They Live (1988) inspired Adblocker
94 points by tokenburner 5 hours ago | 11 comments

robot-wrangler 2 hours ago
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.

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HerbManic 21 minutes ago
What I find funny (only not really) is the wildly different interpretations of this film people have, for many they seem to be primed by other things to see in it what they want.

Basically skeptical of common forms in modernity, that is very clearly the intention. However, I have also seen that in extreme far-right communities this film represents how Jewish people control the world... somehow I don't think that is what Carpenter was going for.

Alas, once your works are in the wild it is out of the creators control in how they end up being used.

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robot-wrangler 5 minutes ago
It's interesting right? In a way there's too much distrust of authority now and not enough. Even the word "skeptic" is sometimes used to refer to people who "do their own research" and somehow doggedly latch on to different conspiracies and manage to just totally ignore what's real.

Avoiding groupthink is another slightly different positive spin on (my read of) the underlying message. There's such a thing as toxic individualism too, but if there's a "bad" way to be a free-thinker then at least you could say it has a pretty limited blast radius

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riffraff 44 minutes ago
My dad pitched this movie to me when I was a kid, as he was a Carpenter fan.

Beyond the somewhat "obvious" message (for a grown up) it's just an eminently entertaining movie.

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shrubby 2 hours ago
Nice pitch. I'll stream it right away!

I've been watching Andor as a instructional manual recently and this seems like a good addition to the reality based manuals out there.

Idiocracy, War INC etc.

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minisini 2 hours ago
I LOVE for someone to make a version of this for Apple Vision Pro. In fact I would put down $500.
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HerbManic 18 minutes ago
If AR ever makes it big, I think we have the first ad blocking idea already fleshed out. Would be kind of fun to see.
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dostick 3 hours ago
Cool idea!the font weight should be extra/heavy, and not true black, dark gray.
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akkartik 2 hours ago
I never found the Matrix very impressive, because I'd been inoculated by this movie.
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tlhunter 2 hours ago
My personal tagline, "I came here to kick ass, build web applications, and chew bubble gum. And I'm all out of gum." came from this movie.
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DeathArrow 44 minutes ago
And Duke Nukem.
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