My head cannon is that Carl was part of some science experiment where he was placed into a virtual reality without him knowing to see how a human would react to insanity around him.
This is around the time Boston bomb squad detonated a traffic monitor from the Department of Transportation, and like 20 airport cops with SMGs almost shot a kid for having a name tag.
Zebbler is still out doing really cool projection mapping and art installations if you check out his live work at Zebbler Encanti Experience, and is teaching VJ’ing at Berklee College of Music in Boston!
It was like taking crazy pills. Fucking idiot bush era broke everyone's brains. At the turn off the century, everyone knew what a computer was and understood that some technology would occasionally come out that they weren't familiar with.
Some dude makes a Lite Brite sign out of LEDs and people fucking freak out and spin it into national news. This was a nothing burger if our police dept in Boston wasn't inept, and also if our news wasn't test running creating mass panic for no reason. This should never have been national news, but the media had been trying to show terrorism was alive and well post 9-11. This was what they could do with the nothing they had.
Of course I do. Its a fantastic meme. But they said "arrested a slide". Is that poetic liscence or did they actually attempt some kind of legal reaponse?
Reminder that to this day the Boston police still refer to this as a “bomb hoax” and won’t take responsibility despite the fact they were the ones that didn’t understand how technology worked and escalated it.
I had a buddy who at the time was a fresh faced probie in the boston pd.
I called him immediately when I saw the news.
I could have hung up the phone and still heard him groaning with embarassment, even five hundred miles away.
Apparently he and a bunch of other junior officers tried to tell the brass that it was a harmless prank, a glorified lite brite, but nobody listened. the old fogeys were so damn stuck on it being some kind of terrorist threat.
The ridiculous thing about it was it wasn't even a prank, it was literally just a "glorified lite brite", it wasn't trying to be anything else other than that. It was basically just graffiti. A prank would imply it was somehow a joke or a trick.
About 20 years ago our local swat team was serving a warrant on a 19yo kid with no prior criminal history. The primary guy was spooked because another cop did a scary knock so his first response was to just open fire through the door. The kid was walking up to the door at the time and was basically executed. They kicked down the door and promptly shot his dog, naturally. Nobody faced any discipline, although the brave cop who shot the kid resigned I believe.
Shooting at a target you can't see, as a trained police officer, ought to result in an automatic life sentence, even without bodily injury or loss of life. The fuck.
My brothers friends dad shot himself in the leg, which almost killed him, while serving a warrant to an empty house. The way it gets framed though in retellings is that he got shot serving a warrant as if there was someone there who shot him.
Unfortunately I'm not allowed to ruin the badass cop imagery by telling my brothers friend how it actually went down.
Bro I was trying to google this story and couldn't find it, but did find two different 19 year olds that were shot dead within this last week in my area. WTF is going on
I probably have some details wrong but here is what my quick search turned up. I think I got the broad strokes right. I was in college around there at the time.
The press conference where they (the people who made the signs) refused to answer questions that weren't about hair, and the press got increasingly pissed off at them for 'not taking this seriously', will live in my head, rent-free, forever. Why should they take it seriously? Because bunch of idiots had an unpredictable reaction, and you want them to feel guilty that you moronically misclassified a light up sign as a bomb? (We all know bombs have large, bright, static displays, of course.)
They had been advised by their lawyers not to say anything about the incident. They just did so in an irreverent way.
And there were minimal consequences for them:
On May 11, 2007, prosecutors decided not to pursue criminal charges against Berdovsky and Stevens, in exchange for community service and a public apology. Attorney General Martha Coakley cited the difficulty in proving intent to incite panic on the part of the two men and called the deal "an appropriate and fair resolution". Berdovsky and Stevens completed 80 and 60 hours of community service at the Spaulding Rehabilitation Center in Boston, respectively.
Reminds me of the cop that emptied his whole clip on a handcuffed black man THEY HAD ALREADY SEARCHED in the back of his patrol car because an acorn fell on the roof. He also repeatedly yells "I'm hit".... : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKmnJgXyZpU
If you're that jumpy and scared you shouldn't be a cop.
To this day there are still many Bostonians who will defend the police response. We have a thread about it in /r/boston almost every year and it's funny every time.
I’m an ex EOD tech, and I often wish I could talk to the guys who responded to these and ask them what made them believe it to be a real device such that they used explosive tools against it.
It’s a Boston thing… for every ultra-smart person in Cambridge, there’s a moron in Brookline or Brighton who’s proportionally as stupid.
I used to work at a CVS when that happened… we had elderly people screeching that “the bombers deserve the DEATH penalty!” and talking about how scary it is that we have terrorists in Boston.
I tried ONCE to explain that no, it’s a thing from a TV show, got written up because the old bat complained that I thought she was stupid (she was extremely stupid, idk how someone makes it 80+ years being that separate from reality)
I have the Ignignot version. I bought it off of eBay a few years after the incident. I am not sure if it is an original. Mine has the battery option but also has a port to plug it in and I do. That’s why I think it’s a reproduction. Anyway, it’s in my retro gaming room and it’s hilarious also blindingly BRIGHT!
Found it on a street corner a few years ago and im pretty sure its real but have no way of knowing for sure.
Now it just sits on my tool box in my garage because I think its neat and remember when the news was going crazy over this.
When I saw it I flipped out a bit and the women I was seeing at the time had no idea why I needed to go back to my car so suddenly when we had just gotten to the resturant, this was on like our second or third date.
