Crappy IRC and Unicode

I use MacIrssi as my IRC client at work and at home. It's mostly great. By mostly, I mean, I wish when people sent smart-ass messages on IRC filled with unicode characters, I could actually appreciate how much of a smart-ass they are being. Instead, all I see is this:

< ganeshanator> gonna go to the \u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588
    and \u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588
    getting those \u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588
    and the \u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588
    on \u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588\u2588

I always forget how to convert it, so I wrote this, and now I never have to remember again:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use warnings;
use strict;

use Encode;

sub unicode_plz { encode( 'UTF-8', pack( 'U', hex shift ) ) }

( my $message = shift ) =~ s{\\u([a-fA-F0-9]+)}{unicode_plz($1)}ge;
print "$message\n";

And, BAM!

Crappy was a harsh word. MacIrssi is pretty great, except for this.