Machine-generated memes in Perl

The Cat's Meow

Article from Issue 157/2013
Author(s):

It started off harmlessly enough with a few funny pictures of cats, but eventually it became the Internet phenomenon par excellence. It's no joke: Perl gives you some great tools for building and customizing memes yourself.

Summer time is intern time: As always during the summer months, my employer has taken on some college students, while we old guys scratch our balding pates and wonder how weird young academics can get. This year, the interns' sense of humor was on full display: Every presentation was adorned with image macros [1] for the purpose of amusement, either as static pictures or animated GIFs in infinite loops.

What started with "I Can Has Cheezburger?" [2] with cuddly kittens – the Lolcats – and cheeky sayings has morphed into an established part of culture known as the "meme." Take an expressive image and put an orthographically or a grammatically challenged saying (Lolspeak) in the header and footer using the Impact font – and you have a ready-made joke (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Modern classic – a Lolcat with orthographically questionable Lolspeak. © Niccolò Capanti.

[...]

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

  • CLI Image Processing

    Powerful command-line tools offer fast and easy image editing.

  • ODF Compatibility

    What happens when you feed an ODT document created with OpenOffice to a word processor like AbiWord, KWord, or Writely? Read on to find out.

  • Perl: Skydiving Simulation

    Computer game programmers apply physical formulas and special tricks to create realistic animations. Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL), which is available as a Perl wrapper, provides a powerful framework for creating simple 2D worlds with just a couple of lines of code.

  • Perl: OpenOffice Label Merge

    OpenOffice offers a selection of preconfigured formats for users who need to print their own self-adhesive labels. Perl feeds the address data to the document.

  • Recovering Deleted Files

    Modern filesystems make forensic file recovery much more difficult. Tools like Foremost and Scalpel identify data structures and carve files from a hard disk image.

comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News