About

LUL is a Twitch emote featuring a picture of video game reviewer John Bain, better known by his online handle TotalBiscuit. The emote is typically used to indicate laughter in a similar vein to typing abbreviation LOL.

Origin

On June 23rd, 2013, Flickr^[7] user itsjustatank posted a photograh of video game reviewer John "TotalBiscuit" Bain laughing at the Major League Gaming Anaheim 2013 (shown below). In 2014, Bain began using the picture as an emote for subscribers of his Twitch channel with the keyword "cynicalLaugh."

Spread

In July 2014, Bain received a DMCA takedown by the photographer for unauthorized use of the picture, due to Bain providing it as a subscription perk.

On July 9th, Redditor Ed_Cock submitted a post to /r/CynicalBrit^[3] featuring "visually similar images" from Google Image search to replace the emote (shown below).

In 2016, the emote was added to the BetterTTV Twitch extension.^[2] On September 1st, 2017, the emote was officially implemented as a global Twitch.tv emote, making it visible to anyone using the service (shown below, left). That day, Bain tweeted that the emote was altered from the original to avoid copyright issues (shown below, right).^[4]

LULW

LULW is a variation of the LUL emote featuring a zoomed-in and cropped version of John Bain's face tilted to be vertically upright. On November 2nd, 2016, the emote was uploaded by user Ian678 to the Twitch emote extension FrankerFaceZ (shown below).^[5]

On April 27th, 2017, YouTuber Sequensy uploaded a video titled "LULW F--k LULW God," featuring a tiled background of the emote (shown below). On July 27th, 2018, Redditor jozehq submitted a post asking "Is there a difference in LULW, OMEGALUL and LUL?" to /r/Twitch,^[6] to which Redditor MovieLoverRob responded that it was "a filler of sorts."

OMEGALUL

OMEGALUL is an expanded version of LUL from the Twitch extension FrankerFaceZ (shown below). It is seen as indicating greater amusement than LUL and LULW. OMEGALUL is commonly used by Twitch chat to replace the letter "O" in words that contain the letter, such as "W OMEGALUL W" for the word "wow." The emote was uploaded to FrankerFaceZ on September 10th, 2016 by user DourGent.^[8]

Search Interest

External References