{"id":1000,"date":"2009-03-14T23:26:20","date_gmt":"2009-03-15T06:26:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewysz.com\/wyszdom\/?p=1000"},"modified":"2009-03-14T23:26:20","modified_gmt":"2009-03-15T06:26:20","slug":"cool-not-cool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/2009\/03\/cool-not-cool\/","title":{"rendered":"It has to be cool enough, but not too cool…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ok, so as Nelson pointed out<\/a>, shortly after my rant against WeFollow<\/a>, I went ahead and sent them three replies. Why? Because enough people were doing it that I figured I should just play along and participate. Of course as I indicated in my last post, once this becomes too mainstream (tech goes below the fold), I’ll lose interest.<\/p>\n

This reminds me of my use of smileys (or emoticons, if you prefer), and how it proves I can be\u00a0susceptible\u00a0to peer pressure if I respect my peers. For the first 12 years of my online life, I refused to use smileys. Well, except for when I used them ironically, but again, I’ll note that this is before I had ever heard of a “hipster.” I think this was when people were just starting to talk about emos, which I later learned were not large Australian birds.<\/p>\n

I refused to use them because I saw them most commonly used by people who did other annoying things like using colored fonts, writing *shrug* and *sigh* and otherwise trying to bring emotion into a textual medium. One day, I was shocked to see Tony<\/a> (Dude, update your blog!) use a smiley in conversation, and I called him out for it. He shot back with something like, “I’ve been using email since the ’80s!” so I decided to refrain from judging him, but still didn’t deem smileys to be good enough for my use.<\/p>\n

Finally, in the summer of 2006, I found myself at Google, surrounded by geeks. And you know what? They use smileys all the time.<\/em> I probably started using them just to fit in and not get fired, and didn’t really see a huge value in them. At some point, however, I started to realize the great thing about smileys. They let you say almost anything<\/em> without risking offense. As someone whose constant attitude of “I can’t believe you took that personally\/seriously, you fool” gets me into trouble more often than I’d like, I’ve found smileys to be a great safety net. Let’s take a look at an example:<\/p>\n

Without a smiley:<\/p>\n

You want to know what else looks like a bug? Your face.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With a smiley:<\/p>\n

You want to know what else looks like a bug? Your face. \ud83d\ude09<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pretty neat, huh?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ok, so as Nelson pointed out, shortly after my rant against WeFollow, I went ahead and sent them three replies. Why? Because enough people were doing it that I figured I should just play along and participate. Of course as I indicated in my last post, once this becomes too mainstream (tech goes below the … Continue reading It has to be cool enough, but not too cool…<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wysz.com\/wyszdom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}