Avris

There are only two queer flags in the official standard for emojis: and . The Unicode Consortium has made it clear that it doesn't intend to add any more… But when has a committee ever stopped us queers from enjoying our flags?

What if instead of resorting to heart emojis in the colours from a flag (like ), you could just say you're ‍⚨ nonbinary or ‍∞‍ polyamorous with an actual flag? We've created a font that circumvents / extends the Unicode standard and lets you use a bunch of queer flags inline!

Putting emojis in your database should be a piece of cake, right? You’ve had enough trouble with encodings in your lifetime, and now that we have the blessing of UTF-8, you’re always so careful to use it everywhere, so you’d expect all the characters to just finally work out of the box, right?

Well, I did expect that. But I’ve recently realised I can only put some emojis (like “️”) in by blog posts. Most of them were just lost or replaced with “?” by MySQL... Oh, those damn encodings again!

But fortunately the solution is quite simple.