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Frinkiac: The Simpsons meme-maker is about to take your quoting obsession to a whole new level

A new website allows users to search screencaps from the show by quote.

Clarisse Loughrey
Thursday 04 February 2016 11:29 GMT
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Say goodbye to productivity; someone just created an instant The Simpsons meme-maker and it is truly glorious.

Public search engine Frinkiac now lets you find that perfect screencap for whichever quote from the show is currently haunting your brain. Drawing from 15 seasons of TV's longest-running animated series, Wired reports that Frinkiac contains an exhaustive 3M searchable screengrabs; which can all be paired with its corresponding piece of dialogue to create instant, usable memes.

We have a trio of creators to thank for this marvel: Sean Schulte, Paul Kehrer, and Allie Young. "We had the idea several years ago when we were quoting The Simpsons at each other all day long, and it was surprisingly difficult to find an image of the scenes we were quoting on Google," says Schulte of his inspiration.

On his own blog, Kehrer details the coding process which achieved such an arduous, impossible task in the matter of a few weeks. Essentially, scenes were cut into 100 equal-sized portions before using average colours to determine changes in framing so that a new screencap can be created. Those screencaps were then coordinated with the matching dialogue in uploaded transcriptions of the episodes; though Kehrer admits there are a few current issues with the matches in season 11.

The site takes its name from the classic episode, 'Much Apu About Nothing', in which Professor John Frink describes his new invention; "Sure, the Frinkiac 7 looks impressive – Don’t touch it! – But I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive only the five richest kings in Europe will own them."

Considering every single, possible event in a person's life has somehow already occurred on The Simpsons, this will truly prove to be the internet's most invaluable tool.

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