low-ki199999 t1_iwl6jn5 wrote on November 16, 2022 at 1:34 PM

Reply to comment by nephelokokkygia in Hobbyist adds a hinge to the Game Boy Pocket, delighting everyone | No, it's not a Game Boy Advance SP. This is the monochrome Pocket with hinge. by chrisdh79

This was helpful! Not that I’m going to be booting up a gba anytime soon haha, but the symbols were also rectangles for me.

Out of curiosity, can you explain what they typed and what you typed and why one works in my phone and one doesn’t?

nephelokokkygia t1_iwldnk9 wrote on November 16, 2022 at 2:31 PM

Generally speaking, text online is encoded in a giant huge enormous standard called Unicode. Unicode is cool because it definitionally encodes every possible character in every language in one standard. Uni = single, code = code. However, Unicode is not quite so cool because to do this, it needs to

Be huge
Get updates from time to time to add new characters people might want to encode

The person I replied to probably copy+pasted the best-looking arrows they saw off some webpage online. This would have been fine, except that the arrows they happened to choose were relatively new to Unicode (from 2014), with relatively little support in fonts. That, by the way, is the other, other issue with Unicode — just because it theoretically supports a character, doesn't mean the specific font you're using on your computer/phone/smart fridge does too. Your font could have been created before the character was added to Unicode, or you could be using a version of the font released before that character was added, or the font creator might just not care about that random arrow you want to stare at with your eyes. So, to support more devices, I chose old symbols for the arrows (technically not even arrows in my case, they're just triangles — from all the way back in 1993!) and old emoji for the A and B (because most devices these days support emoji and I thought they looked neat here). Fun bonus fact, those A and B symbols aren't even designed to represent buttons — they're for blood type, which Japanese people (Japan being the origin of emoji) have historically been obsessed with. It's kind of like the Chinese zodiac, or star signs. But I digress.

This is probably more info than you wanted, but sometimes answers just be like that.

low-ki199999 t1_iwlekin wrote on November 16, 2022 at 2:38 PM

Ahaha definitely more info than I expected to receive, but all of it interesting, especially the bit about the cultural fascination with blood types. That’s super interesting, as it represents an interesting blend of superstitions and modern science/tech, which I’d have to imagine is a pretty specific combination to Japanese culture. It makes sense that some cultures would look at blood types like horoscopes or whatever, I’d just never seen it come up before.