The Rise And Plateau of an Internet Phenomenon

It seems that Minerva's owl has already flown on this subject. It seems that long after the rest of the internet has already moved on from the furor that was lolcats, the coelacanth of text internet that is e2 must learn about them.

A lolcat, also known as a cat macro, is a picture of a cat with a caption on it. Cats, for various reasons, are the most often used animals, but other animals, people and inanimate objects can also be used. The caption can be just about any phrase, but should (attempt to) be humorous, and often refers to a small corpus of jokes and themes. For example, variations on the famous "Im in ur..." phrase are one of the most basic forms of lolcat. Another is "Invisible X", where a cat (or other animal) is posed as if they are interacting with an invisible object.

The exact genesis of the lolcat is unknown. The idea of a picture of a cat with a caption on it is not something that takes a lot of creative or technical ability to create: cats tend to look puzzled or pompous, and I have a protololcat dating back to the year 2002, practically the eonet. However, lolcats as a phenomenon seem to date back to 2005 or so, and are assumed to have come from 4chan, or another such dodgy message board. I remember seeing them in late 2006, but still having to comb the internet to search for the few dozen canonical examples of lolcatitude. This all changed in a month or so when icanhascheezburger, a site dedicated to the posting of lolcats was founded. Because of, or at least in tandem with this, lolcats seemed to become much more popular on sites like livejournal, and soon lolcat style images were made featuring every conceivable animal, as well as celebrities, philosophers and politicians. Websites like roflbot automated the making of images. For several months, lolspeak infected the internets, until sometime in early 2008, the wholesale enthusiasm for lolcats seemed to have waned, although sites like Icanhascheezburger still seem to be doing a brisk business.

The downfall of the image macro and lolcat craze could be attributed to several things, amongst them:

• The fad seems to be intrinsically self-limiting. The purpose of fads is that they are new and interesting. Once the 10000th picture of a surprised cat had been foisted on the internet, the marginal utility started to go down.
  
• Part of this was the mainstreaming of the internet-something that is the kiss of death to the edgy kids that are the engine of interculture. When the pictures were passed around from person to person, they were more exciting. When they became ubiquitous, they were less exciting. Along with this, the humor of early lolcats was less cute, dealing with some R-Rated humor. Once they became more cutesy, they were less appealing.
  
• The standardization and lack of creativity of the later lolcats. This actually caused me some consternation when I was busy making image macros, and people told me I was not using the correct formula. I used a different font and color in my writing than was used by icanhascheezburger: a white Impact Font with black trim. The automated tools that people used on icanhascheezburger, while making image creation easier, also gave people less control over the size, style and placement of fonts. The early image macros were actually not all in impact font. Along with this was the overuse of lolspeak, a style of grammatical and spelling errors that was at first charming, but also was not enough to carry an otherwise uninteresting picture.

These were some of the reasons why lolcats fell from their position of internet glory. Another is just the fact that internet time moves at a different speed than real time. In internet time, lolcats easily lasted for a decade or so, and actually may be due for a retro craze any year (month) now. Just as soon as Rickrolling stops being cool.

LOLcats: a field guide

Any picture of a cat can be captioned to create a lolcat, but certain lolcats have achieved legendary status and are instantly recognizable to anyone who has spent more than ten or fifteen minutes on the Internet. The following cats have been made into memes of their own, which I list below in roughly descending order of popularity.

• Ceiling cat. A wide-eyed orange cat peeking through a hole in the ceiling, originally captioned with "CEILING CAT IS WATCHING YOU MASTURBATE," Ceiling Cat has achieved (literally) religious significance among dorks on the Internet. Ceiling Cat represents omnipotence and omniscience, his Godlike powers endlessly parodied and reimagined through shoops and fics. There is a church of Ceiling Cat on Facebook, and he is the central character in the mostly unfunny lolcat Bible. The existence of Basement Cat, an evil counterpart to Ceiling Cat, has been proposed; the rare times Basement Cat is captured in photographs, usually nothing can be seen but a pair of glowing eyes.


