Nestflix | Hacker News Reader

Nestflix

nestflix.fun

428 pointsemacsen127 comments

I thought this was collection of handmade or LLM generated fake shows, but rather it is a database of fictional shows that appeared within TV or movies, for example the Wayne’s World talk show that appeared within the Wayne’s World movie.

How do people find the time to create something like this? The breadth is staggering.

The list of films itself is crowdsourced - you can check the list of suggestions on GitHub, where there are currently 290 pending titles: https://github.com/lynnandtonic/nestflix.fun/issues

Now, where do the site creators find the time to create every film card? Your guess is as good as mine.

i submitted a few shows to this and included a handful of stills to go along with it, it was an a+ contribution process, but there was still a lot of work i didn't do, so i can appreciate why there's a backlog. great project!

To quote South Park, "there's a time and place for everything. Its called college."

Isn't that from The Simpsons?

Nope, Chef from South Park.

I also remember Homer Simpson saying something similar

wait, is this a real life “simpsons did it”?

AFAICT it’s only found in the south park canon:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0705934/characters/nm0005002

Hey you're right. Just tried finding that one weird movie from The Office, and it's there, creepy stills and all!

https://nestflix.fun/mrs-albert-hannaday/

“Next on.. SICK SAD WORLD!”

This is precisely what I desperately wanted to find. Alas, my multi-decade wait continues.

Ahem. https://nestflix.fun/sick-sad-world/

The Simpsons started as a show within a show so there's hope we can someday buy it for a dollar

I hope I live to see the day when I can feed an AI the "Hamlet" skit from Last Action Hero, the original text of Hamlet itself, and the entirety of Arnold's work in the 80s and 90s and have it spit out the full length version for me to goon over and die happy.

My bet is 20 years for this to happen.

I'll take the other side of that bet and say we will see this happen in <5 years.

Agreed. This is moving faster than people not working in the field realize.

In fact, I'll wager to say that Disney and Pixar are both toast in just a few short years. You won't need Disney, $50-$100M in production funding, or more than one person to make a film. Films will cost $5,000. Then $1,000. Then very little at all.

Everything visual. Cartoons. Anime. Movies. Influencers. Actors. Porn stars.

Music is going to be right there with it.

I think live shows, improv and plays will stick around for a long time. But probably not for much money. It’s fun to do, it’s fun to watch.

Who knows?

> improv

So a fun thing is happening on Twitch right now! VTubers are improving [1] against LLM-powered actors. They're effectively able to put on one-person improv shows in fully dynamic worlds. It's wild.

Check out CodeMiko (probably NSFW). It's captivating to behold.

[1] (yes, we all know)

The problem is that they are wealthy and politically powerful, so it's unlikely they'll go down without a fight.

I fully expect a lot of large-model stuff will become legally nuclear over time, much like the sampling culture in music died off.

And once the reviews are written by AI and the views are generated by bots, we can get those pesky humans out of the loop completely! Eventually we won't even need to have movies, just an agreement between two AIs that one will make a theoretical movie and the other will theoretically review it and watch it a million times. Heck, no human will have any money to go to the movies or buy any merch anyway.

The only humans left in Hollywood will be copyright lawyers!

> those pesky humans out of the loop completely

I don't know why you have such a bad outlook about this.

I have wanted to direct epic fantasy films my entire life, and this is the first tangible shot I have at making something that might look like a "blockbuster". My chances of doing that without GenAI were slim to none. Hollywood is a steep pyramid.

I don't know how you can't be excited. This is the dreams-come-true timeline.

Hm. We may have a difference of outlook. I don't mind a fantasy blockbuster once in awhile, but to me the most interesting films involve interhuman drama that speaks to my own emotional experience, and often just consist of a lot of people talking with occasional plot twists and unexpected bursts of action. I went to film school for a couple years and dropped out, because as much as I enjoyed lighting and directing, I saw that everyone around me was obsessed with good effects and had no interest in good writing. [edit: That and it was insanely expensive and unjustifiable unless I wanted to be a commercial DP when I got out... and I wanted to be a writer.]

Yeah, I guess it would be awesome to just have an AI build your dream movie, but if you have a good script and a couple thousand bucks you can go out and find some actors and make something real right now. If it's good enough, you can get a shot at directing something massive where you actually have control over how your vision is executed, rather than sending your ideas into a "black box".

