CatConLA: Cats, Cats, and More Cats

The internet serves as a pretty suitable place for cat lovers of all kinds to congregate and share in their mutual adoration, but for those looking for an IRL experience, there’s CatConLA. That’s right, friends, there’s a convention for cat lovers now.

We stopped by the second annual CatConLA a few weeks ago to revel in the feline frenzy. The event welcomed 15,000 attendees over the course of a weekend, with attractions like meet-and-greets with celebrity cats (including Pudge, shown above), a “Caticure” station, a giant Escape the Room-style cardboard box for humans, tons of retailers, and so much more.

Among the highlights was a chance to sit down with one of the internet’s most famous cats—Lil Bub (oh, and her owner Mike Bridavsky). The busy duo is in the midst of a Kickstarter fundraiser for a mobile game called Hello Earth. You can play the demo online now, and while we won’t spoil anything, let’s just say it starts on a planet far, far away and ends on Earth with a broken spaceship. If you know anything about Lil Bub, none of this will be surprising.

“She’s a space cat, so a lot of it’s a metaphor for her real life,” Bridavsky said.

Bridavsky and Lil Bub. Image credit: CatConLA

If the team meets its fundraising goal, Hello Earth will become a free “full-blown, NES-style” mobile game created by a small team of Bridavsky’s friends and collaborators. There will be in-app purchases, and Kickstarter backers who pledge at least $15 get everything for free (there’s also tons of exclusive merchandise), so Bub fans should hop on it.

And for all of you cat lovers out there who didn’t make it to CatConLA this year, fear not: it’ll be back in 2017.

We also asked Lil Bub what kind of convention she might organize and the answer was not surprising: space travel.  

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