Lolcat
Lolcat is an Internet phenomenon in the form of humorous images. Shown are photos of cats, where appropriate, orthographically, inter -driven terms and grammatically incorrect words are placed in the mouth. The authors of the Lolcats usually remain anonymous and distribute their work on the Internet. The cat is the so-called Lolspeak [note 1] placed in the mouth, pouring the deviations from standard English in their own conventions. In the meantime, this has solidified to the extent that he leads a life of its own without cat pictures. The book How to Take Over Teh Wurld: A LOLCat Guide 2 Winning. held in the winter of 2008/2009 a total of 13 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Since 2007, a translation of the Bible runs in Lolspeak, in the summer of 2009, a Lolcat musical was performed.
History
The name comes from Lolcat LOL ( stands for " laughter ") and " cat" (English for cat). Lolcats first appeared in 2006 on the forum 4chan. In the forum, the so-called developed Caturday - the posts of cats pictures found mainly Saturdays (Cat Saturday ), the channel user complained about active members, Posts were the Lolcats on other days. From the forum, the trend spread further over the Internet and became the e- mail phenomenon. In a short time, a trend which was joined by tens of thousands of Internet users developed.
Such cats email also reached Erik Nagakawa from Hawaii with an e- mail to his girlfriend and later blog co-founder Kari Unebasami. Nagakawa was impressed enough to give the topic a blog. On 11 January 2007 Nagakawa founded the blog Icanhascheezburger.com. This blog started with the image of a cat who asked precisely that. In the same year Ben Huh took over the site for 2.25 million dollars and began to make a commercial business out of it. Unlike most sites Icanhascheezburger wrote from the beginning the black. Huh has founded or bought, which all belong to Pet Holdings various other related web sites. The more successful of these are for example Probablybadnews and Failblog, which was instrumental in the spread of the " fail" Internet phenomenon. By mid-2009 he moved on to more than 10 million unique visitors a month, until May 2010, the number is increased to 16 million. The first two years, the number of visitors tripled each. Huh themselves are by the English press interviews world.
In the summer of 2009, about 10,000 images were submitted daily at Icanhascheezburger that reviewed by the 20 employees and were posted to the site. By 2010, the number rose to 40 employees serving 18,000 daily submissions for 53 different pages. According Huh is one of the main reasons for success is that it looks as if everything is done by enthusiastic amateurs - as the employee erfänden also not own any images or edit submissions editorial, but studied only in their opinion of fittest. On copyright, the operator being careful in selecting the images are not, but remove images when someone complains about it. Here, according to operator data are about 1 percent of the users time users, of which also the biggest part of the content comes while 99 percent only occasionally stop by on the site. Huh itself estimates that the Lolcats network generates about 10 percent of the entire WordPress traffic.
Molding
Lolcats equip images of - most cute - animals with captions from. They delimit the various levels of meaning that can accommodate a uncommented image and assign the viewer into a particular interpretation direction. Often, the copywriter who claim to surprise the viewer and give the image a meaning that is not obvious at first glance at the Lolcats.
Lolcats are one of the better known forms of image macros, where Internet users combine an image with text in order to achieve a humorous effect. Image macros are much older than the Internet Lolcats. They developed first in Internet forums, the term itself probably goes back to the Something Awful - forum. However, the main conventions for the design of these macros developed in 4chan. Thus, usually cats are shown, also variants occur with other animals, such as the Lolrus, an elephant named Minazo, the running gag as a longing for a blue bucket is assumed.
The Lolcats have it now both about certain grammatical rules for correct and incorrect Lolspeak than using a fixed pool of motives and constellations: The cats are often anthropomorphized, the text itself is strongly influenced by the language conventions that are at the youthful users of SMS and instant messengers, and formed in Leetspeak have. References to computer games, the Internet culture, and science fiction are common.
The makers of the Lolcats use it similar to older forms of text-image combination ( silent films, for example) both dialogic and explanatory text. During the dialogic text is placed directly in the cat 's mouth, the pattern of an intentionally incorrect grammar follows and draws on scene language, the explanatory text of a standard English served. In the dialog text the deviation from standard English can be weighted. On images with different old cats for example, is usually the older cats a standardized English placed in the mouth, while cats boy "talk" to an often strongly developed LOLspeak.
The typeface is also largely standardized. The forum 4chan as well as in later pictures the copywriters use almost exclusively white Impact font with thin black borders.
Recurring themes are:
- Invisible objects: facial expressions and gestures of the cat be interpreted as an interaction with an imaginary object. For example, ( "invisible sandwich" ) is a cat apart arms stretched out and his mouth torn open an "invisible sandwich" placed in the mouth.
- Collection: A cat to linger at a particular place or presents itself in a certain way so that you can be placed under a seizure, usurpation or intrusion. So lets say a cat in the refrigerator: " im in ur fridge / eatin ur f00dz " ("I 'm in your fridge / face your food ").
- Please: A true three -eyed cat makes a request. This includes the image "i can has cheezburger? " (Such as: "I can Cheezburger have [ sic] ?"), Which was the first undisputed Lolcat picture.
- Recourse to English translations of Japanese texts in Engrish and their typical errors. A well known example here is Oh Hai! instead of Hi.
- Lolspeak [note 1] - which spread only with the establishment of Icanhascheezburger.