It's another Caturday!
Even though pretty much every day is Caturday around here, I have a special fondness for this day.
It's fun! All the cat fans and cat lovers share cat photos for fun, and we get to make posts about cats with impunity-- all over the Inter Webz.
But do you know how we actually ended up having Caturday? Who coined that phrase?
I'm ready for CATURDAY!
The Origins of Caturday
A lot of people attribute Caturday to the popular meme site "I Can Has Cheezburger" where thousands of cat memes — often referred to collectively as "lolcats" — were created from about 2007 on, and in the process made the "Impact" font famous.
"Happy Cat," the original "lolcat"
Source: all over Google
My Human even remembers the original chubby gray "I Can Has Cheezburger?" cat that did the rounds as a free-standing meme before it became a thing; supposedly first posted on Cheezburger founder Eric Nakagawa's blog.
But... that's not actually where "Caturday" comes from.
A few old "social media nerds" will tell you that these kinds of cat memes were found on MySpace before that. Which is basically true, my Human says (because he was there), but there was no "Caturday" associated with them.
The actual origins are somewhat less glamorous and a bit sketchy.
The earliest usage of "Caturday" can most likely be attributed to giant forum host 4chan; to one of the image boards there, probably in early 2005, possibly 2004. The timeline gets a bit sketchy because it's dependent on examining the encoded EXIF data attached to image files, which includes a creation date.
Let's keep in mind here that 2005 would be considered "ancient" in the greater timeline of the Internet.
Curator Cat napping selfie...
But back to Caturday:
"Caturday on Saturday" was actually started as a somewhat tongue-in-cheek protest and response to certain 4chan threads on the "random" ( or /b/) boards under the "Furry Friday" heading... which basically was a stream of furry hentai images — a specific genre of anime and manga porn.
Although this is as much hearsay and legend as anything, "Caturday" is often attributed to 4chan user "Anonymous" who may (or may not!) have declared "It's Caturday! Go post some f*cking cats!"
And that, my friends, is how millions of people got to post pictures of cats on Saturdays, almost 15 years later!
Now I'm going to go see what my fellow cat lovers are up to. Have a beautiful day!