LOLcats

Now, I wouldn't consider myself a n00b by any stretch of the imagination. I have an avatar in Second Lie, although I forgot my password about a year ago and have yet to correct the matter. I'm on Flickr, Mog, Last FM, Skype, Veoh, Digg, Odeo, De.li.cious, all that newfangled web hipster 2.0 hoo-haa. But one avenue (well many, but this one for now) of the internet that I remain completely dumbfounded by is the explosion of LOLcats. I could try and put the craze into my own words, but I think I'd better let the experts speak on this one:


From Wikipedia

Lolcats, a compound of lol and cat,[1][2] are photos of cats with humorous captions. They are a type of image macro, and are thus also referred to as cat macros. Lolcats are created for the purpose of sharing them with others on imageboards and other internet forums, especially on Saturdays ("Caturdays").[3]

Lolcat images usually consist of a photo of a cat with a caption characteristically formatted in a sans serif font such as Impact or Arial Black.[4] The image is, on occasion, photoshopped for effect. The caption generally acts as a speech balloon encompassing a comment from the cat, or is a simple description of the depicted scene. The caption is intentionally written with deviations from standard English spelling and syntax[4] featuring "strangely-conjugated verbs, but [a tendency] to converge to a new set of rules in spelling and grammar."[5] These altered rules of English have been referred to as a type of pidgin[4] or baby talk.[6] The text is frequently in the form of a snowclone parodying the grammar-poor patois stereotypically attributed to internet slang.

Lolcats are similar to other animal-based image macros, such as the O RLY? owl and captioned pictures of walruses (lolruses [7]), elephant seals, dogs, hamsters, birds, and rabbits.[8] The format is popular enough to have spread to subjects as diverse as United States Presidents and tapirs.

So it turns out that I fully understood the concept all along, I just never fucking got it. I still don't think it's funny. But that certainly cleared up a lot. Thanks Internet, I'm glad we had this talk. Now I feel comfortable making a submission of my own to the fog of LOLcat hysteria:



Meez so smartz now!