OP, that lower left corner is the power and control circuit. The TO-220 package bolted to the board is probably where the heat is coming from. It's probably a linear voltage regulator if it was made in 07. If it says LM7805 that is exactly what it is. Made for one time use outside they might have just used the board as the heatsink and if it's close to a 1 amp draw it would be running near max temp which is 125°C.
Edit to add, after looking at the board and components. Those are all through hole components and big old style leds. I would bet money this was made before 2010s. Even the PCB and conformal coating scream pre 2010. It could be later but the lack of surface mount components and general style look accurate for 2007.
It was one of my favorite unjustified public freakouts of all time.
There was such a perfect combinaton of older generations thinking that we were preparing for a second 9/11 and younger people thinking "lol, Adult Swim"
the absolute best part was watching serious news anchors try to explain what a "mooninite" was on live television. they were treating a lite-brite character flipping the bird like it was a literal WMD.
I was right at the age to understand how both sides were taking it, and it was funniest thing in the world to me.
For younger people that don't understand the context, it was sort of like having someone spraypaint "67" on the side of a bridge and watching a major city shut down and make national news for days because the adults assumed a drug cartel intended to kill 67 people.
Reminds me of the time in high school that we had a school assembly about how gangs were not allowed in response to people writing Taylor Gang or Die in the bathrooms, which is a reference to Wiz Khalifa’s rap group.
I remember being so confused when I saw this in the news. I was like "...isn't this from Aqua Teen Hunger Force???? Hello???? We don't know these characters???? Tf???"
"Several sources noted that the hundreds of officers in the Boston police department or city emergency planning office on scene were unable to identify the figure depicted for several hours until a young staffer at Mayor Thomas Menino's office saw the media coverage and recognized the figures."
First Responders are trained to identify and provide explosive devices by a few characteristics. Exposed wiring. Batteries. Circuit boards. Things like that. All of which the signs had. Lol
Yeah, on the one hand, I kinda get how there was at least some concern that a bunch of objects covered in wires and circuitry appeared at multiple locations with zero warning.
At work a couple years ago the police shut down an entire one block radius because of a “suspicious item” on the sidewalk that turned out to be a Coleman cooler left behind by a food truck during lunch earlier that afternoon. People actually called it in as a possible bomb. So fucking stupid
This isn’t stupid, the most famous bombings have been coolers and backpacks. Bombs are discrete and blend into the environment, you should be alert for objects like that.
What’s stupid is thinking this led sign is a bomb. As my former sculpture professor once said when the bomb squad was called on his installation art, “What? Do they think the goddamn Riddler is out there?”
I remember that. haha. My mom was so confused. half because she didn't know what ATHF was, and half because it was OBVIOUSLY a harmless prank, but Boston law enforcement and media were treating it like fucking terrorism.
I think a lot of people in law enforcement get into it for «the action» but forget just how boring the job can be, and when something even remotely exciting happens they all go into a collective high gear.
That certainly looks like an original rather than a reproduction. I happened to see one "in the wild" while riding the bus in Manhattan way back when, up on a pole across from what had been Tower Records, and I thought it was pretty neat. So when the first photos of the so-called "hoax device" came out of Boston, I realized immediately what had happened. What a phenomenally stupid mess.
What else is open besides your mouth when you're like kissing on some gay dude and like holding his like muscles 'cause his arms just are like wrapped around you and you feel like so safe 'cause you're like... not that you're gay or nothing but God you just want to bury yourself in his chest and just live there forever.
Dude this is a weird piece of history. Are you telling me you found this just thrown out on the street decades after this incident? It looks exactly 1:1 of the real ones so I’m gonna assume it’s the real deal unless there is some replica mooninite bomb scare led device community I’m unaware of.
I remember that day. As soon as I saw them "defusing" one of these I instantly laughed because I knew what TV show it was from. Think they called it guerilla marketing at the time but the subject matter was so niche that it caused a bomb scare 😂
For added context, this incident is largely responsible for knocking Cartoon Network/Adult Swim out of what some would consider to be its "golden age". The president of the company at the time, Jim Samples, resigned and his successor, Stuart Snyder, made the questionable move to focus on developing live-action/reality shows. The entire channel was rebranded and a chunk of animated programming was handled by importing shows from Canada during his tenure.
A few years back I designed a replica for my friend's birthday. I posted in an ATHF discord that I had no idea Carey Mean's wife ran. She asked if I could make one for him, so I did. It was so cool seeing how happy Fryman was about it!
I’m 36, so ATHF started when I was a little too young for it, but I was watching Cartoon Network in a hotel and Adult Swim came on and I left it on despite not knowing what it was.
So ATHF comes on and I’m watching and my mom walks in and immediately, Meatwad says “I do not want to do anything illegal here, but I would kill someone in front of their mama for a 10-speed. And if anyone testifies against me, I will gouge their eyes out.” Lmao. I’ll never forget it.
So she turned it off, of course.
Cut to 2007, I’m in high school, was talking to her on the phone and she asks me if I saw the bomb threats in Boston. I started laughing. She said “this is a serious situation!” I replied, “it’s not serious. They are the Mooninites and their culture is beyond what you can comprehend with 100% of your brain.”
And then I did not explain further. I’m assuming she Googled it because I heard nothing more of bomb threats.
Street advertising for an adult cartoon. A couple characters from the cartoon made in a lite brite style. The city of Boston's leaders and law enforcement created a panic thinking they were bombs placed around the city.
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u/Kyzzz 1d ago
“We are the Mooninites, and our culture is advanced beyond all you can comprehend with 100% of your brain.”