There's also the problem that visual fx are already pretty cheap, and no longer a reason to go see a movie. No one can even count the number of Viking shows or Lost Starship movies on streaming services, or tell them apart. It's not like when the original Jurassic Park came out and everyone was like I HAVE TO SEE THESE DINOSAURS. (My best friend recently described Avatar 2 as "that movie with the flying blue turds").

So my point is that the market is already oversaturated... just like mobile gaming. Chasing cool graphics, even if you get a monentary viral hit, you just end up lost in the flood of noise when everyone else has access to the same technology.

The pyramid is a good thing, actually, because it forces you to be imaginitive. The people at the top are less imaginative because they think their vast resources can compensate for bad writing. See: George Lucas.

Without a compelling story, a movie is worse than watching someone else play a video game. And with a compelling story, it doesn't matter if it's set on Mars or in your basement. I think it's also why the best games aren't the ones with the best rendering engines, but the ones with the best story and mechanics.

This sounds like the end-state is an increase in the relative value of extremely well-written films, as special effects and eye candy lose their luster as they become extremely common-place (see the Marvel universe of films, for an example of this happening already).

I can definitely see Netflix having four or five rows of AI movies above a ghetto section of "human-made" films. I already have to skip all the Marvel garbage. I mean, it's free to watch Twitch.

  > the most interesting films involve interhuman drama that speaks to my own emotional experience, and often just consist of a lot of people talking with occasional plot twists and unexpected bursts of action

What was your opinion on Clerks? You pretty much described that movie to a tee.

And, for that matter, the first few seasons of TNG.

Clerks was / is one of my favorite movies of all time.

(Far as Trek goes, I liked the original series.)

Did you see Star Trek Continues? If so what did you think of it?

As someone who didn't see TOS in its original run but appreciated it in occasional reruns, and as a huge fan of the original cast movies, it was... weird. But good weird, mostly, weird in a way that somehow captured the zaniness weirdness of TOS, and which was somewhat glossed over in the original movies when they made the jump to Hollywood production values.

I'd check it out if you haven't, just to see what's out there. For that matter, I quite enjoyed Lower Decks, as the Star Trek universe really needed that kind of dedicated comedic outlet, but from a clearly fannish perspecitve that isn't afraid of making very niche in-universe inside-jokes but always from a place of kindness and respect to both the original source material and to the viewer.

Ah, I just clicked your profile and recognized that you're the person building the dream studio! Hah. It makes sense. And that's an amazing project idea. Maybe our views aren't entirely incompatible. I feel like an adjunct to your project would be a separate program / ML workflow that helped to hone screenplays and stories, tilting toward letting people express their experiences through these media in a way that broadened their ideas and expanded their potential audience before committing the ideas to images and pixels.

> I don't know how you can't be excited. This is the dreams-come-true timeline.

In theory yes, but imagine having to fight with another 8 billions directors to find someone who watches your movie. The day we can make our films at home (read as: everyone can make their films at home), is probably the day we'll need to create our own virtual audience as well, as the chances of being watched by some real person will be lower than winning a lottery.

Sounds kind of like YouTube but with better production value?

Afaik that arrangement works quite well by the standards of both the creatives and viewers (and presumably Google?)

that was my absurdist point about AIs making theoretical movies that would theoretically be watched by other AIs

This reminds me of this quote from one of my all time favorite books, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency :

<quote> The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. </quote>

hehehheh. I just re-read that book for the first time in ages a couple of months ago, so Douglas Adams has probably influenced my thinking about these things ;)

Media is popular and valuable not only because it's entertaining, but also because it's something you can talk about and relate to with others. So in that sense having the big brands with popular shows that most people watch is still relevant.

What does "few years" mean? Bet on a timeline or stfu.

And what makes you think that Pixar and Disney won't want to automate the process of movie creation? The movie streaming platforms all reached a equilibrium, so they would work on the "full self-making movie" I suppose?

Disney and Pixar have IP and parks, and a lot of cost with animators, actors, and directors to make new productions off of that IP. If in a few years all you need is 5000 Disney will make new IP for 5000 and structure it in the way that is most beneficial for their multiple franchises based off of their IP.

Disney won't be toast, they'll be a full continental breakfast in a 5-star hotel served by Star Wars Mickey in a waiter's costume.

