Results tagged “pidgin”

As it turns out, there's more to say about kitty pidgin, and thanks to all of those who've emailed and commented with additional links.

First, a great example of prior art for the commercial use of lolcats is Twitter's various error messages. That's the first place I've seen the grammar used in official (albeit informal) communications for a company.

More important is some of the additional understanding I've gained about why some forms of kitty pidgin are so delightful. Take, for example, invisible bike and its variations. Part of the delight of invisible item cat pictures is the element of surprise, the realization of where the missing item fits into the picture yields an "a-ha!" moment that's much more satisfying than a more literal image would be. This isn't surprising -- a lot of humor relies on the element of surprise.

But there's something more subtle going on here. If you've ever read Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, you might be familiar with the concept of "closure". There are many meanings for the word closure, of course, but in comics, it represents the crucial construct of allowing your reader or viewer to make the final connection with your media. This is wonderful for many reasons -- it's trusting the intelligence and creativity of your audience, knowing that they'll make the mental connection in their minds. It's also allowing for spontaneity and inspiration, instead of constraining the ideas (or humor) of an image to merely whatever the original author created. And most importantly, leaving space for your audience to interact with something as prosaic as a cat picture is just plain fun.

Closure has long been part of the vocabulary of comics.

"See that space between the panels? That's what comics aficionados have named "the gutter!" And despite its unceremonious title, the gutter plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics...If visual iconography is the vocabulary of comics, closure is its grammar."

Of course, other media make use of closure as well -- in movies, our minds effortlessly connect each frame to those preceding and following it -- but comics requires conscious (or semiconscious), high-level closure between every frame.

You need an example. Let's go to the world's worst humorous cat pictures: The Garfield comic strip. Fantagraphics has an astounding writeup of why Garfield sucks so bad, despite what your 9-year-old self thought back in the day.

I was impressed to find that Eric Burns and The Strip Doctor broke down what is most fundamentally flawed with Garfield's humor. Redundancy. The problem with Garfield is redundancy. It's redundant. The humor is. Redundant.

I could tell you about this, but that would contradict the premise. Take a look:

Invisible captions! LOL.

Pidgin, formerly GAIM, is the best instant messaging client available; It works with all common IM networks, supports extensions and customizations through plugins, has smart and simple default settings, runs on all common desktop platforms, and is a free open source application. Being so similar to Firefox in so many ways, this leaves the application poised to become the "Firefox of IM".

Pidgin has a somewhat complex history. Originally named "GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger" after the network it was designed to connect to and the window UI toolkit (!) that it used to display itself, the name of the application has been in flux for years due to legal posturing from AOL. In the intermediate years, the name became somewhat anachronistic anyway, as the application added support for MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Jabber, and other chat services in addition to AOL's AIM service.

Now, the last time an essential open source internet client shed its geeky name in favor of one that was more approachable, Phoenix became Firebird and later Firefox. The evolution of the naming of these clients doesn't just reflect the incessant legal sniping over IP and branding that a lot of small projects face, but is also a measure of a focus on the image of the projects. This is somewhat atypical for a lot of open source projects, as some contributors can see a focus on branding as irrelevant to, or even contradictory to, making a good product. But while the Pidgin site lacks some of the slickness and polish of the Firefox site, it's still miles better than the standard "choose a SourceForge mirror for your tarball"-style experience that a lot of comparable projects present to the world.

The renaming to Pidgin also reflects the 2.0 release of the program, a significant milestone that reflects a modularization of the application's underlying architecture, as well as support for additional communications networks. But of course, there are other applications which support each of Pidgin's features, including the clients created by the IM services themselves. Even other third-party clients, like Trillian, support a range of networks as well as many more features than Pidgin includes out of the box.

But where Pidgin's UI is spare, even underdesigned, Trillian commits errors such as the worst default preference setting in the history of modern computer software, a misfeature which automatically links some terms in your conversation to Wikipedia articles. With competition that's trying to pass regular expression stunts off as user benefits, it's no wonder that Pidgin's simplicity seems like a breath of fresh air.

And if you want that sort of complexity, there's a very healthy ecosystem of third-party plugins and extensions to customize Pidgin. Many of them are oriented around practical needs like deeper integration with Windows than is possible with a generic cross-platform client.

In short, the parallels between Firefox and the new Pidgin are undeniable. In a field crowded with proprietary, confusing clients that are tied to individual networks, Pidgin reflects the reality that all of us are connected to more than one network. And despite the rush to try to convert all desktop applications into Ajax-powered web equivalents, there is still ample proof from Firefox's example that powerful, smart, extensible desktop applications are an essential part of the Internet's evolution as well.

All that remains to be seen is if Pidgin will succeed in capturing attention and inspiring innovation in the same manner as its open source sibling.

Wow, you kids really like overanalysis of imaginary pet languages, huh? The best thing about writing Cats Can Has Grammar has been the responses.

• Mat sent me a link to this SF Chronicle story on MeowChat, the online language adopted by cat fanciers when they impersonate their cats in online chat. Note to whomever writes the headlines over at the Chron, if you have to say, "It's not just for crazy cat ladies", it's already not true.

• Danny also brought up MeowChat in my comments here, offering up this overview which gives us a "gives a reasonably good breakdown of that story, though unfortunately in heavily accented meow".

