fanworks

Frinkiac, the incredible Simpsons screenshot search engine, has undergone a massive upgrade. Every episode has been added, which you can see on a handy navigator page (previously it only went up to Season 17, less than half the entire series). There are also improvements to the gif generator, and the meme creator has been supplanted with a “comic maker” that spits out multiple framegrabs of a scene with more options, including new fonts. These changes also apply to its Futurama counterpart, Morbotron.

Paul Kehrer, one of the developers, outlined all the changes and technical mumbojumbo in a blog post, where he also mentions some future plans:

Visual search! We’ve been working on this for a while, but we’re not happy with the results yet so it’s feature flagged off. The biggest challenge is that the visual models which describe scenes are not good at identifying characters. We need to improve character recognition and integrate it with scene descriptions to provide acceptable visual search results and that remains a work in progress. For example, it is not enough to know that Homer, Bart, and Moe are in a scene, we need the textual description to correctly identify which characters are performing which actions. We make no promises on dates (we did neglect this site for nearly ten years after all), but keep an eye out.

Frinkiac initially launched in February 2016 and is probably the only useful tech innovation in the past decade (well, I guess the COVID vaccine was good too). Younger Simpsons fans will never know what a pain in the ass it was finding the right screencap prior to its creation, let alone create gifs. May it continue living on forever.