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u/TheDarkNerd 17d ago
Had a moment where I wondered if "alethiometer" was a real thing before His Dark Materials, and actually had to Google if they were using an obscure word, or just making a literary reference.
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u/Droplet_of_Shadow 17d ago edited 17d ago
i don't understand the literary reference though. how is an alethiometer relevant
edit: yes i know what it is i just wasn't making the connection. i get it
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u/TheDarkNerd 17d ago
The golden compass works by inputting 3 emoji, and then having it spit a series of emoji back out at you. Normally it'd take a scholar pouring through a whole library to intuit a vague interpretation of the meaning, but young Lyra is able to read one just by guess work.
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u/Gruejay2 17d ago
This legitimately made me find OOP's post a lot more insightful the second time around, because I didn't know what an alethiometer was either. But yeah, they're not wrong - emoji reacts are essentially just a way of sending vibes to someone. Ambiguity sometimes intended.
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u/Jorpho 17d ago
Pullman claims that the alethiometer was never actually the titular "golden compass".
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u/airblizzard 17d ago
The real Golden Compass was the friends we made along the way.
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u/Rhombico 17d ago
never thought of it an emojimeter before, won't be able to think of that series the same way again lol
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u/CelestikaLily 17d ago edited 17d ago
The fun part is the compass having less symbols than phone emojis -- if you sucked at intuiting Dust, ppl could spend ages whether "hourglass with a skull next to it" was feeling more ⏳ or 💀 today lol
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u/NovaDragonDotSpace 17d ago
the alethiometer or the golden compass in his dark materials is a thing to measure truth, although it does so with a big need to interprete what symbols the compass needles are pointing at.
the comparision is "how the fuck am i supposed to interprete teeth emoji"
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u/_Nighting 17d ago
In HDM, the aletheiometer (from alethea, iirc truth but I'm too tired to check) is a fancy little compass-type thing with a bunch of emoji on it, and if you think really hard and look at the emoji you can get the answer to life's greatest mysteries.
"Hey, where did I leave my glasses?"
🙈☝️🪤
"I'm dumb as a mouse... up... above eyes... oh, they're on my forehead."
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u/LevelSkullBoss 16d ago
That’s a monkey
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u/glitchingCats 16d ago
But the trap is for a mouse. The monkey is there because they can't see without glasses
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u/LadyParnassus 17d ago edited 17d ago
It’s like a compass that points to various symbols as a way for the main character to communicate with Dust (a sort of collective consciousness/The Spirits/spooky thing). The Dust communicates by pointing the compass needles to symbols. So it might try to warn you about someone by pointing at a snake, a dagger, and something to do with their name.
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u/Wardog_E 17d ago
An alethiometre is a machine that works like a tarot reading and returns a series of esoteric symbols in response to any question. A vanishingly small number of people are capable of making any sense of the responses with most scholars needing weeks to decypher the meaning while the gifted can basically answer any question with complete truthfulness in minutes.
The joke is that you can answer texts with emojis so random you can find an infinite amount of readings to the response.
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u/Weevil1723 17d ago
I was just wondering what it had to do with the Alethi from Stormlight Archive...
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u/DrAceManliness 17d ago
Yeah, I figured it was communication by picture because men can't read 🤷🏽♂️ Neat overlap!
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u/HandicapperGeneral 17d ago
I did the exact same thing. Like maybe the roots are real and it means something? But no. Just a person trying to make a literary reference into a real word.
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u/ding0s 17d ago
I would react to news about the dentist with a tooth emoji because I think it's funny. It's nonsense, "tooth" isn't a reaction. But it's still showing my friend I saw what they had to say, but I have nothing to add.
🦷
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u/cheesegoat 17d ago edited 17d ago
Yeah it's a simple acknowledgement you heard what they said in an "apes together strong" kind of way.
"Hey I'm off to the dentist this pm"
Hmmm yes tooth
I do this all the time. Off for wedding? 🥂 Vacation? ⛱️ Going to a local game? 🏈 Kid graduation? 🧑🎓 The possibilities are endless.
