25APR07 – As a regular excersize, you owe it to yourself to see what’s out there on the Internet in terms of trends and styles. The Internet is fast becoming a living, breathing entity entirely oweing in-jokes to its own history. As pointed out by Anil Dash, lolcats are the latest example among several.

The best use of a cat in an Internet in-joke HAS to be the kitten above. Even surfers who haven’t seen the movie DUNE or read the book might get it in part; those of us who have seen the movie can appreciate the image each and every single time we see it. For some reason, cats and kittens have beat out hamsters, puppies and rabbits as being the in animal for Internet humor. Let’s explore…

Kittens are unstoppably cute. This kitten is having one of those falling dreams obviously; but how to add to the lolcat folk art scene? It’s not enough to come up with some funny expression, cats now have a way of speaking to humans that involves a Jar-jar Binks kind of language. It’s not a creole, it’s not really Cajun Chef in style and it’s not really like that witch lady in Pirates of The Caribbean but it’s close. I can has cheezburger? has become the premiere site for cat-speak.

You’ll notice the spelling is quite parallel with ‘leet speak’ and the fonts that seem most valid (somehow) are Arial Black and, more accurately, Impact. When a cat speaks, it prefers a white text stroked in black. To explain why this is, is impossible. As you drift through the ‘cheezburger’ site, you’ll note the appearance of hideous walruses. I don’t know why, I don’t know when, but the fact that they’re insane about buckets of fish and have wildly evil gazes in most photographs was enough to help them beat out cute bunnies as models.

After getting the gist of cat speak, you may want to include the Invisible Bike joke angle in your picture. Where a blue jean ad sparked contest after contest to airbrush models and actors out of their clothes, the trend has swung, thanks to leaping cat pictures, to airbrush bicycles out from under riders or just make reference to an invisible bike where there was none before. Some artists have had phenomenal success airbrushing loads of bikes out from under Chinese mothers, professional bike racers and dangerous woodland kittens; combining lolcats, cat-speak and an invisible bike should well be considered a master piece.

In mentioning ‘leet speak’ earlier, it may be important for some parents out there to know when they’re being taken advantage of by the kids. Feeling entitled to an elite status forms the basis of a short-cut style of typing. It seems at first that there are no rules for grammar or spelling and perhaps there really aren’t. But what’s made possible are open conversations by kids about drugs, sex and other things that we don’t think they should discuss so openly. Hopefully we all know that four-twenty is a ‘leet’ way of talking about pot. Even the kids don’t know that’s been around for ages. Parents would be well advised to prohibit all odd-ball ‘leet speak’ (a.k.a. l33t) at home; there’s plenty of time for kids to talk privately to friends about whatever they feel like. Letting them patronize you under your nose helps you lose absolute control and appear like a dunce until they’re about 26 years old and have children of their own patronizing them.

In practicing your lolcat work, try to work in invisible items and in-jokes that relate to movies or Internet history. Not all work has to be cute; some can be shocking or just plain entrancing to look at. One commonly occurring phrase isn’t the desire for Saturday, it’s the desire for Caturday. Angry cats often want Caturday to come faster – the angry cat I found became a victim of my Irfran View work, my desire to add to the growing list of Invisible Item pictures and then became the fearsome horror movie star, Hollow Cat.

So get out there, explore, and “surf happy, surf safe.”