From Gimlet, this is Replyall. I'm Alex Goldman.

A couple months ago, I heard from this guy named John Erkard. He's a friend of PJs.

And he wanted to talk to me because he'd become obsessed with this website called Animation

Plaza, which was home to this trove of unbelievably weird gifts. And he couldn't for the life

of him figure out where the hell these came from or what kind of person would have made

them. Some of them, as you'll see in a little bit, we'll sort of veer into this kind of

libertarian patriotic zone. Here's one of the libertarian gifts.

Okay. All right. To describe this, it is a man shaking his head and terror, holding

a sign that says taxes. Well, behind him, Uncle Sam literally tightens a screw in his

butt. Yeah, it's not very subtle. The gifts are these crude 3D cartoons that sort of look

like the Alimic Beal Baby or early Pixar animation tests. And the characters in these

gifts, they have this really weird uniformity. Huge eyes, huge hands, kind of wooden movements.

So for example, there's this caveman. He's got Flintstone pants on. He's got a shark

tooth necklace. He's got a unibrow. And he is bringing a dollar bill to his mouth, chomping

on it a couple times and then taking it out of his mouth again. And this repeats over and

over and over again. I've sort of fallen in love with the gifts. And

my co-workers at work, we are communicating through these gifts. They're sort of part of our

family and like we kind of build stories around them and create original pieces of artwork

with them. And it's easy to sort of think that somewhere in the depths of the internet,

all of these characters are living together as a family.

Now I'm sure that when you think of gifts, you're thinking of a moment snipped out of a

movie or a TV show put on repeat with no sound. Like a scene from Adventure Time or the

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