I bet when CGI was first introduced (~40 years ago), you'd have said the the same or even more hyped: "Dude, in two years, all movies would be made on a computer. All 3D and VFX, by a single guy in his basement. No production or filming. Everything would be done on your computer, you don't need a crew. All these actors are gonna be jobless. Cameras? They're obselete."

Yeah, again, not how things works. Neither financially, nor the technology itself, nor the craft of film production. Not to be a party pooper, but the landscape will still look mostly the same in 5 years.

I agree to the extent that CGI took 40 years to fully mature to be accessible to the masses (read: see what Blender 4.0 can do on a kid's desktop[0]).

AI is maturing fast. It's already on some people's smartphones.

0: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/4.0/

But the stuff that works on people’s smartphones isn’t cinema quality. Which is precisely why it took decades for CGI to become accessible on our home PCs.

Generative AI is already powerful enough to replace big studios for short skits on YouTube. But a full length cinema-quality movie is a totally different ball game.

That all said, I definitely don’t think it will take 20 years to get there either. I do agree that the field is moving fast.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe"

But seriously, the edge research is already ready to put an end to animation for good. Classic Disney animation -- that's 100% done as of right now. Today. It's about to be productized.

It won't be long until we have photorealism too.

And then what? People sit around making animated videos, all of which are completely interchangeable because they're made at zero budget with the exact same technology? Great. Can't wait to ignore all of that stuff just like we ignore the existing low-quality garbage that's already out there.

Go back to being a kid and dreaming again. Your attitude shuts off immeasurable possibility space, closes the door to opportunity, and makes you sad, bitter, and old.

Please don't be like this. You're more useful to the world if you forget everything you know and start dreaming again.

I think you're missing the point. You could flood the market with AI generated movies and art and music and books but a lot of it will be devoid of any real meaning. Also if u have unique generated content for each individual you lose shared culture that comes with normal entertainment - you can't talk to your friend/family/neighbour about AI show 7472648 as they will not have seen it. Looking at AI generated media is like replacing most meals with Soylent, sure you can probably manage to expend your time/fulfill energy needs but it's going to lack something

I don't think AI-generated, personalised, movies would displace the market either. At least not in the forceable future. However to play devils advocate, there is a precedence for personalised stories that are hugely popular: gaming.

Maybe one day in the future, movies become a bit more like gaming. Kind of like "holo-novels" in Star Trek, where the story does adapt to suit the individual.

This isn't going to happen in the next 10 years though. Even technology aside, the various Hollywood unions wouldn't allow it.

If you look at the last big shift in the way society consumed content (from CDs to streaming) it took decades from the invention of Napster before anything like Spotify was successful. And that wasn't because the general public was slow to adopt. It was purely because distributors dragged their heals.

It’s not cheap running cinema quality gen AI. The tools for that level of quality have a few iterations to go through before we start seeing the average Joe using it.

I work in the edge research and your claims are exaggerated at best.

As I said, YouTube quality is already there. But cinema quality still requires VFX people because gen AI hallucinates a lot of weird stuff like 7 fingers on a hand.

You need to think of gen AI like self driving cars. We’ve had semi-autonomous cars for years already but they’re still unsafe to be fully self driving. You still need a human to make corrections. And the same is true for gen AI.

Until the acceptance ratio improves drastically, gen AI is not going to replace Disney.

If anything, ai is _manuring_ fast.

Given that %60 of a films production budget goes to marketing I'll say there will still be studios... They'll just have a higher margin.

If they have a higher margin there will be more studios competing for the same attention span/money and margins will come down.

I’ll take the other other side and bet that they’re in their room gooning right now.

Hey, that's a half truth!

But folks are “already creating movies”, “writing code” and “replacing people” with ai. /s

These aren't AI generated, FYI. I thought so too at first but someone just put in a crapload of work collecting fake movies or TV shows which were in real movies or TV shows.

I think the idea is to use AI to turn these short snippets of imaginary shows into actual full-length show, not to generate more imaginary shows.

Check out Frinkiac[0]. An extremely well annotated dataset of all Simpsons stills for almost every single frame.

How has someone has not used this huge corpus of image and text to write their own Simpson episode?

0 :https://frinkiac.com/gifmaker/S07E04/1166047/1166047

Probably because "The Simpsons" has many (great) episodes already. The closest thing is probably "Dark Simpsons" or Simpsons Shitposts.

