Loyal readers, I know you've been following this gut wrenching story since in came to the forefront yesterday afternoon and I feel it's my duty to, at least attempt, to keep the everyone informed with the details as they continue to unfold. I guess the only place to start is at the beginning...

Yesterday at exactly mid afternoon I was heading out of the house when I discovered that a friend of mine hadn't seen Goaste. As you can imagine I was shocked and appalled, especially since this person has in fact been on the internet before. Obviously I had no choice but to try to remedy this situation and links were provided. Luckily she had in fact seen the famous image previously, just had no idea what it was called. This conversation led to the discussion of the "First Goatse" tag on flickr in which people viewing goatse for the first time have their expressions and reactions archived for the entire world to see.

Usually this tag sends you to photos like this, this, and this, which is what I was expecting. However on this fortuitous it showed me a photo of a cat staring at a laptop. The previously public photo had been located here but has since been made private (so no fun for you), however this completely unrelated screen shot art might give you a rough idea what you might have seen if you clicked that link the other day. I should note that at this point I still needed to leave the house as I was previously planning to do but obviously this cat photo needed to be lolcated. Obviously. So I did. And then I laughed, and then I left. And when I came home I found this:

Whoah.

It's possible I just found the one single person in the world who doesn't love LOLcats. I was as shocked as you were. To be fair I was in the wrong here. I never looked at what kind of license his cat photo had, and even though I did favorite his cat photo I didn't actually provide a link to it at the time I posted it. I can say that I meant to and just forgot, but that won't really do much for the argument at this point. The point is someone was upset their cat photo had been lolcated and demanded it be removed. Not wanting to whitewash history, but also not wanting to further the lolcat hate any more than needed instead of deleting the image I just photoshopped it into oblivion.

Cat... What cat? Admittedly I was a little shocked here myself. I really couldn't believe someone was so anti-lolcats, so anti-fun. But there it was as clear as day.

Shortly there after Jason Escapist commented stating:

"There's such a thing as being well within your rights and still just not getting it. Preventing someone from reposting a picture of a cat, with no personal information or commercial value, is just pigheaded."

To which the original cat photographer replied:

"Why? It's my cat. I asked nicely. I wasn't a douche about it.

Edit: I should rephrase. I asked nicely. There was no link back to my original picture, which wasn't CC'd, and the resulting "remix" or whatever everyone's calling Photoshoppery these days was licensed CC-SA, which is really what hacked me off in the first place."

Which suddenly paints this entire situation in a new light. This has nothing to do with lolcats and everything to do with someone who doesn't approve of "remixes," "photoshoppery," and creative commons licenses, specifically those of the share-alike variety. Or something. Point being this is a huge misunderstanding because as we all know lolcats are independent of all of the above rules and their own internet animal all together.

Further proof to this was when another flickr user, DB noted:

"Still, it's just asking to be LOLed."

Which brought the reply of the originator:

"Yeah, it is, db. I was planning on taking care of that just as soon as my newborn gave me some extra time. Making LOLcats hasn't been a priority for the past 6 weeks or so."

I should note here that lolcat-izing this photo took me approximately 5 seconds. Maybe 6 if you include the upload time.

What I'm trying to say is that LOLcats are not remixes, they are not photoshoppery, they are not mashups or anything of the sort. They are LOLcats. People do not make lolcats to express creativity, they do it to make LOLcats. LOLcats are not the result of simple remixing, they are greater than the sum of all their parts. They are LOLcats. Maybe this ven diagram can explain the situation better:

As you can plainly see there is no intersection between lolcats and anything else meaning they are 100% independent and therefore have their own set of rules. We already know from such prime examples at Ninja Cat, Hover Cat and Tom Crewz Impreshun Cat that the laws of physics (specifically gravity) don't apply to LOLcats, so why should we assume any other laws that we hold near and dear apply in LOLcat world? The fact is we can't, and going forward it's going to be important for us, citizens of the internet, to keep these concepts in mind and not be so foolish as to assume anything we think we know applies to LOLcats.