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Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Dear Emoji Makers

Dear Emoji Makers,

Thank you for your fun little characters that we can use to express ourselves in our Facebook PMs when words fail us. I know that half my friends would have no idea how I was feeling without a couple of dancing minions to demonstrate.

I especially love it when I'm in a group PM with several other people and 2 of them start an emoji war. The notifications make my cell phone sound like someone just rolled triple 7s on a slot machine in my purse.

I check my phone, expecting to see thrilling conversations happening but instead it's a string of sweet little emoji interspersed with seizure-inducing animated GIFs. Oh the joy they bring.

In an effort to maximize that joy, I would like to offer one suggestion if I may. You see the problem is that your emoji are small and on mobile devices they are even smaller. This causes a slight problem for those of us with not quite so young eyeballs. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the emoji I just sent to a friend was not 2 hugging minions but 2 fighting minions. And the emoji I thought was just a happy hotdog was actually a flasher hotdog, holding his bun open to reveal his....hot....dog. 
 
I am aware that there are some options available. The smiley face emoji are usually easy to see but I don't like to use them because those are the ones that old people use. I am not old. I am just slightly visually impaired due to my advanced...maturity.

Therefore I would like to request that you make some emoji that are large enough for not old people like myself to see and use correctly. If it was just about the size of my mobile device's screen that would be great. It would certainly save me future embarrassment brought on by something called a HamCat.

I don't know if you are also the people responsible for the inflatable thumbs up on our mobile devices but just in case I will share my thoughts about that with you as well. First of all, I didn't even know the feature existed until a friend showed me and explained to me how it works. She told me to just touch it and hold until it starts growing then let go when it gets to the size I want. That's a concept I'm familiar with so I gave it a try. My friend warned that if I hold it for too long it will explode and go back to small. Again...familiar territory.
 
I touched the icon and watched it grow and grow, then just at that moment when it was almost where I wanted it the dang thing went small again. Story. Of. My. Life. It took several tries before I got the hang of it but finally discovered that mine prefers a light touch. Now I find it easy to apply just the right amount of pressure to get that little satisfying "pop" at the end.
 
The only problem is that now I can't stop touching it. I touch it four, maybe five times a day just to watch it grow. I'm even touching it in public. Now it's to the point where I don't even have to look at it, I know precisely the point at which it will "pop" just by the sound it makes.

Surely it's a harmless habit, right? Although...I am having trouble seeing all those little emoji and I seem to recall my mother saying something about going blind....

Sunday, July 12, 2015

My Favorite YouTube Comments

 These comments left on some of my YouTube videos are among my favorites. They're mostly negative, sometimes snarky, but always entertaining. Most of them were left on a video that has over 700,000 views despite everything these folks said I did wrong.

And before you complain that they're hard to read...I know, I know. I wasn't about to manually retype them so this is the best I could do. Just go ahead and leave me a comment complaining about it. I have lots of experience with that sort of thing!