Not A Blog™

Dear People of Teh Interwebz,

Well, I got my fifteen minutes of fame.

If anyone noticed the Not A Blog™ down for a few hours yesterday, that’s due entirely to the Lolcat Bible. I noticed a slow build-up of traffic over the past few days, and sundry blogs linking to the post. Yesterday morning I was on the front page of Reddit, and from there, Digg.

The site never did exceed its bandwidth; just the server got overloaded as it served up redirects. Indeed, I’m rather proud of the fact that no one at Digg had to bust out the “duggmirror” comment because my site went down. (Rather, someone linked directly to my Picasa account as a mirror, so that helped. That’s why I set it up, after all)

Speaking of comments—they were almost overwhelmingly positive. Lawlz all around. It’s cool that I was able to make so many people laugh over the past few days. One can never have too much humor in life. I saw a few negative comments, but they were either universally slammed (in forums) or voted down (on sites like Digg). All the feedback has been absolutely great. Thank you everyone.

And to those who commented lame or lolcats aren’t funny anymore—I’ve got one foot in your camp, too. I agree: Lolcats has pretty much run its course. This was fun. Certainly I have no regrets. But no, I’m not going to do the rest of the Bible. (I have seen other people do other parts of the bible, though. Funny stuff.)

I figure Lolcats will end up like All Your Base: venerated, but no longer still-funny humor. And also like All Your Base, there will be those of us who can look back to 2007 and say I was there.

So where do I go from here? Both Graham and my brother told me I’ve won teh internet. (A lot of you have told me I’ve won teh internet. I can has internet? Kthx.) I should just quit. Because, you see, the Lolcat Bible is pretty much like nothing else I’ve done. I think Graham hit the nail on the head, however, when he told me the post works on two levels: the actual Lolcat Bible, but also my analysis of the language. Insomuch that this is geeky-interesting, that’s probably what I should be emphasizing for the people who stop by.

Digg traffic is notoriously known for not sticking. Everyone blows through, lawlz, leaves. How many of you will return to read the Not A Blog™? A few, perhaps. But if you do stick around, well—I’m afraid I don’t have much else to show you in the Lolcats vein.

You can click on the “About” link at the top of the page to get an admittedly snarky About Me page. To be more straightforward: I spend quite a bit of time talking philosophy, here. I talk science. I talk futurism. I’ve got a current debate going on about art.

I also rant. The rants category might be the place to start. I review books (rather harshly), and I write satire and fiction. To a lesser degree, I post music, movies, and art—and I have an ongoing webcomic entitled Stranger, centered around my alien avatar and his/my befuddlement at real-life conversations I’ve had.

For those Lolcat-ers who are still trickling in today and over the weekend, thanks again for stopping by. If you are interested at all in other things I’ve done, here are a few posts you might like to start with.

If your interest lies in the language aspect, you can read about my futurist take on how language might change forms in Linguistic Alternatives. Also along the lines of language, I have a little satire on the Worth of Words, and I define some art terms in a manner inspired by Ambrose Bierce in the Modern Art Dictionary.

In the vein of religion + pop-culture mashup, I’ve got a repurposing of the “goes to 11″ scene from Spinal Tap in We Have Four.

Many geeks seem to be into recursion and postmodern humor. If you like word-play and recursive discussion, you’ll like Confused and No News is New News. You may also enjoy Meta Public Radio.

If straight-up parody is more your thing, you might like my parody of pretentious public radio interview programs with Savant.

If you like zombies, be sure to take a look at the Zombie Commerical I co-directed.

I have a lot of varied material. Look around.

So all that to say, it’s been fun. I’ll never forget the day I got dugg. As for the Lolcats? I’m pretty sure that’s a one-trick pony, and I’m looking forward to getting back to the regular, boring Not A Blog™ material. I’ll probably ride the wave for a few days, but I’m not going to make it any sort of ongoing project.

However, by popular demand, I am going to post a transcript of the Lolcat Bible on Sunday so you can read it without burning your eyes out staring at the photograph. In fact, there’s a little bonus material. When I originally did the translation, I wasn’t sure how much I’d need to fill a page, so I actually wrote out the entire first two chapters. There’s a little more of chapter two not shown in the image that’ll goes along with the rest.

Stay tuned.

-Ted

[Edit: The Lolcat Bible and this associated post does not fall under the Creative Commons License. They are copyright 2007, Ted Stoltz.]

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