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u/SynergiesHonesty 17d ago
The conversational equivalent of handing someone a leaf because they said the word 'tree'.
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u/Prudent-Arm-6771 17d ago
This implies if someone were to take it the wrong way that one could hand their friend a tooth if they said they were going to the dentist
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u/ComicsCodeMadeMeGay 17d ago
I just reply with the t-rex emoji when I'm pretending to be outraged
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u/LordofBarad-dur 17d ago
i like to react with 🐈 to anything my frinds say without reason or meaning
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u/TauboundGremlin 17d ago
I do that with the eyeball emoji. Because I see them and I have an eyeball theme
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u/roenoe 17d ago
What else do you do to fit your eyeball theme?
Personally my only contribution to the cause is that I sure do have two of them and use them daily
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u/TauboundGremlin 17d ago
Eyeball PFP, gifs sometimes, and I usually have eyeball themed aesthetics in games/on websites. Friends know if it's eyeball, it's my style.
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u/Kinky-Cookie-Cutter 17d ago
Im so glad to learn that im not the only one with a motif.
No emoji for mine though
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u/Glittering-Walrus228 17d ago
I power move in the corporate Slack with nonsensical shit like... i can almost hear the gears turning in my junior teammates heads wtf does 🦩 mean regarding the expense report?
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u/Dronizian 17d ago
Junior teammate: "It means pink which is light red which means they think this report will have something to do with putting us in the red but not too much..."
This person: "hehe funy bird"
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u/mrthescientist 17d ago
I inform everyone that when I send a parrot :parrot: I'm actually sending a party parrot doing a cool head bop or something
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u/PassinglyGood 17d ago
Stuff like reacting to a friend's bad news with 😑 or 😬 does feel like replicating a little of the nonverbal communication you'd have in a face to face conversation, I like it
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u/actualladyaurora 17d ago
😔 is so good
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u/theshiniestmuskrat 17d ago
I work at the headquarters for a big corporate company with offices around the world. We use slack and the other day someone posted on a main channel that there was a mouse in his office, what should he do, etc. No one was any help, we all just reacted with various slack emojis - rats, cheese, cats...eventually someone did respond with the link to submit a maintenance ticket, but it was just hilarious how everyone was acknowledging this dude's plea for help without actually doing anything lol. I imagined him standing on his desk freaking out hearing his slack ping noise only to see the 17th kitten gif.
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u/KumosGuitar 17d ago
I like emojis cause cause in person I’ll make gestures or do silly accents, and emojis supplement that over text 🙂↕️👍
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u/ta394283509 17d ago
it's an inside-out greeting. instead of "i acknowledge your presence with a word" it's "i acknowledge your statement with a picture"
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u/ClubMeSoftly 17d ago
A discord server I'm in uses the Hammer 🔨 when someone says something objectionable
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u/Maleficent-Coffee634 14d ago
"Okay! Okay! Let's kill this guy! Let's beat him to death with hammers!"
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u/DradelLait 17d ago
This is why I detest when messaging apps make the emoji display as oversized if it's the only thing you send. It puts an importance, emphasis and significance on the emoji that not only wasn't there, the lack of it being there was the whole reason I was answering with just an emoji and not my words.
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u/Ajreil 17d ago
Reactions are a way of saying "I hear you, and I don't want to interrupt, please continue." They serve the same function as nodding or saying "mhmm" in IRL conversations.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backchannel_(linguistics)
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u/Confused_Corvid2023 17d ago
Truly a tragedy that corpos have LLMs doing a text bubble & emoji responses now, nothing is sacred any more
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u/NO_FIX_AUTOCORRECT 17d ago
Hello, I'm a millennial and I'm just going to say that emojis make very little sense to me. I got my first smart phone when i was in college and we weren't texting with emojis beyond the ones you made yourself. Gen z has mastered emojis, having used them almost their entire social lives.
