Frinkiac – 3M "The Simpsons" Screencaps

Posted by GlumWoodpecker 7 days ago

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Comments

Comment by reaperhulk 3 days ago

Maybe for our tenth anniversary we should update the codebase and finish some features we haven’t touched in a decade…

Comment by davnicwil 2 days ago

A friend of mine uses frinkiac all the time, I wasn't sure where he was sourcing all these quotes/memes from until he told me about it a few months ago.

Awesome to see you're on HN. I'll take the opportunity to say thanks for this service! We're of that cohort who grew up on the simpsons and it formed a large part (a majority?) of our humour.

Brings joy and laughs to my friend group at least!

Comment by redrix 3 days ago

Thank you for putting together and maintaining Frinkiac!

I use Frinkiac multiple times a week to share memes with friends. We all grew up watching S1-8 weeknights over dinner and can quote those episodes almost flawlessly.

Would love to read some blog posts on how the site works, anecdotes from 10 years of maintaining it, legal troubles faced (etc)!

Comment by 3 days ago

Comment by milchek 4 days ago

"Medium Setting!" - https://frinkiac.com/gif/S03E22/319309/322862/

The GIF generator works well. Nice work!

You could probably delete some of the frames that have credits shown over them - since you have plenty of material already anyway, for example: https://frinkiac.com/caption/S17E16/137763 or https://frinkiac.com/caption/S16E09/162162

Comment by monkpit 4 days ago

Frinkiac has been around for at least a decade :)

Comment by reaperhulk 4 days ago

We launched Feb 2, 2016 so almost a decade since then! Of course, we ran it for just ourselves a bit longer so it’s been slightly over a decade at this point.

Comment by deanputney 1 day ago

Have you written about the tech behind Frinkiac and Morbotron at all? I'm super curious how it works (although I'm sure I could guess), and also how it might be generalized for other shows. Hosting infrastructure and cost to run would be interesting too!

Comment by MBCook 4 days ago

Has it been that long? I remember having a ton of fun with it when it first launched.

Great job.

Comment by hemmert 4 days ago

Congratulations, really nice! I wasn’t aware of this.

Comment by jasongill 4 days ago

I've always wished the GIF generator could embed the subtitle like the single frame "make a meme" feature can, but it does work surprisingly well

Comment by ChrisKnott 4 days ago

You can do this [0] just press Add Meme after Make GIF.

[0] https://frinkiac.com/video/S06E08/ZzAEDYhlQxZ5l2A8E5aowS1M82...

Comment by jasongill 3 days ago

doh!

Comment by wyldfire 4 days ago

> No one who speaks German can be an evil man.

https://frinkiac.com/caption/S05E02/566865

Comment by GlumWoodpecker 3 days ago

Surprised to find this on the front page today, I posted this four days ago (hovering over the post timestamp confirms this), yet the timestamp says "11 hours ago". Weird.

Comment by zote 3 days ago

Your post was chosen for the second-chance pool https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

Comment by GlumWoodpecker 3 days ago

Thanks for the clarification!

Comment by kotaKat 3 days ago

sometimes you'll also get an email from hn as well letting you know you got a second chance submission ;)

SUBJECT "Your submission <name> will be re-upped"

Comment by JeremyHerrman 4 days ago

shameless plug for a similar site which a friend built, but for dozens of TV shows and movies:

https://amphetamem.es/

Comment by AmbroseBierce 3 days ago

No South park hum? But Rick and Morty is there so it's not a policy against foul-mouthed cartoons; Smiling friends is also missing but perhaps it's too unknown or too recent to be there.

Comment by thejazzman 3 days ago

Pre-AI it’s tedious to find/fix/verify the subtitles — and there are a lot of episodes of South Park. Literally the reason why it’s not there :|

Comment by AmbroseBierce 3 days ago

If you sort the top 50 best rated episodes of all time on IMDb you would already have 90% or the quotes people search for, so I would focus on your those if you ever try to take a stab at it.

