Remember the old days of the Internet, when music meant MIDIs, video meant tiny RealPlayer clips, and porn meant 16-color fleshtones? Animated GIFs boast some of that retro feel, reminding me of a time before Flash animation and embedded high-def movies. This archaic art form has caught on with bloggers, especially the trendy ones using platforms like Tumblr and Posterous. Old becomes new, retro is in, yadda yadda. Let's look at some funny moving pictures from eight animated GIF blogs.

1. GIF Party

My personal favorite, Molly Lambert's GIF Party is "a place where GIFs hang out, and do whatever!" Molly specializes in TV clips taken out of context. For example, the four-second shot from Gossip Girl, below, shows how dumb it looks when you show a writer writing. In public. On a laptop. On a newspaper stand. Oh god please somebody mug him.

2. Loopable

These GIFs are particularly hypnotic since they loop seamlessly. This Donkey Kong loop even has a blank background. Ideal for making forum avatars or Twitter icons.

3. Daily GIF Blog

The presentation is messy, but this blog has some of the longest storytelling GIFs, like this crutch skate trick.

4. Sally McKay

Sally's GIF collection is particularly wild. She specializes in natural-science-related animations.

5. Posterous: Animated GIF

This page collects every post tagged "animatedgif" from the web service Posterous, so it's a grab-bag from a variety of users.

6. GIF Anime

While this often-NSFW blog does specialize in anime, the creators throw in in plenty of interesting photo GIFs and other hand-drawn animations.

7. Love GIFs

Both the movie clips and handdrawn animations in this collection are just a couple of frames long, for a more classic, low-bandwidth feel, which seems perfect for this moment from The Breakfast Club.

8. Three Frames

This blog is the pinnacle of artistic limitation, as each GIF contains just three consecutive frames from a feature film. Readers make a game of guessing the movies. Can you recognize this one? (Really, can you? I have no clue and now I wanna see it.)