Those wily Japanese. Not content with using their own pictographic writing systems, now they're getting inventive with ASCII. I thought I'd seen all the emoticons (starting with the Piltdown smiley :-) through the more advanced XD and the pre-Cambrian variants such as >_< and O_o) but there's a whole new genus based on alphanumeric DNA rather than the punctuation-derived underpinnings of its predecessors.

The canonical type exemplar is "orz", although variants include "JTO", "STO" and so on.

Confused? Hornswoggled? Clicky for enlightenment. Then clicky to visit the sculpture garden.