Friday cat-blogging

I have been a daily visitor to I Can Has Cheezburger for well over a year now, and admit that while a lot of them are just dumb, some of the lolcat photos and captions make me giggle like a little kid. I'm obviously not the only one, as they have become one of the highest-trafficked humor sites on the internet and have spawned dozens of imitators.

For a long time, I just surfed in, scanned through the day's pics, and continued on with my more purposeful web browsing. Then, not long ago, I was killing an afternoon waiting for my car to be serviced, and I actually checked out the site more thoroughly than I had before and actually read some of the comments. The more I read, the more I was compelled to peruse the comments on other photos and even went back several pages in the photos reading comments there as well to see if what had struck me almost immediately was out of the ordinary for the site.

A large majority of the commenters there write in fluent lolcat-ese, with very specific and carefully-followed syntax, grammar, and spelling rules, a common shorthand for many terms, and with comment threads a few hundred comments long. As with most blog comment zones, a lot of people clearly are online chums and socialize with each other as part of the comments.

However, that's not what hit me. It dawned on me that a lot of these people are probably fetishists of the sort often known as "Furries" or "Fuzzies," those incredibly peculiar people who dress up in elaborate stuffed animal costumes and socialize with each other at private parties, up to and including costumed sexual encounters of varying degrees of eccentricity.


Picturing a lot of the lolcat commenters sitting around at their computers wearing purple dog suits and lavender cat suits with sweaty foreheads and sticky spots in their fake fur really puts a whole new slant on lolcat humor.