Comment by martythemaniak 4 days ago

For enjoyers of classic simpsons, I highly recommend /r/simpsonsshitposting, a delightful blend classic simpsons, absurdist/surrealist/dadaist art, multilayered inside jokes and often NSFW content. It could not exist without The Frinkiac.

Comment by UncleSlacky 3 days ago

Also /r/The_Leftorium...

Comment by uza80 4 days ago

My primary news source.

Comment by dirtybirdnj 3 days ago

The gif maker workflow is fantastic, amazing how smooth it was an the output is clean and crisp. Beautiful UX I practically tripped over this feature without even thinking about it and it worked great.

Comment by mparnisari 4 days ago

I love this website. I wish I could search it in Spanish. I grew up watching the Simpsons in Spanish and I sometimes struggle to find the right clip because I don't know the exact translation

Comment by wyldfire 4 days ago

> Inflammable means flammable?

> What a country!

https://frinkiac.com/caption/S12E18/437896

Comment by paulsmith 3 days ago

I'm glad you shared this because, in my head this Dr. Nick quote is so canonical it must be from the original golden 8 seasons, so it's nice to be reminded there are occasionally good things after! ;^)

Comment by wyldfire 4 days ago

"Bake him away, toys"

https://frinkiac.com/caption/S05E02/1285083

Comment by kristianp 3 days ago

MONEY CAN BE EXCHANGED FOR GOODS AND SERVICES https://frinkiac.com/caption/S05E08/145628

https://frinkiac.com/caption/S05E08/147696

Comment by Theodores 3 days ago

This really works!

I wanted the scene where Homer is pulling an all nighter and orders Marge to put the coffee pot on. Search terms 'coffee pot' and hey presto:

https://frinkiac.com/caption/S15E22/1142350

Comment by hatmanstack 3 days ago

Had no idea this existed and IMHO what the internet was made for. Well played sir. https://frinkiac.com/video/S12E09/5fI0bxc31gXMaJNjLhbIeyRQP6...

Comment by j45 4 days ago

"Max Power" - https://frinkiac.com/video/S10E13/wRtZ0QdDirXfWVwbdZ3jU_8NAE...

Can't find other clips by quote.

Sometimes Grandpa talking about wearing an onion on his belt is important.

It would be great to add the meme mode to the gif rendering so it was captioned.

Comment by acomjean 3 days ago

We used this Max Power quote at work.

https://frinkiac.com/caption/S10E13/786535

Comment by j45 4 days ago

Very cool.

"Max Power" - https://frinkiac.com/video/S10E13/wRtZ0QdDirXfWVwbdZ3jU_8NAE...

Can't find other clips by quote.

Sometimes Grandpa talking about wearing an onion on his belt is important.

Comment by philsnow 3 days ago

Is the reason there isn't a perfect show/movie-to-meme site with All the features and All the shows, that such a site would attract notice from rightsholders and then implode from fending off spurious legal complaints?

Comment by brigham 3 days ago

Playphrase is pretty good

https://www.playphrase.me/#/search?q=spurious&language=en

Comment by ChrisKnott 4 days ago

This is literally my favourite website, I use it several times a week.

I do wish the search was a bit better; it could show the matching quote below the matching frame, and it doesn’t seem to support phrase queries.

A more advanced feature would be searching by speaking character too.

Comment by aizk 4 days ago

Very cool. Maybe add some image embeddings for additional metadata for the search results?

Comment by seg_lol 3 days ago

> I have wasted my life

https://frinkiac.com/caption/S09E04/211961

Comment by horsellama 4 days ago

shameless plug to something similar (albeit less polished) I’ve been hobbying on for Fantozzi and PeepShow (still wip)

https://asdfasdf.fyi

Comment by sefrost 3 days ago

FYI - https://peepshow.gifglobe.com/

Comment by Zee2 4 days ago

Seems like the search is based only on the transcript/dialogue - not an image embedding. Would be super cool to actually use some CLIP/embedding search on these for a more effective fuzzy lookup.

