For languages that can be represented as a sequence of little pictures Unicode is a little better than ASCII. For the rest, it's a scam: We tell people that we have a way of dealing with human languages in computers but it's half-baked, born in ignorance, and all the grotty details are papered over, but you can write PIZZA SLICE or POOP now, so fuck it, ship it.

Represent: "Astral Plane"? What does that have to do with a standard catalog mapping numbers to pictures? I feel Unicode messes that up.

Encoding: UTF-8 is near perfect, 'nuff said. Ken Thompson and Rob Pike doing their thing.

Drawing: Doesn't even begin to touch it really.

Unicode is a nasty little black hole that's sucking up time and other resources and not really solving the problem.