On WordPress.com, the free blogging platform I just switched away from for the TV, eh? site, the top blog listed on the dashboard stats always used to be Scobleizer, former Microsoft “technical evangelist” Robert Scoble’s blog. Then I started noticing this site called I Can Has Cheezburger? hitting the top spot most often. How could I resist checking out a site with that title?
Turns out, checking it out didn’t really solve the mystery. The subtitle of the site is “lolcats tagged for your convenience (also for ur lol*s)”.
Um … huh? What’s a lolcat? Wikipedia tells me it’s an image macro used on forums. Um … huh? My forum experience is pretty limited, and I’d never seen anything like these out in the wild, but I Can Has Cheezburger has pages and pages of cat pictures – and dog pictures and walrus pictures – with mangled English captions. And it gets more hits every day than one of the most popular tech geek blogs out there. It gets over a quarter million hits a day. Crazy.
Slate has a hilarious slide show essay on the lolcat phenomenon, Cat Power: You Cannot Resist Lolcats. It taught me even more:
A reader pointed Dash to a San Francisco Chronicle article about MeowChat, where people maintain cat identities online and speak in a cat language that slightly overlaps with lolcat speak. (Genius detail: Some cat lovers disdain MeowChat because it implies that cats are not intelligent, evolved creatures.)
I’m sure this is exactly why those Clean Slate Internet guys want to make sure the Internet can handle future demands on it. Gotta make room for the lolcats.
I guess it’s safe to assume that you haven’t stumbled upon any “lolgays” sites yet then.
It’s nice to know that there people out there with even less of a life than I have. I find that comforting.
No, but that Slate slide-show article mentions them briefly … my mind boggles.
That’s…um…special? Strange? Bizarre?
Yeah … special. That’s it 🙂
I speak as a total cat lover, and some of the lolcats are adorable, but I just don’t get even that part of it as a phenomenon. And the MeowChat creeps me out a little.
Mildly amusing but, yeah…what’s the point?
KJC
I really hate these cats now. I once spent about 15 minutes on roflcat.com and while some are amusing (like MONORAIL CAT and INVISIBLE SANDWICH), I got sick of the “cute” bad grammar used, especially with the “Im in ur [something] [doing something]”.
The fortunate thing is that like most fads on the internet, this will eventually go away.
Someone brought up that site recently … I want to say it was Denis and Callaghan but I wouldn’t swear on a stack of bibles. I have my own funny animals live and in person, no need for internet ones.
I saw Monorail Cat on Alex’s site but didn’t know where it came from. I’ve never heard of Invisible Sandwich cat but of course now I have to check it out …
The ultimate single page of _all_ the cats. You need broadand for this page, and it will still take a while.
http://www.acc.umu.se/~zqad/cats/index.html
Oh my god, it’s every cat picture ever taken!