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.
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!
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!
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)!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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! ;^)
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
"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
Frinkiac has been around for at least a decade :)
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.
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!
Has it been that long? I remember having a ton of fun with it when it first launched.
Great job.
Congratulations, really nice! I wasn’t aware of this.
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
You can do this [0] just press Add Meme after Make GIF.
[0] https://frinkiac.com/video/S06E08/ZzAEDYhlQxZ5l2A8E5aowS1M82...
doh!
Maybe for our tenth anniversary we should update the codebase and finish some features we haven’t touched in a decade…
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!
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)!
> No one who speaks German can be an evil man.
https://frinkiac.com/caption/S05E02/566865
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.
Your post was chosen for the second-chance pool https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
Thanks for the clarification!
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"
shameless plug for a similar site which a friend built, but for dozens of TV shows and movies:
https://amphetamem.es/
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.
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 :|
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.
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.
Also /r/The_Leftorium...
My primary news source.
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.
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
> Inflammable means flammable?
> What a country!
https://frinkiac.com/caption/S12E18/437896
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! ;^)
"Bake him away, toys"
https://frinkiac.com/caption/S05E02/1285083
MONEY CAN BE EXCHANGED FOR GOODS AND SERVICES https://frinkiac.com/caption/S05E08/145628
https://frinkiac.com/caption/S05E08/147696
"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.
We used this Max Power quote at work.
https://frinkiac.com/caption/S10E13/786535
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
Had no idea this existed and IMHO what the internet was made for. Well played sir. https://frinkiac.com/video/S12E09/5fI0bxc31gXMaJNjLhbIeyRQP6...
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.
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.
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?
Playphrase is pretty good
https://www.playphrase.me/#/search?q=spurious&language=en
Very cool. Maybe add some image embeddings for additional metadata for the search results?
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.
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.
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.
How would someone go about doing this, just curious?
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.
shameless plug to something similar (albeit less polished) I’ve been hobbying on for Fantozzi and PeepShow (still wip)
https://asdfasdf.fyi
FYI - https://peepshow.gifglobe.com/
See also: https://morbotron.com/ for Futurama!
And https://masterofallscience.com/ for Rick and Morty.
edit: Though it seems to be somewhat outdated.
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)
https://amphetamem.es/ For everything else!
> I have wasted my life
https://frinkiac.com/caption/S09E04/211961
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.
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 :)
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.
The span of Simpsons meme literacy is identical to the span of western civilization.
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.
TIL i'm part Irish
cool; https://frinkiac.com/video/S05E02/tcqDQyGgz-EeKltdDceypD3NHA...
https://frinkiac.com/caption/S05E16/277226
LOL
Possibly the best and most important website on the internet
I prefer comb.io, it has full clips
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!
mmmmm cromulent
You’ve really embiggened this post with your cromulent comment.
[dead]
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.