for your consideration: meme cats.

upon further consideration of yesterday's mourning post, i have found one place where l33t speak is acceptable. only one.

that would be the difficult yet rewarding task of perfecting the meme cat, also sometimes known as "teh cheezburger cat," the "macro cat," or the "lolcat." if you haven't seen one of these, you live under a tiny rock.

i believe that part of the allure of the meme cat is, in fact, the l33t speak and the ability to engage with the paradox of language and translation in an increasingly global space (all your base are belong to us).

and in case you were wondering, this post does have another point, too.

the importance of meme cats to mass social media and censorship. no, i'm not kidding. there's a talk from the ETech conference on it that you should read.

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excerpt: "With web 2.0, we’ve embraced the idea that people are going to share pictures of their cats, and now we build sophisticated tools to make that easier to do. As a result, we’re creating a wealth of tech that’s extremely helpful for activists. There are twin revolutions going on - the ease of creating content and the ease of sharing it with local and global audiences.
[...]
Blocking banal content on the internet is a self-defeating proposition. It teaches people how to become dissidents - they learn to find and use anonymous proxies, which happens to be a key first step in learning how to blog anonymously. Every time you force a government to block a web 2.0 site - cutting off people’s access to cute cats - you spend political capital. Our job as online advocates is to raise that cost of censorship as high as possible."

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a parting gift, 11 of my current favourite meme cats:
ringu cat, schroedinger's cat, staplr cat, grail cat, godmother cat, copy cat, snozberry cat, dune cat, flavor cat, stick cat, and of course, base cat.

and 2 adaptive (meaning non-feline) advertising commentaries...
network and tactics.