• Longcat. The locus classicus is a photo of a beautiful white cat named Nobiiru who is being suspended by her armpits so that her long, long body hangs below. The original caption read simply "LONGCAT IS LONG" (or "looooong" or "looooooooooong"), leading to a variety of Internet jokes of the structure "adjective noun is adjective" ("hot barista is hot," "boring meeting is boring," and so on). Longcat herself has been shooped into dozens of variations, towering over tall buildings, emerging from clouds, and looming above cityscapes. She has also been pitted against Tacgnol, her black but equally long adversary, in cosmic battle. (It probably shouldn't come as a surprise that denizens of the Internet like dualistic religions.)


• Monorail cat. It's hard to explain why this one is so funny. Basically it is a fluffy orange cat balanced along the top of a mirror, her legs tucked underneath her. The scene looks uncannily like a transit car on its rail. The cat was originally posted into a blog on catmas.com in late 2006, and achieved notoriety through I Can Has Cheezburger in January of 2007.


• Invisible series. These are not invisible cats; rather, they are cats who are (theoretically) doing things with invisible objects. The original caption was INVISIBLE BIKE, where a leaping cat was caught by the camera in such a way as to seem like it was riding, well, an invisible bike. It became something of a game to catch cats in awkward poses and then to imagine what's missing from the picture: a cat with paws outstretched might be playing an invisible piano, three cats in midair might be on an invisible trampoline, a yawning cat measuring a space of a few inches in front of its face might be eating invisible corn on the cob, and so on. Intertextuality is rampant in the invisible series, as cats are imagined to do invisible things with objects that other lolcats are famous for.


• Keyboard cat. The lolcat is generally a static medium: it is rare to encounter lolcat video. But "Play him off, Keyboard Cat" has become a giant meme both within and beyond the Internet, and stills from the original video are posted onto bulletin boards and discussion threads by nerds everywhere. The original footage from 1984 shows an orange tabby named Fatso wearing a blue shirt and playing a bloopy tune on an electronic keyboard. Today, that video is posted in response to anything that's not funny or fail in some other way. In a rare moment of insight, Wikipedia notes that Keyboard Cat has become the vaudeville hook of the twentieth century; Keyboard Cat pulls bad acts off the stage just as the cane did in earlier generations.


• Holdup Cat. A tiny orange kitten holds its paws up in a classic surrender pose; a gun is pointed at the animal, held in the hand of someone offscreen. This is one of the very oldest lolcats, dating from the early 2000s, though perhaps it's not a lolcat strictly speaking since the photo did not originally come with a caption.


• It's dangerous to go alone! Take this. A famous line from The Legend of Zelda finds new life in this caption, which is attached, in classic 8-bit Nintendo font, to a photo of a tiny, mewling, cream-coloured kitten held in cupped hands. Though the line in its original video-game setting was in reference to a magic sword, the kitten seems like a much better item to protect any traveller on life's journeys.


• Sup. A dignified-looking grey tabby leans on the back of a couch, striking a pose that resembles a human male leaning toward a pretty woman at a bar. The caption is simply sup, forgoing the lolcat penchant for capslock in favour of an aggressively casual lowercase. A couple of other animals have managed to strike similar poses; GIS finds a sup collie on a picnic table and a black sup cat in a cardboard box.


• Cast Magic Missile. A svelte brown cat is playing with something that reflects of the light of the camera flash so intensely that it looks like a bolt of energy between the cat's paws. The caption evokes memories of D&D, itself a rather nerdy in-joke. Related to Magic Missile Cat is the Imma chargin mah lazers meme, which recycles an earlier /b/ joke. Originally "Imma chargin mah lazers" was a caption on a shooped picture of some Dragonball Z character in blackface, but has since been applied to cats with flashbulb-lit glowing eyes.


• I made you a cookie, but I eated it. A very sad-looking orange cat is standing on its hind legs, its front paws dangling in front of it, otterlike. The garbled grammar of this sentence has been applied to countless disappointing scenes, sometimes with another noun substituted for "cookie," or another irregular verb improperly conjugated.