40,000 Emoji

Posted ,

I added ~40,000 emoji to my work Slack instance. Don't @here me.

How

  • Google's Emoji Kitchen was shared with me, one fateful afternoon.
  • I used a slightly modified version of this PowerShell script to grab all of the emoji. The script wasn't working as is, I had to fix a few broken variables. I also had to use an older version of the JSON emoji list, as apparently emoji kitchen has done a rewrite and that file no longer exists. I found the newest version of that file I could and went with that. It cost me about 10,000 emoji... but it's all good, it's not like we're in short supply here.
  • I grabbed a second little PowerShell script to move the images out of subfolders into a main single folder. I don't know jack about PowerShell and mostly do bash scripting, but this has made me mildly interested and we'll see what the future holds.
  • I'm not an admin, so no API access to bulk upload. I used a Bulk Emoji Uploader plugin for Chrome.
    • At first I tried to dump everything into the uploader at once via drag and drop. Chrome was, predictably, extremely unhappy with this choice and immediately crashed without so much as a 😉.
    • Then I chunked my drag and drop uploads into batches of about 3,000 emoji to ensure drag and drop wouldn't crash. I attempted to use a single Chrome window without closing it... for the lols. It predictably crashed once I'd gotten through about ten batches of 3,000 emoji, costing me some time and effort. You lols some, you lose some.
    • Then I just opened ten tabs at once and started dumping in batches of 3,000. Success. It started around 2AM on a Wednesday, and finished around 6PM on a Saturday.

What's Next

Emoji can be intensified, set on fire, glitchified, slid, zoomed, spun, and many other effects -- ala Make Emoji. We are going to see what we can do with this information.

40K emoji x 28 effects = 1,120,000 potential emoji.

No limit, you can add as many emojis as you like! 🐳🌳🐻🐩🕺 -- Slack on Twitter

Are you sure, Slack? Are you really, reallyyy sure? 👀💖

Why

Why not? I'm a bored and easily amused nerd. They're cute and it made me laugh.

The idea that someone could wander into our Slack instance's emoji and essentially "amaze.jpg" at seeing over 40,000 emoji loaded in... top tier lollery, even if I do not witness this directly.

Amazement

It also put me in a decisive lead for a long-standing war between myself and a coworker: we've been going back and forth on who has the most emoji uploaded to our Slack instance for about two years now. 100% worthwhile. You know who you are and what you did and it's legitimately absolutely disgusting(ly adorable). I can't wait to see what comes next, most fun game I've played in ages. 💖

As aforementioned, Slack has also most pridefully boasted that there's no limit to the number of emoji allowed in a given instance... oh, we shall see.