I hate this new phenomenon. I'm n ur... shut the fuck up!!!

Also, these appear to be the only two reasonably amusing ones.

This is a continuation of a six year old joke.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us

Wherein "us
Its brief but intense popularity derived in part from its poor translation into English and partly from its near-accidental adoption by a core group of Internet humorists."

Geek fodder circa 2001.

ACTUALLY... lolcats are more of an adaption from the combination of image macros on the 4chan boards and the "im in ur base, killing ur d00ds" meme :

-------------------
Two players (one unnamed, the other known as 1337h4x (leetspeak for "Fucking Nerd")) are in a game of Starcraft, with 1337h4x playing as the Zerg race, and the other as either the Terran or Protoss races. 1337h4x Zerg-rushed his opponent, and on finding that he was getting raped, his opponent asked:

dude, where are you?

im in ur base, killing ur d00ds
----------------

While the Zero Wing phenom and lolcats are related in some regards, they are for the most part two entirely separate things.

Wow, Tron, too bad you can't go back and delete that now, huh?

Yo dawg, I'm just droppin' mad science... that's all. Mad lolcat science.

I'm in a state of juxtaposition over seeing these sort of posts on the Merc.
a) Feeling slightly cooler knowing about these (not so anymore) inside internet jokes
b) Feeling even more nerdy having known about source of them [inside jokes].

As an aside, leet speak was invented in order to prevent the FBI's carnivore system from being able to pick up on illegal conversations. But it's origin was invalidated once its use was adopted by video gamers.

Nice!

See... I never even thought to think of where leetspeak comes from. And now I know... My first encounter with "leetspeak" was with the Back Orifice trojan.

It used port 31337 (which spelled "eleet") as it's backdoor. B.O. was a cheap shot, but damn. That shit was FUN. Making porn pop up on your friends computer every 5 minutes never got old for some reason.

I fell asleep at 1337h4x.