Animals face the same problem as people: awkward run-ins at CVS, the fear of going outside for missing something on the Internet and an equal hatred of Nickelback.
And now we finally have a Tumblr that gives a voice to the voiceless: “Animals Talking in All Caps.” Ranging from turtles to polar bears, high quality photos of animals acting like themselves are splashed across a bright blog with snarky sentences punctuating each picture.
The blog, which racked up nearly 5,500 followers in just a month since it was started, was created by Justin Valmassoi. The Seattle-based band booker created the blog out of boredom.
“Occasionally I’d see some photo of an animal and I’d make it say something,” Valmaossi wrote in an email to The Daily Dot.
“I realized I had 15 or 20 of them all scattered around, and I had just moved to Seattle and didn’t really know anyone or where to go so I killed a couple of rainy nights hunting them down and putting them in one spot,” he said.
The jocular stories that accompany each post are born naturally, Valmaossi said. “Sometimes I’m feeling political, mostly I’m feeling retarded,” he joked.
“Some of them just write themselves,” said Valmaossi. “I try to be entertaining whenever possible, even when I’m being serious, so mostly I just write things that would make me giggle hope other people do too.”
Notes, or comments and reblogs in Tumblr-speak, range in the few hundreds for each post and reaction has been positive. He initially just posted a link to it on his Facebook and Twitter profiles but his friends just read it. His friends shared it with their friends and the fan count grew larger.
Valmaossi said he gets the “occasional’ marriage proposal, some stalkers and number of requests from couples who want him to use their significant other’s name in it, which he likes as names for animals are hard to come up with, he said.
As for visitors, he was thrilled when he had 250 followers but once it hit 1,000 followers, he couldn’t believe it.
“Now I’m just staring at my follower count for hours a day in utter disbelief,” said Valmaossi. “I don’t even know how to take it. Nobody’s ever really reacted this positively to one of my bad running jokes before. I’m dumbfounded.”