Hacker Cinema
Letterkenny
2016 · TV series · 12 seasons
Created by Jared Keeso
Letterkenny follows Wayne, a good-ol’ country boy in Letterkenny, Ontario trying to protect his homegrown way of life on the farm, against a world that is constantly evolving around him. The residents of Letterkenny belong to one of three groups: Hicks, Skids, and Hockey Players. The three groups are constantly feuding with each other over seemingly trivial matters; often ending with someone getting their ass kicked.
6 positive4 neutralfrom 10 commenters
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10 comments on Hacker News
I believe it’s in reference to the humor TV show Letterkenny which has a beer brand called Puppers. Characters on the show often ask for another fucking puppers.
For chirping, I'll bring up Shoresy, spin off of Letterkenny TV show, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoresy
The film Slapshot with hockey banter/ribbing (at a Gilmore Girls-type pace).
I have little doubt that movie dialogues have gotten more difficult to understand. My viewing has spanned films from the silent era wirh subtitles through to the present so I've a wide range to compare.
It's big topic and too complex to discuss in detail so it's best to illustrate with examples.
A decade or two ago the local national broadcaster used to show old movies from the 1930s or so on the midnight/dawn graveyard shift and often I'd be working at that time. I'd have the TV running and listen primarily to the sound with an occasional glance at the screen and I could easily follow the movie with little effort. Some of the easiest films to follow were English ones such as those that came from Gainsborough Pictures and so on.
Now to the present, I like the raw, rough and profane Canadian sitcom Letterkenny which is about the lives of people in a small Canadian farm town of 5000 people. (Right, this is television but the trend is the same as movies.) The trouble is its dialogue is so fast and punctuated with interruptions, asides, innuendo and oblique references and in-jokes (that are only partly stated because the characters already know them) that I have to record the show and view it several times to get its full impact. I've even turned subtitles on to help but they flash past so quickly that they hardly help especially so when many people are talking at once (they're almost too fast to read). Even when one becomes familiar with the voices of the characters I doubt if most people would have much hope of fully comprehending the action without the vision.
Letterkenny is new and very cleaver television but it's miles and miles away from the nice well-ordered dialogues of those old 1930s movies.
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Edit: I don't want to give the impression that I can't follow the dialogue or understand the references as I usually can. It's not intrinsic understanding that's the problem, rather the issue is the type of presentation, essentially Letterkenny's dialogues which are usually both disjointed and multithreaded whereas oldstyle presentation was more ordered, linear and presented in serial fashion. The differences are thus vast.
After some technical know how and upfront time investment, piracy is genuinely easier and presents a better UX than the legal route.
With the suite of production-quality piracy automation software out there, as well as BYO media front ends like Plex et al, those who are so inclined are a long long long way past the ‘manually rifling through Usenet or Demonoid’ of yesteryear. One can simply visit a polished web UI of a piece of software running on their home network, and that they want every season of Letterkenny in 4K and it’ll be available to them within the hour.
Those who consume media this way don’t need to keep track of which steaming service has the rights to which property at the current point in time. Nor do they need to deal with inconsistent and increasingly Byzantine UXs of steaming service apps. They can instead enjoy a consistent interface on all of their devices with a single play queue, with even the ability to build playlists and collections of media that would otherwise be across streaming services.
I am significantly visually impaired and as such find it difficult to sit back on the couch and bounce between different apps and interfaces on my Apple TV. Were I inclined to consume media by way of piracy, I imagine that I’d find the experience to all in all be much more accessible than doing things the Right Way. All completely hypothetical of course.
The one thing that paying for and using streaming services has over the modern privacy approach, for one that has the prerequisite technical knowhow and ethics to pirate in the first place, is discovery / recommendation engines. The current suite of piracy apps make attempts to recommend new media to you, but obviously they can’t hold a candle to the millions of hours and petabytes of Big Data that powers…say…Netflix’s recommendation engine.
I genuinely believe that there’s a notable portion of pirates that would stop doing it if it were easier to consume content legally. This is why you see music piracy sinking deeper and deeper into the shadows. Comparing music consumption with movie or even TV show consumption has its limits, but were there a legal way to consume such content with a Spotify level of coverage, I think that it’d be quite compelling to these people. Of course, piracy is much less of a problem than it once was, so who knows if media companies even care anymore.
Thank god someone finally built this, I've been kicking around this for forever in my head (glue together some STT library and logic to adjust subtitle offsets) but I never had the time.
Really I wish Plex would just build this in, it's right up their alley. Movies aren't terrible since you can adjust the offset once (still a huge PITA and I feel like a toddler making an "L" with my hands to tell right from left when it comes to knowing "Do I need to increase or decrease the offset to fix this?", "Ok, I saw the subs before I heard it so I need to increase the offset", etc). TV shows are a whole other cluster. To be fair 80%+ of the time I have no issues with subs on my TV shows but if it's off then you can plan on readjusting after almost every commercial break.
I used to watch Letterkenny and I needed subs for that show to keep up but the only ones I could find were off and after each commercial I needed to adjust them by over 5 seconds which, at 50ms intervals, is a massive PITA.
These are all things I've experienced in the past three years, though some started or came out earlier.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (even better if you liked Children of Time)
Ted Lasso on Apple TV+
Star Trek: Discovery on CBS/Paramount (especially Season 2)
Letterkenny on Hulu
Cobra Kai on Netflix
The Country Things album by Granger Smith
Allow me to introduce you to season 1 episode 3 of Letterkenny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1IAUWIWjo8
fun fact: that was kind of the plot of a letterkenny episode, called "Fartbook", from season 1. it's really good!
https://letterkenny.fandom.com/wiki/Fartbook
> According to Xu, more than 100 martial artists looking to avenge Wei challenged him in the aftermath of the fight. Xu took out a pencil and paper, ranked his challengers in order of priority, and set about in earnest on his now-famous quest to “fight fakes” (“fake” and “battle” are homophones in Mandarin). As of this writing, Xu has fought 17 of those challengers in public matches. He has defeated them all.
This is straight out of an episode of Letterkenny, where one of the guys proves that he’s the best fighter in the town. Hilarious episode, can’t believe it actually happens in real life. Season 1, episode 2 if you’re curious.
Maybe so. But I've been transplanted to Toronto the past number of years.
Off topic: if you haven't seen Letterkenny yet, please watch. It is rural Southern Ontario. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4647692/