I have no idea how it happened, but somehow I found myself browsing through the website: icanhascheezburger.com. It's a site where they take pictures of cats (and other animals) and write up captions for the picture. This is apparently supposed to be either:
a) Funny.
b) Cute.
I found it neither. But for some strange reason, I couldn't stop looking at more pictures.
It didn't take long to notice that things were spelled wrong on purpose and with awkward phrasing. Here's a good example:
And another:
The first thing I thought to myself was, "Mai Gawd! They's awl be race-eests!"
It was at that point that I decided I was going to do a post to uncover how these cats were being made out to sound like Jamaican-Creole gangsters. I was going to post a bunch of pictures as examples and hopefully get the story picked up by a major newspaper and expose these people as the bigots they were.
Then I actually did a little researching on these cats and discovered once again that I am a moron.
LOLCats is actually a huge internet phenomenon that has been going on for quite awhile. Unbeknownst to me. I went to my old friend wikipedia, and sure enough there is an LOLcats wiki-page.
Most of the phrasing for these cats come from different types of internet slang. A few examples you might recognize are:
"I'm in ur base killin' ur doodz."
"All your base are belong to us."
Just find a picture of a cat and insert your own awkward phrasing. Here's one I just made up for fun. If I'm breaking a copyright law, please let me know.
Okay, so it's harder than it looks.
Anyways, it's amazing that this has caught on and become so viral. Seriously, if you spend a little time looking it up, you'll see that this stuff is everywhere. Even more astounding is that this type of language (the Jamaican-Creole gangster style) is actually being developed and debated upon. Some are trying to build it into a feasible programming language. My head is about to explode, so I'd better just stop there.
Here are some interesting links on the subject:
LolCode and Feline Dialectology: This is a linguistic buff's point of view.
LOLCode: These are the guys who are currently working on a programming language. It's either genius or insanity. I can't decide which.
lolcats2.com: This just has a ton of LOLCats.
6 comments:
Dangit, now that I look at it, I think that cat's head is in a lime. I suck.
Oh yeah - LOLCats! My coworker and I have been cracking up at this forever. In fact, we have a little practical joke we play where if one of us leaves our desk w/o locking our computers, we run over and change their desktop wallpaper to this image: http://www.brianmcculloh.com/img/unlockDESKTOP.jpg
I think we made that off one that said "I'm in ur cmputer... stealin ur mgahurtz!" or something along those lines.
My favorite one so far is based on WoW, and it says "I'm in ur account... sharding ur purplz!" with a cat sitting in front of a computer, kind of like the one in that link i posted. (If you don't know anything about WoW, then you probably won't get it, but if you do it's freaking hilarious)
But to understand any of this phenomenon, you MUST watch the one that started it all: "All your base are belong to us." To watch the movie (which I highly recommend), go here and click WATCH THIS MOVIE.
Sweet, thanks Brian! Yeah, the first time I'd ever heard of "all your base are belong to us" was when I wrote this post about the Colts. Dude made a cool picture about it.
Awesome, I guess that was right before I started reading LITS. Can you believe when you wrote that the Colt's hadn't won the world championship yet? Isn't that weird to think about - that there was a time when we were sittin' around doing whatever in a world where the Colt's hadn't won it yet?
Thanks for introducing me to this Art. lolcats are awesome. I now subscribe to that 'i wants a have can I get cheezberger?' site you mentioned.
I need to lolcatzinize my cat one of these days...
Man, I'm just glad I'm not the last person on the planet to have heard of these things. Dude, if you have lolcatzinize your cat, please let me know.
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