There's also Morbotron[0] for Futurama, The Penske File[1] for Seinfeld, and memeSRC[2] for any/all of the above; from what I hear, memeSRC may be superior to Penske File, but I can't speak to that, as it is relatively new to me, but I've definitely seen it before, although it is newer than the show-specific sites previously mentioned.

[0] https://morbotron.com/

[1] https://www.penskefile.com/

[2] https://beta.memesrc.com/ (newish beta v2 @ beta subdomain; use root domain for stable/legacy v1)

Remember Alf? He's back! In pog form.

You might want to look up the current definition for "goon" It might not mean what you think it does

He clearly meant what he said.

I'd buy that for a dollar!

https://nestflix.fun/its-not-my-problem/

Fabulous labour of love. It’s the type of thing you’d see on the old Internet – only much more polished.

Happy to see both the docu-drama “Making a Monster” and French art-house film, “Les Cousins Dangereux” included.

https://nestflix.fun/making-a-monster/

https://nestflix.fun/les-cousins-dangereux/

The amount of effort gone for these designs is unheard of in the generative day and age. At first I thought it was Ai generated design but the text is too clean, and the imagery way too relevant. Super impressed.

Just want to say thank you for having a link for "as seen in" showing all the fake movies/tv where they are from.

It's missing Lethal Weapon 5 and 6: https://github.com/lynnandtonic/nestflix.fun/issues/176

The irony is that the It's Always Sunny Lethal Weapon and Thundergun 4: Maximum Cool [1] episodes made fun of exactly that.

[1] https://nestflix.fun/thunder-gun-4-maximum-cool/

Where’s Wormhole X-Treme?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0709220/

It’s the only result when using the site search: https://nestflix.fun/search?search=Wormhole+X-Treme

Nestflix’s search is unlike Netflix in that it shows only what you searched for – without a mix of vaguely related shows or films.

I can't wait to watch Threat Level Midnight with Michael Scarn.

I always wished this was an actual movie: https://nestflix.fun/the-night-the-reindeer-died/

Who would not want Lee Majors (The Six Million Dollar Man and The Fall Guy) in a xmass action film?

The Rural Juror. Oh that takes me back.

Oh good they have Stab. That franchise really went downhill but the first one was great!

I've heard they're doing a reboot. Stab: New Blood.

Well, if it can get out of development hell but I'm hopeful!

Wait I’m curious. What are you referencing here? I see a very niche video for scream (2022) aka Scream V called Scream New Blood but it doesn’t seem to have been an associated title ever with the film. And it was of course released. And I think in universe they went through Stab 9.

I live in the world of my own imagination. Everything I say should be taken with a grain of salt, mixed with two eggs, 1 cup of flour, 1 cup of corn meal, 1&3/4s cup of buttermilk and 1/4 cup of melted butter, blended together, allowed to rest for 10 minutes and baked in a pre-heated and pre-buttered cast iron skillet at 375 degrees for 25 minutes.

I was hoping it would be live and time-lapse streams of birds making nests, like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtLIuEg_lDg

Next up, they should add or link to any existing clips for these fictional media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koLgAcmOav8

(2021)

Some more discussion from then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28189435

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Welcome to Nestflix - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28189435 - Aug 2021 (51 comments)

Shouldn't most of the episodes of WandaVision be included? (I'm sure it's a rights thing, but that's the premise of the show ...)

I saw the name and was really hoping this was some kind of aggregated bird watching webcams or resource for birders. Bummer.

Interesting decision to leave out movies that were fake, then became real. Like Machete was fake until it became a real movie!

I think there was already a plan to actually make a Machete move. But not "Machete Kills" or "Machete Kills Again."

Hahaha Arrested Development has got so many worth mentioning. I'm going to have to watch the whole thing again...

Gandhi’s back and this time he’s mad. No more Mr. Passive Resistance.

    "Gimme a steak, medium rare."

I'd totally watch it: https://nestflix.fun/gandhi-ii/

It's too bad they didn't (couldn't?) link the original commercial for it from UHF.

https://youtu.be/4ega5Rcct2s?si=Dr3iOlDzoUoFjHoM

Disappointed to find they don't have The Magnificent Steiner. Oh well, one of these days...

https://nestflix.fun/contribute

Haha this is awesome, Good Will Hunting 2 is probably my favourite bit from a comedy movie.