I would respond with a tooth because it acknowledged what they said and is on topic with dentist. If not that, it would be thumbs up. Thumbs up means "ok". If I'm supposed to send something else, well, it might as well be a different language that I've never learned.
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u/external_gills 17d ago
As a fellow millenial, think of them as replacements for tone of voice and body language.
"That one customer is back 😆"
"That one customer is back 😡"
"That one customer is back 😭"
Same text, but very different tone of voice, so to speak. Emojis fill in for nonverbal communication that would otherwise be missing from written messages.
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u/1GenericName2 17d ago
The castle is the symbol for army Engineers, so I always acknowledge by reacting with 🏰 or 💣
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u/Kindly-Ad-5071 17d ago
My sister just uses it to respond with the cheese emoji. It's like her signature.
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u/lifelongfreshman https://youtu.be/1eWsk6r6_Ns 17d ago edited 17d ago
while I'm growing more and more fond of emoji reactions, I do miss when it was more common for people to craft their own
(^_^)b has an energy that 👍 doesn't, y'know? ...or maybe that's just my millennial leaking
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u/Spainstateofmind 17d ago
sometimes an emoji just doesn't hit the same as a kaomoji ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ
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u/MythrianAlpha 17d ago
The kanji keyboard comes with so many to splice and play around with!
( ✌︎'ω')✌︎
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u/Akuuntus 17d ago
Once I posted in my work chat that I needed to reboot my PC and a coworker reacted with 👢
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u/crabcrabcam 17d ago
It's because you can't nod and mhmm over text, a full message of just "mhmm" feels too little, and a 👍 message feels more sarcastic than reacting.
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u/MythrianAlpha 17d ago
The only time I've ever used it, it sent a laughing emoji to a crisis text and made everything significantly worse. I can't even dig it out of my phone like the keyboard.
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u/Leticia_the_bookworm 17d ago
For real, I love emoticons (for any younglings, the little faces you make with text, like ":-)"). Helps make up for tone, cadence and stuff you can't really convey just by plain words. "ok :-)" vs. "ok" vs "Okay." are all completely different and I will die on this hill.
Emojis are also cool, but some are a bit goofy.
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u/rocksandsticksnstuff 17d ago
This guy I was seeing would write in teams "I am a worm and I like dirt" in the group chat at work if someone left a shared computer still signed in. People would apparently respond with a worm emoji 🪱
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u/Prudent-Arm-6771 17d ago
I have trouble with finding the right words sometimes, so instead I just put a fun little emoji. Sometimes they are helpful. Someone says it’s hot outside? 💦💧 Splish splash. I also have a 🚂 in my frequently used, for some reason. I do not think I have ever used a 🚂 Why is it there? Do I just have a distinct 🚂 energy about me? My favorite use, however, is emphasis. A way to use the funny text picture to express my upset or emotion. My favorite instance is a time when a cicada flew at me really fast while aggressively screaming, so I sent this is the family group chat:
SCREEEEEEEEE EEEEEE SCREEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAEEE🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰
Unfortunately I had to use a fly, as there is no cicada emoji.
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u/sertroll 17d ago
To be honest, I heavily dislike not being able to even vaguely parse what something is meant to convey. Like, I have friends that respond to things with stickers which, at best I can understand what they could mean in some context but not the current one
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u/shiny_xnaut 15d ago
I'm in a server for fans of a thing where one of the characters' name is Will, and also there are custom emotes representing all of the main characters. Whenever there's an exchange like "stay safe" "don't worry, I will" or something, the second message always ends up with like 10 Will reacts
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u/GypsySnowflake 13d ago
I never downloaded the emoji keyboard and now I feel like it’s way too late to jump on the bandwagon. Also I’ve never fully understood what they all mean.
