Hacker Cinema
Boston Legal
2004 · TV series · 42 min episodes · 5 seasons
Created by David E. Kelley
Alan Shore and Denny Crane lead a brigade of high-priced civil litigators in an upscale Boston law firm in a series focusing on the professional and personal lives of brilliant but often emotionally challenged attorneys. A spin-off of long-running series The Practice.
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12 comments on Hacker News
This reminds me of how I felt when I was 14 years old and I discovered what oxytocin was on an episode of Boston Legal.
The fact that feelings of love and closeness could be prompted by a mere chemical was deeply saddening to me. It wrecked my worldview.
"Love is just the result of some chemical? Then it's not even real!" I thought to myself.
Fast-forward ~20 years later, and that's proven to be an obvious— and massive— and useless— oversimplification.
Of course love isn't "just a reaction caused by a chemical." It's a fantastically complex emergent property of our biological system that we still absolutely do not understand.
It's the same with thinking: are parts of it analogous to pattern matching? Sure! Is this the whole story? Not even close.
Depends on the content. For popular crap that I'm probably going to delete later I generally go for the 10-15GB option as finding a decent rip at a lower file size can be annoying (Latest marvel movies, etc). If something is sufficiently obscure or visually stunning I'll normally keep it at 10-15GB rips depending on the source material (Obscure horror movies, Dune). For regular stuff that I still want to have a copy of but that is popular enough I'm not worried it's going to disappear I go for the smaller versions (The expanse, adventure time).
Right now one of the biggest things on disk are a bunch of Boston Legal episodes. I have family that enjoy it, and I'm too lazy to find a good small release so it's taking up more space than it needs to.
I try to get HEVC encoded video where possible, and when I know there's a particular release group that produces high-quality I'll set up tags to prefer them.
My wife refers to this problem as the Alan Shore Democrats (Alan Shore from Boston Legal TV Show). People who care about the plight of the working poor, but then you find out that they only do so to appease the poor so they don't rise up and revolt against the status quo.
It's the politics of fear. Democrats yell "Vote for me, I will keep those evil republicans from making abortion and being gay illegal." And the Republicans yell "Vote for me, I will keep those sodomites and baby killers in check." They paint the other side as evil, split the poor people in half, and stay in power. The truth is, they desperately need each other, because, if people stopped hating their neighbor for a second, and turned around, they might realize that they are being fucked by their elected officials on both sides.
Firefly is great, albeit short.
I was forced to watch Buffy, but while the first season makes you cringe, it is pretty good. Not as stellar as people claim, but really good. I think Joss Whedans masterpiece wasn't Buffy, it was Toy Story. But do watch the musical episode "Once More, With Feeling"!
Babylon 5, of course, if you can tolerate the (even for the time) bad CGI.
I've just watched DS9 from beginning to end, something I had wanted to do for 15 years now. Hasn't aged well, and I hadn't seen it in English before. Avery Brooks' overpronunciation is painful, but it is the best Star Trek series by far.
Friends was something I've enjoyed as a teen, and later as an adult. It was a totally different experience as an adult. I think that's worth a lot, to have a depth that appeals differently to you in different stages of your life.
Modern Family was way better than expected.
ALF is a bit painful to watch nowadays, it also hasn't aged well.
Golden Girls are probably still great, The Cosby Show definitely is!
Boston Legal is fun, fun, fun! Hey, why shouldn't Nantucket be allowed to habe its own nuclear weapons? But do watch all the newer Star Trek series before BL, so you can appreciate the ST heavy cast.
Dallas! Oh my. Incredible how old Victoria Principal is today.
ER was great, but I haven't seen much of the last seasons. I also liked Chicago Hope, but it clearly lost.
The 2004 Battlestar Galactica. Probably the most modern TV series of its time, great themes and issues, pretty current, fantastic buildup to the big finale and then... disappointment.
Game of Thrones, if only for the shock value ;-)
And at last, the Tv series I've probably enjoyed most in the last few years: the first two seasons of Veronica Mars. But make sure you can stomach it, the season finales are sickeningly evil (especially season 2).
I first installed Ubuntu either a few days before or a few days after the Hoary Hedgehog release. I recall using the Gnome version first and then adding in the Kubuntu packages a few days later.
