64 Bits Meme Original

[Bonifacia Cramm]

64Bits, 32 Bits, 16 Bits refers to a viral clip from the 2013 YouTube video Tiger Electronic Games by The Angry Video Game Nerd in which he counts down from 64 bits to 1/4 bits and shouts "the wrist game!" In November 2018, a video in which the quality of the video decreased together with the countdown went viral, spawning a meme format in January 2021.

On September 6th, 2013, YouTuber The Angry Video Game Nerd (AVNG) uploaded[1] a video titled "Tiger Electronic Games" in which he reviewed a number of handheld LCD games manufactured by Tiger Electronic Games. At 12:27 mark, AVNG introduces Batman Returns game watch produced by the company (video shown below). The video received over 12.3 million views in eight years.

The video did not see further spread until on November 19th, 2018, YouTube[3] user funkymonkey2K (authorship unconfirmed) uploaded an edit in which the video and audio quality decreased together with the countdown, as if to illustrate the lower quality of graphic and audio abilities of lower-bit consoles. The video received over 72,000 views in two years (shown below, left).

In late November 2018, the video received viral spread online. For example, on November 24th, 2018, Twitter[4][5] user @SeclusiveBlue reposted the video (tweet no longer available). On November 26th and 27th, 2018, YouTube[6][7] users TheGreatBoiMan and Lakitu64 reposted the video, with the reuploads gaining over 490,000 and 256,000 views, respectively.

On October 25th, 2019, YouTube[8] user 3gp Blingee uploaded a similar meme, with the video ending with an animation of AVGN pointing at the game watch (shown below, right). The video received over 957,000 views in one year.

On November 20th, 2020, YouTube[9] user Foxy Animates posted the earliest known edit inspired by the viral meme, with a drawn image of a wolf getting progressively more pixelated. The video received 5,400 views in three months (shown below, left) and preceded the trend rather than spawning it. On December 2nd, 2020, YouTube[10] user BBPT.V uploaded an edit in which a stick figure got more pixelated, with the video gaining nearly 600,000 views in two months (shown below, right).

The trend did not become viral until mid-January 2021, when the the original video and BBPT.V's meme started being recommended by the YouTube algorithm. On January 14th, 2020, YouTube[11] user Skoptograp posted a Minecraft meme that received over 250,000 views in one week (shown below, left). On the same day, YouTube[12] user arutama. posted a Delivery Dance meme that gained nearly 30,000 views in the same period (shown below, right).

The format can contain up to 8 bits per pixel, allowing a single image to reference its own palette of up to 256 different colors chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space. It can also represent multiple images in a file, which can be used for animations, and allows a separate palette of up to 256 colors for each frame. These palette limitations make GIF less suitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with color gradients but well-suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.

While once in widespread usage on the World Wide Web because of its wide implementation and portability between applications and operating systems, usage of the format has declined for space and quality reasons, often being replaced with video formats such as the MP4 file format. These replacements, in turn, are often termed "GIFs" despite having no relation to the original file format.[3]

CompuServe encouraged the adoption of GIF by providing downloadable conversion utilities for many computers. By December 1987, for example, an Apple IIGS user could view pictures created on an Atari ST or Commodore 64.[4] GIF was one of the first two image formats commonly used on Web sites, the other being the black-and-white XBM.[5]

The optional interlacing feature, which stores image scan lines out of order in such a fashion that even a partially downloaded image was somewhat recognizable, also helped GIF's popularity,[6] as a user could abort the download if it was not what was required.

As a noun, the word GIF is found in the newer editions of many dictionaries. In 2012, the American wing of the Oxford University Press recognized GIF as a verb as well, meaning "to create a GIF file", as in "GIFing was the perfect medium for sharing scenes from the Summer Olympics". The press's lexicographers voted it their word of the year, saying that GIFs have evolved into "a tool with serious applications including research and journalism".[10][11]

Dictionary.com[16] cites both pronunciations, indicating /dʒɪf/ as the primary pronunciation, while Cambridge Dictionary of American English[17] offers only the hard-g pronunciation. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary[18] and Oxford Dictionaries cite both pronunciations, but place the hard g first: /ɡɪf, dʒɪf/.[19][20][21][22] The New Oxford American Dictionary gave only /dʒɪf/ in its second edition[23] but updated it to /dʒɪf, ɡɪf/ in the third edition.[24]

