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This is a good thing. The emoji set is too bloated with these "but I have mid length hair, freckles, and stud earrings, not hoops!" inclusions. A simple 2+2 pictogram is perfectly sufficient. The point of the yellow happy face is that it's happy, not that it's a yellow face.
I (half-jokingly) lean the other way: a picture is supposedly worth a thousand words, so let's make it earn it. "Face With Stuck-Out Tongue And Tightly-Closed Eyes, Medium Brown Skin Tone" is only 1/77th of the specificity that should be possible.
Instead of maximizing paperclips, the brightest minds of our generation have been working to apply the power of AI to solve this problem.
Everytime someone uses an AI generated custom emoji in a groupchat I weep for the continued straying away from the fuckbot future. I want my robot waifu to do my laundry and indulge in degenerate cosplay on appropriate demand, not drool out inconsequential slop. We could be solving for a pseudodynamic social management agent, and instead the best minds want to make AI bark in 16 vs 15 registers at once.
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Nintendo Miis have good customizability without being infinitely granular. Inserting Miis into emojis might be an attainable goal.
Emoji + Mii = Emiiji ?
Reinventing vector graphics one stupid committee decision at a time.
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Miimoji
Close, but not quite.
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But the pictogram isn't happy. It's grey and joyless.
Edit: It seems I misunderstood you, but for a family emoji I want it to look nice & happy, and that goes for pretty much all families. I haven't seen anyone use the pictogram so far, and imo you might as well remove it altogether.
Well, I think that it is unfair that happy families were represented and joyless cohabitation projects doomed to end in divorce, trauma and drug abuse were not adequately represented in unicode. I mean, these kids have it hard enough, the least we can do for them is having an emotionally adequate representation of their childhood.
I jest.
What I really think is that rather than trying to enumerate all possible family situations, it might be better to just compose families out of emoticons for individual family members.
Representing 'formerly three adults: an adult of indeterminate gender who left (red X superimposed), a blonde woman and a bearded man who died (bearded ghost icon), as well as a toddler, an female elementary student and dog and formerly a cat (which also left, red X)' in a single character is probably not feasible.
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