Im In Ur Closet / Writing Ur Shirtz

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im in ur

By Evan Ackerman

If you just can’t get enough of those funny image macros (especially those of the Lolcat variety), now you can be one yourself, whether or not you’re a cat. ThinkGeek is offering this “IM IN UR (noun) (verb)ING UR (second noun)” shirt that lets you write in your witticisms with a washable marker. That’s right, you can be in someone’s base killing their d00dz one minute, and then be in their fridge eating their roffles the next.

According to ThinkGeek,

“the marker will wash off in hot or cold water and even comes off with a wet paper towel for those mid-day changes of mind. This is NOT write on / wipe off, because we didn’t want you to have smudgy writing because you bent over 15 minutes after you’d donned the shirt. However, some of the washable ink will come off if you rub against it.”

The shirt and marker are about $17.

If you’ve been able to refrain from participating in online forums (and didn’t follow the Wikipedia link above), I bet you’re pretty confused right now, so after the jump, I’ll explain just where the heck lolcats came from.

Cat pictures are ubiquitous on the internet, I guess because there is a significant population of people who have nothing better to do than a.) post pictures of their cats and 2.) look at other people’s posted pictures of cats. The marriage of cat images and text (the spawning of the “lolcat” culture) probably has it’s roots in other image macros (i.e. the use of a captioned image to convey a concept, idea, or meme), the most famous of which would be the “O RLY?” owl. Of course, this being teh intarwebs, image macros are most often captioned in a sarcastic manner through the deliberate misuse of spelling and grammar. This goes especially well with cat images, since it makes the captioned cats “sound” cute.

The first lolcat image macro was “I can has cheezeburger,” which was a captioned picture of a hungry looking cat that supposedly came from a Russian cat food box. Responses were quickly posted of satisfied looking cats with captions like “I did has cheezeburger,” and from there, things of course got way out of hand, to the point that lolcat images supposedly use up one third of the bandwidth of the WordPress blogging network.

“IM IN UR (noun) (verb)ING UR (second noun)” is what’s called a snowclone, which is basically a sentence structure that can be rewritten to fit different contexts. The origin of this particular snowclone is probably from StarCraft, where a new player engaged in a multiplayer online game typed “im in ur base killin ur d00dz” just before getting himself beaten into dust. However, as with many Internet memes, nobody seems to be quite sure what the exact origins of the phrase were.

If you’re interested, you can read more about lolcats in this article from Anil Dash or this informative slideshow from Slate.

[ IM In UR Blank ] VIA [ Random Good Stuff ]

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