Stirring rhetoric as an effective tool of political communication is dead. Long live funny-face GIFS. Here are the four most important moments of the 2015 State of the Union.

I've been listening to fake guru voices, watching videos of charismatic new age leaders, and making cosmic GIFs for two months, nonstop, as a way to make amends for the emotional damage I inflicted on office drones a few months ago. This—Introspections.me—is the result. I feel like it's warped my mind.

This bizarre GIF of Emma Watson revealing that she's actually Sofia Vergara in a rubber Emma suit has basically swallowed the internet whole this morning. But what the fuck did we just watch? Don't worry, there's an explanation. Kind of.

Remember 2004, when Karl Rove got a dingleberry re-elected president in part by mobilizing conservatives to vote down gay marriage in a bunch of states? Well, it's only taken a decade, but gay marriage is winning. And the pace is picking up.

The thermometer says it's 15 degrees outside right now. Wind chill of -2. Even inside, I can hardly feel my toes. But you know what I can feel? This nice, warm, crackling fire. Feel that? Mmm. Yes. Hot. I could close my eyes and die of frostbite in its warmth, right now.

Beyoncé's Public Tour of Incomparable Greatness and Alarming Indignities continued on Sunday night, as the singer was briefly yanked into the crowd by an overenthusiastic (or perhaps exactly the right amount of enthusiastic) fan during a stop in Sao Paulo.

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As a quick but dramatic way to visualize changes in the landscape, Texas architect Samuel Aston Williams created GIFs out of aerial maps of American cities from the past thirty years. Watch developments spiderweb, woodlands disappear, grids fill in, water sources shrink, and roads extend forever, over and over again!

One of the noblest, most versatile, and yet most underused story-telling mediums available today is the Beyoncé gif.

I'm not a fan of the proliferation of reaction gifs on the internet. Gifs are crutches for people who can't express themselves with words. Also, Gifs frequently cause long, boring debates over the correct pronunciation of "Gif."

You are looking at, more or less, a portrait of the internet over an average 24 hours in 2012—higher usage in yellows and reds; lower in greens and blues—created by an anonymous researcher for the "Internet Census 2012" project. How, exactly, do you gather this much data? Well: not legally, that's for sure.

Looks like anyone hoping to see a grown woman battle a 14-year-old 24-year-old in the press will be going home disappointed; Tina Fey has neither the time nor the patience for you to make her nonexistent feud with Taylor Swift "a thing."

You ask: why do I need a GIF of New York Senator Chuck Schumer nodding creepily at last night's State of the Union address? But you misunderstand: it is not the need that creates the GIF, but the GIF that creates the need.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio gave the Republican response to Obama's State of the Union speech tonight, and while he spoke a lot about protecting his neighbors and a son's love for his mother, he was really just very thirsty. Parched even. Mouth full of steel wool. Tongue is old velcro. Lips stuck to teeth.

This is President Obama doing an exploding fist bump with someone Sen. Mark Kirk (R - Ill.), who had a stroke in 2012, after the president's arrival and before his speech. That's right: not just an exploding fist bump, an exploding fist bump with a Republican. The state of our union is dope, y'all.

There are only two true approaches to being in the audience at a major televised awards show, forever in conflict: full, 100-percent commitment to having the time of your life, and full, 100-percent commitment to not giving a shit. On Sunday night at the Grammys, Taylor Swift took the first path, and Jay-Z took the…

What is Honey Boo Boo, if not America's greatest public intellectual? And what is Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, if not an audiovisual genealogy of continental philosophy? And what is the internet for, if not GIFs that combine high culture and low culture to reveal the instability at such a binary's heart, and also for…