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Emoji Kitchen (emoji.supply)
850 points by liberia on July 25, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 190 comments








Spider makes truly terrifying combos, like Penguin-spider: https://emoji.supply/kitchen/?%F0%9F%90%A7+%F0%9F%95%B7%EF%B...


One of the forms the Thing took while escaping from the Antarctic base.


Won't be able to sleep now.


Tornado Octopus needs to become a movie.


Tangential, but I can hardly be the only one who thinks emoji are stuck in a preteen mindset, with poop being the naughtiest thing expressible. Which serious language has no words for sex, drugs and the tragedies that haunt a human life?


Yes, this is because emojis are created by committee. The Unicode committee to be precise.

If instead emojis could be drawn and inserted in messages and maintained and shared through emoji-libraries by actual users, then we would get an actual naturally evolving language. Much more interesting.


As a classic example of a naturally evolved emoticon language, on the SomethingAwful forums anyone could (and still can) buy an emoticon for $30. Here they all are: https://forums.somethingawful.com/misc.php?action=showsmilie...


Surprised there are so few.

Conditions for buying one for $30 are here:

https://store.somethingawful.com/products/smilie.php


Many many hilarious but inappropriate smilies have died as part of the SomethingAwful revamp. I'm still not clicking on that link at work...

I should confess that I absolutely added :ohdear: :colbert: :v: :argh: :welp: and a fair few others to Slack at work.


:shobon:


That's probably also why we don't have a real gun emoji (or it's rendered as a water pistol in many places). Although guns aren't the nicest invention, they are real and sometimes need to be represented graphically.


The pistol emoji originally looked like a real gun. I think only Windows had a fake looking gun (more of a ray gun than a water pistol) initially.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150625033351/https://unicode.o...

The change to a water pistol started with Apple in 2016, and then other companies followed:

https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/


This was so important for (american) vendors and the (more or less american) committee that they even retroactively changed the standard from "pistol" to "water pistol", in the light of (american) gun violence.


Msn messenger had custom emoticons in 2003. Me and my friends had our own little vernacular of custom emojis. And then microsoft forced everyone onto skype. I keep being amazed how chat hasn’t really improved in decades, only churned.


It is nothing short of a disgrace that we can't even personalize the fonts in whatsapp and similar clients.


Right, I have a hard time believing that a emoji for e.g. "love hotel" would be able to become a emoji nowadays, if it had not been grandfathered in.


It's possible in Slack. Every Slack workspace has its set of own emoji. Some of them are unique, some are almost universal.


party parrot might be the most common across the Slacks I've been into


Is it even a real company if they don't have the party parrot?


On Telegram, one can make one’s own sticker packs by simply uploading a bunch of images. I see a lot of sticker packs on the theme of “my fursona expressing various emotions”, and it is pretty common to see one person have a new idea for an emotion or interaction, which is rapidly copied into other people’s sets when they have the resources available to create or commission a new drawing.

Furries being furries, a lot of these are pretty explicit, and pretty inventive in their explicitness.


Yup! In fact, getting more stickers has been on my list for a while now.

They're used for everything, but they both: * Capture an emotion with more granularity than available emojis * Capture an intended physical action whether sfw or nsfw (owo) * Invoke everything that comes with seeing your character "come to life" as well as assisting you in embodying that character (like a fursuit does)


This is one of the most important features of telegram; without it, the furries wouldn't have become the core userbase during the early years.


... or programs could just display images instead of continuously approximating them (which is why unicode is so bloated and unreasonable about)


This is literally Telegram stickers.


Are these stickers inline? It's not a language if you can't make a sentence.


Are glyphs going from left to right the general rule now? It's not a language otherwise? Pretty sure there are a tonne of pre-Western languages that buck this trend.

People tend to use stickers in amongst regular text in a way that's more "I could write out how I feel/what I'm going to do to you/what you're going to do to me, but instead I will _show_ you".

Take the regular language in between stickers as the grammar/conjunctions as conjunctions are to regular language.


No, they are not. But almost no one uses emoji to compose sentences anyway.


I've noticed that emoji and stickers are absolutely not used in the same way.

People often combine multiple emoji to express certain things that can't be expressed with a single emoji (and too difficult to find/create a sticker for).

Stickers are also much less subtle and more in your face, and therefore not appreciated in the same way.


although i’ve noticed mostly human emojis can be used consciously. the others (tree, objects, etc) are suggested when you type a word but almost never selected to replace words in a sentence. So i don’t know who really uses them.


