This is the kind of thing that gets ruined if it blows up too big, but we’re going have to trust you guys not to be dicks about it: there’s a website called Dump.fm and it’s just…fantastic.

It was started last year by the impossibly named Ryder Ripps, who looks reaaall pleased with himself for a programming nerd. He’s a 24 year-old artist who is into the internet (he also started InternetArchaeology.org, which documents the clipart of the early internet and is hilarious).

You know that thing you do with your pals where you start out sending a picture to answer an email and then it turns into this incredibly long thread where you’ve spent all day exchanging weird pictures and got no work done? What Ryder Ripps has done is distill the essence of that into a website: it’s one big chatroom where the best and worst gifs and jpegs of the interwebz are spunked into your brain by the greatest and coolest internet dicks in the world: artsy kids with Macbooks.

It’s not just like browsing image blogs on Google Reader, because here you can contribute, stir things up by dropping your own weird shit into the melting pot (the mix of metaphors and slang in this sentence are gross) and go for it.

If you watch it long enough you’ll also see that there’s almost a language and an etiquette developing among the harder-core users, like emoticons but with pictures. Think about that. Deep.

This week there’s an exhibition of the best gifs’n’pegs on Dump at the 319 Scholes Gallery in Brooklyn. You missed the opening but maybe head over anyway, it’s not all about free booze all the time.

Here‘s a slightly more in depth piece on Dump, and below are some Gifs from Dump’s vaults.