Today, I learned that Android makes it possible to send merged “emoji”, which combine distinct emoji artwork into something new.¹ It’s awful! For instance, here’s 🐙 Octopus and 🌭 Hot Dog:

Thanks, I hate it! Apparently, these have been “artisanally crafted”, which means some monster or monsters brought these creations to life by drawing them each individually. For shame.

If you visit emoji.kitchen, you can create some of your own grotesqueries.² The site doesn’t seem to have all the options offered by Android itself, but it’s got plenty of awful on offer:

Things like this fancy poop shouldn’t be, but that’s the world we live in. I’m sorry.

Footnotes:

1. I put emoji in quotes because the resulting art is simply a bitmapped image, rather than an inline combination of two real emoji. Nowadays, many emoji are actually made by combining multiple emoji using a “zero width joiner”. For example, the Rainbow Flag emoji 🏳️‍🌈 is a combination of 🏳️ White Flag and 🌈 Rainbow. ↩︎

2. Speaking of grotesqueries, sure, .kitchen is a top-level domain that should exist why not? ↩︎