HAHAHAHAHAHA ONLY EIGHT MORE HOURS AND I AM FREE FREE FREE FREEEEEEEEEEE
...ahem.
well, not exactly 'free', since i start my new job tomorrow morning. but free enough, for the moment.
posted by anne @ 2:03 PM
aleatory contract
my own personal Waterloo
Sunday, May 06, 2007
...ahem.
well, not exactly 'free', since i start my new job tomorrow morning. but free enough, for the moment.
aleatory contract
my own personal Waterloo
Previous Posts
- too. fucking. perfect.
- see what had happened was...
- i wrote a letter to the publicity flak at the anna...
- i mean i'm pretty sure i get it at this point
- well, they're blasting Wagner over the PA speakers...
- fe pranks suck.i have an opportunity to last-minut...
- little boris just can't help himself
- well, damn.
- "perversion of the birth process" averted!
- i want to see a marshmallow peeps version
24 Comments:
REQUESTING PHOTOSHOPPED PICTURE OF CATS TO DESCRIBE HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT YOUR NEW JOB
Seconded!
moar lolcatz when i have pshop access but
until
then
I BRINGS TEH INTERIM LULZZZZ
Do these conform to the rules for kitty pidgin, as laid down by Anil Dash?
i is in anil's toobs, blockin his interwubs.
(anil dash appears to be a tool, srsly. no offense meant, but all these Authoritative Histories of Lolcat which seem to have sprung up in the past week are just bizarre. and most seem not to cite 4chan at all. FAIL.)
On the one hand, I want to defend Anil Dash, because he's been blogging for ages and is often really delightful.
On the other hand, I feel obligated to point out this evidence, which I can't deny does lend a lot of credence to Annelet's tool theory.
i confess freely that i know nothing of this anil dash, but given his site design (fully a third of it devoted to adspace and a pic of himself talking into a mike?) and the slipshod science-writer-in-newsweek-meets-"synergy"-loving-marketing-flak feel of his blogstyle is quite offputting. he comes off like someone who writes about the internet, rather than someone who uses the internet.
also, everyone knows that you do NOT piss off Anonymous. (okay, except maybe the FBI.)
I really hate the name "lolcats." The pictures are cat macros, just like there are hamster macros and the occasional walrus and nick cage macro.
Furthermore, these cats are rarely
loling, so it seems wrong to label them lolcats. In fact, most cats I know are vry srs. And jesus you guys kitty pidgin doesn't exist it's a fucking joke. It's baby talk for cats.
but scott, if you are willing to accept 'lolcat', it lets you refer to the 'lolrus' when dealing with pictures of a walrus who has lost his bukket. the name stems, i think, not from the fact that the cats are loling, but that they make one lol. lol-inducing cats. lolcats. (though, problematically, Serious Cat is not a lolcat. Serious Cat is Serious.)
'macro' just sounds stupid to me, and besides, none of the actual definitions of 'macro' apply to the Funny Animal Pictures Commonly Known As Macros. does it have anything to do with code or economic theory or extreme closeup photos using zoom lenses? no? it is not macro, then. srsly. why call it a macro?
it's not exactly 'baby talk', either. it's a weird amalgam of typo, 133t and misuse of tense. it does seem to have its own internal grammar -- which, though hardly consistent, is pretty funny all the same.
Baby talk isn't a consistent language either. I'd argue that it's super-similar to baby talk, in that the general idea is to be cute and unrelenting, teeth-baring focus on the subject (babies in baby talk, cats in cat macros), but like baby talk, it's mostly substitution of words, cat cant just has odd tense misfires as a cherry on top of this linguistic sundae. This is the main problem with calling lolcat speak, if we must call it that, even a pidgin language: it's based primarily on substitution. Most of the cat jokes stem from substitution within an understood construct, like i'm in ur ____ _____ing ur _______. This is it's own joke, and if it wasn't for the leetspeek usually attached, would be grammatically correct. It's entirely unrelated to the "I has a ___" joke, except for the salient feline quotient, which both usually feature (I'm in ur macaroni's, warmin my feet, and I has a shovel are notably absent of furballs of any kind). This substitutive quality is directly, and this is unbelievably crucial guys, to the COMPLETEY DUMB MEME HIJACKING THAT /b/ ALWAYS DOES. That /b/ sometimes manages to be hilarious while doing it is a miracle. The catspeak is a meme, not a language, its purpose is to be exhausted of substitutions until it is no longer funny, and after that it can be used as nostalgia. Cats are a pretty rich vein of ore, however, so they're probably always be funny, until some post-cat-holocaust(the catocaust) world where playful cat pictures will be considered disrespectful and we'll all be making photoshops of cats crying a single tear with the NEVER FORGET mantra typed right underneath. Let's pray and work for a future where this will never come to pass.
