Are you sick of reading about selfies? Are you tired of hearing about how those pictures you took of yourself on vacation last month are evidence of narcissism, but also maybe of empowerment, but also probably of the click-by-click erosion of Culture at Large? Could you do without another think piece analyzing the adoption of the word "selfie"? Or another indignant commentary on the glittery monstrosity that is the selfie sombrero?
Me, too. And yet this is, I should warn you, another thing about selfies. Yeah, another one. Sorry. It's just that, today, JibJab—the people who brought you those satirical animated videos in the late '90s and early aughts—released a new messaging app: one that lets you paste a picture of your face onto a moving character, creating a selfie-fied version of an animated GIF. (Remember "Elf Yourself"? It's like that—but less elf-y, more selfie.)
You can use the app to graft images of your face onto, among other settings, moving images of: classic cartoons. And Jack Nicholson movies. And cats.
The grafting is awkward. So are the animations themselves. The most obvious way to describe this new strain of selfie is "delightful." The second-most-obvious is "absurd."