
The Life and Times of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (2014) - raleighm
https://www.theawl.com/2014/05/the-life-and-times-of-%C2%AF_%E3%83%84_%C2%AF/
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KineticLensman
The article has some great philosophical comments on those pre-emoji days.

I prefer, as an antidote to 'move fast and break things', the Andalusian video
snail:

    
    
      _@/

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bloob_bloob
¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

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Jokes aside I distinctly remember seeing it a lot in ircs and AOL chat rooms.
I guess this article is based on easy to search publicly available data. Makes
me wonder what other linguistic minutia have we lost because it's behind
closed doors.

~~~
orev
I too find this recollection suspect. IRC used sideways emoticons like :). I
don’t think it even had Unicode until recently, and using anything other than
ascii has always been frowned upon. Sure, there were plenty of other types of
ascii art, but shruggie is distinctly from the Unicode era.

