I’d have to say I’m sick of them. It’s mostly because the same tired old pictures make their way around and around again.  These things are only funny once, if that. There is no humor to be found in a lolcat that you’ve seen a thousand times once Uncle Harry sends it out in a blanket email. By the time that Uncle Harry discovers it, whatever funny it may have initially had has been burned, shot, stabbed, blown up and eviscerated. That meme has already been around forever once the internet tentacles reach email.

The best way to find funny stuff on the internet is to dig it up it yourself. Blanket emails are the last stop on the internet train. They are the horse of the internet funny delivery system. At one point, horses were the fastest way to get around the country, but nowadays, we have modes of transportation that move a whole lot faster than the tired old horse.

99% of all memes on the internet started at a site called 4chan. That’s where the plague known as lolcats was born along with leetspeak, Rickrolling, mudkipz, chocolate rain, pedobear and nearly every other meme you’ve ever seen, along with the concept of the internet meme in the first place. The site has been around since 2003 and has been churning out memes ever since. It’s not even remotely family friendly or safe for work, so I wouldn’t recommend visiting unless you want to be awash in a sea of nonsense.

Sadly, 4chan is a shadow of its former self. The fact that news networks have done stories on it just proves that it’s nearly dead. These days, it’s mostly made up of douchenozzles who think swear words, porn and animal abuse are the height of imagination. You have to wade through a lot of junk to find something even remotely worthy of attention, but to this day, most of the internet memes originate at 4chan. Almost every blanket email contains at least one image that originally came from there.

It’s interesting to me how quickly some of these memes die out while others take root and seem to last forever. The Kanye West “Ima let you finish but…” meme died in less than a week, while others, like lolcats, have spawned a whole host of sites like icanhascheezburger.com and just refuse to die. You just never know what’s going to take root and stick.

If I want to see these things, I go to the source; I don’t wait for it to come to me. If you go to the source, you see these things a year or two before Uncle Harry gets his grubby email account on them. By that time, you’d rather take a bullet in the brain than look at another lolcat.

So, here’s a public service announcement: Dear general public, please, stop sending out blanket emails. I’ve seen them before and if I haven’t, it’s probably because it wasn’t funny enough for me to find on my own. Thanks in advance. Love, Goldfish.