Back in 2007, Adam "Apelad" Koford created a marvellous, funny, weird alternate history for the then-viral phenomenon of LOLcats, running-gag memes of cats whose superimposed dialog had many odd grammatical quirks: the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats," a pair of comic-strip hobo cats straight out of the 1930s, who found obscure and clever ways to riff on our contemporary LOLcats. Read the rest
Hugh sez, "EFF'r Parker Higgins tells me this sign was at a rally he spoke at in Berlin recently."
Grumpy Cat builds a GNU Internet [Frerk Meyer/CC BY-SA]
(Thanks, Hugh!) Read the rest
From the Boing Boing Flickr pool, a wonderful photo by Kai Teoh, a Boing Boing reader and photographer based in Minnesota who is available for editorial and special occasions booking. Read the rest
A photo of a kitten named Wheatley captured and shared by Boing Boing reader Beckitten in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool. Read the rest
That is a high claim, I know. But over Labor Day weekend, a combination of dedicated curation and popular vote resulted in Henri 2, Paw de Deux being named the best Internet cat video.
The Internet Cat Film Festival, sponsored by Minneapolis' Walker Museum of Art, drew a live audience of more than 10,000 people last Thursday night. Videos were curated from a massive collection submitted online, and were grouped into thematic categories— foreign films, for instance, or comedies. Henri 2 took home the Golden Kitty, a People's Choice award.
Bonus: If arguing about the merits of Henri 2 weren't enough of a gift to your procrastination tendencies, you can also check out a full list of all the films screened at the festival, including links. Read the rest
Boing Boing reader Nicholas Longtin of Minneapolis has carefully 'shooped a series of photos from the 2012 Olympics to include his cats. I'll consider it complete when this shot's included. (via BB Flickr Pool) Read the rest
I approve of this meme. (thanks, Antinous!) Read the rest
In my latest Guardian column, "The internet is the best place for dissent to start," I look at Ethan Zuckerman's recent talk on the Internet and human rights, and the way that cute cats create the positive externality of a place for dissent to begin and flourish, and look at the problems this causes:
Zuckerman's argument is this: while YouTube, Twitter, Facebook (and other popular social services) aren't good at protecting dissidents, they are nevertheless the best place for this sort of activity to start, for several reasons.
First, because when YouTube is taken off your nation's internet, everyone notices, not just dissidents. So if a state shuts down a site dedicated to exposing official brutality, only the people who care about that sort of thing already are likely to notice.
But when YouTube goes dark, all the people who want to look at cute cats discover that their favourite site is gone, and they start to ask their neighbours why, and they come to learn that there exists video evidence of official brutality so heinous and awful that the government has shut out all of YouTube in case the people see it.
The internet is the best place for dissent to start Read the rest
GirlieMac, aka Tomomi Imura (Twitter) just won the internet with her deftly conceived and Photoshopped series of HTTP status message "motivational poster" images, featuring cats. A bunch of them are featured above and below. The full set is here at Flickr. She's taking suggestions for more, if you can think of any she missed. (thanks, Bonnie Burton)
On Submitterator, Musicman pointed me towards this great presentation on LOLspeak as a form of language play, and why people engage in that play. According to Lauren Gawne, who gave this speech last week at the Australian Linguistics Society conference, the choice to use LOLspeak has a lot to do with establishing identity—the playful identity of "cat", and the serious identity of "knowledgeable Internet user".
Includes an explanation of why LOLspeak is language play and not some language mashup "kitty pidgin".
You can read more about this on Lauren Gawne's blog Superlinguo.
The video, by the way, is 20 minutes long. It's also got a little bit of weird, warbly feedback in the audio, but that doesn't get in the way of hearing what Gawne is saying. Read the rest
Who can resist the advice of the "world's most famous cat photographer"? I hear he got the title from the World Cat Photography Society, which, as any fool can tell you, is the world's leading authority on the subject.
Canada's Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper has figured out what Google+ is good for: cat pictures. Apparently he has a history of using kitteh as political props... Read the rest
Kitten hugs! What do they mean? Amanda Fiegl at National Geographic News has the hard-hitting answers you've been waiting for. This is why I love the Internet.
Folks who've commented on this video seem convinced that this kitten is having a nightmare. But do kittens really have nightmares, or dreams at all?
Well, the kitten's clearly dreaming. It may not be a nightmare, it may be running after a mouse; we'll never know. Naysayers will say: You can't prove cats dream. But if you measure brainwaves in cats, dogs and several other animals, it's clear that they go through a period of rapid-eye movement, or REM sleep, when the brain is very active. In humans, exactly the same thing happens--and that's when we dream. I read a study that kittens do a lot of this kind of sleeping in their early life, as their brain is developing. And I believe it makes sense that REM sleep is not only associated with the maturation of neurons in the brain, but also with dreaming processes. As kittens begin to sense the world around them, those things can be regurgitated in sleep in the form of dreams.
Cat Hugging Video: What's Really Going On? — National Geographic News Watch
