.gif guide

100% off!

Dec 09, 2024

I’ll be selling some goods at Rhizome’s super ultimate internet day at HEART in New York this weekend, December 14. Come say hello and stay for the talks, workshops, and 20+ other vendors. If you’ve ever wanted to purchase any of my “wares” you can do that (at a discount!) here.

The holiday spirit has eluded me this year. I’m not really shopping for presents and I haven’t made it through a single made-for-streaming Christmas movie (normally I’d be into the double digits by now). Maybe it’s because I was out of the country this Thanksgiving and am off the natural holiday rhythm. There’s still time for me to lock in. I’m looking forward to staying home and dedicating myself to a puzzle, maybe with this Hallmark movie about a rideshare that sends the protagonist back to 1999. I <3 time travel.

Instead of a traditional gift guide—thank you to those who have included my Dollz Tarot in theirs—I’m going to do a .gif guide. To me, saving a file can feel just as thrilling as making a purchase. I even filmed a .gif haul, in the style of YouTube “haul” videos, in 2017: HUGE! GIF HAUL! In the video, I talk about each .gif sitting on my desktop like I just got back from the mall.

I spend a lot of time on gifcities searching for .gifs of sexy women. Many of them lead to shuttered amateur porn sites or devoted personal collections of low quality webcam .gifs. The sexy .gifs mingle on my desktop with the more safe for work ones. Sometimes, when I have to teach or give a presentation, I migrate them to a folder called “2 SEXY 4 DESKTOP.” This one in particular reminds me of one of my favorite paintings, Gerhard Richter’s Woman Descending the Staircase (a reaction to Duchamp’s 1912 Nude Descending a Staircase).

Glitter graphics make up a large percentage of my .gif collection. I’ve dedicated a lot of my preservation efforts to saving these in particular, simply because there hasn’t been a ton of conservation around Myspace-era content. Often, these .gifs would either serve as personal flair on a Myspace page or be used for leaving comments on another user’s profile. Phrases such as “thanks for the add!” and “showing some love” were particularly popular. They’re not so dissimilar from greeting cards. Sometimes, they get so oddly specific, like this one I picked out featuring a banana split and the words “he dumped me,” that I wonder what the particular use case for them might have been. I imagine someone searching far and wide to find the perfect graphic to alert their Myspace friends of their recent breakup.

When I’m really depressed, I DoorDash a meatball sub from Subway to my apartment. I’ve recently deleted all of my delivery apps to discourage this type of behavior. Instead, I’ll force myself to reread “On Self Respect” by Joan Didion every time I’m tempted to rack up $30 in delivery fees.

I have 1,923 .gifs saved to my “DOLLZ” folder. My computer struggles to run smoothly as I comb through the files. I love the word poser. Perhaps a more contemporary term would be “fake” or “unrelatable.” The use of the word in the early aughts is proof that we’ve valued the elusive concept of “authenticity” since the dawn of the internet, where faking it took on a new dimension. I wondered why someone might want to use this .gif, but it turns out it’s in reference to Avril Lavigne: 7004.gif features the same doll graphic and reads “AVRIL SUX!”

Hamsters aren’t really part of the online landscape the way they were when I was growing up. Hamsters were random. Now being random is talking about Ohio. Is there a .gif for that? Last night, I got together with a group of friends to play Glee Karaoke on the Wii, which features “up to 30 hits from Season One.” We were encouraged to “Gleek Out” and if you did poorly, the game would flash words like “BOO!” and “ALMOST.” Tough crowd.

Everything that a girl needs: chocolate, cell phone, vodka, midol, tampax, dr. pepper, eyeliner, spa wax, and tissues.

While at the dollar store looking for Christmas decorations, I came across a couple of picture frames that used images of Avril Lavigne and Ashley Tisdale as their “stock” photo. I recognized the Ashley Tisdale picture because a friend of mine has one of the frames displayed in the entryway of his apartment. I find this particular phenomenon amusing because the person in the image is so recognizable, but it’s always a picture of them you’ve never seen before. It’s almost as if the style of the headshot and the context of the frame wants to render them anonymous, but it’s impossible. Has anyone ever hung an art show of just picture frames with the “stock” images of celebrities they came with? Seems like a layup.