Unicode contains a lot of great and useful things. And as things tend to go, people find creative uses for
them. It’s currently trendy to use some of Unicode’s special characters for “font effects”,
𝕝𝕚𝕜𝕖 𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕤 𝕖𝕩𝕒𝕞𝕡𝕝𝕖
(assuming you have good font support, you should see cool double struck letters reading “like this
example”). There are easy converters available for finding out the best
styles.
Unicode versions 7 and 8 have added many new emoji to the standard. These emojis first became available in mobile phones
and are supported by default on modern Android and iOS devices. OS X also has a builtin emoji input method. As such,
emojis are beginning to appear on IRC too and it’s useful to be able to see them.