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Cake day: August 11th, 2023

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  • I actually haven’t listened to any other Zappa albums, but probably will at some point.

    I love the titular track, so I was excited to listen to the whole thing, but I think I found it 30 years too late. I get he was trying to go Reefer Madness style with his Central Scrutinizer telling a parable of how rock music leads to self-destruction, but the jokes just fell flat for me.

    Obviously the nice girl who ended up having to do wet t-shirt contests to get home, the gay prison sex, the robot sex, saying Africans don’t have record players, etc. were all supposed to be absurd, but it’s very 70s humor that nowadays feels more denigrating than biting satire. I also didn’t really get him corpsing in the voiceovers: I’m guessing it was supposed to be a reminder not to take the story seriously, but I personally found it distracting.

    I did find it cool that he mixed solos from his live shows into his songs, but it wasn’t enough to save it for me. It’s like when you go back and watch older movies or tv shows, and suddenly something just blatantly racist or sexist just pops up and immediately dates it way more than the technical aspects do.

    In short, it feels like Zappa is trying way too hard to be edgy, and it sucked the life out of the album for me. The opening song still slaps, though.


















  • Moobythegoldensock@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzTiny pp
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    11 days ago

    Problem is that this legitimizes their belief that there are set characteristics that define people as “manly.”

    Every 30 years or so we make some sort of social progress for women and/or LGBT people, and then a panic ensues that society is trying to destroy manliness. The Joe Rogans and Andrew Tates of the world suddenly pop up and start selling their nonsense that will magically make them the man’s men that their grandfathers were (while in fact their grandfathers were being told the same thing.)

    The solution to this isn’t to tell the loud whiners that their exact fears are true. It’s to divorce ourselves from the notion that being a man is determined by penis/testicle size, or even by having them at all. By telling the bigots that their worst fears are true, we’re tacitly endorsing their bigotry as legitimate, when we should be doing the exact opposite of that.


  • In most of the games she’s racing against another group, but several times is alongside them or even ahead of them. For example, in the very first game she’s working with someone else who sends her in first to retrieve the treasure, and then steals it from her.

    Plus, a good chunk of the time the items are hidden inside priceless ancient artifacts, and Croft has to dig into her British roots to destroy an ancient culture’s legacy so she can get a few bullets or whatever.