Rejected Candy Hearts
Part of a series on Valentine's Day. [View Related Entries]
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About
Rejected Candy Hearts are a series of images parodying Sweethearts, a type of small heart-shaped candies sold around Valentine's Day, with custom generated messages that are unromantic, off-putting or suggestive in nature. As it is with the actual candies, Rejected Candy Hearts can be seen as a seasonal meme on Twitter that peaks around Valentine’s Day each year.[3][4]
Origin
On February 13th, 2009, Buzzfeed[8] reported on the ACME Heart Maker[9], a website that allows visitors to create customized candy hearts with messages that are two lines long with no more than four characters per line.
Spread
On February 13th, 2011, rejected candy hearts went viral on Twitter, spawning a large collection of Sweethearts parodies with custom-generated messages under the hashtags #rejectedcandyhearts and #candyheartrejects. In the following 24 hours, several internet humor sites and blogs ran compilation posts highlighting the best of #rejectedcandyhearts, including Funny or Die[1] and The Huffington Post.[2] Around the same time in February 2014, a web-based app called Cryptogram[5] was launched to allow easy creation of Sweethearts parodies, which was subsequently picked up by Geekosystem[6] and Geek Sugar[7] on February 13th.
Bot-Generated Hearts
On February 9th, 2018, Research scientist Janelle Shane published an article entitled "Candy Heart messages written by a neural network" on Tumblr. [10] The post outlines her process for creating an A.I. that generates Candy Heart messages (examples below). She writes: "I collected all the genuine heart messages I could find, and then gave them to a learning algorithm called a neural network. Given a set of data, a neural network will learn the patterns that let it imitate the original data – although its imitation is sometimes imperfect." The post received more than 18,000 notes in five days.
Several media outlets published stories on the Candy Hearts, including CNET,[11] Gizmodo,[12] The Verge,[13] The New York Post[14] and more.
On February 10th, Twitter[15] published a Moments page on the hearts.
Notable Examples
Search Interest
External References
[1] Funny or Die – 13 Rejected Candy Hearts
[2] The Huffington Post – Candy Heart Rejects On Twitter: The Funniest Tweets
[3] Cafe Mom – 10 Hilarious 'Candy Heart Reject' Tweets Will Make You LOL
[4] Salon – Rejected candy heart sayings
[6] Geekosystem- This Website Lets You Make Your Own Candy Hearts, So We Made Some Nerdy Ones for You
[7] Geek Sugar- Make Your Own Rejected Candy Hearts
[8] Buzzfeed- Uncomfortable Hearts
[9] Acme- Heart Maker
[10] Tumblr – Candy Heart messages written by a neural network
[11] CNET – AI valentine candy heart ideas: 'Stank love' and 'I honker'
[12] Gizmodo – AI-Generated Candy Heart Messages Let Your 'Sweat Poo' Know It's 'Time 2 Wank'
[13] The Verge – I never understood romance until an AI-generated love heart told me: LOVE 2000 HOGS YEA
[14] The New York Post – AI generates hilariously weird candy heart messages
[15] Twitter – These AI-generated candy heart messages are super weird
Related Entries 11 total
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Top Comments
Jakalope Gregg
Feb 12, 2014 at 02:49PM EST
Gravity Man
Feb 12, 2014 at 03:32PM EST