Hacker Cinema
Supernatural
2005 · TV series · 45 min episodes · 15 seasons
Created by Eric Kripke
DramaMysteryScience FictionFantasy
When they were boys, Sam and Dean Winchester lost their mother to a mysterious and demonic supernatural force. Subsequently, their father raised them to be soldiers. He taught them about the paranormal evil that lives in the dark corners and on the back roads of America ... and he taught them how to kill it. Now, the Winchester brothers crisscross the country in their '67 Chevy Impala, battling every kind of supernatural threat they encounter along the way.
4 positive2 negative19 neutralfrom 25 commenters
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28 comments on Hacker News
So I remember sharing a file to my brother and "uploading" it over very slow DSL at the time (I think I was getting 100kbps a second or something). The file was copyrighted, a TV show, Supernatural, or something like that. Anyway, the upload was instant. Apparently Megaupload would do a quick hash of the file (not sure if it was in browser or probably more likely the first 100k bits or something of the file), and if it was a file that was already on their servers, they would just make a new download link for it, and the "upload" would finish. Links would be taken down by DMCA notices from forums and other file sharing sites (back then you could get good money making affiliate links and such, so people did a lot of their own uploading). But your private links and links you didn't share would remain. The files remained.
The fact that they did the hashing thing and kept the files locally really, incontrovertibly, proved they weren't deleting the files themselves when a notice went out. And that they were aware the hashed file was given a DMCA notice. This one little thing, probably to save bandwidth (and convivence for the end user of course; though outside of Linux ISOs there's little question what kind of files people are sharing), screwed him.
Anyway, #freeRossUlbricht (Yes I know he tried to make a hit out and a lot of people died from drugs he enabled to be sold, but the hit never happened and the drug users were consenting adults.) A life sentence is insane. 20 years? OK. Life? Heck he rejected a plea deal that would've given him 10... bet he regrets that now.
This somehow reminds me of the TV show "Supernatural" where Angels need 'consent' of the people to possess their body. Which basically is "they said yes", and often how they get the 'yes' contains a lot of deceit (pretending to be someone else etc) misdirection and even torture...
I find it entirely baffling that the top shows on Netflix are lighthearted shows (usually comedies) that go on for many seasons. Friends, Seinfeld, suits, office, Gilmore girls, supernatural
But… Netflix doesn’t make these kinds of shows. They give small orders of episodes to niche shows and cancel them quickly before they have time to gain an audience.
Obviously they know which shows people watch, but why doesn’t that translate into them making those shows at presumably less cost?
For all we know, in 5 years you could ask an AI to "reproduce the entire Supernatural TV show but change the character names, dialog and look just enough to bypass copyright issues - 7 seasons, 24 episodes each MP4 format"
> The defense of “you shouldn’t change anything about my beloved series” is pretty flimsy.
Nobody said that. You're building a straw man and putting words into people's mouths (or comments, rather).
Of course there's always going to be changes when adapting for different media. People dislike when important things change.
> If you don’t change anything, then what’s the point of watching/reading/playing the same thing over and over? Doesn’t any series just get incredibly boring without variation?
I've re-read lots of books, and there's many reasons I do it. Sometimes it's as stupid as missing the characters. Sometimes I'm co-reading with a friend who just recently started the series and I recommended it; so it's like a little book club. Sometimes it's nostalgia, etc.
Similarly regarding TV shows. Sometimes I just wanna share the moment with another person, see their reaction etc.
Games are a whole different situation though. Not sure why you even put that in there. Do you play games often? I feel like you either don't, or just play a genre of games I don't. It kinda baffles me why you'd even ask what the point of replaying games is...
> Great literature, TV, and films say things. Sometimes you might not agree. But at least it makes you think. Ideally, each entry in a series should say different or evolving things.
I both agree and disagree... I like the way something like BSG or Arcane (TV show, great btw) or even Buffy "says things" where they're not, ... literally spelled out in a patronising way?
> But I do think even beloved series have to have room for adaptation and experimentation. Because otherwise, they stagnate and can get to a point where they’re no longer worth watching
I kinda agree with this, though. There's some great successful examples of this (JoJo's Bizarre Adventures or Supernatural come to mind)
Same thing with Supernatural. Season one especially was a Classic Rock masterpiece, but when the show hit Netflix they had to replace all the music due to licensing. :-C
I remember watching the episode "Faith" from Supernatural in TV with an amazing usage of "Don't fear the reaper" by Blue Öyster Cult (the cowbell one), and when trying to searching the episode in streaming platforms was replaced by a generic rock song... a total shame considering the plot of the episode it's about a literal Grim Reaper.
