Something has gone very wrong with the database encoding on this blog after a recent update, so all my lovely UTF-8 characters have gone mojibake.
Trying to find ways to fix it. It may have to be manual. Remember, kids: have backups before letting WordPress upgrade!
Here’s the Python equivalent of what I think the database has done:
bytes("I ???? UTF-8", encoding='utf-8').decode(encoding='cp1252')
'I 💔 UTF-8'
Quite why my hosting thought a character encoding from last century was appropriate, I’ll never know.
Update, November 2023: kinda-sort fixed the backend, but the encoding is still weird — can we…?