Image Macro is a term for an image with an attached textual component meant to transmit added, usually hilarious meaning. It's related to the idea of a macro command, a keystroke that activates a more complex series of keystrokes automatically. You know, lazily transmitting more information through less work, that's what Image Macros do. Cat Macros do the same, but with cats. Meaning they are better. Cat Macro is punchy phrase, those hard syllables sounds great together. Lolcats sounds lazy. And what about all the cats that haven't had the chance to be photoshopped yet, are they still lolcats? I think all cats are lolcats. Why discriminate?
post-cat-holocaust(the catocaust) world
agh Connie Willis agh
two things:
if 'lolcat' is bad because it 'sounds lazy', why are macros good because they allow you to transmit large amounts of information 'lazily'?
by that definition of 'macro', EVERY DAMN PICTURE EVER is a macro. pictures being worth a thousand words and all. it doesn't work as a descriptor for a stylised form of pshoppery, it's too vague. plus, 'macro' is already used to mean something entirely different within photography. plus too, 'cat macro' doesn't sound punchy. it sounds doofy. 'cat macro' puts the 'ass' in 'assonance'.
moss:
dash is one of the sixapart people? oh dear. i hate to say it, but that does explain his behaviour on that MeFi thread. 6A made a dreadful hash of the LJ buyout and pissed off a hell of a lot of users. it's really odd to see him proposing, in a MeFi thread, to make a similar hash of MeFi. communities are delicate, intricate things, and he really seems to have a tin ear when it comes to hearing the feelings of people *in* such communities.
not to mention that, waaaaay back in 2000, i watched just what he proposed ('it looks more professional! people will trust it more!') kill off an enormous and unique web community. (among other things, admittedly, but that little change in layout was the first blow.) it still makes me sad, and i've still never seen anything quite like H2G2 in its heyday. its shell is still around, but now it's nothing more than Everything2's poor relation.
i'm sure he's a nice guy and all, but if i read much more about him i'm going to have to disable my Tool Alarm. he keeps setting it off. also, emoticons are even uglier than the MeFi layout. and so very 1997.
Just dropping in to second the 'Anil Dash is a tool' thesis. Right now someone is cooking up a panel discussion at the next AJAX orgy: "Hallmark 2.0: monetizing cat pictures."
More than anything else, "Cat Macro" sounds like the name of a plucky schoolgirl detective.
Yeah, I really can't deny that he's a tool, for all I do want to give him credit for at least having been an entertaining tool since the old days.
However, regarding this:
6A made a dreadful hash of the LJ buyout and pissed off a hell of a lot of users
I do want to note that, as far as I can tell, LiveJournal cannot exist without a lot of its users being pissed off at whoever happens to be in charge of it. SixApart's only really serious mistake was buying it in the first place, and that still counts as a good deed because it let Brad spend more time programming.
i don't know; it's true that LJ Knows Drama, but a lot of mistakes were made there, i think. i've never been that emotionally invested in LJ, and i watched the process with some detached amusement. still, though: you just can't start out by fulfilling your (admittedly paranoid) userbase's worst fears of SELLING OUT OMG!!! while simultaneously photoshopping your company's logo onto their mascot and assume things will go well. particularly not if you start vaguely implying they're all gonna have to start paying for the privilege and do little to quash rampant rumours.
why did they buy livejournal, anyway? i remember mena explained it, but it still didn't seem like such a good idea investmentwise.
I tried showing my mom the lolrus today 'cause I thought it would amuse her, and she thought I was making fun of her grammar.
but your mother isn't a walrus! i mean, as far as i know. if your mother was a walrus, that would be pretty cool, though.
She's a Norwegian. They utilize similar syntactical tropes.
given the etymology of 'walrus', that makes total sense! i find this inordinately pleasing.
I'm coming to this late, but I had precisely the same reaction as Mirabai reading this thread, agh Connie Willis agh. I was terribly disappointed by that book. Also, I just encountered lolthings for the first time today (via slate, for I am lame) and that walruses dialect is straight aunt jemima, which makes me a little uncomfortable, subtextwise.
http://hamsterinthewheel.com/fatalfury/walrus-bucket.html
Lolcats in general seem to have started off brilliantly and then slid pretty rapidly into derivative mediocrity. Still, they amused me for a good hour or so this morning.
Oh, see, I loved that book. Frikking loved it. Loved it so much I bought it for my aforementioned mother and am chagrined that she doesn't seem to be grooving on it as much as K. and I did. Oh well.
I don't think the walrus dialect is meant to be Aunt Jemima-- I think it's more Retardese (I hear it in a sort of "tell me about the rabbits" voice, but maybe that's just me), which has its own set of subtextual-ethical problems-- just different ones.
Good God was I ever giving SixApart too much credit back here. Believe me, in won't happen again.
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