The disagreement over the pronunciation has led to heated Internet debate. On the occasion of receiving a lifetime achievement award at the 2013 Webby Awards ceremony, Wilhite publicly rejected the hard-g pronunciation;[13][25][26] his speech led to more than 17,000 posts on Twitter and dozens of news articles.[27] The White House[13] and the TV program Jeopardy! also entered the debate in 2013.[26] In February 2020, The J.M. Smucker Company, the owners of the Jif brand, partnered with the animated image database and search engine Giphy to release a limited-edition "Jif vs. GIF" (hashtagged as #JIFvsGIF) jar of peanut butter that had a label humorously declaring the soft-g pronunciation to refer exclusively to the peanut butter, and GIF to be exclusively pronounced with the hard-g pronunciation.[28]

GIFs are suitable for sharp-edged line art with a limited number of colors, such as logos. This takes advantage of the format's lossless compression, which favors flat areas of uniform color with well defined edges.[29] They can also be used to store low-color sprite data for games.[30] GIFs can be used for small animations and low-resolution video clips, or as reactions in online messaging used to convey emotion and feelings instead of using words. They are popular on social media platforms such as Tumblr,[31] Facebook and Twitter.[32]

Conceptually, a GIF file describes a fixed-sized graphical area (the "logical screen") populated with zero or more "images". Many GIF files have a single image that fills the entire logical screen. Others divide the logical screen into separate sub-images. The images may also function as animation frames in an animated GIF file, but again these need not fill the entire logical screen.

GIF files start with a fixed-length header ("GIF87a" or "GIF89a") giving the version, followed by a fixed-length Logical Screen Descriptor giving the pixel dimensions and other characteristics of the logical screen. The screen descriptor may also specify the presence and size of a Global Color Table (GCT), which follows next if present.

An image starts with a fixed-length Image Descriptor, which may specify the presence and size of a Local Color Table (which follows next if present). The image data follows: one byte giving the bit width of the unencoded symbols (which must be at least 2 bits wide, even for bi-color images), followed by a series of sub-blocks containing the LZW-encoded data.

Extension blocks (blocks that "extend" the 87a definition via a mechanism already defined in the 87a spec) consist of the sentinel, an additional byte specifying the type of extension, and a series of sub-blocks with the extension data. Extension blocks that modify an image (like the Graphic Control Extension that specifies the optional animation delay time and optional transparent background color) must immediately precede the segment with the image they refer to.

This structure allows the file to be parsed even if not all parts are understood. A GIF marked 87a may contain extension blocks; the intent is that a decoder can read and display the file without the features covered in extensions it does not understand.

Each frame can designate one index as a "transparent background color": any pixel assigned this index takes on the color of the pixel in the same position from the background, which may have been determined by a previous frame of animation.

Many techniques, collectively called dithering, have been developed to approximate a wider range of colors with a small color palette by using pixels of two or more colors to approximate in-between colors. These techniques sacrifice spatial resolution to approximate deeper color resolution. While not part of the GIF specification, dithering can be used in images subsequently encoded as GIF images. This is often not an ideal solution for GIF images, both because the loss of spatial resolution typically makes an image look fuzzy on the screen, and because the dithering patterns often interfere with the compressibility of the image data, working against GIF's main purpose.

In the early days of graphical web browsers[when?], graphics cards with 8-bit buffers (allowing only 256 colors) were common and it was fairly common to make GIF images using the websafe palette.[according to whom?] This ensured predictable display, but severely limited the choice of colors. When 24-bit color became the norm, palettes could instead be populated with the optimum colors for individual images.

A small color table may suffice for small images, and keeping the color table small allows the file to be downloaded faster. Both the 87a and 89a specifications allow color tables of 2n colors for any n from 1 through 8. Most graphics applications will read and display GIF images with any of these table sizes; but some do not support all sizes when creating images. Tables of 2, 16, and 256 colors are widely supported.

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