Christian inspired me with his That’s Gold emoticon that he created for MSN to post up one of my own MSN experiences. It actually is also related to something being “gold” but I went for something a bit more generic and literal.
I’ve made a bunch of stupid, useless MSN emoticons to amuse myself and my friends, but by far the most often used is the emoticon to use instead of saying “that’s gold!” or just “gold!” or even just “lol”, or sometimes to supplement lol when you really want to show your appreciation for a comment someone has made and “lol” just doesn’t cut it yet you don’t want to go with “alol” (actual laugh out loud) or add an extra “hahaha” or something else onto the end.
This emoticon’s story is also quite interesting because it went through several stages of evolution, as seen in Fig. 1 above.
Here you can see the emoticon graduated from its first inception as a static emoticon which MSN displays very small and boring in the chat window. Clearly, this is not the effect we were after with this emoticon so more work was needed. In the unlikely case that you want to download the boring version, it is provided for you as a normal static GIF file below. It does look the same enlarged size as the other emoticons but don’t be fooled — MSN will shrink it once you convert it to an emoticon.
The next version was the first animated one but it also failed to impress us with its predictable, even keeled and slow wagging side to side. If this emoticon was a dog, you wouldn’t assume that it was particularly happy to see you, would you? It is more of a dog that is begging for a biscuit at the side of the table but doesn’t really believe it will get a biscuit, yet it can’t leave the table lest it misses out. Thus this emoticon failed in its task of conveying the “Gold!” emotion successfully as well.
Finally, we struck gold (hah!) with the next iteration. This version was named “Goldy” because of either a mistyped filename or for some equally inane reason. Nevertheless what it lacks in name it makes up for in spirit, because you can’t deny what this emoticon conveys — wacky comedy gold! And that’s what it represents. So next time your friend says something hilarious you don’t need to just say “oh that was gold my friend, yes indeed you certainly have a sense of humour don’t you”…you can just slap this emoticon into his window and show your gratitude for his comic genius.