Okay, admit it: some of us watch Adult Swim. Those who do know about their general attitude of Fuck-The-Rest-Of-The-World-We’re-So-Over-You. They’ve got such a huge following of teens and college kids that they feel like they’re the center of a massive subculture.
I belive it’s this attitude that leads them to think they can leave things strewn around a city and people will just smile at the whimsy of it all. They may even have (in the depths of their subconscious minds) the impression that the majority of civilians will ‘get’ the reference.
Okay, if I’d stumbled across one of the lite-brites, I would have thought it was hilarious. A perfectly fitting viral marketing idea. But the folks at Adult Swim should know their fanbase better. (I.e. their fanbase is MAYBE about 1% of people who will see these things.)
Funny how they’ve been up in a half-dozen cities for two weeks and nobody else freaked out and shut down the goddamned city. This is rank incompetence on the part of the police, Homeland Security, and everybody else.
It’s a fucking Lite Brite with a cartoon character on it. Get a fucking grip. It should have never gotten this far. Did none of the “experts” we’re paying a fuckload of money to keep us safe just look at the first one of the damned things and say “Hey, wait a minute. These are just light-up signs. They’re not bombs. Back down from DEFCON 1 and open up the streets again.”
WTF?? You’d think that anybody with a multidigit IQ would immediately realize that leaving unknown boxes with wires and electronics around like that was a Major Bad Idea.
I watch AS (hey, stoners and grad students have a lot in common). They do have a “fuck you, we’re cooler than you” irreverence on the bumps. But most people in the working world have no idea what ATHF is. And it’s not as if a familiar face or cartoon character on an object makes it safe, either.
On the moon, our powers of advertising have advanced beyond ALL comprehension.
I have to say I’m surprised that any of you are going along with charactrizing this as “a box with LED’s and circuit boards.” The cops and associated John Q. Laws need to get their heads out of their asses, and, frankly, so do you. Any indignation towards Adult Swim is misplaced here. LOOK at the fucking picture, would you? It’s not some random assembly of electronics, it’s a character on, well yeah, a lite brite. If I leave my lava lamp on the street corner for the trash collectors, does that mean I’ve planted an incendiary device*? Jesus fucking Christ, get a grip indeed. :rolleyes:
*notwithstanding the fact that’s probably not a safe means of disposal
Let’s just hope this madness will all be resolved with new federal legislation that requires registration of all objects with blinky lights.
“Whacha got there, boy?”
“Oh, hello officer. This is just my new flashlight.”
“Is it registered under the ATHF act?”
“What do you m–”
“Get in the van, boy.”
Will the Boston bomb squad now roam the streets blowing up every abandoned dishwasher or sofa dumped by the side of the road? How about public trash cans? After all, any one of them could EASILY contain an IED capable of killing dozens of people! That’s how they do it in Baghdad.
I’m serious here. There are real security measures that can be put in place to reduce the risk of a bomb attack. Freaking out over a “device” that’s nothing more than a circuit board with a few blinking lights and shutting down the city in response is just stupid.
Here, take a look at this Boston street scene I found randomly on Google. See that trash can on the left? How many pounds of C4 are inside it? How many of those people on the right are going to die when it goes off? You want to get serious about anti-bomb security? Then start with real hazards like the one in this photo.
My God, if this is all it takes to paralyze a major city we are well and truly fucked … .
Or no one else noticed them, they decided their viral marketing effort was a failure, and someone decided to call the cops to get some attention? Fuck, I dunno, that’s about as smart of a decision as putting up Lite-Brites of some character that I can’t even recognize (and yes, I watch ATHF) in various large cities and hoping that… what? People who recognize the character already watch it, people who don’t either don’t watch it and won’t understand even where to look to find out more, or they just don’t decipher the sign even though they’ve seen the show.
That’s probably the one funny thing about this…most the media outlets are displaying full pictures of the “devices,” not realizing that the character is shooting the bird. Any publicity they can get, I guess.
So, do terrorists usually put bright lights and animated cartoon characters on their bombs? 'cause it seems to me, if I were planting bombs in a major city, I’d kinda want them to be inconspicuous. You know, so people don’t see them and disarm them before they explode? Low profile definitly seems like the smart bet when setting up a major terrorist attack, but maybe that’s just me.
Sadly, this climate of fear has been the normal state of affairs in America ever since the widespread Burma-Shave terror campaigns of the 1950s.
Jesus Christ. It was a freaking ad. I’ve got one of those things across from my apartment right now; it’s been there for weeks (this one doesn’t light up though-- maybe it has a defective warhead). There was no “hoax;” there was no “bomb.” The “mysterious wires, LEDs and boxes” are only “mysterious” to people who can’t figure out that “wires” and “batteries” are necessary to make “LEDs” “light” “up.”
This is even dumber than that incident a couple months ago in London where some artist’s found object installations were mistaken for bombs by other idiots.* Seriously, why in the hell would terrorists call attention to their bombs by making them light up in advance? That’s the kind of goofy-ass shit you expect from the Joker, not actual criminals.
*I suppose it could have been the exact same idiots, on vacation or something, but that seems unlikely.
I’m sure this will translate into millions for the ATHF movie.
Okay, I liked ATHF for about a week (three years ago) and I know the attitude you’re talking about, but blaming AS is stupid. These ads aren’t pranks. They aren’t fake bombs. It’s just a case of people freaking out over nothing. The fact that citizens and police flipped out like this tells me that the populace is in a state of totally irrational fear, and that if another terrorist attack or disaster comes, nobody will be able to respond properly because they are too busy obsessing over… and I think this deserves a little emphasis…
LITE BRITE, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, LITE BRITE!
Do you realize that if 19-year-olds were running the police departments, they would have responded in a rational and sane manner? That’s not so good.
