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Behold the Twitter lovechild of President Obama and Sonic the Hedgehog

Behold the Twitter lovechild of President Obama and Sonic the Hedgehog

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What if President Obama and Sonic the Hedgehog mind-melded to create one public statement? Perhaps it would sound something like this:

This message is the end result of a site called Tweet Mashup. It works by combining various tweets from two accounts of your choosing into one, mostly conversational tweets. If you’re shy of a few ideas, Tweet Mashup is happy to get you started with popular mashups of accounts like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Emo Kylo Ren, Selena Gomez and Elizabeth Windsor, or Lin-Manuel Miranda and Pizza Cat.

Tweet Mashup is the brainchild of Jonathan Adler, a data scientist based in Seattle. His name might sound familiar to reality TV show fans — Adler won the third and final season of King of the Nerds, in which a proclaimed geeks competed for a cash prize. He now spends most of his days working on mathematical analysis, but Twitter bots are a favored side-project.

“This is the first one of my weird creations that took off,” Adler tells The Verge. “It’s scary! I just made this in my free time on a little server, and suddenly it’s getting overwhelmed with traffic. It feels like a lot of responsibility. But also it’s great to see how much fun people are having with it.”

Adler says the site has already wracked up more than 100K views and over 50K unique Twitter handles. Throughout the day, it’s struggled to load under the surge of interest.

“I never designed it to work with this much traffic because I didn’t think it was possible people would like it so much, so now I am spending my free time trying to optimize it,” Adler says. “Hopefully in the next day or two I can get it more stable before traffic dies out.”

Finishing Tweet Mashup has been a spare-time project for the last month or two for Adler. Jess Eddy helped him with the design, while the initial idea was the product of funny website ideas he bounced around with his wife.

“People have been really clever with their mashups in ways I never expected,” he says. “The best ones are when you mash up a serious person and a weird person. Such as WeRateDogs and RealDonaldTrump.”

If you’d like to imagine Donald Trump having anything to say that doesn’t make your jaw hit the floor, perhaps this is a place to start. Personally, I’m a big fan of mashing my own tweets up with pals. Combine one of my former colleagues with me, for example, and you have the ultimate existential sad girl. Wonderful.