You wake up one morning and look out of your window. But instead of the familiar scenery, there are enormous walls of pastel-colored scaffolding, scrolling past in various directions as far as the eye can see! Aaaah!!!

Animated GIFs can be ridiculously fun, or ridiculously annoying. Or both at the same time. Usually both.

They’ve somewhat declined in popularity as of late, though whether that fact should be greeted with a moment of silence in commemoration of days gone by — or loud prayers of thanks to the deity of your choice — is perhaps uncertain.  In fact, if you want to see GIF animations online nowadays you have to look for them, rather than merely having to randomly browse for 30 seconds or so.  Seems the only things that move anymore are advertisements — and those are rarely as appealing as bouncing smiley faces.  Or sparkling unicorns.  Or really, really, really surreal . . . things.

Yep, there’s still a few left out there.  Don’t jump out of that window yet.

(Fun fact: you can use animated GIFs as your desktop background in Windows XP and earlier.  Nifty, eh?)