My Goos are Your Goos, Your Goos are My Goos

Scott Hardie | March 27, 2026
It's been a long time in development, but finally there's an improved tool for making your own celebrity goos: My Goos, a completely rebuilt tool on the site.

The old "Create a Goo" page stopped working last fall, when the API that it uses to find celebrity photos was discontinued by the provider. I made myself about six weeks' worth of goos to sustain the game while I built a replacement (that's how we got an entire month of Avenger goos), but building the new version turned out to take much longer than I had predicted. There are still some advanced bits and pieces needing work, but the new version is more than ready for everyday use, and I'm glad to offer it at last.

Some of the improvements:

- You can now edit a goo after submitting it, as many times as you'd like, up until it publishes on the site. This was requested by Steve West some time ago, and I've had it on my to-do list ever since. Erik Bates and Chris Lemler also mentioned how much they'd like this feature.

- You can now save your progress with any number of form fields blank, since the edit form will let you finish later. There are six fields that must be filled in before your goo can be published (celebrity name, source image, gooed image, category, clue, intended difficulty), but you can save the form without them.

- Searching online for a celebrity photo now uses a different API that didn't exist when I made the last one. It's a little slower to return results, but it serves up a wider variety of images.

- The selection of which part of the photo will become the source image is completely rewritten from scratch, and I think it's a big improvement. You can now resize the square selector within the photo to get precisely as large or as small of a square as you want, and the image will always fit within your screen. Getting the selector to be draggable and resizable on a phone was not easy, but it works; you can now make a goo as easily on your phone as any other device.

- Alternate spellings are now spread out as a separate field per each spelling, so there should be no more confusion as with the comma-separated old list.

- Between you creating the goo and me reviewing the goo before publication, either of us can write an unlimited number of comments back and forth to each other, as we discuss any aspect of the goo-in-progress. You can also edit your past comments. These comments will disappear when the goo publishes, so don't worry about them becoming public.

- See a thumbnail of each of your pending goos, and its status as it awaits publication, under the "Edit a Goo" section of the My Goos page. This section only appears when you have created some goos and they haven't published yet, so it will be missing at first.

- The list of your past goos, at the bottom of My Goos, has an improved interface, with thumbnails of current goos and a numbered list if you want to see your total. This section only appears if you have created goos and they have been published, so it might be missing at first.

- The new tool is far less wordy than the last one, which became something of a "wall of text" as it tried to provide too much guidance about how to make ideal goos. This time, I'm trusting that the process is clear enough to skip most of that detail, but I can always restore some if needed.

More improvements to this tool are coming. I also look forward to restoring a few things that I had to cut for time, like the ability to solve pending goos myself for fun.

I look forward to any feedback that you have, positive or negative. Hopefully this project goes beyond restoring your ability to create goos yourselves, and actually makes it even more fun and easy than it was before.

Bring on your celebrity goos!