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:
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.
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.
Back in the mists of time, I wrote about a peculiar property of words called Zipf’s Law. The idea is quite simple: the frequency at which different words occur in any large body of work, ordered from the most common to the least common, follows a predictable pattern. This is true across languages, and even in some texts, such as that in the Voynich Manuscript, that we haven’t yet deciphered.1
It’s publication day again! Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji is published today in the UK and other non-US territories.
You can order a copy from Norton, Amazon, Waterstones, Bookshop.org, Blackwell’s or Topping & Company. (If you’re ever in Linlithgow, Scotland, drop into my local bookshop, Far From the Madding Crowd — I’ll try to sign a few copies for them.)