• TabbsTheBat (they/them)@pawb.social
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      10 days ago

      An emoticon in the same series as ones like OwO or UwU or °w° etc. I suppose they’re pretty much localized to the furry fandom. =w= in this case is used to express no strong emotion in particular… mostly like mild tiredness or slight annoyance

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
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        10 days ago

        Ah, I thought it was something like that, but with client integration.

        I remember back in the days of phpBB and vBulletin forums and MSN Messenger, they had special emoticons that would replace text strings with a graphical icon, say, 8) would make a smiley face with sunglasses. Or (L) would make a heart.

        I got so annoyed at how out of place the graphical emoticons looked that I trained myself to write them backwards to not trigger the program to replace my text.

        So instead of writing :) I write (:

        Just as I wrote that sentence, I reflexively reversed the first smiley and got confused when I was about to write the second…

        Sorry for the tangent, and thanks for the explanation.

        • TabbsTheBat (they/them)@pawb.social
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          10 days ago

          So instead of writing :) I write (:

          Ah, I developed a similar habit for certain emoticons within messaging apps for example for something like :3 I’d replace the number 3 with the Cyrillic letter З which tends to look the same in most fonts, or otherwise switch the characters around as you do to not trigger the automatic emoji replacement haha

    • lath@piefed.social
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      10 days ago

      ASCII emoticon. The two “=” are the eyes and the “w” is the nose. It represents a bat head expressing a state of mind. Check the username to understand my reasoning.

        • fartsparkles@lemmy.world
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          10 days ago

          It’s some variation on UwU OwO 3w3 which, as far as I’m aware, imparts simply “cute” from Asian cartoons/animation.

          I’m equally baffled by it but I was there in the beforefore times when smileys were visualising human faces.

          :-)

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
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        10 days ago

        Ah, thanks!

        I thought it was to demonstrate that the game was large (wide) in some way…