My father did not die, but when I was a very young adolescent, he went in for heart surgery at a time when same was a bit more medically dangerous than nowadays. He did survive.
Some years later, when a father and child said goodbye in an "E.R." episode at college, I (to my own surprise) went into near-hysterics and had to call him. 20+ years later, when scrolling through TikTok, someone put a similar scene from "Supernatural" in a video and it shook me hard.
I can definitely sympathize with your friend; in each of those two cases, the reaction proceeded with nearly no cognitive thought or ability to affect it via a thinking process. Trauma is a bit of a puppeteer.
The prevalance of these state sanctioned laws and their rebranded remnants reminds what I liked about the first few episodes of Lovecraft Country.
Its basically like the show Supernatural except with the twist that Dean and Sam Winchester had to hunt demons but also had to escape white only neighborhoods and sundown towns every episode, because they were black.
That kind of perpetual threat alongside a different non-race related plot isn't portrayed often.
This is why I prefer mini-series to full on series. It's a complete self-contained story.
There weren't that many multi-season shows that I loved and had a decent ending - usually it gets milked to death that main actors quit and then either show cancelled (Castle) or get a new actor and suck (x-files).
Some shows have awful resurrection - 24, I loved the entire thing except for "reboot" and last season.
Some shows have honest writers, BSG reboot was clearly getting too convoluted and had to be ended before it cancelled.
Some shows try to pivot to tumbler fanfics for content - Supernatural. Which was dumb because people were interested in such stories were already watching it.
> If you have a new series, all potential viewers are potential viewers. If you have a season 3, the only potential viewers are season 2 watchers.
That doesn't always top factor. Some shows can generate money outside of screen - merch. That's how supernatural stayed so long.
In the UK, Doctor Who is clearly an outlier. The other really long-running shows are soap operas like Eastenders or comedy panel shows.
But in the US, there seem to be an awful lot of outliers, and it's on the strength of those series that Netflix initially established their following: Friends, The Office, Park and Rec, Seinfeld, Community, The Walking Dead, The Blacklist, Gilmore Girls, Grey's Anatomy, West Wing, That 70's Show, Supernatural, Criminal Minds, and I could keep going, honestly, for quite a while.
So yes, there's an extent to which 5 or 8 seasons is less common, but the goal for US shows has been 100 episodes for decades now, which is usually 5 seasons of 20+ episodes each.
If Netflix is adopting a more UK-like approach, that might result in better TV eventually, but it would be nice for creators to know they have to tell their story in 16 episodes rather than 100.
Very cool.
I know this is a tad off-topic, but, it's sort of related since it's about fonts.
I've been looking for a good "serial killer typewriter" typeface, similar to what's used in the credits of the TV show Supernatural, but I haven't found anything that looks particularly good. Does anybody have any recommendations? Free fonts would be preferred, but I'm willing to pay a bit for the right look.
Disney owns ESPN, a controlling stake in Hulu, Marvel, Lucas Films, Pixar, Disney Animation, and 20th century fox (FX, fox searchlight, many classic movie franchises, X-Men, Fantastic 4, etc). I'm probably missing something. I imagine that Disney will eventually sell a mega subscription service that bundles all of their media.
HBO Max will have all HBO content (obviously), all Warner Bros content, the CW (you know all of those teen dramas people love to watch on netflix like Riverdale, Supernatural, the Flash), Cartoon Network and a bunch of other subsidiaries that I can't name off the top of my head.
Amazon people will have prime subscriptions which gives them access for free.
I don't know why anyone would keep a lifetime subscription for any of the rest. Maybe only subscribe when your favorite shows are on?
Anyway, I think the future of streaming will be interesting to watch. I've made a fairly large bet on Disney stock and I would have bought Warner bros stock if it wasn't owned by ATT (I like Warner bros, I don't like the rest of their business).
A huge portion of the American TV-watching demographic doesn't pay very much attention to shows while they are watching it. So they prefer shows that have predictable rehashing of the same plot each season. Think Supernatural, Grey's Anatomy, Once Upon a Time. You don't really need to put effort into remembering previous episodes because you've seen them enough to get the gist without any background.
