SomethingAwful and the Image Macro

2002

An animated Photoshop Phriday entry of the kind SomethingAwful's goons industrialized after 2002, the rotating-image grammar that 4chan would inherit and Tumblr would scale. Place: Forums of SomethingAwful, somethingawful.com Figures: Richard Kyanka (Lowtax), site founder · the SA Forums Goons Lowtax launches the weekly Photoshop Phriday and Comedy Goldmine threads on the SomethingAwful Forums in 2001-2002. Each week the SA Goons take a source image (a photograph, a movie still, a news screenshot) and produce dozens of edited variants competing for laughs. The threads incubate the visual grammar of the modern image macro: bold Impact-font captions, exaggerated MS Paint effects, the deliberately-crude versus the technically-impressive. Many of the threads include short looping animations. The GIF, on a forum where every member is loading every page over residential broadband or worse, is the only animated format that loads fast enough to be worth posting. The medium constrains the joke; the joke shapes the medium.