Failure has been part of the human condition ever since the Fall of Man. Every one of us learns of the ubiquity of failure, almost from birth. Failure generally means that you tried something that didn’t work, with consequences all too often catastrophic. In a larger sense, you can also fail by not bothering to make an adequate effort in the first place.
During the past decade, the familiar word “failure” has become the Internet meme “FAIL”. The infamous Urban Dictionary defines Fail in various ways, including “The glorious lack of success.” The FAIL meme has propagated in tandem with the seemingly exponential growth of FAILure in the world at large.
I’ve occasionally experimented with the FAIL meme myself, both on deviantART and on 1389 Blog. The following example suddenly became more relevant after John McCain won the 2010 Arizona Republican primary election:
The unfortunately leftist online Slate Magazine contends that the growth of the FAIL meme reflects Schadenfreude, defined as pleasure at the misfortunes of others:
the good word
Epic Win: Goodbye, schadenfreude; hello, fail.
By Christopher Beam
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2008, at 11:55 AM ET
…What’s with all the failing lately? Why fail instead of failure? Why FAIL instead of fail? And why, for that matter, does it have to be “epic”?
It’s nearly impossible to pinpoint the first reference, given how common the verb fail is, but online commenters suggest it started with a 1998 Neo Geo arcade game called Blazing Star. (References to the fail meme go as far back as 2003.) Of all the game’s obvious draws—among them fast-paced action, disco music, and anime-style cut scenes—its staying power comes from its wonderfully terrible Japanese-to-English translations. If you beat a level, the screen flashes with the words: “You beat it! Your skill is great!” If you lose, you are mocked: “You fail it! Your skill is not enough! See you next time! Bye bye!”
Normally, this sort of game would vanish into the cultural ether. But in the lulz-obsessed echo chamber of online message boards—lulz being the questionable pleasure of hurting someone’s feelings on the Web—”You fail it” became the shorthand way to gloat about any humiliation, major or minor. “It” could be anything, from getting a joke to executing a basic mental task. For example, if you told me, “Hey, I liked your article in Salon today,” I could say, “You fail it.” Convention dictates that I could also add, in parentheses, “(it being reading the titles of publications).” The phrase was soon shortened to fail—or, thanks to the caps-is-always-funnier school of Web writing, FAIL. People started pasting the word in block letters over photos of shameful screw-ups, and a meme was born.
The fail meme hit the big time this year with the May launch of Failblog, an assiduous chronicler of humiliation and a guide to the taxonomy of fail. The most basic fails—a truck getting sideswiped by an oncoming train, say, or a National Anthem singer falling down on the ice—are usually the most boring, as obvious as a clip from America’s Funniest Home Videos. Another easy laugh is the translation fail, such as the unfortunately named “Universidad de Moron.” This is the same genre of fail that spawned Engrish, an entire site devoted to poor English translations of Asian languages, not to mention the fail meme itself. A notch above those are unintentional-contradiction fails, like “seedless” sunflower seeds or a door with two signs on it: “Welcome” and “Keep Out.” Architectural fails have the added misfortune of being semipermanent, such as the handicapped ramp that leads the disabled to a set of stairs or the second-story door that opens out onto nothing. Even more embarrassing are simple information fails, like the brochure that invites students to “Study Spanish in Mexico” with photos of the Egyptian pyramids. These fails often expose deep ignorance: One woman thinks her sprinkler makes a rainbow because of toxins in the water and air.
The highest form of fail—the epic fail—involves not just catastrophic failure but hubris as well. Not just coming in second in a bike race but doing so because you fell off your bike after prematurely raising your arms in victory. Totaling your pickup not because the brakes failed but because you were trying to ride on the windshield. Not just destroying your fish tank but doing it while trying to film yourself lifting weights.
Why has fail become so popular? It may simply be that people are thrilled to finally have a way to express their schadenfreude out loud. Schadenfreude, after all, is what you feel when someone else executes a fail. But the fail meme also changes our experience of schadenfreude.What was once a quiet pleasure-taking is now a public—and competitive—sport.