Shows like NCIS, Law & Order, and Criminal Minds will literally run the same plot each episode. These are some of the most popular TV shows in history.
Studio executives don't want to accept that they have a hit show that doesn't cater to this demographic. Once the main story wraps up, usually after 4-5 seasons, the original creator will get fed up or fired because they are unwilling to drag the story out any longer. Then the studio brings in a generic writing team to transform the show into one of those a predictable rehash shows.
It never works because the people who are into those shows won't get past the first four seasons, and the original fans of the show get tired and stop watching.
While I love RottenTomatoes for Movies, I find it abysmal for TV Shows. Here are some shows with a >90% score:
- Almost all seasons of Supernatural
- Seasons 3 & 4 of Veep
- Seasons 4, 5 & 7 of New Girl
- Season 2 of The Flash
- Season 2-4 of Arrow
Now I'm not saying that those shows are all shit (tho they are certainly not in my ballpark), but I doubt anyone thinks of them as 100% shows, in the same sense that Moonlight is a 98% movie.
The problem comes with few reviews (which is also a thing with more niche-y movies), which is probably amplified in later seasons, where reviewers who don't like it stopped watching.
In context of the article, it's the myth of good guys versus bad guys instead of gray characters. That means these characters have moral choices to make. A tiger doesn't understand morality, while Kylo Ren and does, but chooses to do join/stay on the dark side, which means causing a lot of people harm, which he's fully aware of.
We don't hold a tiger morally responsible, while most of the beings on the tv show Supernatural would be, since they're capable of making moral choices. Even the ST Borg understand morality, although they consider it irrelevant. But the Federation would probably hold them responsible, if they had the power to put the Borg Queen on trial, like they ended up doing with the Changeling lead female character from the Dominion.
I disagree with you on SG-1, though I'd like to bring up Supernatural 'spoiler mentioned as a perfect example of what you're talking about.
SG-1, compared to many other overdone shows, had one redeeming quality - the protagonists (in this case, all humans) actually progressed through the course of the show. In SG-1 humans went from 1980s level of technology in Season 1 to spaceships, teleporters and off-world colonies in Season 10. So new 'bigger bad' always made some kind of sense, and I feel there was a space for a few seasons worth of additional interesting ideas.
That, or they could have simply continued Stargate: Universe.
There is one series I'm really up in arms about it being recently cancelled - Person of Interest. That one was nowhere close to repetitive, it had tons and tons of space for good, intelligent story developments, and it got cancelled behind the crew's back anyway, because whatever. Fuck you, CBS, for cutting out what was probably the only thing in history of television that approached the topic of AI in a smart, realistic way (and also basically broke Snowden's revelations a year before Snowden).
Lol reminds me of the Charlie Bradbury (Felicia Day) in supernatural - there is one episode set around a LARP
I get the feeling its not your Ruby-fu, but Rails is a lot like trying to jump into the show Supernatural in Season 10. I did some Rails sites early, and now have very little clue what's going on when I read new code. I'm sure I could get it, but its going to be a time investment. This seems to be the way of opinionated frameworks.
What movies/tv shows are you watching? Try Supernatural. Try the old movies from the 90's like Hackers and The Net. Even the Matrix. All of them featured women hackers as well as men.
I was not given "the focus" by default. My Jr. High and High School did not have a CS program at all. I taught myself how to program (Pascal and Assembly) by READING BOOKS, because we lived in a rural area and dial-up internet is slow!
Is it so wrong to believe that if I can do it, so can others, regardless of their gender? Maybe I have a higher confidence in women than they do!
While there's a healthy debate in the US (and to a lesser extent in Europe perhaps) about the extent of spying being done by governments, I see hardly any concern in India among both media organizations (with probably the exception of The Hindu newspaper), businesses and citizens.
Fed by the constant drip-drip of "free" features, people are almost blind to the true "cost" they're paying. I've tried my best to convince people I know to adopt even simple (not foolproof, which probably nothing is) countermeasures like VPNs or HTTPS-Everywhere...but nobody gives a damn.
Reminds me of a Supernatural episode [1] featuring drugged Turducken sandwiches that turn people into passive, media-absorbing, harmless zombies.
[1] - http://io9.com/5861160/turducken-and-the-rise-of-dick-make-one-helluva-supernatural-episode
U don't consider PRISM such a big deal, to be honest.