Not full sentences perhaps but there is a reason the Egyptians used hieroglyphics, and a reason we say a picture is worth a thousand words, so adding some to a text message is very common


I had to make my girlfriend stop doing that because I couldn't decipher what she was saying, it was like +30% extra information I thought was decoration :D

Also, on Tinder bios emoji soup is a thing.


Almost no one, besides some country with the biggest population on earth. ;-)

Btw:

http://www.emojidick.com/


Most messengers have these stickers too


They are glyphes. You don't expect the roman letters to individually represent all concepts.

In the same way, emoji are glyphes and just symbols. We will attach meaning to each symbol, combinations of symbols and context, and will express whatever we want with it.

Just like people say "this is the shit", and "this is shit", and it says litterally the opposite of each other.

E.G: we already use the eggplant to talk about sex.


And disappointingly, all emojis used for sexual inuendo are excluded from the emoji kitchen.

The sexual inuendo combos may probably be some of the most used combos other than the official ones.

The prudishness really is disappointing.


The gun emoji was converted to a squirt gun en masse because #oh-mai-gawd-guns-evil. Yet a pretty decent chunk of our entertainment in shows, movies, and games include (gasp!) guns that resemble over the top usage against other human beings, which is fine because it's fake and people are smart enough to draw the distinctions.

Emojis though? Nah, not possible. Too triggering.

I'll be sure to ask Google and Apple to ban the Peach emoji when I accidentally bite into the pit and need tooth repair.


It's not preteen, it's corporate.



And if I might add: why do we need multiple colors for a heart or multiple hearts? One wasn't enough? Are we going to cover all the drinks know by mankind or one generic "alcoholic" drink was okay? What about flowers? Do we need to cover them all or a generic "flower" pictogram is enough?


Most of those "weird" emojis were grandfathered in from the Japanese standard


Why even multi color human? Nothing more racist than making a point about color anytime you use an emoji.


I exclusively use the purple heart where my online handle has the word Purple in it. Then others use it too. It has aided expression, however marginally.


One Love Rasta

Edit: unfortunately there is no support for emojis on HN. Just imagine a red, a golden, and a green heart there.


It's not a language, you're not supposed to write Shakespeare with emojis.

In technical parlance, human language is Turing-complete, emojis are a limited scripting language to expand our expressive ability.

Nobody is replacing Objective C in macOS with Applescript.


I guess an emoji could be proposed for grief, that is a tricky question in itself. There is a system to go through to add new emojis, it does seem to be very hard work now.

https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html

I was going to say something as intense as grief is too much for emojis, but it would mark the maturing of the glyphs.


There are already a few that touch on grief, but at the end of the day they're still little cartoons, which naturally make them more lighthearted.


What a weird comment - there's multiple drug emojis (syringe, pill, whisky, beer, cocktail, cigarette, sake), tragedies (gravestone, sad faces, sick faces, hospital, ambulance, bandage, casket, skull and crossbones). There's even a middle finger.

The sex ones are peach, eggplant, squirt, bed, volcano, pointing finger hand followed by ok hand, lips, and love hotel.


Oh but there is

>Sex

Aubergine and peach, various "horny" faces

>Drugs

The leaf, the clouded face, the syringe


I'm not a big user of emoji outside of Slack reactions, but I do enjoy that many emoji have become euphemistic of things like sex, drugs and tragedy, e.g. the syringe, the aubergine, the herb leaf etc.


If i understand correctly, this is developed by Google and shipped with their keyboard. They aren't going to start suggesting custom lewd stickers to people.


As a furry, the answer is: telegram stickers. Oh boy is there a sticker for every conceivable sfw and nsfw feeling or action. For example (sfw): https://t.me/nowandlaters/789


Well there is the "love hotel" https://emojipedia.org/love-hotel/

But otherwise I agree.


Emoji inherited that from the Japanese though, from eons past. Something like that would never get in today.


Drugs, <needle>, <pills> Death has four, Sex is a lingo. <Eggplant>, <splash>

(I don't know why I emojis to post)

Creating pictographs of ideas isn't easy.


Like Newspeak in euphemism then, but retaining ambiguity.

Plus a committee that can retroactively change what people have said.


Hindi has words but not commonly used and understood slang for many of these concepts.


Well, there’s always U+0130B8.


Again, trying to eliminate grief by decree. And then we wonder why everyone is depressed. If negative things are so undesirable, why do we represent them in the arts?


Looking at the Emoji list (in general, not from the link above) I can see plenty of emojis displaying concern, sadness, grief and other "negative" emotions.


No jealousy or loneliness


How would you depict that with a pair of eyes and a mouth?


I've always thought U+01F97A FACE WITH PLEADING EYES does an okay job of representing loneliness. If you were to tint U+01F616 CONFOUNDED FACE green, it would be good for jealousy, perhaps.