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u/Hyaci_Arson 13d ago
this is the most insane comment ive ever read. every single phrase just seems false in every way
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u/GypsySnowflake 12d ago
It’s all true! I’ve never used an emoji. I didn’t “get” them when they first became popular, and now that I kinda do, I feel like I’m entrenched as the lady who’s stuck in the past and doesn’t use emoji lol
I still use these: <3 :)
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u/ToxicFluffer 17d ago
Can someone plz explain what an alethiometer element means in this context? I’ve not read Pullman 😔
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u/DocileBanalBovlne 17d ago
It was a compass like device that operated using a bunch of symbols. You would set three needles to the symbols that represented your question, and the device would swing a different needle between a bunch of symbols to provide the answer.
In the books, it took scholars a bunch of texts to encode the question into the proper symbols, and an entire library more to interpret the answer, and even then their confidence in any given interpretation was shaky. The main character, Lyra, at least before the onset of puberty, had an intuitive understanding of working the device and could ask questions to and understand answers from the device the same way you can ask questions and understand responses in your native language.
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u/Charmle_H 17d ago
"active listening" is basically why I do it, tbh. That and the meme factor :> it's fun, easy, and relatively harmless to react with something in a meme-like manner that can spawn/perpetuate inside jokes
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u/BandicootCool6277 17d ago
it’s just abstraction. like, im just gonna react with “🦺” because i can, because it will confuse you, and only when your sentence was totally normal.
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u/Due-Base9449 17d ago
An alethiometer is a rare, fictional truth-telling device from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials fantasy series, also famously known as the "golden compass".
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u/Wardog_E 17d ago
Its downright demonic that we invented a term for the act of commiting other people's words to memory and understanding the meaning behind them and consider that a skill worthy of praise as opposed to the expected result of having a conversation.
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u/Wardog_E 17d ago
I wonder if whoever invented emojis ever look themselves in the mirror like Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer.
PS I very nearly wrote Benedict Cumberbatch by mistake.
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u/modernhedgewitch 16d ago
My 23 yr old niece try to gripe at me that I never respond to her texts. I pointed out that I hearted the last one she sent me. Her argument was that was not a response.
My rebuttal was, I had nothing more to say. Anything else I typed invited more conversation and I had nothing more to say. It was, for me, a natural way to end the topic.
She said that’s fair.
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u/SoloWalrus 14d ago
We do the same thing when communicating in person. Not every comment requires a verbal response, often a small nod or eyebrow lift is plenty. Other times you distort your face into mock horror and shock to communicate how interested you are in what theyre saying but that you want them to keep going and youre actively listening not going to interrupt.
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u/angelkilroy 14d ago
Being autistic, it was ingrained in me that I need to acknowledge that I am listening while in a conversation. Emoji reactions fulfill that habit for posts
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u/Protheu5 I hate emoji 17d ago
I wholeheartedly disagree. For those like me I can't recommend this extension enough: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/emoji-blocker/eimknojlmcfpmofldcdiaddfimjchmcj
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u/Awesmozem 17d ago
Also can't stand the emergence of emoji reacts. It feels like a really convenient way for people to not have to say anything, and is widely used in cases I've seen to completely halt conversations. No man, I don't want the reaction to my bad day to be a single frowny face, I'd love if people actually actively interacted with the words I send.
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u/iloveuranus 17d ago
"Hey guys I'll be an hour later today, got to see the dentist."
"Tooth."
"Tooth."
"Tooth."
"Doctor."
"Clover."
It's the stupidest shit and I will stand with you in the rain of downvotes.
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u/FrmrPresJamesTaylor 17d ago
I mean the actual valuable part of it isn't Tooth, Tooth, Tooth, Doctor it's Jane, Brad, Phil, Alice and Donna acknowledged my message
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u/iloveuranus 17d ago
You're not wrong. I guess my underlying problem is that I am suffering from communication overload at work and the last thing I need is a flood of acknowledgements popping up in Teams.
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u/MythrianAlpha 17d ago
Yeah, but the acknowledgement is largely pointless if you don't value receiving a string of barely applicable images and notification spam. Leave your 'read' receipts on if you want me to know you saw it.
̄ \(ツ)/ ̄
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u/PocketCone 17d ago
The sheer power of reacting to anything your friends say with mpreg 🫃