That's mere a narcissistic (hipster's) self-delusion.
I still feel like an idiot at 40.
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A hipster is mere a role-governed behavior with corresponding fashion and hairstyle.
'Hackers' at 20
121–130 of 164 posts
Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#122One of the things I love about this movie is how much it got right . The general attitude of the time, the feeling that we had in that era. This film shows what it feels like to spend all night reading through hexdumps trying to solve a complex riddle. I don't know anything else that captures that. Of course it had to be "inaccurate" to show visually what that feels like without it being super boring. It glorifies a…
I agree and tend to think of it in terms of how the movie 300 depicted the Persians as monsters. They were nowhere near as monstrous in real life but the Greek saw them that way. And the only way to convey the sense of how the ancient Greek viewed them to our modern eye was to make them hulking giants. In much the same way, Hackers had to do something to depict how we felt about computers at the time. I remember thin…
> They were nowhere near as monstrous in real life
In fact, they weren't monstrous at all. No more than any other army.
One overlooked factoid in 300 is that despite all the "we fought for FREEDOM!" stuff, the Greek city-states were slave-keeping societies (and Sparta was friendly with infanticide), whereas the Persians invading them were Zoroastrian - a religion that forbids slavery. :)
Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#123Sneakers[1] > Track Down/Takedown[2] > Hackers[3] > Sword Fish[4] [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/ [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/ [3] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/ [4] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0244244/
I feel like having Swordfish in there at all skews your "weak side" of that list to the gutter. Not fair to Hackers to be so closely associated with Swordfish. Edit: typo
Having swordfish in there at all, and not War Games, invalidates the list.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off deserves more credit than swordfish on social engineering alone!
Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#124One of the things I love about this movie is how much it got right . The general attitude of the time, the feeling that we had in that era. This film shows what it feels like to spend all night reading through hexdumps trying to solve a complex riddle. I don't know anything else that captures that. Of course it had to be "inaccurate" to show visually what that feels like without it being super boring. It glorifies a…
I was at Summercon the year before Hackers was released and I remember there being some kind of presentation about it, with the point being made repeatedly that we shouldn't get hung up on the technical details, and that it had the same director as _Backbeat_, which I gathered was a good thing. It always amused the hell out of me that they had Matthew Lillard playing Emmanuel Goldstein. They should have cast Steve Bu…
I don't think that was literally supposed to be EG, just a knowing nod in that direction
Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#125There's three really great hacking movies: WarGames, Hackers and Sneakers. WarGames really nails the solo bedroom hacker of the 80s but then mixes in the DoD and general purpose AI to turn it into a coldwar thriller. Sneakers is a clever, quirky, thoughtful adult hacking film. Hackers though, teenage me ate up the feeling of the hacking culture that it espoused. When I read cyperpunk books, I pictured the environment…
The biggest thing I like about WarGames as a geek/hacker movie is that it has one of the more realistic depictions I've seen of the critical skill required for security research (or doing many other worthwhile things): a giant pile of research, trying many different things, most of which don't work, eventually leading to success. All shown in an montage cutting between a library and a computer, with this awesome musi…
There's a retrospective on WarGames that's even better than the CS Monitor Hackers article at http://archive.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/16...
WarGames was another case of life imitating art imitating life, when the over-the-top NORAD command center set (the director called it "NORAD's wet dream of itself") became the blueprint for command centers everywhere going nuts with monitors.
A NORAD commander is quoted there: "A few years later, I was an executive officer with the Air Force Space Command stationed at Norad near Cheyenne Mountain. And I'm wondering, 'Gee, where can we get such cool-looking displays?' It was a good forcing function. It required us to all of a sudden say, 'If it really can look like this, why doesn't it?'"
Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#126Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#127This movie came out when I was 18 and I very much related to the characters in the story. My friends and I definitely stepped up our "hacker" game after seeing this film. I also bought the soundtrack on CD (that's something you did then) and it was what got me into techno/house music. Funny side story: I grew up in LA and one of the things we got to do as teenagers was see pre-screenings of movies. This was usually b…
> ...20 years later that scene is horribly sexist and a sign of the times. IIRC, (and I may not RC) that scene is Jolie and Miller engaging in sexual role-play. A few moments later, we cut to what's actually going on: the pair is making out on a bed, and their friends have just walked in to deliver good news, but are currently gawping at the spectacle. Jolie notices the gawpers, gets up, calls them something off-colo…
The sexism is that part that they cut -- the gratuitous nudity.
Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#128I loved the OST, especially orbital's "Halcyon on and on". It's still on my 'snowboard' playlist. I still remember the intro scene vividly[1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxb5YrDjDZ8 "New York - The City that never sleeps"...
Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#129One of the things I love about this movie is how much it got right . The general attitude of the time, the feeling that we had in that era. This film shows what it feels like to spend all night reading through hexdumps trying to solve a complex riddle. I don't know anything else that captures that. Of course it had to be "inaccurate" to show visually what that feels like without it being super boring. It glorifies a…
I agree and tend to think of it in terms of how the movie 300 depicted the Persians as monsters. They were nowhere near as monstrous in real life but the Greek saw them that way. And the only way to convey the sense of how the ancient Greek viewed them to our modern eye was to make them hulking giants. In much the same way, Hackers had to do something to depict how we felt about computers at the time. I remember thin…
The structure of 300 is it is the atory told by the lone survivor of the 300, to drum up support back home and to motivate the troops. The only "real" part of the film is the charge at the end, everything else is the visualization of an oral retelling.
Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#130Sneakers[1] > Track Down/Takedown[2] > Hackers[3] > Sword Fish[4] [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/ [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/ [3] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/ [4] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0244244/
The Matrix? It is also unpleasantly fast predicting the future.