the other night

We talked about backup solutions for our data.

Michael said that by now, 5 years ago he would have expected to give his credit card and some words to a software agent, and it would go off and find the right thing online, and a box would just show up at the house with a backup solution in it.

I said that the agent would actually be off looking at kitten pictures; Joy of Tech said so in their Web N.0 predictions.

Michael said he didn't know about kittens, but that some of his friends are into cat pictures with captions of the form "I am in your blah, blahhing your blah" and that these were deemed extremely funny.

We had to look it up.

Apparently, the concept is called Lolcatz. We found a nice, clear definition, which says: an LOLCAT is any photo of a cute cat along with an irony-free caption... An LOLCATZ is a photo similar in content, but one that captures the aggressive stupidity found in some parts of the Internet, such as 12-year-old boys who grew with the Internet their entire lives.

We found many examples of the genre. Some of them were even amusing. We felt the best ones embody both the definition, and the caption form, written in l33t speak.

We made our own.



Amusingly, when we found the original WebN.0 Joy of Tech, it includes a sideways reference to LOLCATZ. So, as usual, Michael and I are several months behind on our web memes. Hey ho.