Ur Model Is Belong to Me (+ Netspeak)

I. I Can Has Toyz

My father just sent me a generous Christmas check, allowing me to continue my quest for a Happy Childhood by buying this model kit ($30): it's the same model he gave me for Christmas, 1975.

I put it together all jolly-whompered back then; but I have already wrested a promise from Bink, she of the little careful hands, that she will help me.

By the way, the "All Your [X] are belong to me" is lolcat netspeak that comes from a rushed translation of a Japanese animation into English, which rendered "all your bases now belong to us" into "all your base are belong to us."

I've been reading up on lolcat and other netspeak because Krista and I have a plan (cunning, but dependent on her academic job-hunt and therefore highly theoretical) to translate the ur-K/S "Pon Farr in a Cave" romance story into kitteh. 
(Hm. That's "ur" as in "original," of course, not as in lolspeak "you're/your." Isn't life complicated.)

Lolspeak's perfect since Spock is obviously a cat, and cats go into heat.

It was Krista who introduced me to the lolcats at I Can Has Cheezburger. 
People make zillions of lolcats--my favorites are ones in which the maker really gets inside cat think--interpreting almost any event as an opportunity to be fed, for instance.

^ Here's my translation of Spock thinking "...and like two ivory eggs his buttocks seem" from my Virgil vid (which in turn comes from the Rude Person stories).

I learned the origin of some of the classic phrases from the Wikipedia lolcat entry.

Another classic, "Do not want," comes from a Chinese bootleg copy of Star Wars: The Revenge of the Sith, which thus mistranslated Darth Vader's "Noooooo!" 

This lolTrek use of it, right> 
is from the wonderful and now-famous "We Has Tribbles and Also Troubles" from the blog Live Granades.

II. Non-lolcat Netspeak

So, while I'm at it, here are a few other odds and ends of "netspeak" I looked up recently.

Here's George W. Bush, lolcat style. 

"The Nets": You know how people refer to the Internet as "the nets". That backdates to our soon-to-be-dearly-departed prez:

"I hear there's rumors on the, uh, Internets [pause] that we're going to have a draft." --George W. Bush, in the second 2004 debate.

Other originally ironic slang terms include "interweb(s)" and the like.

"Captcha" is slang for "word verification," or "optical character recognition" (OCR)--those things you have to decipher to prove you are a human and not a mechanical spammer. It is a made-up acronym: "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart."

"FTW" = "for the win," or a good thing. I don't usually adopt netspeak like this one that I can't figure out on my own (e.g. obviously OMG = "oh my god"--I mean, even Augustine used this one, except he said, "meus deus," and quite a lot too; "LOL" is an exception--I expect that to turn up in Webster's any day). But when I meet one I can't figure out, I like to look it up.

The Urban Dictionary says "FTW" comes from the TV game show Hollywood Squares when , on the final move (expected to win the game), contestants would announce their move was "for the win."

"Embiggen." This is the sort of slang I like--the sort I can figure out. : ) I usually see it used next to photos: "click to embiggen [make bigger]." Wiktionary's entry ascribes its modern use to Lisa in The Simpsons in 1996, but notes its 1884 use in Notes and Queries: A Medium of Intercommunication for Literary Men, General Readers, Etc. (Gosh. I used to run into that journal, with a shortened title, studying Classics.)

But you knew all that.