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Hot Takes for Tuesday May 2, 2017
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1. We officially have too many emojis.
Emojis are a great way to communicate with someone when you want to convey as little information as possible. For instance, if I wanted to tell my roommate that I’m going to Taco Bell to enjoy a delicious Crunchy Taco Supreme for the conveniently affordable price of just $1.69, I could either send him a text that says “I’m going to Taco Bell,” or I could skip all that effort and send him the taco emoji…
Hopefully, he can translate what this clip art means after living together for a few years.
When emojis first came out, they were simple, to the point, and only used when you were trying to flirt with someone but had already ended a text with “haha” or “lol” too many times. Now, emojis are everywhere. You can order a Domino’s by texting the pizza emoji to a phone number.
This is a dangerous game you’re playing, Domino’s.
Emojis are also becoming politicized for some reason. People have been worked up about models not representing the average human body type for longer than I can remember, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that the handball community was very upset when the current Simpsons-colored handball player emoji didn’t truly represent their ethnic background.
Why is there even one handball player emoji?
And every few months, Apple releases a new batch of emojis and deletes/changes old ones that made people feel uncomfortable. For instance, the former gun emoji – – has been changed to this neon green water gun – . So now when you threaten someone over text message, they can feel safe that your most vicious intentions end with them being a little damp.
I’m pretty worked up about this. Maybe because I now have to scroll a full 6 times to get to the fire emojis, which is part of my actual job here.
Take Temperature:
5/10 – Behold the OG flame!
2. Amish people were right all along.
I know slightly more about Amish culture than I do about the French Revolution, and I know absolutely nothing about French Revolution. Like, I don’t even know what century it was in. But my family actually bought our dog from Amish dog breeders, so I picked up a few observations.
For example, I noticed that they were bigtime hat enthusiasts. Like, seriously, every single person in the community was wearing a hat the entire time I was there.
That’s just about the upper limit of my knowledge, so take the rest of this hot take with a grain of salt.
As far as I can tell, the Amish people basically woke up one day in 1808 and said, “Wow, life can’t get much better than this. Let’s literally never adopt a new innovation ever again.” And then they stuck to their word and have been churning butter ever since.
But, as crazy as the Amish lifestyle seems to the rest of us, weren’t they kind of right all along? If everyone in the world had gone all Breaking Amish the Pacific Ocean wouldn’t be filled with trash, the ozone wouldn’t resemble a piece of Swiss cheese, and there would probably be no fracking (I actually have no idea what fracking is, but I know people are real upset about it).
So, next time your family goes to Amish country to get a new English Bulldog, remember that if we all took a page out of their book our lives might be super duper boring, but the ice caps would still be cold as shit.
Take Temperature:
7/10 — Might want to consider wearing sunscreen.
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