Once in a great while, we are privileged to experience a cultural event so extraordinary, it becomes part of our shared heritage. 1969: Man walks on the moon. 1971: Man walks on the moon again. Then, for a long time, nothing happened. Until now, as Frinkiac, the search engine that matches Simpsons quotes with screencaps, introduces an animated GIF feature.
Announced on Twitter by one of Frinkiac’s three creators, the new function marries Frinkiac’s promise of on-call Simpsons screencaps for any occasion with animated GIFs, the lingua franca of tweets, Tumblr posts, and text messages the world over. It builds on the existing screencap function by letting users manually select frames from any Simpsons episode in the system to create fluid animations up to four seconds long. It’s currently in beta, but seems to be fairly bug-free, based on our early tests with search terms like “photographic memory” and “beat up Martin.” Why, even classic Simpsons writers are getting in on it:
Presented as a public service: pic.twitter.com/fh8TgunhBN
— Bill Oakley (@thatbilloakley) May 12, 2016