Yes, they spy on innocent people, in an attempt to flush out (or whatever the term is) the dangerous or potentially dangerous ones. However, I genuinely doubt my privacy is very compromised, because I refuse to believe someone is getting paid to sit and read through Facebook posts or messages about my obsession with Supernatural (great TV show on CW), or read through "IF YOU DONT SEND THIS TO 7 OTHER PEOPLE A PIANO FROM THE HEAVENS WILL CRUSH YOU INTO THE PAVEMENT" emails my neighbour is forwarding.
Also, I have a friend who talks in acronyms most of the time (over Skype chat) and I have a file called deectionary.txt (her name is Dee) with around 200 lines, I find it very amusing to think some analyst spent hours trying to decode her message because it contained "bomb" in what looks like "mtwbi bombing m/i shc play asg ol" which means (used near-real example) "my twat brother is lagging my Internet so he can play a stupid game online". She has no disability, she's just very "efficient," I guess!
Besides, I don't have anything to hide, so I don't really care. If I had some top secret business I needed to attend and would care to keep secret from the NSA or CIA, I would probably (as would many of you here, too I believe) make my own thing to do the job, because I wouldn't take someone's word that they give a rat's furry bottom about my privacy.
Fans of the TV show Supernatural raised around 10,000 quid for a 17 year old who was kicked out of the house by her parents because she came out as lesbian to them.
I guess 10,000 is not a much, but it was a one-week effort and it was a bit disorganised, to be honest. However, it did help her to buy a ticket to the UK (She lived in Germany and was staying at a friend's place in the meantime), find a job, rent an apartment and get settled in.
Everything dies. From old age or fate. Even the universe will die. Reminds of that great line Death said (from the TV show Supernatural). It went something like,
"Neither of us remember who is older." Referring to himself and god. "But I'll reap god too".
The more we are capable of prolonging life the more "fate" is capable of ending it. Sure, we might be able to prolong it - maybe to 200 years. But in the end, there is always an end.
I think we'd be better off as a society if we accepted death happily - as we accept life. You can't have one without the other.
When we are born, nature promises us nothing except death. It's just that simple.
It's unfortunate we've surrounded it with so much fear.
Our ideas on death must change. Cause frankly, it's killing us. Death is the natural order.
I heard a great line from one of the few TV shows i watch, Supernatural;
"Who came first? The chicken or the egg? We're too old to remember. But I know this, I'll reap god too". - the aspect of Death.
Actually, a lot of recent horror and sci-fi stuff is lifted from Islamic mythology (which itself is rebranded Jewish, Kanaanite and Babylonian lore.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gog_and_Magog
The TV show "Supernatural" heavily features themes of spirituality and daemons that are lifted from Islamic culture. The recent remake of Clash of the Titans also feature similar themes; the Jin, desert scorpions, Jin riding camels, etc.
Absolutely agreed. I want Steam for movies and music. I'd actually start spending money DVDs and TV series if a service like Steam existed. (Well, more money than my current "buy Supernatural on DVD and nothing else" policy, anyway.)
People like to claim that TV is only full of crap. This is grade A, Microsoft-FUD-level, Bullshit.
Like anything, sure, most of it is crap. Just like if you went to a bookstore and picked up 10 random fantasy novels. You might conclude that they're all just cookie cutter pablum - most are - but then you miss out on George R. R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice, Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana, LeGuin's Earthsea, and other truly excellent works of fiction.
But like anything, it takes some investment to tell the good from the bad. If you just watch Jon & Kate Plus 8, Entertainment Tonight, and According to Jim, yeah, you're better off without the TV altogether. But I claim that there's more good TV being made now than at any time in history, particularly for niche markets.
Here's some of my recommendations: Mythbusters, Penn & Teller's Bullshit, Supernatural, Dollhouse, The Office, 30 Rock, Lost, The Simpsons (not as great as it was, but still fun), The Daily Show/Colbert Report, Mad Men... and more, there's just a ton of really high quality work being done.
If your argument is that instead, you watch things online/through netflix, that makes sense. If I didn't enjoy live sports sometimes, I'd consider doing the same.
Not everyone has to have a hobby of watching television, or movies, or reading for that matter, but the opinion that it's all crap is extremely ill-informed and snobbish, and I strongly encourage it to be dropped as something that makes you sound actively stupid when you say it. It's an anti-pattern.