Forget song remixes, deepfake video melds, and even PokéFusion, because now we’ve moved on to emoji mashups.
A Twitter account called @EmojiMashupBot has been programmed to do the Lord’s work—taking two emojis and blending them together to birth a single beautiful new emoji. It may not sound like much at first, but in a world where a snowballing amount of our textual communication is handled through these little icons, every addition to our emoji lexicon is an opportunity to express ourselves in a new, succinct way.
Every hour, our new favorite bot posts a new emoji, Frankenstein-ed together from two the account says are chosen at random.
https://twitter.com/EmojiMashupBot/status/1153092444763934720
https://twitter.com/EmojiMashupBot/status/1153228906742386688
https://twitter.com/EmojiMashupBot/status/1153213245232205824
https://twitter.com/EmojiMashupBot/status/1151025334424408064
The bot launched last week with a simple zipper-lipped angel, and it didn’t take long for it to gain quite a following, amassing almost 80K followers already.
But perhaps even better than the hybrid emojis themselves are the way people on Twitter are reacting, coming up with clever uses and meanings for these hyper-specific and sometimes non-sensical symbols.
https://twitter.com/itheshyguy/status/1153047331392098304
https://twitter.com/Singey42/status/1153032487855169537
https://twitter.com/Pizzaisanalien/status/1153137989066919937
https://twitter.com/Ale_X_X_/status/1153310024686559233
https://twitter.com/RubixKubezz/status/1152971678277746689
https://twitter.com/ChaoticHighway/status/1153349326221062145
And sometimes people just immediately recognized something in these emojis that they knew they had seen somewhere before.
https://twitter.com/akayatuk/status/1153276946299494400
— poodle (@poodle4r) July 21, 2019
https://twitter.com/OhHeyItsY0u/status/1153014582614482944
While new emojis are being launched regularly, there will always be far more that we want than we will likely ever get. Unfortunately, @EmojiMashupBot has its limits—after all, no combination of faces is going to give the world the transgender flag emoji they’ve been lobbying for for years — but there’s still a lot to appreciate here.
And for now, the emoji mashup bot does seem limited to faces, but might its creator decide to start mashing up other emojis in the future? Could we get a robot unicorn? A clown on fire? A poop taco? We can only hope. But in the meantime, we can totally appreciate the weird ride it’s taking us on.
https://twitter.com/eightpanpeas/status/1152593515249131526
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