cat

A family of tags — /j (joking), /gen (genuine), /srs (serious), /lh (light-hearted), /nm (not mad) — that grew from /s in 2020 among communities that wanted tone made explicit. The record's entry for the vocabulary that tried to fix text, and for the arguments about whether it did.

A flood of AI images of Donald Trump cradling cats, marching with ducks, and wading through floodwater with kittens under each arm, produced in September 2024 after the debate claim that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating pets. Posted by supporters and by official accounts, shared as memes rather than as evidence, which was new. The record's entry for AI images that were fake on purpose and political anyway.

An octopus in a suit pretends to be a human father, with each limb steered separately and every household task turning into wreckage. It began as a student project in 2010, and the 2014 sequel arrived exactly as the wobbly-physics craze peaked. The record files it next to Surgeon Simulator, but with a better story.

A lawyer in a court hearing on Zoom with a cat filter he could not remove — 'I'm here live, I'm not a cat' — which was the pandemic's most-shared thirty seconds. The record's entry for the filter as a defence.

An animated series about cats that get high, voiced by Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher, Chris Rock, Jane Fonda and Vitalik Buterin, funded by selling 10,420 tokens for about $8 million in 35 minutes in July 2021. In September 2023 the SEC found the sale was an unregistered securities offering; the company settled for $1 million without admitting or denying the findings. The cartoon that became a precedent.

The alert Snapchat sends when someone screenshots your snap — the small betrayal receipt that made 'they screenshotted' a sentence with weight, and that generations of teenagers have tried to dodge with a second phone. Widely known from 2013, extended by Instagram to disappearing DMs in 2018, and the record notes it is the only notification whose main effect is to make the sender wonder what they said.

Every photograph in the world redrawn as a Studio Ghibli frame, over one weekend. Miyazaki had called this sort of thing an insult to life in 2016; the servers melted regardless.

A cat in spectacles and a bow tie behind a rack of test tubes, delivering science puns in Impact font from 2011 — 'If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate'. The record's entry for the laboratory's only feline professor, retired 2015.