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¯\_(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.

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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.

Wouldn't you have needed to use a Japanese text encoding (JIS?) and a corresponding font to get the "tsu" (ツ) kana in pre-Unicode days?

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