You are thinking about particular renderings of emojis. The actual definition for U+01F97A FACE WITH PLEADING EYES does not represent loneliness at all and you can't expect that whatever shows up for whoever you're talking to does. But people do keep adding these expectations to emojis that are not encoded in unicode at all so while emojis do give the impression of being a standardized encoding we're really back to vendor-specific codepages.


I meannnnnn if you know you know :)


and yet it's extremely commonplace to represent sex or drugs using existing emojies


I noticed this on gBoard in the last year and have had a ton of fun discovering combos. Mix penguin with a lot of other animals and they wear a tuxedo, like: https://emoji.supply/kitchen/?%F0%9F%90%A7+%F0%9F%A6%89=8kr


Fantastic! That includes penguin + penguin = penguin in tux

https://emoji.supply/kitchen/?%F0%9F%90%A7+%F0%9F%90%A7=8kr


This is incredible, how did you pull this off? I love what you did with the favicon and the page title too!


The combinations are the work of a very talented team. (See https://jenniferdaniel.substack.com/p/introducing-emoji-kitc...)

This viewer is just a small hack to let you look through what already exists : ) Source: https://github.com/alcor/emoji-supply/tree/main/docs/kitchen


Wait so someone at google added this to gBoard unofficially. We need someone to create an apple keyboard with this too.


Are they free?

The following makes it sound like these websites pirate the graphics, so that wouldn't work for a keyboard for the App Store.

>If you have an Android device I recommend downloading Gboard and giving it a whirl. If you don't have a phone running on Android … you could consider getting one lololol or trying it out on a number of unofficial websites (tsk tsk! I don't approve!!! :Face-with-Symbols-on-Mouth-emoji:)

https://jenniferdaniel.substack.com/p/introducing-emoji-kitc...


Ok, I read her article but didn’t follow the links. The emoji kitchen is a google gBoard project, Jennifer works on the gBoard team and is part of the emoji kitchen team. All the other sites are just documenting (in fun ways) the work that the emoji kitchen team is doing. And apparently regular non-google people can submit combined emojis to the emoji kitchen to be added.

I guess it’s a question of who owns the copyright.


How does it work under the covers?


humans drew the pictures.


I searched everywhere - first, I thought AI style transfer, but it looked too clever.


I estimate 4.5 human-years of effort (1.5 years nonstop).


Such a disappointment. Great work though.


Disappointment?! It's amazing!


I looked at the GitHub repo, backed up a bit, and looked around. There's a Wallpaper generator of Emoji's too:

https://emoji.supply/wallpaper/



OMG, that's amazing!


Using the magic wand on any emoji gives the blob version of that emoji https://emoji.supply/kitchen/?%F0%9F%AA%84+%F0%9F%99%82=849


Even the crystal ball turns into a blob: https://emoji.supply/kitchen/?%F0%9F%AA%84+%F0%9F%94%AE=849


That is frankly fantastic... I absolutely adore the blob emoji, so much so that the default emoji that ship with my product are the blobs.


I have a soft spot for them too. In case you're missed it, they've made a return in the Noto Emoji font:

https://blog.emojipedia.org/exploring-googles-new-black-and-...



It should be possible to make a font that combines these with ligatures, right? It’s kinda sad for these to be limited to one app.


It’s definitely possible with ligatures. I’m not looking for a side project at the moment, but if you have free time that disappointment might be just a side project away for you. Edit: respecting/crediting others’ work as appropriate of course!




Those are pretty great!


Most of these "do the obvious", but the thing+itself combinations are a lot more fun.




100 + 100 = 1000 :)


0010001001000001011011000110110000100000011110010110111101110101011100100010000001100010011000010111001101100101001000000110000101110010011001010010000001100010011001010110110001101111011011100110011100100000011101000110111100100000011101010111001100100010


Are these all done by hand? That’s a stupendous amount of custom work.


Are these downloadable somewhere? Would like to add some of them to Slack / other apps.

Edit: Apparently "Emoji Kitchen" is a thing made for a Google keyboard, and this web page is just a frontend to show those.


I downloaded all 26,500 and uploaded to archive.org

https://archive.org/details/emoji-kitchen

They add new ones fairly regularly though!

https://gist.github.com/chapmanjacobd/b45da73a4aa147f0f7bba2...


The resulting "dish" is a png that you can open in a new tab, or just download straight away.


Yeah, was just hoping it was available somewhere. Looks like the project has enumerated all combos here, at least: https://github.com/alcor/emoji-supply/blob/main/docs/kitchen...

And then just fetch them from gstatic.