It’s no wonder, then, that the fail meme gained wider currency with the advent of the financial crisis. Some observers relished watching wealthier-than-God investment bankers get their comeuppance. It helped that the two events occurred at the same time—Google searches for failsurged in early 2008, around the same time the mortgage crisis started to pick up steam. And the ubiquity of phrases like “failed mortgages” and “bank failures” seemed to echo the popular meme, which may have helped usher the term out of 4chan boards and onto blogs.It’s rare that an Internet fad finds such a suitable mainstream vehicle for its dissemination. It’s as if LOLcats coincided with a global outbreak of some feline adorability virus. The financial crisis also fits neatly into the Internet’s tendency toward overstatement. (Worst. Subprime mortgage crisis. Ever.) Only this time, it’s not an exaggeration….
As with the gapers block phenomenon, we can never quite look away from failures that are not our own. Whether trivial or spectacular, whether humiliating or oddly heroic, whether well-deserved or the outcome of pure happenstance, failure gets our attention, and well it should.
I don’t think it’s always schadenfreude. Sometimes we laugh out of relief because the troubles belong to somebody else this time around, even though we know it could have happened to us.
Other times, we laugh about failure even when the failure DOES embroil us in its consequences, as with the ongoing political, social, and economic debacles in the US and the EU. (If you need a good laugh right now, check out the Sunday Funnies political cartoon series on Flopping Aces.) When we can share a good laugh, it not only underlines the lessons that we can learn from these failures, but also lightens the burdens that we all must bear as we work our way through.
It takes a particular type of self-righteous and aggressive ignoramus to think that the real evils of this world will all go away if enough people can be shamed or bullied into denying that those evils exist.
Simmons’ apartment on Liberty St. overlooks Ground Zero. Each letter of the banner features different religious and spiritual symbols. Like Bloomberg, Simmons is a big supporter of the planned center: “I was trying to figure out ways I could reach people and promote a message of tolerance…The fact that it is a public discussion, that there’s so many against it is what I think is disappointing to me, that so many people don’t know that we founded our country on the First Amendment,” he told the AP.
By Charlie Sykes
Story Created: May 15, 2009
(Story Updated: May 15, 2009)
As John McAdams sums up the story so far:
It all started with a parody from Tom McMahon, who was aggravated by the extremely smug and intellectually slovenly bumper sticker in which a variety of religious symbols spell out “COEXIST.”
McMahon produced a parody bumper sticker with Nazi and Communist symbols substituted.
His point, of course, was that some religious views are simply impossible to coexist with, and must (like Nazism and Communism) be fought.
We Christians strongly believe in tolerance, and this is what British novelist Dorothy Sayers pointed out about “Tolerance”:
In this world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called indifference, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.
If any viewpoint is equally as valid as any other, then no viewpoint has any meaning, and it matters not what any of us thinks, says, or does. This philosophy is truly satanic, and it is called nihilism.
You’re a cat and you have to do the usual “cat things” to survive and get the female feline. Eat fish out of the fish bowl, catch mice, and steal milk from sleeping dogs are some of the things you have to do to survive in this surreal masterpiece from Bill Williams.
Guests at Minnesota’s oldest hotel could request a cuddly cat for the night
My husband and I stayed at the famous Anderson House Hotel in Wabasha, Minnesota a few years ago. The female tabby we chose spent most of the night cuddling with my husband. But I didn’t mind. The room was picturesque and the food at the restaurant was good.
Okay…I know it’s a family website. But it’s not what you think. So shame on you!
Actually, The Historic Anderson House in Wabasha, Minnesota is, according to innkeeper Teresa Smith, the state’s only legal “cat house.” And for a very good reason. The staff of the 151 year-old bed-and-breakfast includes five friendly felines who, upon request, will come to your room evenings, warm your bed, and keep you company. What’s more, the hotel provides a litter box, toys, and food with each “kitty-to-go.” Most guests reserve a cat with their room, Smith says, and many put their dibs in early to ensure their favorite will be available. Poor souls with allergies can request a no-cat room.
I recently looked up the hotel’s website and was disappointed to find that the domain name was being “parked.” It turns out that the famous landmark hotel that had been established in 1856, had failed to survive the Obama administration. At least all of the cats who once provided companship for the guests still have homes.
