Oakland, California-based stop motion/GIF artist Headexplodie (aka Annie Wong) thinks that society is overreacting to menstruation, an ordinary biological process that affects half our population. That's why she created "Ovary Actions" (get it...? Overreactions = Ovary Actions), an ongoing series of lovely animated gifs based on period euphemisms. She's hoping they'll take some of the stigma out of "that time of the month."
She writes:
I’m interested in the cultural paradox that exists around menstruation. Although it’s an ordinary and healthy part of life, we treat it as if it were a mysterious thing which leaves us with a confused and silly view of it....
I just think it’d be cool if we could all be more chill and comfortable with talking about this thing that for so long has been painted with a broad brush of negativity.
I personally used to think about my periods as something to be ashamed of, to hide, something that made me feel absolutely gross. But since embarking on this project I’ve opened myself up to various menstrual educators, artists, and entrepreneurs, and seeing their work in my daily feed makes periods seem totally normal. Being able to talk openly about it with my friends has done the same. Normalizing periods is the first step in being able to take better care of our reproductive health.
"Panty Painting" 🔴 It would be comforting to think that whenever I experience a period leak that I haven’t “ruined” my panties, I’ve just coated a canvas in crimson!
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Who needs mp4 and the mystery meat data within? Kornel Lesiński's
lossygif compresses GIF images, including animations, at the cost of noise. Though GIF does not offer true lossy compression, superimposing long horizontal lines of identical pixels gets the job done before encoding. Photoshop already does this, but this is better at it and it's free.
See also
Gifski, the author's high-definition GIF movie encoder. It does the exact opposite thing, manipulating the GIF format into showing thousands of colors per frame at the cost of massive file sizes.
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Click play below and, er, enjoy.
(via Daily Grail) Read the rest
The image you see here is a still frame from a splendid cinemagraph—a seamlessly-looping short video or GIF—that does not do the original justice. Atlas Obscura's Anika Burgess writes on the strange majesty of Ray Collins and Armand Dijcks' cinemgraphs of waves, where the captured natural beauty becomes weird, even threatening, in the eternally-recurring moment.
“The idea was to stretch out the 1/8000th [of a] second during which the image was created into infinity. In a lot of my work, I like to mess with people’s minds a little, and this contrast between a very short time span being stretched infinitely long, and between motion and stillness is a perfect example of that.”
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Wikipedia: "Pomacea canaliculata eggs.
Several apple snail genera (Pomacea, Pila and Asolene/Pomella) deposit eggs above the waterline in calcareous clutches. This remarkable strategy of aquatic snails protects the eggs against predation by fish and other aquatic inhabitants." [Source (via JWZ)]
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Adam Pizurny's Tumblr is an endless font of stupendous and surreal GIFs.
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The Reaction GIF generator takes a brief video of you and spits out a GIF, thereby meeting your need for a brief animation of your confusion, dismay and horror to post in blog comments or on social networking platforms.
I don't have a webcam at the moment, but this particular GIF is uncannily like me every time I have the thought "I wonder what's going on on Twitter."
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The gif was created from a 2012 project called Asobi by Japanese art student Yasutoki Kariya of Musashino Art University.
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Writer and animator Natalie Gray creates a lot of great fan art, but one of her coolest pieces is this Harry Potter-themed “What do wizards have in their pockets” collection. The four GIFs represent the four Marauders: James Potter, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and Peter Pettigrew. Read the rest
Uploaded by redditor Ins1der, who attributes it to Instagram user Cblimagery, an Indiana resident.
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The Internet Archive has a wonderful front-end: GifCities, a search engine for the myriad of GIFs that once graced legendary website hosting service Geocities. [via Andy Baio]
GifCities: The Geocities Animated Gif Search Engine was a special project of the Internet Archive done as part of our 20th Anniversary to highlight and celebrate fun aspects of the amazing history of the web as represented in the web archive and the Wayback Machine. Geocities was an early web hosting service, started in 1994 and acquired by Yahoo in 1999, with which users could create their own custom websites. The platform hosted over 38 million user-built pages and was at one time the third most visited site on the web. In 2009, Yahoo announced it was closing down the service, at which point the Internet Archive attempted to archive as much of the content as possible. ... Mining this collection, we extracted over 4,500,000 animated GIFs (1,600,000 unique images) and then used the filenames and directory path text to build a best-effort “full text” search engine. Each GIF also links back to the original Geocities page on which it was embedded (and some of these pages are even more awesome than the GIFs).
If you're just here for the under construction GIFs, here are all of them. Read the rest
