What does it take to garner 20,000 Twitter followers in the span of about a week? Simple. Just promise to match up photos of ordinary people with photos of adorable dogs who strongly resemble those people. That is the simple but ingenious premise of an account called, in typically ungrammatical LOLspeak, You Are Dog Now. Here’s how it works: Readers submit photos of themselves or their squads, and the account matches these snapshots with pictures of lookalike dogs. The account then tweets these perfect pairings with the same cryptic message every time: “You Are Dog Now.” Whether this is meant to be a compliment or an insult is unclear. Either way, the effect is the same. A dog is no longer merely man’s best friend. A dog can now be man’s best symbolic representation of his true inner self. Some modest examples follow:
Occasionally, the account finds a canine counterpoint for a public figure as well, as seen here.
As of this writing, the origins of You Are Dog Now remain opaque, though Uproxx has discovered a tweet that implies the account’s creator is a college student. This theory makes sense, as this Twitter account is exactly the kind of entertaining but unproductive diversion that helps to provide a necessary distraction from all that bothersome studying.