I use Gboard on my Pixel phone yet I cannot figure out how to use these for the life of me


> To use it: You need an Android phone (sorry Tim Cook!!) 1. Download and install Gboard 2. Open it and set it as the default keyboard on your phone 3. In Gboard's settings check to make sure that Emoji, Stickers & GIFs > Suggestions while typing > Emoji is enabled. This is what ensures that the feature is on :-) 4. Tap two emoji in your keyboard and it suggests a combination of those two emoji

https://jenniferdaniel.substack.com/p/introducing-emoji-kitc...


> Emoji, Stickers & GIFs > Suggestions while typing > Emoji is enabled

It actually requires enabling Emoji, Stickers & GIFs > Suggestions > Emoji Stickers. I assume emoji needs to be enabled as well though.




In this context that equals sign is more powerful than used on other combinations.


There's probably a "free vs open software discussion" interpretation hidden in there somewhere


Ponkey


This is the most amazing thing I've ever seen on the internet.


[flagged]


What is the most amazong thing you have seen on the internet?


It's probably the one that lets you combine THREE emoji.


And you can typically combine any emoji with itself to make an even more version: https://emoji.supply/kitchen/?%F0%9F%98%88+%F0%9F%98%88=rt



> 100 + 100 = 1000?

There’s 10 kinds of people :)


Neat. I made a Telegram bot so that all users get access to these emojis: @emojimixingbot It works only in inline mode


Edit: Never mind, I figured out that inline mode means invoking the bot in any chat by typing @emojimixingbot and then typing two emojis. The mixed emoji then appears as a sticker that can be sent. The bot does not respond to emojis sent to it directly (in the chat with the bot).

Previous question (now irrelevant with my answer above): What’s inline mode, and how exactly would one use this bot?


Yep, i should write a better description for it so that people don't get confused


Neat. A bit tangental but I'm curious, where do you host it? Is there a gold standard for these bots, like everyone writes them in Node and hosts them on DO kind of trend?


Good question. Telegram's infrastructure and dev ecosystem is vaguely weird, much like its overall technical design.

Originally the bot framework was HTTP-based, in the literal sense that new message <-> new HTTP GET, and you'd have a webserver somewhere printing out a response to send back. (You can either use incoming webhooks or (yay latency+efficiency) periodically poll Telegram for messages since a given time).

Telegram later released the internal C++ shim/proxy that relayed MTProto (Telegram's protocol) to HTTP requests, so you can now colocate both processes on the one machine for better latency, although many implementations still use the old webhook method.

Later-later, Telegram also released a C++ library applications can use to abstract out the process of dealing with MTProto.

Nowadays, MTProto is well-documented enough that there are independent client implementations of the protocol (that support signing in as users and bots), which incidentally are slightly more flexible than the C++ library or bot shim (mostly because Telegram has specific needs and wasn't initially aiming for a general-purpose consumable at design time).

The record-scratch part is that the two leading independent clients are incidentally written in PHP. Yeah. I don't mind PHP myself, but it was definitely an "oh. okay" moment lol. Like I said, Telegram's infra is interesting.

So there's exceedingly-likely a Node helper library you can use (although you obviously don't fundamentally need one) to build bots in JS if you want; the next level after that would be coordinating with the C++ or PHP libraries, and the boss level :P would be connecting to MTProto directly (which isn't the end of the world, just... an "overloaded motor" number of moving parts to take on all at once for what's realistically likely a hobby-level curiosity).


On my raspberry since I've calculated that it'll be cheaper on it compared to DO, but at first yes, i used DO, templated docker container and this bot is also written based on started nodejs template bot


Amazing, works great!


It's nice to see these outside of GBoard! Some really creative designs.


This reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirby_64:_The_Crystal_Shards#G... :

> Kirby 64 introduces Power Combos, the option to combine Kirby's copy abilities. Power Combos can be created by inhaling two enemies at once, by throwing one ability at another, or by spitting an enemy at another. The latter two methods create a colored star that can be collected to obtain the Power Combo. There are 28 possible combinations, which are stronger than normal copy abilities or have added effects. For instance, by combining the "Burn" and "Needle" abilities, Kirby can shoot fire arrows. Players can also mix two of the same abilities, which will increase their power.



I love the most popular one, the sad face meme hiding behind the happy mask.

Too bad I can't share because that site has emojis in the URL and HN eats them.


Was just thinking this


I’m disappointed in how many cheese+[other food] combinations just result in a question mark. So many delicious possibilities


Spidercheese!



There’s no chocolate rain. Yet …


I was really hoping I could put pineapple on a pizza, because that's an emotion that's hard to put into words


We need <italian-looking person> + <disappointed face> for that.