Comment by petercooper 3 days ago

Agreed. If you search for Barney, say, none of the top ten picture him at all and is mostly people speaking to or about him. Even running them through a vision LLM for a list of keywords would yield better results than the subtitles, I suspect.

Comment by redrix 3 days ago

I actually prefer it this way.

When I use Frinkiac, I already know the quote (or at least a few words from it), and I simply want a still or short gif of it (with a customized caption typically).

YMMV of course.

Comment by adzm 4 days ago

How would someone go about doing this, just curious?

Comment by wincy 4 days ago

You’d just run every picture through CLIP, essentially you run an image generator backwards. Instead of text to image like most end users use when using something like stable diffusion (been awhile since I’ve done this), it can do the exact opposite and generate tokens (just words in this case) to describe the input image.

I’d guess famous characters like Bart and Marge and other Simpsons characters would likely be known by the tokenizer so it’d be pretty easy. So then you’d be able to guess.

Feel free to correct me on small details if anyone has this more fresh in their mind but I’m roughly correct here.

Comment by OisinMoran 3 days ago

Some funny related cultural trivia is that often Americans find the hardest thing about integrating into Irish culture is how much we reference the Simpsons in day to day life.

Comment by dalyons 3 days ago

Same as Australia, if you’re a millennial/genx. Only 4 tv channels and one of them was showing endless simpsons repeats in the after school time slot. Almost everyone knows s1-11 references.

Kids these days with their on demand streaming don’t understand the monoculture :)

Comment by redrix 3 days ago

Absolutely! Australian Millennial year. Grew up watching S2-8 every night over dinner on Channel 10 (IIRC), and I sometimes think I could communicate exclusively in Simpsons quotes from that era.

Comment by quotemstr 3 days ago

The span of Simpsons meme literacy is identical to the span of western civilization.

Comment by OisinMoran 3 days ago

Span? Yes. Density? Not as much. I only say it as I've been surprised on several occasions by American friends living here voicing the same thing. I think it may have been in part due to some fortuitous scheduling making it so that literally every Irish person above a certain age has seen a heap of episodes. That and possibly that there wasn't much else on.

Comment by ares623 3 days ago

TIL i'm part Irish

Comment by dan-g 4 days ago

See also: https://morbotron.com/ for Futurama!

Comment by Jordan-117 4 days ago

And https://masterofallscience.com/ for Rick and Morty.

edit: Though it seems to be somewhat outdated.

Comment by evan_ 4 days ago

and https://funcooker.fun/ for 30 Rock. (I think the Frinkiac people used to run a different 30 Rock page but it went away at some point)

Comment by thejazzman 3 days ago

https://amphetamem.es/ For everything else!

Comment by echo42null 3 days ago

cool; https://frinkiac.com/video/S05E02/tcqDQyGgz-EeKltdDceypD3NHA...

Comment by balls187 4 days ago

https://frinkiac.com/caption/S05E16/277226

LOL

Comment by greekrich92 4 days ago

Possibly the best and most important website on the internet

Comment by ThrowawayTestr 3 days ago

I prefer comb.io, it has full clips

Comment by redrix 3 days ago

IMO Frinkiac is hard to beat if you just want to caption a Simpsons image (or gif) and share it directly; particularly with a few words modified to fit the situation.

comb.io is good for those occasions where you need the actual clip with audio.

Just my own opinion of course!

Comment by TYPE_FASTER 4 days ago

mmmmm cromulent

Comment by redrix 3 days ago

You’ve really embiggened this post with your cromulent comment.

Comment by djaowjxj 2 days ago

[dead]

Comment by TZubiri 4 days ago

You know, I tried to look for source code or a downloadable database, to play with a local fork, but I haven't found much.