• 0 Posts
  • 227 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 11th, 2023

help-circle



  • My bad, I thought you were making a joke about Pika saying “planned obsidence” instead of “planned obsolescence.” I did not realize you were making a genuine inquiry.

    Planned obsolescence is when businesses intentionally design a product to become useless after a period of time.

    For example, imagine a high end camera company that also sells replacement parts. They change their lens shape every model, and only keep the most recent models’ lenses in production. When an older model’s lens inevitably breaks, the customer cannot buy a replacement, and thus has pressure to buy s new camera, and the company hopes that most customers will buy from them again.

    We see this in tech with smartphone companies only giving OS updates for a few years, causing older phones to go end of life, so even if the phone is fully functional it needs to be replaced. Again, the company hopes the customer will again buy from them rather than going to a competitor (who is likely running the same scheme.)

    OP suggests Microsoft’s TPM requirement is there to force new computer sales, which will include a purchase of a Windows 11 OEM license bundled with the PC.









  • 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.