• I made it to Language Log! "After a bit of investigation, though, I've decided that I don't feel badly enough about this to undergo the lolcat immersion required to change it." NO LOLCATS FOR U LOL.

• Metafilter loves lolcats.

• And finally, I found the tags and descriptions that people used while bookmarking the post on del.icio.us to be delightful.

If you spend any time at all observing net culture, then you'll have been unable to miss the recent explosion in popularity of lolcats. This relatively recent phenomenon is the convention of taking pictures of cute animals, most frequently cats, and overlaying absurdist captions on the images.

The core behavior has existed for some time; "Image macro" is a generic term for this kind of folk art, and cats have always featured heavily in these types of Internet in-jokes. But a few distinct categories have sprung up that have helped amplify and popularize the phenomenon.

• I'M IN UR X Ying your Z. This construct, based on i'm in ur base, killin ur d00ds has morphed into a catch-all structure for annotating cat pictures.

• Invisible Item. Variations on the seminal Invisible Bike, these are images of cats, usually in midair, with captions that prompt us to fill in imaginary objects or actions that complete the scene. There's something brilliant to these images, speaking to our mind's ability to intuitively extrapolate unseen details.

• Kitty Pidgin. And finally, the newly dominant lolcats, of the family I Can Has Cheezeburger? These seem to be spawning nearly infinite variations, and have exploded in popularity since being named "lolcats" instead of the more general "image macro" or "cat macro".

The rise of these new subspecies of lolcats are particularly interesting to me because "I can has cheezeburger?" has a fairly consistent grammar. I wasn't sure this was true until I realized that it's possible to get cat-speak wrong.

Incorrect kitty pidgin jumped to my attention the first time I saw a reference to Dune being used with a lolcat image. The caption on the linked version of the image, "The spice must flow." is fine, if not particularly cat-like. But the caption on the version I saw first was much more verbose: "I are dunecat. I controls the spice, I controls the universe." Besides being an awkward attempt at overexplaining the punchline (I've never read Dune or seen the film, but the joke is obvious) this was just all wrong. The fact that we can tell no cat would talk like this shows that kitty pidgin is actually quite consistent.

I was having a conversation with Ben and Ben a few weeks ago where I suggested this consistent grammar for lolcats could be a "cweeole". Knowing a bit more about such things now, I realize this isn't a creole but more likely a pidgin language, used to help cats talk to humans. And since "pidgin" is already a cutesy spelling of a mispronunciation, there doesn't seem to be any really cute way to rename it to reflect its uniqueness. "Kitty pidgin" might be the closest thing we have to a name for this new language.

There's a consistent visual vocabulary to the construct, as well. If it ain't Impact or Arial Black or some other nondescript sans serif font, it ain't lolcat. White letters with a black outline are a must. But codifying a design guide for lolcats is well beyond my abilities.

Unfortunately, the evolution of these grammars online can be very difficult to track down; This kind of nascent web culture is generally frowned upon by Wikipedia (witness the deletion of the I'm in ur base article since the Ask MetaFilter thread just a few months ago) and there are no other sites designed to collect definitive collaborative reference material. It's going to take time to document kitty pidgin with any degree of accuracy.

I've just started bouncing the idea of kitty pidgin off of Erin and Grant, two of my favorite word experts, but I'm confident that someday we'll have kitty pidgin dictionaries. Perhaps we'll even get all the niceties that Klingon and Elmer Fudd-speak enjoy, like a Google translation, a Microsoft Word dictionary, or a cat-native version of the Bible or Shakespeare.

I has a links

Okay, go out and look at some of the finest kitty-related content:

• Kitty pidgin's already made its way into business communications -- our last LiveJournal news post had lots of references to our team-up with Photobucket under the heading "We has a Photobucket". I was especially proud of my quick-and-dirty PhotoShop work in that thread.

• Gordon McNaughton's created a LolCat Build(e)r. A fantastic and essential app, though I have to take issue with the use of CamelCase InterCaps in the word "lolcat".

• Cute Overload is likely the seminal site for taking the "cute culture" aspect of online behavior seriously. Meg Frost always has fun with the content, but I haven't seen any high-profile definitive collections of these genres that predate Cute Overload.

• Choire Sicha is a genius, but if you needed more proof, you can now just head to lolgays.com to be redirected to his Gawker post on lolgays. It's exactly what you think it is.

Update: This post has gotten an amazing reaction, and inspired a number of follow-up posts, including a look at MeowChat and PetSpeak and my thoughts on Cats, Comics and Closure. I've also collected responses to the popularity of lolcats in a few posts:

• Inadvertent Lazymeme Clearinghouse Lamentations shows some of the best early responses to the meme
• Pidginholed shows lolcats gaining popularity in mainstream media, including a Houston Chronicle cover story
• And perhaps most amusingly, The LOL Street Journal marks the milestone of lolcats making their way, yes, into the Wall Street Journal.
• If you enjoy this sort of stuff, you'll want to join me at ROFLCon, an event being held at Harvard just to celebrate silly online memes like lolcats.

Though I've been familiar with the terms for years, I wasn't sure of the exact differences between a pidgin and a creole. So:

• A creole is the combination of one or more languages into a new, stable language. A mashup of languages, if you will.

• A pidgin is a simplified language used to help two groups with distinct languages communicate with each other.

"Creole", of course, is also a term used to refer to various ethnic and social groups. Now I feel better that I know the difference between these terms.