Sunday’s ‘Game of Thrones’ Set a Piracy Record

HBO

The way torrents work, if you’re unclear and if I’m correct, is that lots of people share pieces of a single (frequently illicit) file as they simultaneously download other pieces of the file, and eventually they’ve got a complete, death-laden Game of Thrones episode ready to be popped into the ol’ VLC Player. On Sunday night, 193,418 eyepatchless pirates did that very thing, sharing a single copy of “The Lion and the Rose,” TorrentFreak reports [via EW], which is a record. (The previous high: 171,572 people sharing the Season 2 finale of Game of Thrones.) An estimated 1.5 million people downloaded the episode within its first day online. “In addition to this record-breaking torrent, there were also several other Game of Thrones torrents out there with tens of thousands of people sharing,” writes TorrentFreak, before going on to bet that the record will be broken again within the coming weeks.

The dust-is-settled accounting on True Detective’s ratings proves it to be HBO’s most-watched first-year series ever, with an average of 11.9 million viewers per episode. Six Feet Under was the last one to hold the record, averaging 11.4 million viewers back in its 2001 debut season.

Easter Billy!

Brilliant Single-Serve Tumblr, Outta Left Field Division: TL;DR Wikipedia. [via]

Here’s Philip Seymour Hoffman in the trailer for God’s Pocket, directed by John Slattery and costarring Christina Hendricks, John Turturro, and Richard Jenkins.

Brilliant Single-Serve Tumblr, Better Late Than Never Division: Time Is a Flat Circus. (True D + Family Circus.)

The first actual trailer for NBC’s Rosemary’s Baby.
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Kickstarter goal for Neil Young’s PonoMusic: $800,000. Final tally: $6.2 million. It’s Kickstarter’s third-biggest campaign ever. [via]

A CoolDad Photoshopped his sons into classic album covers.

Watch Amy Schumer’s dead-on Aaron Sorkin parody.
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Stream Future’s new album, Honest …
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… and/or the new Eels, The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett.

Did you catch the Samuel L. Jackson/Pulp Fiction reference in Captain America: The Winter Soldier? [Spoiler alert.]

And here’s another trailer (with bonus French subtitles): the Tommy Lee Jones–directed The Homesman, featuring Hilary Swank, Jesse Plemons, Meryl Streep and daughter Grace Gummer, Hailee Steinfeld, and Tim Blake Nelson. Very Western-y.

Filed Under: Afternoon Links, Game of Thrones, rosemary's baby, Zoe Saldana, billy on the street, easter, amy schumer, Aaron Sorkin, Inside Amy Schumer, tommy lee jones, the homesman, philip seymour hoffman, John Slattery, god's pocket, kickstarter, ponomusic, Future, tumblr, true detective, captain america: the winter soldier, Samuel L. Jackson, Eels, the cautionary tales of mark oliver everett, torrents, piracy, hilary swank, Christina Hendricks