the beach. But that’s the level of wingman competence you get when you ask me.
@Elaine the Witch:
Lots of things at this point cause he the DM in my DND group.
That right there gives you not only an opening shared interest but some potentially valuable information. Is he out to one-up the players or to preside over a shared and consensual (if sometimes challenging and vexatious) good time? Does he ask about players’ hard no’s? Can he adapt to player orneriness and unpredictability?
Sooo… my latest weird thought is “if Trump gets Greenland, and Putin gets Alaska, does that mean Frederiksen gets Kaliningrad?”
(For reference, Frederiksen is the current Prime Minister of Denmark, and Kaliningrad used to be an independent germanic kingdom named Köningsberg and is currently under Russian control despite the physical separation between the two.)
Aaand I just had another. What happens to the Palestine flag emoji if Palestine ceases to exist? I hope that doesn’t happen any time soon, so this is purely a what-if.
I already know that “what is a country” for the purpose of flag emojis are determined by ISO-3166 (which is not controlled by the Unicode Consortium). I did a bit of research and found that, if a country stops existing, then it is removed from the main ISO list 5-10 years after it’s gone.
At that point it appears the Unicode Consortium would be in a bind; their policy is to never remove any emoji once added, but their policy is also to only use the main-list ISO countries. I suspect that the actual result would be recommending that it be depreciated; that all devices should continue to support it for backwards compatibility but make it unable to be inserted/typed by normal means.
But that would creates another potential issue: How Unicode encodes country flags is by using a pair of “invisible letter” codes based on the two-letter country codes listed in ISO-3166. Palestine is PS. Suppose, in the distant future, Unicode is still in use and there’s a different country which gets assigned PS. I have no idea how they’d handle that.
@ snowberry
The irony of the Palestine flag is that it was designed by a Brit. Sir Mark Sykes, of Sykes-Picot fame.
Like most British ideas its original purpose was to annoy the French.
https://i.postimg.cc/q7pb5N84/temp-Image-Pfvdhp.avif
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20140123-flag-of-paradox/
Ugh, that last one really could have been written better, but I didn’t have time to edit it properly. Also, I just figured a way to get the invisible letters to appear: 🇵🇸 🇵 🇸 .
So, addenum: The last time a country ceased to exist was in 1993 (Czechoslovakia) but that wasn’t an issue yet because Unicode didn’t do flag emojis until 2010. Another country which is currently in danger of existence failure is 🇹🇻 Tuvalu, due to sea level rise rather than genocide.