#185: Face Without Mouth

Arthur Trope Presents: The Inscrutables

No. 185

“Face Without Mouth”

Artie was late to the whole texting thing, like all other technology, but Syd got him into it & he warmed up quickly bc it’s basically like writing captions. And there isn’t that much difference in the end result tbh bc he gets a lot of blank face responses from Syd, and everyone else he texts with, which is his favorite single emoji response of all, and pretty much sums up what he’s going for with his life’s work, I think. He needs a healthy percentage of people to say ‘I don’t get it’ to feel like he’s onto something. (Most people, Artie included, call this emoji ‘blank face’ but officially it’s called Face Without Mouth & according to Emojipedia it was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.) I don’t expect this one to perform very well, based on the focus group scores, but the Committee let it slide I guess bc emojis are a global thing & Slothrop is just happy to see Artie’s submissions actually following his strategic directives. So Slothrop’s feeling a little momentum there, which he needs bc the stress is starting to wear on him. We’ll see how this one does across the network today. I’m not holding my breath. The comments will be telling. Or not. Hard to say. Artie doesn’t follow the social media accounts, but he loves a good Face Without Mouth in the comments when I show them to him on my phone. -Ed. 😶