Hacker Cinema
Harold and Maude
1971 · Film · 92 min
Directed by Hal Ashby
A deadpan young man obsessed with death meets an eccentric septuagenarian who teaches him to live life to the fullest.
3 positive4 neutralfrom 7 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
8 comments on Hacker News
It's a machine that has custom medallions in it, typically themed to the location. All but one that I've seen have been aluminum. You pay in, then you have an arm that you can spin around an alphabet to select a letter. Then you pull a lever, and that letter gets stamped into the medallion. You can do this around the circumference of the medallion, up to something like 25-30 letters. When you're done you pull another lever and the medallion drops out, engraved with whatever custom message you entered.
In the movie Harold and Maude, Harold and Maude are sitting on the shore near an amusement park, and Harold says "I made you something" and gives her one of these medallions from the park, reading "Harold loves Maude." She expresses appreciation, then throws it into the water. He's stunned and asks why, and she replies, "So I'll always know where it is."
Whenever I come across one of these machines I make a medallion that says "Geoff loves Katerina" for my wife, but over many years, she only has four of them. I'd like to find more machines.
As I said, most are aluminum. There used to be a machine like this at the exit from Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland. That one used "doubloons" made of some other (heavier) metal.
>PA used to be a town where the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and the like got started. Harold and Maude was (partially) filmed here. But such things are now inconceivable.
I remember how in the 80's and 90's there were still movies like Mrs. Doubtfire with characters on minimum wage renting in downtown San Francisco lol
For what it's worth, I think I did a reasonable job of this. I don't consume any web-based algorithmic feed content and participate in nothing interactive other than Hacker News and do not visit Hacker News every day, or even every other day most of the time. Almost never on weekends. It's really an "I'm bored at work" thing.
As others said, I had to replace these things with something else. I'm not meditative enough to just sit around with a perfectly still mind staring at the wall. For me, it was a few things. Books, first. Not hugely consistent with what they're about. First few years was mostly sci-fi and fantasy, then a year or so of non-fiction pop physics books. Right now, I'm mostly reading cooking books and learning to cook better. That's the second thing. I cook all of my own food, from scratch, and experiment a lot. That consumes quite a bit of time and it's active time. Third, music, but not algorithmic feed music. No YouTube music or Spotify recommendations. Nothing social. I'm listening to complete albums, curated either because I'm in my 40s and already know a lot of music I haven't listened to in a long time, or via human critics the same way I curated music in the 90s. Fourth, movies, but again, nothing algorithmically generated. Just like it's 1999 again. In fact, Alamo Drafthouse is doing a celebration of 1999 for its 25th anniversary. It happens to also be my and my wife's high school graduation year, so a lot of beloved movies to go see. At home, we're doing 70s. We've gotten through Easy Rider and Rosemary's Baby (yes, I know, they're 60s), Badlands, Days of Heaven, Dog Day Afternoon, and Harold and Maude. Quite a few more to go, queued up and ready, curated from prior knowledge. I've already seen most of these but my wife has not. Fourth, exercise. You can't just get off the couch and do it. I spent years building up the capacity after spending the latter half of my 30s mostly inactive due to degenerative spine problems. Started off with resistance bands and walking 6 years ago. Today, I lift for about an hour 6 days a week and then run, row, or both for cardio, anywhere from 60-90 minutes a day. Fifth, concerts. My wife and I saw Judas Priest and Dead Kennedys at the end of last year, Tool last week, and we've got Madonna, Social Distortion and Bad Religion, Ministry, Echo and the Bunnymen, and Slowdive scheduled over the next few months. We usually travel to a multi-day festival or two each year as well but haven't decided which yet for this year. This is also curated from prior knowledge. I guess I miss out on whatever is hot right now, but oh well, there was plenty of great music already out there in 1995 and plenty of these acts still tour.
All in all, this gives me goals, accomplishments, scheduled events, social interaction with a real, non-anonymous person I actually know who is physically present, had made me far healthier, more fit, and better looking, and the quality of my entertainment, though I suppose less "addicting," is much higher.
The downside is this is expensive, but it probably doesn't have to be if you actively bargain-hunt, stay local, work out at a gym instead of buying your own equipment, and eat worse than me. Probably many people on the Internet would say another downside is I'm not very tuned in. It's an election year and I have no clue what any candidates are doing, saying, winning races, and I probably won't vote. Oh well. I'm sure the world will do about the same as it would have done if I didn't exist, which is fine. I'm not that important and neither are you.
Edit: I guess it's worth adding none of this involved or required getting rid of my phone. The phone is, in fact, quite useful. I listen to my albums on it. I buy movie tickets and concert tickets through it and they're delivered to the phone. I buy airline tickets and keep them on the phone. I keep my recipes, log my food, log my workouts, and map my runs on the phone. The local train system sells and keeps passes on a mobile app. There is nothing wrong with phones per se. Just don't let these apps gamify shit for you. Don't opt into social features. Don't create an account if they don't force you to. Disable all notifications. Don't worry about what other people are reading, where they're running, what they're eating. Just worry about yourself. Don't have or use any pure social apps. No algorithmically-generated content feeds. Read full-length novels, watch full-length feature films, and listen to complete albums. Force yourself to exercise at least a medium-term attention span. You don't need a change of theme every 40 seconds.
The scene I find most memorable from Harold and Maude [0] is the priest's response!
I consider myself to have seen a lot of films, but it took watching There's Something about Mary for me to discover the film!
[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=n7qd7UrR5ic
What a charming individualist young lad! Great contrapunctus to all these TikTok wannabe "'subscribe my channel' influencer" losers that lack any personal style, acting merely as advertising and exhibition space (their room and their body).
His photo reminded me of the film "Harold and Maude", if anyone here has seen it.
Once I'm retired, I would like to digitize my own grandfathers prisoner of war diary, including that episode where they ate a dog so they didn't die from starvation, but it turned out to be the camp commanders dog, so that meal had an enormous price tag in terms of consequences. (Just to point out it wasn't all black shiny cars in the 1940s!)
I was hoping someone would mention this. That movie is a flat-out delight. See if you can spot the actor who played "Harold" in "Harold and Maude".
Books:
Most of you will know it, but to make sure: I wouldn't want to die without having read
"Gödel Escher Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid" (Douglas R. Hofstadter),
a 1000-page recursive poem about consciousness, bio-chemistry, mathematical versus musical beauty, zen koans, recursion, symmetry, formal rule systems, AI and more. Every second chapter is written as a dialog.
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky)
In our time, media manipulation is at its historic peak, so perhaps everyone should know a bit about the political-economic underpinnings. How issues are framed and chosen, the influence of money, reporting biases.
Dining with Terrorists: Meetings with the World's Most Wanted Militants (Phil Rees)
A former BBC journalist tells about meals with 'interesting' people and the trickiness associated with the definition of 'terrorism'.
I'm also going to throw in some movies for good measure.
Films:
Meaning of Life https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085959/
Adam's Apples https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418455/
Harold and Maude https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067185/
Don't say that.
My mother is 75. So is her twin sister.
Ever see the movie "Harold and Maude"?