I'm Royalty.

On occasion over the past year or so, people would leave comments here that contained little cartoon smiley faces. I don't mean the ascii smilies like :) but actual images. I'm embarrassed to admit it publicly, but I had absolutely no idea how they did it. I didn't see anything to select the various smilies in my comments box and I was too embarrassed to ask. Mostly I didn't think about it because I hate smilies, but I also ignored it because I was annoyed I couldn't figure out where the damn things came from. Did these commentors have some kind of third-party smiley software? Were they using HTML image tags and hosting the images on their own servers? Neither of these explanations were satisfactory.

Yesterday while I was leaving a comment at a blog that uses the dreaded Haloscan like I do, I noticed a question mark that was a hyperlink. I was curious as to what it linked to. When I clicked it a new window popped up with all the damn smilies on it. You'd think this remarkable discovery would fill me with joy, but it only made me feel like the all time king of the morons.