A puff of purple smoke seeps in and voila! Crystal appears!
Hello fine feline friends! (This greeting also extends to non-felines)
If you spend any amount of time on the internet you may have heard of these things called GIFS which stands for Graphic Interchange Format.
Sadly it doesn't stand for Griffin Intelligence Fedeation, although i'm sure that exists somewhere in the multiverse.
As you will also know if you've spend any amount of time on the internet is that GIF are glorious magic things that magically move and repeat and you ogle at them over and over and over.
Now I do love GIFs just as much as the next rabid reader, to be able to express an emotion in a picture that MOVES is such a wonderfully delicious feeling! I especially love animal GIFs becuase, animals + pictures + MOVEMENT = Perfection
Exhibit A of friendly GIFS that DON'T frighten me:
Animal GIFs are good because a) Animals, and b) animals are something that exists and everyone else who sees it can recognize and say, yes, this is a creature who is probably not human, oh look it's a meerkat with googly eyes, and laugh and swoon at the little animals accordingly.
Good GIFs are also ones from cartoons/things I actually know of i.e. Harry Potter, Sesame Street, ect.
Such as...
(because what else is there to talk about besides the upcoming US elections??)
These I know EXACTLY where they are coming from and what happened and why THAT EXPRESSION HAPPENED IN THE FIRST PLACE! I can therefore say, yes, I like this GIF, this is what it comes from la dee da, and proceed with my life.
Here is where the frightening part comes in!
If you do not want to hear about frightening GIFs because you believe that mayonnaise is much scarier, then please just look at the pretty pictures and ooh ah and proceed with your life, because this is about to get ranty and mildly irrational.
Say there is a GIF like this
Yes, the expression is marvelous, the emotion took the nail on the head and hit it precisely on the fear and anxiety I am feeling at the moment (Am I overreacting? ABSOLUTELY NOT!)
But the problem is that I have no idea where this GIF came from, what show/movie/video/world. And that is NOT OKAY. I have no idea the context where this was used AT ALL and whether something horribly inappropriate or disturbing has just happened and I go willy nilly posting it other places on the internet oblivious in my GIFing.
And to make matters even worse the spiders who crawl into this blog (i.e. lovely readers) who recognize this GIF say, oh Crystal, I love that movie/video/show and start asking me about it and how lovely it is and try to convert me to their fandom cults and I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what is going on and I am left frantically googling what in the world this and just sitting there an ignorant puddle of awkward ooze! AWKWARD OOZE I TELL YOU!
This my friends is why I avoid GIFs that I don't know the people involved as a general rule, except in the most dire circumstances (i.e. the GIF is TOO PERFECT to abstain from using!)
But animal GIFs are good, and Harry Potter...need I say more?
_Crystal_
Leave a comment with your thinkity thoughts! Do you ever have a (perfectly rational) fear of using unknown GIFs? (Likely) Or am I just crazy? (Highly likely)