At that point, I was fairly used to Debian and I'd used some of the other "shiny" distros at the time (like Linspire, shudder) but Ubuntu (and Kubuntu) was one of the first distros to work with my Atheros Wi-Fi dongle without significant amounts of pain. I mean, it was still a pain but I was able to get it done.
Ubuntu -- and Kubuntu especially -- was my obsession for a few months in the spring of 2005. I still remember torrenting episodes of a brand new TV show called "Grey's Anatomy" (that had taken the time slot of my beloved "Boston Legal") that had just debuted and watching it in variations of Mplayer in Kubuntu. Funny. Grey's Anatomy is still around a decade later too.
These days, I only use Linux on the server and very, very rarely on a test VM, but I have an enormous amount of respect to the KDE team and the Kubuntu team for keeping on keeping on.
Though unrelated, today I was watching a 2006 episode of Boston Legal where one of the characters makes an impassioned argument about how Americans have next to no privacy nowadays (2006) and how the NSA is already reading all of our emails and listening to all of the phone calls. Anyone who was involved in any way with security knew perfectly well what NSA was doing, and yet it took this long for people to care. And truth be told, outside our technobabble no one cares still. Sigh....
I think the difference here though is conferences like this are intentionally positioned at being more casual and less formal/professional. I doubt lawyers even have similarly casual conferences of this nature. In the tech world, we've intentionally positioned our conferences to be this way. I honestly think therefore that people will be more likely to bring their normal set of standards to bear in situations like this.
Now, I have a question for you. Imagine that you're a woman and you're walking to the restroom, past a line of 40 or 50 men. And now imagine those men have any time recently walked past a magazine store where upon they saw hundreds of magazines depicting women naked (ie. every single magazine store anywhere).
Or imagine those men are discussing the latest episode of Boston Legal, a typical TV show depicting a professional setting (legal firm) which contains highly sexualised themes (like, again, pretty much every show on TV today).
I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm simply making the point that the standards people seem to be applying in the tech world seem to me to be completely out of whack with what society in general deems appropriate.
>While if I was deciding what terms to choose ab initio from the universe of all possible words in all possible languages, my alibi here is that I studied law for a few years.
Well, you should also work on the "syntax" thing, for I find the first phrase above ("while if...") incomplete.
That said, you studied law? That makes two of us. Only in my case, "studied" mostly means I've watched every "Boston Legal" and "Law and Order" episode.
>Most of the phrases I picked up en route are mostly obiter dicta, et cetera, with only limited utility. Others are enormously useful; "inter alia" has escaped into other parts of academia.
Has it escaped because it is enormously useful, though, or because it makes for "pretty" and "refined-sounding" phrasing? Because academia is full of such, well, to put it succinctly, bullshit. (I admit that in law it can be well known and have an additional well defined role that augments the standard latin meaning).
>But while ceteris paribus it might be the case that I could use Chinese characters, English has a far greater de facto affinity to, and stock of, Latin due to the historical connection commencing in the 1066 Norman Conquest and the imposition of the lingua Franca.
Sure, but with the Chinese conquest of the economy and commerce space, commencing circa 1995 and the slow financial, diplomatic and cultural decline of the US, one could say that the era of the previous lingua Franca is over.
Res ipsa loquitur.
Err, I mean 用事实说话.
(Come to think of it: does this succinctness mean that the Chinese can write their whole life story in Twitter with room to spare?)
I'm reminded of the Boston Legal episode where the defendant kills his mother and they argue that he's not a danger to society because he only had one mother and is therefore not going to repeat his crime.
More seriously, I'm not sure if I should interpret your statement to mean that white collar criminals are dangerous or that they should never go to jail.
I've just been watching a Boston Legal episode (from series 4, ep 7), and fictionally, they sue YouTube. Not 'MegaView' or 'SuperVid', but YOUTUBE. I wondered how they can get away with using a real company in a fictional lawsuit?
I want to clarify that this is a reference to the TV show Boston Legal, where William Shatner's named partner in a law firm, says his own name frequently, as if to say 'I'm Denny Crane and I'm the best'.
Maybe he as Aspergers syndrome like the character Jerry on the television show Boston Legal.