Procatinator: Random Cat GIFs Wedded to Random Songs

Procatinator shows you a cat GIF. At the same time, it plays a song. The two were chosen independently and have no relationship to each other whatsoever. Then, roughly one time in eight, the cat’s head bobs exactly on the beat, or a cat falls off a table at the precise moment a chorus drops, and you experience something close to a religious event.

Then you click again and get a completely unrelated cat and a completely unrelated song and it means nothing. That is the game.

What is Procatinator?

Procatinator is a survivor from an earlier internet, the period of roughly 2010 to 2013 when a small single-purpose website was a perfectly reasonable thing to build on a weekend and leave online forever. The design is black background, cat in the middle, minimal controls. No branding. No about page worth reading. No newsletter.

The mechanic is randomness plus a human brain, which is a more powerful combination than it sounds. We are relentless pattern-matchers, especially where rhythm is concerned. Show someone a looping animation and play any music at all over it, and their perception will start bending the two together, snapping movements to beats that were never synchronized. Most of the time the illusion fails and you get a cat doing one thing while a song does another. Sometimes the illusion holds completely and the pairing looks choreographed.

The site is essentially a randomizer for those near-misses and occasional bullseyes, and it is deeply satisfying to sit and click through because you never know which one you are getting. The bad pairings cost you three seconds. The good ones you send to five people.

The cat GIFs themselves are a museum piece by now. This is the pre-TikTok internet cat canon: grainy, short, silently looping clips of cats knocking things over, staring into the middle distance, and executing maneuvers that appear to defy the animal’s own understanding of physics. Half of them are recognizable to anyone who was online in 2011. The music library skews similarly, a grab bag of pop, hip hop, video game themes and inexplicable deep cuts.

Nothing about the site has been updated to modern standards, and that is part of the appeal. It does not know about engagement, retention or personalization. It knows about cats and songs.

What can you do with Procatinator?

• Click through pairings. The core loop. New cat, new song, evaluate, repeat.
• Wait for a sync. Do not skip too fast. Some pairings take a couple of seconds of loop before the accidental choreography reveals itself.
• Share the good ones. When a combination genuinely works, note the cat and the track. Getting someone else to that same pairing is part of the fun and part of the frustration.
• Study the cat canon. Treat it as an archive of early internet cat culture, most of it long since buried under a decade of newer content.
• Use it as a very bad radio. The song clips keep playing while you click. It is the least efficient music discovery tool ever built and it works about as well as you would expect.
• Test your pattern-matching. Notice how quickly your brain tries to fit the movement to the beat even when the two are hopelessly mismatched.

Tips to get the most out of it

Click once to unlock audio. Modern browsers block autoplaying sound until you interact with the page. If you are staring at a silent cat and wondering what all the fuss is about, that is why.

Give each pairing a full loop. The temptation is to skip instantly. Resist it for at least one cycle, because the sync usually appears on the second or third repetition of the GIF rather than the first.

Turn the volume up more than feels sensible. The whole effect depends on the music being present rather than background. At low volume your brain never commits to the illusion.

Do it with someone else in the room. The good pairings are much funnier shared, mostly because the response is involuntary and neither of you can explain why it worked.

Do not expect a favorites system. There isn’t one. This is a website from before every site tracked what you liked, and losing a great pairing forever is part of the deal.

Stop after ten minutes. There is no ending, no score and no completion state. The site will happily generate cats until you close the tab.

If you like Procatinator, also try…

• OMFGDOGS: the canine equivalent, running dogs and a relentless loop, equally unnecessary.
• The Useless Web: one button that flings you to a random site of exactly this vintage and value.
• Petit Tube: random YouTube videos nobody has ever watched, another exercise in curated randomness.
• Zombo.com: the patron saint of websites that do one thing and do it forever.

Dig through more of the old internet in Weird & Wonderful, or waste an afternoon properly in Entertainment & Fun.