Animated GIF Museum: Amphetamine Pencil

Animated GIFs are a dying breed. Forged in the early days of the World Wide Web, GIFs were used to add non-static content to sites long before Flash, CSS and Javascript came to the fore.

Nearly 20 years after the format was created, animated GIFs serve a purpose. They’re like a time capsule, and harken back to a simpler time, when we marveled at the potential of the Internet before it was completely overtaken by phishing and porn.

To that end, Geek6 is endeavoring to preserve and pay tribute to this dying format in our Animated GIF Museum. From time to time, Joe and I will showcase an example of the finest art created in this medium and discuss its merits. With the aid of your critical opinion below, we seek to not return the GIF to its former days of glory, but to immortalize its place in the Web’s history.

“Amphetamine Pencil”

Josh: This is what I expect Gary Busey to be like in real life.
Joe: Quite happy for a guy whose life’s purpose is to die a slow, agonizing death.
Josh: …don’t we all? Lives gradually getting shorter, duller… rubbing our heads on the floor to eliminate errors.
Joe: My Scantron would look like a pollock painting if I used him on the SAT.
Josh: I feel bad for the guy — doomed for all eternity to stab out a poorly formed ellipsis before deleting its existence.
Josh: He’s like a school supply Sisyphus.
Joe: After watching it for about 8,000 times you start to wonder if doing that kind of trick is actually possible.
Joe: …
Joe: it’s not.
Josh: Obviously, you haven’t seen Gary Busey’s booking mugs. I think they snapped them mid-gyration.

View past installments in the series