Last Update: March 23, 2009 – 7:19 PM
By: Kerry Westenberg
A voice-mail message at the storied hotel in Wabasha starts out with a promising welcome.
Then comes a sigh, and these words, “We are sad to say that due to the bad economics that are going on, the Historic Anderson House has had to close its doors.”
Until it stopped operating Thursday, the Anderson House had been the longest running inn in the state. It was built in 1856 when Wabasha was a bustling Mississippi River town.
…
The building is on the National Register of Historic Places, but may be more famous for its collection of cats that guests could bring into their rooms for the night.
…
Fancher said that the more than dozen cats that resided at the hotel have been adopted by friends and former employees.
NOTE: “Hello Kitty” is a trademark of Sanrio, Inc. This firearm was built as a parody of the California Assault Weapon ban and this blog posting is for educational purposes and to draw attention to “Assault Weapon” gun laws and to encourage debate on such. This gun is not for sale, nor is any replica or copy of it available for sale on this site.
So called “Assault Weapons Bans” such as the now expired 1994 Clinton ban and the one still in place in states such as California seek to ban rifles that our misguided legislators feel have no purpose in civilian hands. They identify “evil features” they can use to generically classify these “military style” weapons in sweeping terms. Of course these features, such as plastic pistol grips, barrel shrouds, and bayonet lugs have absolutely nothing to do with the firearms potential lethality in the real world and are merely cosmetic features. After all, it really doesn’t matter what color the firearm is if it fires the same ammunition right? Well, in the “spirit” of the California Assault Weapon Ban I decided to do my best to alleviate the fears of my fellow citizens and gun-banning legislators when I put together a new AR-15 for my wife. Below is the result of my painstaking work to transform an Evil Black Rifle (EBR) into a Cute Pink RIfle (CPR). Introducing the Hello Kitty AR-15!
You can submit your own Caturday threads for future weeks!
1389AD does not “own” the Caturday Internet meme, either on Blogmocracy or anywhere else. With that in mind, both regular and guest contributors are welcome to submit Caturday threads to Blogmocracy. To submit a guest post, just email your contribution to:
And your government bureaucrats are at work, with hilarious results:
Evidently, Sal the cat got on the jury duty roster after his humans, Anna and Guy Esposito, identified Sal as their pet on the long-form 2010 Census report.
See the whole story, with comments, here at Purry Duty.
According to the infamous Urban Dictionary, cats will fall from the sky and you’ll receive a thousand sandpaper kisses.
Though Wikipedia seems not to have a Caturday page, it describes the Caturday Internet meme on the Lolcat page:
The first recorded use of the term “lolcat” is from the anonymous imageboard4chan circa 2005. The word “Lolcat” is attested as early as June 2006, and the domain name “LOLcats.com” was registered on June 14, 2006. Their popularity was spread through usage on forums such as Something Awful. The News Journal states that “some trace the lolcats back to the site 4chan, which features bizarre cat pictures on Saturdays, or ‘Caturdays’.” Ikenburg adds that the images have been “slinking around the Internet for years under various labels, but they did not become a sensation until early 2007 with the advent of I Can Has Cheezburger?” The first image on “I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?” was posted on January 11, 2007, and was allegedly from the Something Awful website.” Lev Grossman of Time wrote that the oldest known example “probably dates to 2006,” but later corrected himself in a blog post where he recapitulated the anecdotal evidence readers had sent him, placing the origin of “Caturday” and many of the images now known by a few as “lolcats” in early 2005. The domain name “caturday.com” was registered on April 30, 2005.
There’s even a Russian version of Lolcats (with English translations below each picture) at lolkot.ru.
This is probably one of the strangest products we carry on the NeatoShop (and believe me, we carry a lot of strange stuff). Behold, the Cat Butts Magnet Set, a pack of 5 refrigerator magnets with pictures of felines from the non-cute end. It’s probably the perfect WTF gift for the cat lover in your life: Link
The cat decided to pee on the beanbag, so that the filling would be dumped in the bathtub, and then she could play in it.
Just a note: She did not actually eat any of the filling, and she did not suffer any ill effects. She’s also not allowed near the beanbag anymore, so she won’t be playing in the filling again.
