For reasons I don’t fully understand, the Internet Archive’s crawler had a lot of trouble capturing porn pages on Tumblr over the years. Even when it got the text and comments on a particular post, the image was often not captured. The cultural loss of the curated porn collections on Tumblr when Yahoo took the porn blogs dark was painful enough, but the fact that such a small portion is archived tends to intensify the pang.

The loss seems even more severe in the realm of animated porn .gif clips, which were an art form almost unique to Tumblr. Perhaps because of the file sizes, these seem generally to have been archived less successfully than single-image .jpg files. But a few of these Tumblr ghosts were saved.

Here’s a classic example: an enthusiastic blowjob animation prepared by DarkMinstrel007 back in 2013. Don’t let anybody tell you that making porn .gifs isn’t an art form. You could call it curation if you prefer, but if so, all you’ve done is established that curation, too, is art-making.

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