Lolcats are breeding like rabbits!

This week Slate has a good “slide show”-style article called “You Cannot Resist Lolcats.” It examines the phenomenon of cute animal photos on the Internet, particularly wacky cat photos with captions that capture the way cats would talk, if they could. I particularly appreciate the author’s explanation of one exceedingly popular running joke: “The ‘I’m in ur X, doing Y’ construction is a punch line found all over the place, and originates from an old video-game taunt: “I am in your base, killing your d00ds.”

Obviously, pet photos have been on the Internet practically since its inception, and sites like this one are typical. In my current blogging experience, though, lolcat-type images (and variations like “lolpresidents”) seem to be proliferating en masse. In the absence of a big, blogosphere-unifying meme like Snakes on a Plane, which flooded the Net with parodies and homages last year (at least, up until the actual movie came out), pet “macros” seem to be the pastime of choice.

And my household is no exception. Recently I came home and discovered that my computer’s wallpaper had been replaced with multiple images of this:

Which, I suppose, is preferable to multiple images of this: