As I wrote last month, I’ll soon be launching a new version of Shady Characters. Specifically, I will be replacing the current version on or around Friday 17th April. You can preview the new site at https://staging.shadycharacters.co.uk; with luck, it should look more or less identical to the current version. That said, a few things will change:
Comments will be handled by email. When you submit a comment at the new site, it will pop open an email template for you to fill in. I’ll review and moderate all comment emails before adding them to the site, which means there may be a delay before your comment is posted. Drop me a line if you have any problems.
Email subscriptions will change (but you shouldn’t notice). I’m retiring the existing email subscription system in favour of a new one but will carry over all existing subscriptions. If you don’t want to receive email notifications any longer, you can unsubscribe over at the newsletter page.
This will be the last post on WordPress. If you currently follow Shady Characters via the WordPress app, you won’t see any new posts after today. If you’d still like to follow the blog, sign up for the email newsletter or follow the RSS feed in your favourite feed reader.
And that’s about it! If you want to get a preview of the new site, take a look at my most recent post, about a trip to Egypt I took in February this year. Leave a comment on the post to let me know how it looks!
Were you ever put through a slide show of someone’s holiday snaps? Well, my family and I visited Egypt in February and I am now a clear-eyed Egypt booster who has been telling anyone who will listen how fascinating a trip it was. Lacking a Kodak slide projector, I’ve written a few (thousand) words about our experiences. The post is up at the test version of shadycharacters.co.uk: you can read it here and leave comments here.
I plan to switch to the new version of Shady Characters soon, so please let me know if you notice any issues with the new site.
As I mentioned last time, I’ve been working on a new version of blog that doesn’t rely on WordPress. That new version is just about ready to go, and I’d love to get your thoughts on it before I switch over to it permanently. A preview is available at https://staging.shadycharacters.co.uk, if you want to take a look; everything should look and work much as it does at the moment, although commenting, newsletter subscriptions and the contact page are now handled via email rather than in-page forms.
Please have a poke around and let me know what you think! If you find broken links, or images, or formatting — anything at all, really, that doesn’t seem right — please let me know in the comments here or over at the new place.
Look: I am just a blogger. I can write about punctuation, or emoji, or books, or calculators, and I can hope that my readers will enjoy it. I can post about interesting things I’ve read or watched and hope that someone else will find them interesting too. And that’s great! I never imagined I’d still be doing this (and still taking pleasure from it!) a decade and a half after I started. Nor did I imagine that blogging would give me the chance to write and publish one book, let alone four of them, but it did.
But as 2025 rolls over into 2026, the happiness I take from blogging seems a little hollow in comparison to events in the wider world. I suspect I needn’t go into what those events are — if you have a TV, a newspaper or a smartphone, then you are already very well aware, and, moreover, it would be understandable if you preferred not be reminded at all — but for me, the spite, the hate and the intolerance that drive current events are becoming increasingly hard to ignore.
My power to do much of anything about all of this is limited. But even so, I’ve decided to make a couple of changes to the Shady Characters media empire™ to avoid actively making things worse. First, I will be deleting my accounts on X/Twitter. I hadn’t used them for some time, but X’s descent into free-speech absolutism reached a predictable and abhorrent nadir with the recent CSAM scandal, and I cannot in good conscience leave those accounts in place. I’ll be deleting them in the next thirty days. If you’d like to follow me elsewhere, look for me on Mastodon and Bluesky.
Separately, and time permitting, I plan to move the Shady Characters blog off WordPress. There are technical reasons for doing so, but there’s also the fact that WordPress’s co-founder, Matt Mullenweg, seems to be speed-running his transformation into a dictatorial tech CEO. Mullenweg has a talent for picking distasteful fights: in 2025, his main company got rid of three hundred employees who disagreed with him about a petulant lawsuit against another company; in 2024, he publicly chastised a transgender Tumblr user amid allegations of transphobic moderation policies. Mullenweg is no Elon Musk, but he is starting to show the symptoms, and I would prefer not to be a data point which supports WordPress’s numbers.
Honestly, neither of these changes amount to much. This is only a blog, after all. But taking a small stand feels better than doing nothing, and, in the end, I’ll still be blogging and I hope you’ll still be reading. Thanks for your support!
Welcome to the 2025 Shady Characters advent calendar! I’ll be counting down to Christmas by way of ten of the most interesting, controversial, and downright odd emoji to have appeared on our screens. Enjoy, and come back every other day or so for a new entry!
Day 10, and we are at the end of this year’s Shady Characters advent calendar! Today, to answer, belatedly, a question asked by Larry Hosken, we’re looking at PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS (🙏).
Per John Kelly at Emojipedia, and in common with some of the other emoji we’ve seen in this series, PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS looks a little different now to its original form. It was one of the earliest emoji to make it out of Japan, when Apple made it available on the iPhone in 2008, but even then it was unclear how best to draw it. One school, headed by Japanese mobile operator Softbank, held that the emoji should show two hands pressed together in the same way as today’s version. The other, led by Softbank’s competitor KDDI AU, showed a person, not just a pair of hands, with their head bowed in thought or prayer and their hands pressed or clasped in front.1 Both versions persisted for some time, with the latter finally dying out between 2015 and 2017.2
It was around the same time, too, that the meaning of PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS seemed to change. Before then, ‘🙏’ had been used mostly as a gesture of prayer, praise or gratitude. Then, in 2014, it became fair game to use it as a high-five gesture instead.3,4 It seems plain enough where this new interpretation came from — after all, ‘🙏’ isn’t an unreasonable depiction of a high-five — and it is a sign of emoji’s flexibility that PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS can sustain two such different meanings.1 (Neither of which, it should be noted, have anything much to do with the emoji’s formal name.)
Before we wrap up this year’s advent calendar, I want to use ‘🙏’ in its original sense: I want to thank you, the readers of the Shady Characters blog, for coming back year after year and for buying the books I’ve been lucky enough to be able to write.
2025 has been a challenging year, not least because my day job at Blackford Analysis came within a hair’s breadth of being made redundant in October. Many of my colleagues — friends, really — were not so lucky, which is why it’s gratifying to see that many of them have since landed new jobs elsewhere. And it’s why it was doubly pleasing to be able to catch up with so many of them, as you can see below, at the launch of Face with Tears of Joy at my local bookshop, Far From the Madding Crowd. If for no other reason than that, ‘🙏’ seems like the perfect emoji with which to wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
Current and former colleagues at the launch of Face with Tears of Joy at Far From the Madding Crowd in Linlithgow, Scotland. (Photo courtesy of Sandra Küntzel.)
