I imagined as much. My commiserations. Birmingham seems to be stuck in a rut it can't get out of.

Is Birmingham still as bad, then? I'm impressed with how Edinburgh has come on, although the very centre of town is still a bit underwhelming.

CAE 53's great reads include:
- @royinori.bsky.social on worm hunters in S. Ontario
- @keithhouston.bsky.social on emoji language
- @clearwing3.bsky.social on the history of @theonion.com
- @birdhistory.bsky.social on feather beds of the 1800s

& more!

jodiettenberg.substack.com/p/fifty-three

Hi there - there are no plans so far, but if a Spanish language publisher was to come along I'm sure my agent would be able to make it happen.

I also appreciate that PLATO and Coconet are subjects near to your heart; I have similar interests where I get frustrated if a book or other work omits something that I think is important. But that doesn't make those omissions a "hole" in the story - just an alternative choice.

If there are future editions where I can revise and expand the book, great. If not, I'm still happy with the history that I put together. To my knowledge, PLATO was not a significant influence on emoji history, and Matt Sephton's work puts Japan's emoji earlier than Coconet.

Honestly, there is no script. I wrote the best history of emoji I could in the space I had available. I also needed to cover current usage and potential future developments. I appreciate there are other aspects of emoji history that you're interested in, but the line had to be drawn somewhere.

One more thing, to respond to your original post: the book doesn't say Japan invented emoji. It originated the name and their modern incarnation (c. mid 1980s, if not before), but the book is clear that similar phenomena existed beforehand, even if none of them were as popular or as influential.

On the second sentiment, I would agree with you if i thought that that was what I had done; as it is, I'm happy that I collected a number of obscure historical threads together in a way which I don't think has been done before.

I agree with the first sentiment. Even so, I *did* continue to revise the historical section right up to my deadline. Matt Sephton's discoveries were antedating Japan's history of electronic emoji even as I was writing.

(So much for "lastly"!) There just wasn't room to write about every influence on emoji, so I had to focus on those which other emoji experts have identified as being most relevant. And even then, I didn't have enough pages to devote as much attention to them all as I would have liked.

Lastly, I think I've seen you mention Coconet before, but it was something that came up during my research at all. As such, again, I'm not sure it is broadly considered to have been an influence on the development of emoji.

I'm also unsure how widespread its influence was. Many systems could create facelike symbols, but not all of them were influential enough to be considered emoji predecessors.

Hi Brian - I'm aware of PLATO (I'd love to write about it one day), and I'm aware of the symbols it was possible to create with it, but I don't think they're in a direct line of descent to emoji. (@emojipedia.org might be able to add more detail.)

Hi Bryan - sorry to hear it! What's missing?

This is fantastic!

Lastly, some credit where it is due: Keith Broni at the mighty https://emojipedia.org/ reviewed the site, and Zach Leat’s 11ty (https://www.11ty.dev/) made it a pleasure to build. Thank you both! #emojipedia #11ty
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If you want to learn even more about emoji, you can pre-order my book, “Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji” (shadycharacters.co.u...), which will be published next month. Not long now at all!
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I really enjoyed making the site. Some programming, some thinking about emoji, some website design; I’m happy with how it came together! If you agree, please share emoji.shadycharacter... here or elsewhere. You can also reply here with your thoughts or leave a comment at shadycharacters.co.u....
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