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The next time someone tells you the Internet is nothing but a series of tubes filled with kittens and teenage bullies, remind them that they are forgetting something: Tacos. Because the online world that brought us Nyan Cat and It’s Peanut Butter Jelly Time is now kind of weirdly obsessed with folded-up Mexican street snacks.
Let’s back up. First, when the Internet was message boards, people would type <grin> so you would know when they were kidding. That was annoying. So they started inventing emoticons, which started as simple smileys like this guy :)
and reached their apex with this shrugging guy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Then, the Japanese started creating teeny keyboards full of teeny pictures that mobile phone users could include in their teeny texts. And lo, the people were totally into them, especially the poop one.
But then people started getting bent out of shape because they wanted a taco. Why a taco? That’s one of those eternal questions. Maybe it’s because tacos are the ultimate snack, and the original food-truck item. Maybe it’s because tacos remind people of … uh … ladies, and everybody loves ladies. Maybe it’s all a big plot from our corporate overlords at Taco Bell.
I, for one, am happy to serve our new overlords and am quite fond of meat that is only partially meat. Welcome, overlords!
All this is to say that the debut of the Apple Watch kicked off a fresh round of “we want our eight-bit-style tacos.” For realsies: There are not one but two Change.org petitions dedicated to demanding a taco emoji. And #TacoEmoji is a repeatedly trending hashtag on Twitter.
(Seriously, people, it’s a $350 watch, and you’re worried about something as frivolous as a taco when you could be worrying about whether your steak is done.)
Anyway, at long last justWink, a subsidiary of American Greetings, has come to the rescue. The company has been out in full force in New York this weekend, paying out-of-work actors to dress up as tacos and hiring a truck to hand out free fare to anyone who downloads their app, with its taco emoji, to her Apple Watch.
Or her phone. It could be her phone.
Plus the app also offers other emoji options, including poop with flies coming out of it.
Anyway, taco.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.