by Bug Einme

Hey again. Loyal fans of the Domain. Yep I came back despite a very profitable summer, I decided to come back to the site where I make practically nothing, but that is beside the point. I am not in this gig for the money. I am in it to tell everybody about the wackiness of the scientific world.

While I was on summer vacation I ended up frequenting an online forum. While there I was introduced to the most fascinating of beings. They call themselves emoticons. At first I thought they represented an impressively primitive form of life. After all, their one goal is to stand in place and express a single emotion. No offense to this noble tribe, but I was able to express more than one emotion about 10 seconds after I was born. (I was perfectly content just sitting there, but the doctor went and spoiled my fun by making me cry…. Diabolical).

When I introduced a couple of these friendly faces to my posts I tried to converse with them about how they can diversify their lives. Imagine an emoticon that will change emotions at its own will. None of my subjects succeeded in learning anything, and there were quite a few tragic accidents. Twitch was probably the most promising of the new breed of emoticons, but he snapped under the pressure. Now all he is good for is twitching.

After my grandiose failure with Twitch, I decided they were better off the way they are. So I started to observe them in the wild (since all the ones I have ever found were trained to show a single emotion). My hope was that they would be able to express themselves in more than one way, without the interference of society.

I decided to jump into the “net” and “surf” around. However, it took me quite a while to find the ever-elusive Wild Emoticons. For their protection I will not reveal the URL where I located them.

I was amazed at how diverse they seemed to be. Some of them looked quite devilish and some looked unbelievable vague. Some of them would walk around sideways, while others bounded around normally. Interestingly enough the sideways ones tended to avoid the more easily recognizable ones at every turn. I also noticed that the easily recognizable ones were more often the subjects of predation by the local bits. My theory for this is the more easily recognizable ones don’t blend in as coding as easily as the sideways groups. For safety reasons, the sideways groups avoid the commoners at all costs, most likely for fear of being turned into one. Hopefully preservationists may eventually find a way, to reverse the commoners into their natural form.

The most unique one that I found I call )8P. Since he was the most confusing one to look at. When I first came upon him I thought he was razzing me. After I stuck him with a cattle prod for his insolence, I was amazed to see that he now resembled a sad person wearing a baseball cap.

This was a fantastic breakthrough. It showed me that the Wild Emoticons could express themselves in more than one way. This led me to more experiments. Using various implements of science (Stun-guns, baseball bats, beat the piss out of chittix sticks, etc.) I learned that many of them could express themselves in a variety of ways. For instance, )8) Was quite happy until I told him why the chicken crossed the road, then he seemed quite upset.

-8, this happy little fellow looked all spiffy with his bow tie on, but when I splashed him in the mud he just got really big eyed and upset.

However, despite my scientific successes, the local authorities thought that I was being a menace to society. It took them a while, but they eventually caught up with me and threw me out of their habitat. But I had succeeded in showing that emoticons are able to express a variety of emotions until their will to show multiple emotions is broken by our technocratic elite. My goal is to one-day reintroduce a tame emoticon into the wild. Fortunately Twitch seems more than willing to allow me to experiment on him. Don’t mind the screams, he always does that. Check out my new signoff for something else I learned on this journey.

-Bug V&X