About

"This is Relevant To My Interests" is an expression used to convey approval and enthusiasm over a given topic. It is most commonly used on media-sharing websites in the form of text-based comments or image macros featuring photographs of concerned-looking animals.

Origin

While the phrase is rumored to have originated on 4chan, its earliest archived use in an online discussion board was posted on the gaming enthusiast NeoGAF^[2] forums by member Mr Jared on October 21st, 2005. In the thread, Mr Jared expressed his approval of a Japanese adult video (JAV) for the console video game series Rumble Roses by saying "This is relevant to my interests."

Spread

On November 16th, 2006, Flickr^[3] user "the boy on his bike" uploaded a LOLcat image macro featuring a photograph of a cat sitting at what looks like a console with the caption "This is relevant to my interests" to a gallery of 4chan-related images. As of July 10th, 2012, the user has since deleted their account.

On September 18th, 2006, an entry for "Relevant to my Interests" was created on the Internet culture wiki Encyclopedia Dramatica.^[5] On January 11th, 2007, the original cat image macro was reposted to the LOLCat website I Can Has Cheezburger.^[1] On June 30th, 2008, Urban Dictionary^[7] user Fablic Kurac submitted a definition for "RTMI", defining it as an abbreviated version of the LOLcat meme "relevant to my interests." On July 11th, 2008, I Can Has Cheezburger^[10] published an image macro of a cat with a pizza box with the caption "Dis pizza / iz relavint / 2 mai intrsts" (shown below).

On November 15th, 2009, a Facebook^[6] page titled "Joining Pages That Are Relevant to my Interests" was created, which accumulated over 390 likes within three years. On October 8th, 2011, the "Relevant2MyInterests" Tumblr^[8] blog was launched, which predominately highlighted photographs of scantily clad women. On December 1st, a t-shirt with the original cat image macro (shown below, left) was released on the online retailer website Zazzle.^[9] On June 18th, 2012, the Internet humor site Memebase^[11] posted a Bear Grylls image (shown below, right) with the title "This is Relevant to my Interests."

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Search query volume for the keywords "this is relevant to my interests" began rising in April of 2007 and experienced their first major peak in June, coinciding with a peak in popularity of Caturday.

External References