Top Internet Memes in 2013

The grumpy cat craze can be traced to Sept. 23rd 2012, when Bryan Bundesen (Cataliades) posted a picture of his sister's Tabatha's cat on reddit.  This was immediately picked up by other redditors who let their captioning and photoshopping imaginations run wild.  

Grumpy cat looks like a snowshoe cat, a rare breed created from siamese cats with white socks crossed with American shorthairs.  It seems that you shouldn't judge a cat by its face, Grumpy Cat, or rather Tard, apparently has a very sunny and friendly disposition, as her owner testifies in the interview below.

Why would a moustache graphic appear in so many places on the internet?  Ok I have to admit that this trend still mystifies me.  I am only aware of it because of the number of very popular products with the iconic, isolated stache on them.  

My main thought is that this is something to do with Movember, which organises men to get sponsored to grow their upper lip hair during the month of November and donate the money for prostate cancer research.  If you know anything definite about this, please let me know in the comments.

These crudely drawn but cute faces are characters in rage comics-used to tell illustrate typical real life stories.  Many of the faces are not actually experiencing rage.  However, since the prototype, rage guy, made his first appearance on 4Chan's board in 2008, to express his anger, the name rage faces is used for all the characters.

The cast of faces has grown hugely and includes favourites such as the "no" guy, the "y u no" guy, me gusta (I like) and many others.  There is even an Obama rage face.

There are several online generators that allow people to quickly create and publish their own rage comics.

The courage wolf, the best life coach you can have, started giving internet users advice around 2008, although the exact date is uncertain.  The meme is based on a photo of a snarling grey wolf taken by photographer Jeff Vanuga.

The wolf joined and eventually superseded Advice Dog on bchan4.

This is probably the oldest meme I can remember, although I am sure there have been many others.  The phrase comes from the hilarious translation of the Japanese game Zero Wing into English released in 1991.  

The phrase became widely used after it was popularised on the Something Awful message board.

Have a look at the cut scenes from the game below in the video below, as well as the many places where it has appeared since then. 

Although I have to say that the  phrase "You have no chance to survive make your time" is also worthy of mention