I love this, quite a few of these made me laugh. It's like a modern take on Charlie Brooker's TVGoHome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TVGoHome

Do they include fake shows that subsequently become real, like Kujibiki Unbalance? Given that some of the fake movies from Grindhouse are on there but not the ones that were subsequently made, I guess not?

I wonder if any of them will ever be "realized". Well, as a real series, I mean....

Come to think of it, I suppose it's already happened?

The movie Machete was made after the trailer. The trailer was sandwiched, with other fake ones, in between the two parts of the Tarantino / Rodriguez double-feature Grindhouse. I remember because I saw Grindhouse in theaters and years later saw the actual trailer for the real movie Machete and did quite the double take. What a B-movie clusterfuck.

Last year Eli Roth did the same thing with his Grindhouse trailer, turned it into a real movie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving_(2023_film)

Are there any doubly (or higher order) nested movies or TV shows? E.g., a movie shown in the background of the Truman Show?

It's a misnomer - should be called "nestimdb" not "nestflix" as there are no actual flix available.

You must be fun at parties

My favorite is McBain from the Simpsons that actually has a complete plot told over clips from several unrelated episodes.

The recommendations seem a bit weak. What is the best way to build a recommender system for fictional works of fiction?

The recommendations are on par with Netflix. I imagine that’s a feature – not a bug – and the creators wouldn’t want to build a better recommendation system.

Can't find the cartoons you can watch on the internet in GTA V

Edit: nevermind, it excludes videogames. Which is fine

> *Asbestos in Obstetrics*

> In this classic TV movie, hundreds of pregnant women are trapped in a maternity ward infested with asbestos.

> "If they can manage not to breathe until we can get them out of there…"

i've never wanted to watch something more

https://nestflix.fun/asbestos-in-obstetrics/

You know what would be fun(and awesome), if the thing just let you download a "master" Massive Movie Model(MMM) and send in smaller size prompt data to generate any of the movies in that catalog on demand. It would shift all that streaming cost to GPU cost to the consumer. Nestflix would just have to invest in making models and prompts personalized to your taste.

Kung PowII Tongue of Furry, the sequel of Kung Pow! Enter the Fist.

Whoau! Parental advisory. Explicit Content.

Sadly The 3 never got made into a (fake) movie. (Adaptation (2002))

Having never watched it, I’m now very ready to sit down for Tropic Thunder

Lots of Simpsons stuff, but needs 'Worker and Parasite'.

Also Mattel-Hershey Chocobot Hour, although I don’t know if it will qualify. It appears on screen, but always inside the character’s TV.

Is this made with nest? Is it open source?

I would love to see them add books as well

You watched a lot of movie :)))

But do they have Gekigangar 3?

Hah, you might have beaten me to the punch! I submitted it nonetheless. Soon the world will know about all the geki-action.

Awh, I was really hoping this was going to be a bird watching website lol

No Jaws 19?

no warriors of grün?

i love this

Posts like these end up full of comments like "it's a shame they don't have my favorite fictional show." For those posts, they have a "Contribute" section. https://nestflix.fun/contribute

It's hard to find good Shakespeare films, IMHO - I love the plays, but so many films seem underfunded and amatuerish. The only good movie versions of Hamlet I've seen were (in parts of) the films Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and Fat Ham.

Edit: I'm not complaining and don't care much, but HN is puzzling sometimes! Currently this comment is at -1 - it's such an innocuous comment, and it added some substance. Maybe people really hated those films! :)

Ran is a pretty good king Lear.

Ran is an incredible film, IMHO. However, for these purposes, it doesn't fit what Nestflix is looking for: It's inspired by King Lear and follows some of the plot, but the plot also differs in many ways, the scenes and characters differ in many ways, and there's not one line of the Shakespeare play in it.

I think you missed what Nestflix is hence the downvotes. This is a site for Pyramus and Thisbe thats performed inside A Midsummer Nights Dream not about inspiration and derivation.

Thanks for responding. To be clear, you're saying that the Hamlet scenes performed in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern don't fit Nestflix because Hamlet is a real play. The play-within-the-play in Hamlet, performed by the traveling players, would fit. ?

Yeah. I mean R+G is pretty much created a reverse nesting category I guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com