On December 6, 2013, Giant Bomb aired an episode of their weekly show "Unprofessional Fridays"3. During the stream, Jeff Gerstmann was playing a space farming game called Starbound and casually remarked, "I've been doing some farming with my hoe here"2. While others on the stream reacted more overtly, Scanlon's response was a subtle, almost involuntary double-take and blink. It was a blink-and-you-miss-it moment buried in a multi-hour stream7.

Scanlon himself didn't even remember doing it. "It was one joke in a two-hour stream that we did every week, and a very forgettable moment for me at the time," he told Sky News2.

Blinking White Guy crossed over from internet joke to genuine mainstream awareness faster than most memes. Scanlon appeared on Good Morning America in December 2017 to discuss his unintentional fame7. The GIF was named the most popular GIF of 2017 by Tenor and ranked second on Giphy's annual list8.

What sets this meme apart is what Scanlon did with the attention. Rather than cashing in on merch or brand deals, he directed his visibility toward raising money for the National MS Society. His 2019 Bike MS fundraiser raised over $34,000, and he went on to use his platform for the cause year after year4. As one Bored Panda commenter put it: "'blinking' white guy is now 'b(l)i(n)king' white guy"4.

The meme also became a case study in "delayed virality," where content sits dormant for years before the right context launches it into the mainstream. The gap between the 2013 clip, the 2015 first use, and the 2017 explosion shows how unpredictable internet fame can be7.

The story of Blinking White Guy begins not with the meme itself but with Giant Bomb, a gaming website born out of controversy. Jeff Gerstmann was fired from GameSpot in 2007 over a review dispute, and several colleagues followed him out the door1. Together they built Giant Bomb into a site known for its casual, unscripted video content. Drew Scanlon joined as an intern in 2008 and became a key part of the team's on-camera presence1.

By 2013, the team had a well-established weekly show called Unprofessional Fridays, where staff would play games and riff on whatever came up. The December 6 episode was unremarkable by their standards. Gerstmann was playing Starbound and made a mildly suggestive comment about "farming with my hoe"2. Scanlon's barely perceptible double-take was just one of thousands of small moments across years of streaming. Nobody flagged it as special7.

For nearly two years, the moment existed only in Giant Bomb's video archive. The Giant Bomb community had a habit of making GIFs from their shows, and at some point someone clipped Scanlon's blink. But it stayed inside that bubble until July 2015, when NeoGAF user Tokubetsu used it as a reaction to a heated album debate7. Even then, the GIF didn't break out. It spent another year and a half as an inside joke among gaming forum regulars3.

February 2017 changed everything. A student tweeted the GIF alongside a joke about being overwhelmed in biology class, and it blew up8. The tweet's brilliance was in its universality. You didn't need to know who Drew Scanlon was or what Giant Bomb was. You just needed to have experienced a moment of quiet shock at something dumb2. Within days, the GIF was everywhere on Twitter, attached to jokes about adulting, politics, relationships, and pretty much everything else.

Scanlon watched it happen in real time. "There were animated GIFs made of us all the time, but this was the first one that jumped species from our own little video game community to the internet at large," he told Sky News2. Friends and strangers started sending it to him. "I had people saying stuff like, 'my mum just sent this to me on Facebook, she doesn't even know who you are'"2.

The meme's staying power through 2017 was partly a product of the times. As Scanlon put it: "I think the pervasiveness of it also has to do with the fact that there are so many crazy things happening in 2017. If it was more of a calmer year maybe we wouldn't see it as much"8. By year's end, it was officially one of the biggest GIFs on the internet, ranking second on Giphy's annual list and first on Tenor8. Scanlon even did a segment on Good Morning America7.

Scanlon left Giant Bomb in 2017 to start Cloth Map, a travel documentary series exploring how games bring people together around the world2. He was deliberately low-key about his meme status for a while. "I've been resistant because it feels like I don't own it," he explained. "It was created by the internet and I didn't have anything to do with it. It would feel to me like the band wearing the band's T-shirt"2.

That changed in 2019 when Scanlon decided to put his fame to work for charity. Two close friends of his were affected by multiple sclerosis, and he signed up for Bike MS, a 120-mile cycling event in California4. He tweeted the GIF with the caption: "Hi Internet! I'm Drew and THIS IS MY FACE. If this GIF has ever brought you joy in the past, I humbly ask you to consider making a donation to the National MS Society"2. The tweet got over 22,000 retweets. His original goal was $10,000, but he smashed through it quickly2. His team, The Big El West, finished 7th out of 134 teams, and Scanlon raised over $34,611 for MS research4. He went on to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for the cause in subsequent years7.

Also in August 2019, the meme mutated into a new format. The multi-panel "First Guy To" template used sequential frames from the original GIF to tell micro-stories, showing a character's reaction changing over a few seconds6. This gave the Blinking White Guy meme an entirely new use case beyond simple reaction posting.

Today, the GIF is still one of the most recognized reaction images on the internet. It works because of its restraint. There's no screaming, no exaggerated shock. Just a quiet, relatable moment of "did that really just happen?" And behind it is a guy who turned that moment into real good4.