Caturday 28 July 2007

Pic of the day: Caturday! (From the anime Tonagura, except for the text of course.

Lolcats and cat macros

Some niblets of my entries may not make quite sense unless you are familiar with one of the most outrageous but still worksafe fads on the Internet: Lolcats, or cat macros.

I am not sure when or how the lolcats crept into my world. It is not long ago, a year at most, I'd say. The word "lolcats" I first remember from a Sims 2 legacy by another frequent poster to the LiveJournal community for that game. She had two cats in her game (so this must be after the release of Pets less than a year ago) and she referred to them as "the lolcats". She also made a couple pictures with those cats and a short funny text, and called it "cat macros". I think this was the first time I noticed those words, but I may have seen actual pictures of cats with funny text before.

Wikipedia can tell you better than I (and at great length) the history and properties of lolcats. I just wanted to mention it since it is Caturday, and since I know I have made a couple subtle references recently.

A fascinating part of this is the lolcat grammar. It is simple and childlike, just not quite. It verbs nouns and nouns verbs. It also uses some expressions from IRC-speak and text messaging, like "ur" instead of "your". It often uses z instead of s, at least at the end of words. It is interesting how this pseudolanguage seems to be coming together gradually as it is more used. You can definitely get it wrong already, and you can usually guess when people intentionally lolcat their writing.

Well, it beat "fast forward", eh?