Hacker Cinema
The Colony
2009 · TV series · 2 seasons
The Colony is a reality television series that is produced by the Discovery Channel. The program follows a group of people who must survive in a simulated post-apocalyptic environment. Casting was done by Metal Flowers Media. The first season had 10 main cast members as well as almost 100 actors who did additional scripted and improvisational work for the show.
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4 comments on Hacker News
I remember John Cohn, an IBM Computer Engineer, was on some TV show called The Colony and built one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkH6mFlfH3o and I seem to remember it getting much further than this clip.
Safety and Liability will always be an issue.
Monopolistic and malign practices always creep in. Say you miss and are late on rent, and then walk in to find you've been terminated. They won't say its because you were late on rent, but its not outside the possibility that they'll have some other manufactured excuse.
Maybe the buildings have ongoing recording that isn't disclosed, Wayward Pines style.
The incentives for this only make sense when you factor in the additional malign control the company gets over the employee.
Reminds me of that one TV series "The Colony" (not a post-apocalypse type movie).
I bought The Knowledge several years ago. It's a fantastic book, with just the right amount of detail. One thing I particularly liked was the focus on how to get certain materials in a likely post-apocolyptic world - for example, instead of just telling you how to mine iron, the book explains that there is likely cast iron all over the place in things like cookware and even if it's heavily rusted, it can be cleaned and re-smelted and will be perfectly usable. The point was it was a practical guide to rebooting civilization, rather than just a list of recipes for technology.
As for the TV show premise at the beginning of the article (16 survivors that have to scavenge things in an abandoned place for a long period of time), this was done very well in a show called The Colony (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1470018/) with fairly realistic hardships (roving bands of thugs that would mace the survivors in lieu of firearms, for example). Worth watching, even if just for the interesting tech they produce, like distilling their own ethanol to power a small engine to recharge some car batteries to power handheld tools and lighting).
I've tried to get people on here interested in the show before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=761443
I think it's a great show and I really like seeing all the different business ideas. Most of the founders seem to make mistakes in the negotiations but I think there have been some pretty good deals on the show so far.
I definitely recommend watching it, either live or on Hulu, it's one of the best shows on TV and definitely one of the best reality shows, other than The Colony.