Or the leaning tower of Pisa leaning a bit more.

Although Pizza is from the South of Italy isn't it, and Pisa is in the North.

Leaning tower of Pizza, you just know there's a T-shirt of that.


No. Their comment deserves <pinched fingers>.




Reminds me of the Little Alchemy game: https://littlealchemy2.com/


Love it when people create great things for fun! Here I am working the work :(


Lovely, I was able to make a nauseous cat emoji within seconds. Wish I had this during idle vet-appointment chat earlier today...thank you


Very cool how he sets the favicon.ico to the new mixed emoji

https://github.com/alcor/emoji-supply/blob/main/docs/kitchen...


I am kind of amused that the combination of Moon and Robot is so weak that the robot is shrugging its shoulders as if to say, "It is what it is.":

https://emoji.supply/kitchen/?+=rt


Am confused - is this new? I mean, Emoji Kitchen has been around for almost a year now -- but I can't remember if this site had all the combos before? It used to be just two at a time or something?

Wish there was a proper About -- is it that all the combos are now revealed?


The interface is better than I remember - previously there were little vertical menus for picking the emojis, so only a few were visible at a time.

Edit: I'm remembering a different site with a similar concept: https://tikolu.net/emojimix/

And as someone else commented, there's also https://emojikitchen.dev/



This is absolutely brilliant!


Shameless plug: if you like fun emoji-related projects, I built EmojiSwap - the global, P2P emoji exchange. It's a trading market for emojis. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/emojiswap-trade-chat-win/id160...


This is really interesting to me because of a little proof of concept I made. Is there a way I can contact you?


yeah bedelstein12 at gmail


I am a teenager at heart I guess, because + anything and I was cracking up. I needed the laugh, thanks a lot, this is fantastic.


These are amazing! I just hope Google won't pull the plug on this viewer since the images are hosted on gstatic.com.


Yeah, there used to be an official emoji kitchen website long before it was integrated into Gboard, but they go rid of it after the Gboard integration :\

I've been looking for a site like this since, apparently there's a few others like: https://emojikitchen.dev/



The magic wand turning emojis into their old blob-style representations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blob_emoji) is actually an amazing little easter egg.




My brain is broken, all I can think is that this would make a wonderful deep learning dataset. Too small to train on, but big enough to fine-tune on.


These are combinations of two emojis.

Is it just me, but if it matured a lot more and one could have a combination of several emojis we could make Wordle for Emojis?

Emojidle



I prefer using the alphabet for all writing, because emojis are not freely and universally available everywhere :)


These are actually images, no device has emoji fonts to support the combos. On gBoard it pops them in as stickers/images so anyone can see them.


If textual communication is about the lowest common denominator of capabilities, no one would be commenting in hacker news comments :)


While these are typed using emoji, they are sent as images, so they do not rely on fonts.

I would have tested it myself in Gboard, but it relies on the "suggestions" feature which requires internet access, which I will not accept for a keyboard app.


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I was really hoping I could put on a , because that's an emotion that's hard to put into words


Oh neat! I feel like Facebook Messenger already does this sometimes where it combines emojis.


how do I use this with Gboard?


You have to enable "emoji stickers". Then you type two emojis and you'll see a sticker suggestion pop up on the top of the GBoard if it exists.


For me if I type two emojis it starts showing suggestions for other emojis, and the first one is always the kitchen combo if it exists.


Wish the background color or transparency was controllable.



This is interesting, emojis have revolutionzed how we converse and communicate. But, we have taken inspiration from our ancestors who used to paint caves with symbols -- the first form of emojis we found.


Thanks God this is not a part of the Unicode standard.


0/10 duck emoji is missing.

Kidding aside, great work, love this!


The avocado scorpion is by far my favorite. Props.


There are a lot I like, but my favorite for now is this vibrating taco: https://emoji.supply/kitchen/?%F0%9F%92%93+%F0%9F%8C%AE=fl7


[taco intensifies]


https://emoji.supply/kitchen/?%F0%9F%A6%82+%F0%9F%A5%91=7vu It’s got a share feature. Kinda wish they put the emoji in the url haha. Edit: ah hn strips emojis.


Is this in Unicode and part of my core OS yet?


i tried to combine heart/lung/brain and neither combo worked


Neither did trying to put my pen the the trash can. And combining the party emoji with itself didn't create a more excited party emoji. I imagine it's still a work in progress.


There's a Gherkin, and there is cool.

But the is no cool as a cucumber, or Pickle Rick for that matter.


I am pretty surprised that all the options from https://xkcd.com/1813/ are not there.


Incredible.


incredible




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