Photo of the Year: A Cracked 64 ripoff

The beginning of the year is the time to look back on what has just passed us by - through Top of the Year lists.  While many will be publishing their lists of the best of 2012, I'm more interested in what happens over at Cracked; they try to identify what typified the year that was.  This is, to me, far more interesting, and so, I will be offering my take on the same 8 categories that Cracked's columnists wrote on.

Movie

Tweet

Person

Song

Video Game

*     *     *

Photo of the Year

I'm honestly not sure if this is cheating or not.  Are gifs (or is that .gifs?  Or GIFs?  I really am not sure.) eligible for this category?  Hmm, I'm not sure, but I'm going with it anyway, because I can link to this GIF through Blogger's 'insert image' button.

Felix Baumgertner's freefall was one of the most amazing videos I watched this year, and, in true 2012 form, it was pretty much immediately turned into a meme.

No, this isn't a cop out, GIF is the American word of the year, according to Oxford American Dictionary.  While it's certainly not a new concept, GIFs are a cultural product of the Internet.  Our propensity to turn everything into a meme knows no bounds.

Now, maybe I'm looking into this too much, but YOLO was also on the shortlist for word of the year...

Runner Up: Mars

This is seriously the coolest thing ever.  Some scientist was likely stoned out of his mind, and thought "Dude, what if we just send a camera to Mars," and in 2012, after several expeditions, Curiostiy is the best Mars rover we've sent up.  No big deal, just sending a rover up to Mars.  Enjoy the pics it sends back.  Standard stuff, apparently.