The Hexacoto

So you know, the doge meme that has been pervading on the internet?

Well guess what? The original doges have been found!

From The Verge:

When 51-year-old Japanese kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato started seeing strange pictures of her eight-year-old Shiba Inu dog Kabosu popping up on the internet this past August, she was a little freaked out. “I was taken aback,” Sato, an elegant, brown-haired woman given to wide smiles, recalled. “It felt very strange to see her face there. It was a Kabosu that I didn’t know.”

What Sato didn’t realize was that Kabosu had unwittingly become the face of “doge,” the white-hot internet meme that plasters photos of Shiba Inu with fractured phrases written in rainbow-colored Comic Sans type. The images often feature a “wow” in one corner, then a series of intensifiers, like “so” and “such,” paired with nouns relevant to the picture. “So scare,” “such dapper,” “many skill,” some examples read, like a surreal narrative of the dog’s inner monologue.

A snapshot of Kabosu perched on a couch, glancing sidelong at Sato’s camera with tan eyebrows raised, paws warily crossed and mouth pulled back, was suddenly Photoshopped onto a Twinkie, a giant rock, a Canadian landscape, and a Christmas sweater. The dog’s face was used as the symbol of Dogecoin, a flash-in-the-pan Bitcoin alternative popular enough to be targeted in a recent heist. Kabosu was used to mock politicians in the United States and Canada. And though she had seen some of the images online, until just a week ago Sato had no idea what the doge meme actually was.

She had just wanted to share some cute pictures of her pets on the internet.

Read the full feature article on the Verge here! You’ll get to see the other pictures of the doge in it too!