One thing I've always visually loved on a good animated gif is the disconnect between static elements and motion, like the rain on this one.

Wow, that is equally cool and creepy at the same time.

CONSTANT, BELIEVING! HOLD ON TO THAT FEELING!

rrrrrrriiiiiiighhhhhhtttt

one of my recent favorites.

I love this post.

Based on the first five or so pages, this guy only likes about 5 movies/directors.

I agree, animated gifs are much better than videos for most things. And the absence of sound is a big reason why. It's usually just some indistinct yelling, or a horrible pop song dubbed on. Nothing like clicking on a funny link at an insomniac 3 AM and having music start booming out.

@8 And if you want sound, there's always ytmnd.

I'm so confused. YouTube used to be the new Kazaa, which used to be the new .GIFs.

Yeah, I'm with @9. Has Paul come out of a time machine from 10 years ago?

I like .gifs. The lack of sound and that they don't tax my old powerbook like annoying flash animations do or used to do until I installed an application for Safari that blocked all flash.

paul this post is a little bit lame. where are the editors around here?

Who says they need to lack sound?

Since I joined Tumblr, I've created a subfolder in my pictures file just for gifs. They're so charmingly succinct.

The thing about gifs is that they only support a 256 color palette, so they end up looking exceedingly ugly.

Also, they seem to tax my non-windows browsers due to crappy libraries or something.

I really wish png had implemented animations in the main spec.

Wow. Paul post another clueless time warp trend prediction.

I've told my browser to block animated gifs since 2004. It's those idiotic forum emoticons-for-the-literal-minded I can't bear.

AND they are the illustration of choice for the Wizarding paper, The Daily Prophet.

You guys have no idea how far over my head you're talking with all this stuff. I thought this was kinda cool until I read some of the comments, so it shows you how tech-unsaavy I am. Lets see, I can log into SLOG, copy and paste (well most stuff, but I don't know how to attach a picture or put a box around a comment), with some help I was able to upload an avatar, and I can usually edit, preview and post comments although sometimes all or part of the comment falls off. Oh, and I can send a text message in a pinch as long as it's going to a phone number, but I don't know how to do those "text COCK to 22822" things. I was going to have my 3-1/2 year old niece and nephew teach me how to do the text thing (not the COCK one) but the last time my niece saw my cell phone she pointed and said "WHAT IS THAT?" So maybe not.

The only problem with GIFs is that they allow some wiseass to drop one that initially appears to be static into an advice thread on a forum somewhere, and then something jumps out at you and scares you shitless. I've learned my lesson; I always check the file extension before opening.
There are some excellent GIFs, though. Like this.

josh bomb @5, i only had yours up for a second - i got too scared that something awful was gonna leap out of that shower. does that happen?

@23 nope, it fools you into waiting for the live feed that never ever ever happens.

@22- Well played.