


Since Slashdot (unfortunately for trolls) does not allow the embedding of objects, such as images and sounds, in HTML-coded comments, graphics must be constructed using textual characters: ASCII art. IGN Forums – This face ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ruined my life.One of the most creative ways to express ones self in Slashdot's forums is with graphical, artistic representations art. Tech N9ne (via Wayback Machine) – ( ͡ ° ͜ʖ ͡°) HUPIT Gaming (via Wayback Machine) – ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)this is the best epic meme in a while( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) World of Warcraft (via Wayback Machine) – The Sha of Casuals On July 15th, the AnimatedText Tumblr blog highlighted a rotating animated GIF featuring four copies of the emoticon posted with the tag "degdeg." Within the next 48 hours, the post garnered upwards of 1,000 notes. On July 13th, Tumblr user TakeFlightLittleBird posted a collage of the emoticon in 39 different fonts (shown below, right), gaining over 18,700 notes in the first four days. On June 26th, Tumblr user Cynical-Seadragon posted screenshots of the emoticon made out of building blocks in the indie sandbox game Minecraft, captioned with the keyword “degdeg” (shown below, left).
#Ascii art troll face how to#
The likely cause of this was that this user's text-to-speech software only tried to pronounce the degree characters and nothing else, either because it saw those characters as punctuation or it didn't know how to vocalize them. On June 10th, 2013, Tumblr user Franklenlobo blogged that his computer's text-to-speech program pronounced the "( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)" emoticon as "deg deg." Within the following five weeks, the post accumulated upwards of 112,000 notes. However, it should be noted that the emoticon had been circulating among Japanese Twitter users prior to its introduction on the English-speaking web. In April 2013, 4chan's /b/ (random) board reportedly became flooded with an emoticon bearing a marked resemblance to the "lenny face." Denoted as "( ‾ʖ̫‾)," the emoticon was defined as the Keep Calm and Carry On face by the online emoji dictionary site Emojicons on April 19th, followed by similar strings of mentions on Tumblr, Facebook, Steam and several imageboard and forum communities. The following table shows, in order, which characters are used in ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°). The largest of these fan pages was created on November 18th and has 4120 likes. As of November 29th, 2012, there are more than 150 Facebook pages containing “( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)” in the title on Facebook. Additional mentions were found on Tumblr, Twitter and Yahoo! Answers. Over the next several days, various threads with the emoticon popped up on HUPIT Gaming, Tech N9ne, gun enthusiast forum AR15, the IGN Forums and the Facepunch forums, among others. As of November 29th, there are more than 1450 search results for "( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)" on YouTube. On the following day, cubegoat uploaded another video titled "Fresh ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) of /b/el Air," featuring various animated versions of the emoticon accompanied by the theme song for the 1990's sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (shown below, right). EST, 4chan users had raided the /r/Israel subreddit (shown below, left), with some users referring to the emoticon as "le Palestine face."Īlso on November 18th, World of Warcraft Forums member Kuallius submitted a post titled "The Sha of Casuals ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)" and YouTuber cubegoat uploaded a video titled "( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)" (shown below, left). In the post, Redditor 8-bit_d-boy commented that the face resembled the children's television show character Bob the Builder. EST, which included a screenshot of the face being used in a 4chan thread (shown below, right). Redditor Dogcatcher1979 submitted a post titled "So I guess this is a thing now?" to the /r/4chan subreddit at approximately 3 p.m. A screenshot of these bans was also shared on FunnyJunk, where it earned 3900 points and gained more than 101,000 views. (ET) that same day, the face had been posted to 4chan's /v/ (video games) board, followed by similar posts on /sp/ (sports) and /b/, where numerous users were eventually banned (shown below, right) for spamming the boards with the emoticon. After someone complained about seeing too many posts in stickied threads, an anonymous user used the emoticon and the phrase "this thread is leaking from the heavens." Other users began derailing the thread by posting derivatives of the emoticon with different types of eyes, which continued for three days.īy 11 a.m. Posted on the site's International board, "( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)" was used as a comment in a thread about whether or not administrators should change the settings on their spam detector. One of the earliest appearances of the emoticon was posted to the Finnish image board Ylilauta at 8:45 a.m.
