It’s time to build Shruggie!
In the current quarantined state of the world, everyone probably has an insane amount of time to kill. Today’s featured website, buildshruggie.com, provides an excellent way to kill this time. This site is the world’s most random, useless puzzle; its pieces are various keyboard symbols you can put together to make a shrugging emoticon ( ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). With all of my spare quarantine time, I set out to create this masterpiece of an emoticon from the following scattered text:
If you have no idea how to complete this puzzle, you can scroll down and see how I completed it. The strategy I used was to stay organized and keep a clear head to avoid confusion with the different puzzle pieces.
How I Built Shruggie
The first thing I did was create a basic framework of the emoticon by immediately placing the brackets forming its face in their place. This provided some sort of a frame of reference when I put the rest of the emoticon in place.
After this, I grouped all the pieces with the same shape together to avoid scrambling around my screen when I create this emoticon. This proved to be very helpful in reducing confusion later on in the process.
Now, it was time to build the emoticon itself. I started with the eyes and the mouth since they were much less complex than the shrugging arms. I knew that this emoticon’s arms are made of straight lines, so I singled out the slightly curved lines (top middle and far left) as the face. Obviously, the two identical short lines in the top middle area were the eyes, and the longer line on the left was the mouth.
I then started work on the most iconic part of this emoticon: the shrug. Here, I had to use a bit of reasoning to figure out which piece went where. I thought the longer horizontal lines were the upper arms, which are horizontally positioned in a shrug. Because the hand is shorter than the upper arm, the shorter horizontal lines were the hands, which are raised and placed horizontally.
The two diagonal slashes (which were the forearms) were easy to figure out. With these, the direction the slash was facing corresponded to the side of the face it belonged on.
With all of this in mind, I finished building Shruggie!
Conclusion
I had accomplished virtually nothing in building this shrugging face, but I was able to kill a decent 20 minutes. I also felt strangely proud of myself for creating order from the chaos of keyboard symbols. If you, like me, have absolutely nothing to do (which is very possible), go check this website out!