It starts with the silliest of side projects: what would a copy-pastable map entirely made of emojis be like? Then it progressively turns out to be not that silly after all - and raises a lot of interesting questions. Some technical: how do you create a Leaflet plugin? Why does it make sense to use vector tiles? How do we work with landcover and landuse in OSM? Some others about cartography: Could this be a way to make bivariate choropleths bearable? How does it relate to other thematic mapping techniques such as Chernoff faces? And some seemingly impenetrable mysteries: what is the Zero-Width Joiner? What is the Unicode Consortium Emoji Subcomittee and what does it wants?