Watch it if you haven't already. I accidentally landed in the middle of it while doing some illicit late night channel surfing when I was a kid.. this left quite an impression.
I think it was a healthy formative influence for me and primed me for rejecting fads / peer pressure, distrusting authority, etc. Probably also helped me to resist the more unhealthy aspects of a religious time/place, and I was even doing light reading on Cartesian skepticism a few years later, which got me into math. Didn't figure out the name of the movie until years later when it was a big meme.
This is not advice but I definitely advise you to show your small children this movie before they are old enough to think it's corny. They may have a schizophrenic episode or descend into solipsism sure, but they may also get scared as hell by monsters and learn some mental judo, and thank you for it later.
it replaces terms used to exalt Artificial Intelligence to what they really mean, and some tongue in cheek jokes against things that are used to pass billionaires/tech as friendly (e.g. replacing bill gates with his actual name)
Caution - At one point I was running a greasemonkey script to replace religious words with funny alternatives. Had a bad time when I installed it and forgot about it and it replaced my manager's first name, Christian, with the funny alternative.
In short, aliens have invaded earth, but wear a special skin to appear human. To average people, they appear and sound identical to real humans. The lead character discovers that special sunglasses can show the aliens without their human-like skin. (They look a bit like the aliens from "Mars Attacks".) When wearing the sunglasses, most outdoor adverts are replaced with bland single-party-state-style propaganda encouraging people to consume, work hard, and follow the rules.
I can honestly say that the trailer does no justice for the film. It is much better than the trailer. When I saw first saw this, I was genuinedly spooked. One half of the film is good fun 1980s alien invasion beat 'em up, and the other half is a thoughtful commentary on the age of consumerism.
They Live was such a fun B movie. It is also kind of timeless.
It is far from a perfect or even very good movie, but the key messages are great and simple and the "chew bubblegem" scene is one very actionable scene. Long live Roddy.
Misread the title to mean that They Live inspired the concept of adblocking in general. Which would have been an interesting coincidence, since it did inspire one of the early Mozilla logos. [0]
Back in the late 90s I stood up a webserver in my office that returned fake banner ads for 404's. I used the in-house DNS server to vector "*.doubleclick.net" over to it.
We'd get amusing banner ads for things like cocaine-based nasal spray, renting pigs, and other vaguely off-color things in place of real ads. It was very, very amusing. I didn't tell anybody I was doing it and got some real laughs when people submitted helldesk tickets asking about the ads.
It got the axe when a technician printed some Mapquest directions that included off-color ads and left them laying around at a Customer site.
Aside: The fake ads came from a website called "Bannertown", (if memory serves). I believe it's long-since defunct. I'd love to find the ads today. They were very amusing.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 61.3 ms ] threadI think it was a healthy formative influence for me and primed me for rejecting fads / peer pressure, distrusting authority, etc. Probably also helped me to resist the more unhealthy aspects of a religious time/place, and I was even doing light reading on Cartesian skepticism a few years later, which got me into math. Didn't figure out the name of the movie until years later when it was a big meme.
This is not advice but I definitely advise you to show your small children this movie before they are old enough to think it's corny. They may have a schizophrenic episode or descend into solipsism sure, but they may also get scared as hell by monsters and learn some mental judo, and thank you for it later.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/artificial-cl...
it replaces terms used to exalt Artificial Intelligence to what they really mean, and some tongue in cheek jokes against things that are used to pass billionaires/tech as friendly (e.g. replacing bill gates with his actual name)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44406552
In short, aliens have invaded earth, but wear a special skin to appear human. To average people, they appear and sound identical to real humans. The lead character discovers that special sunglasses can show the aliens without their human-like skin. (They look a bit like the aliens from "Mars Attacks".) When wearing the sunglasses, most outdoor adverts are replaced with bland single-party-state-style propaganda encouraging people to consume, work hard, and follow the rules.
I can honestly say that the trailer does no justice for the film. It is much better than the trailer. When I saw first saw this, I was genuinedly spooked. One half of the film is good fun 1980s alien invasion beat 'em up, and the other half is a thoughtful commentary on the age of consumerism.
(like a very poorly maintained easter egg, not a problem if is broken by something else)
It is far from a perfect or even very good movie, but the key messages are great and simple and the "chew bubblegem" scene is one very actionable scene. Long live Roddy.
[0] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-hi...
We'd get amusing banner ads for things like cocaine-based nasal spray, renting pigs, and other vaguely off-color things in place of real ads. It was very, very amusing. I didn't tell anybody I was doing it and got some real laughs when people submitted helldesk tickets asking about the ads.
It got the axe when a technician printed some Mapquest directions that included off-color ads and left them laying around at a Customer site.
Aside: The fake ads came from a website called "Bannertown", (if memory serves). I believe it's long-since defunct. I'd love to find the ads today. They were very amusing.