Nerd Arts

Pulling up one from the past. You old schoolers may remember the Hamster Dance phenomenon. Since then numerous other internet memes have come and gone. But the Hamster Dance lives on in the original geocities site archived here

The Hampster Dance [sic] or Hampsterdance is one of the earliest examples of an Internet meme, originally a simple Geocities page featuring rows of animated hamsters dancing in various ways to a sped-up sample from the song “Whistle Stop” by Roger Miller. Hamsterdance.com includes Hampton, Fuzzy, Hado, and Dixie as the singing Hamsters.

Canadian art student Deidre LaCarte, who was competing with her best friend and sister to see who could generate the most traffic, designed Hampsterdance in August 1998 as an homage to her pet hamster, named Hampton Hampster. Using four simple animated GIFs of hamsters, repeated dozens of times each, and a loop of background music embedded in the HTML, then a fairly new browser feature, she named the site Hampton’s Hampster House and had Hampton declare his intent to become a “web star”. The clip, “Whistle Stop”, was taken from the opening credits to Walt Disney’s 1973 animated version of Robin Hood and later the famous original HampsterDance 9-second loop WAV (dedodedo.wav) file was removed due to Disney copyright infringement. Until March 1999, only 800 visits were recorded (about 4 per day), but without warning, that jumped to 15,000 per day. The website spread by e-mail, early blogs, and bumper stickers, eventually even featured in a television commercial for Internet Service Provider Earthlink.

Fans of the site created variations on the original dance, using politicians such as Dan Quayle and Cynthia McKinney as well as household objects such as Pez dispensers.

Lolling, a compound of lol and a word (generally a noun), are photos with humorous captions. They are a type of image macro, and are thus also referred to as cat macros. Lol_______ are created for the purpose of sharing them with others on imageboards (particularly 4chan) and other internet forums, especially on Saturdays (”Caturdays”).

Lol______ images consist of a photo with a caption characteristically formatted in a sans serif font such as Impact or Arial Black. The image is, on occasion, photoshopped for effect. The caption generally acts as a speech balloon encompassing a comment, or is a simple description of the depicted scene. The caption is intentionally written with deviations from standard English spelling and syntax featuring “strangely-conjugated verbs, but [a tendency] to converge to a new set of rules in spelling and grammar.” These altered rules of English have been referred to as a type of pidgin or baby talk. The text is frequently in the form of a snowclone parodying the grammar-poor slang stereotypically attributed to users of the America Online service.

Lol_____ are similar to other animal-based image macros, such as the O RLY? owl and captioned pictures of walruses (lolruses), elephant seals, dogs, hamsters, birds, and rabbits. Various deviations of Lol______ have appeared as well, such as Rofl_____. The format is popular enough to have spread to United States Presidents, spawning sites such as LOLPresidents.com and loltapirs.com.

While lolcat language is very difficult to place absolute rules on, some language patterns seem to be constant:

* “Have” becomes “has”
* Any soft U becomes “oo”
* “O”s can be changed to Zeros
* “You” becomes “U”
* “Are” becomes “R” or “Be” or “Is”
* Words that are or could be abbreviated in some circumstances become one misspelled word. (”We are” is changed to “We is” then finally becomes “Weez”)

Lolcat language is largely based on phonetically spelling words as incorrectly as possible while leaving them readable

lolpr0n

lolburners

lolthenews

lolmaps

lolpresident

lolgeeks

loltrek

LolCat

LOLBOT

I shouldn’t be posting this, but I am….

lolcat Grammar

While lolcat language is very difficult to place absolute rules on, some language patterns seem to be constant:

* “Have” becomes “has”
* Any soft U becomes “oo”
* “O”s can be changed to Zeros
* “You” becomes “U”
* “Your” becomes “Ur”
* “Are” becomes “R” or “Be” or “Is”
* “The” becomes “teh”
* Words that are or could be abbreviated in some circumstances become one misspelled word. (”We are” is changed to “We is” then finally becomes “Weez”)

Lolcat language is largely based on phonetically spelling words as incorrectly as possible while leaving them readable.

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