Have a costume party with a wild kingdom of new choices
Google recognizes just how much fun people are having with Emoji Kitchen, Gboard’s tool for combining two different emoji into an often-unexpected (but alwasy amusing) mashup. The mix-and-match sticker pack contains a veritable zoo full of fun, and with its latest expansion introduces the ability to make your own “tiger king.”
We’re not talking about a caricature of the infamous “Joe Exotic” at the center of Netflix’s hit true-crime docuseries, but while the show remains a pop-culture staple, Emoji Kitchen’s tigers are of the adorable cartoon variety. Users can add crowns to the images — or a cowboy hat, or sunglasses. This tiger won’t bite or attempt to put a hit out on you.
Emoji Kitchen is so popular because it turns using emoji as an expressive shorthand into a creative act all its own, giving users plenty of choices to mix and match in surprising and colorful ways. Gboard suggests it automatically whenever you add an emoji, which might be considered an improvement over hunting for stickers.
It gets harder to add new emoji characters as the list grows. 9to5Google notes that new emoji need to work with characters already loaded into the app and concludes that future additions to Emoji Kitchen will come in “smaller batches.”
There is a concrete reason for all this stripey business, of course, and it has nothing to do with lurid true crime — the new Lunar Year is also the Year of the Tiger, and it begins February 1, 2022.
Find out just how creative you can get with the latest update to Gboard — you can grab it from the Google Play Store below.
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