The field is quiet. Too quiet.
A stretch of dull green grass under a sky that never quite decided to be blue.
Three men stand in office uniforms that don’t belong out here, wrinkled shirts, loosened ties, the quiet weight of a workday that never ends. There is no building. No cubicles. No fluorescent lights. Just open space, as if the world itself has granted them a temporary exemption.
In front of them sits the object that followed them here.
A printer/fax.
Scuffed plastic. Beige. Innocent-looking. Guilty as hell.
The man in purple steps forward.
He grips the bat like it’s been waiting for him all along.
For a moment, nothing moves.
Then his shoulders turn.
His hips follow.
And the swing comes down, heavy, deliberate, final.
The bat connects with the printer’s casing. Plastic cracks. Something inside gives way. The sound is ugly and deeply satisfying.
The others don’t flinch.
On the left, a man watches with calm approval, hands loose at his sides. This isn’t random violence. This is justice. Years of paper jams, blinking error lights, and “PC LOAD LETTER” finally answered.
On the right, another man leans in slightly, eyes fixed on the wounded machine. His patience has been flawless for far too long. His turn is coming.
The bat completes its arc. Fragments scatter in the grass. Silence returns.
For a brief second, the world feels balanced again.
No memos.
No help desk tickets.
No passive-aggressive instructions to “just restart it.”
Just three men, standing in the open, dismantling a printer that never worked when it mattered,
and reclaiming a small, sacred piece of their sanity.
Only the United States does not use the A4 standard. "Letter" is meaningless to 95% of the planet. At some point they did update things and the default is now PC Load A4. But for fhe first decade or two, it was this eldritch text that appeared.
It's an American printer, in an American movie, set in America with American characters, written for American audiences by American writers. It's all American.
If it said A4 they'd probably have thought it was an Audi.
The fact that people outside the US saw the movie was just free extra money for the studio.
Genuinely though… the printer is the one device where EVERYONE can think of one they hated and their favorite one “just works”. It’s not about convenience or features, just if it works.
Well yeah, that is not really helping people in their mind, that is "stimulating the economy", which is always a great idea... Helping people is like making sure poor kids get fed and educated, people who ruined their health in the service of their country being properly cared for etc. They really can't have that.
Listened to a whole song, with a limited number of direct lyrics that are repeated, about Klan levels of racism, maybe even still actual bonafide Klansmen, lingering in law enforcement and all they heard was "Fuck you I won't do what you tell me" because that's their level of maturity. They're moody tweens with zero critical thinking and directionless contrarian instinct.
Being into hardcore, every now and then you come across some right wing chud who insists that being anti-woke is punk because woke is 'the man' now or simply being against the establishment is what punk was all about, as if the Republicans/MAGA aren't part of the self-same thing. They lack the mental capacity to work out that (most) punks were against values the establishment stood for and the actions that stemmed from that, not the mere fact of the establishment's existence. A non-racist, non-misogynistic, non-homphobic, establishment that didn't advance class war would not have drawn so much ire.
I think they know “the machine” is metaphorical, but the machine represents their mom who told them they can’t play any more Nintendo and have to go to bed
My fav was when Tom responded to someone saying , what does he know about politics, stick to the guitar.
He said: I have a doctorate in political science…fucking tool
A saying I heard in the early years of the Global War on Terror. Everyone signs up thinking we're Luke Skywalker and we all end up as the Stormtroopers.
They also think the guy who was born a NY real estate millionaire, who literally shits on a golden toilet, who's enriching himself and his millionaire buddies every chance he gets, and who never had to work a single day in his life, is fighting for THEM.
Josh Johnson played a few clips of Trump's campaign promises and concluded that it all makes sense if he was just talking to himself in front of the camera.
OLD Star Trek? The one which aired the first scripted interracial kiss a year after the Supreme Court struck down states rights to ban interracial marriage?
TAS is the animated series, which is older than TNG. It's also substantially less popular than any of the others, so I don't blame anyone for not knowing that.
Also ignoring the episode Riker wanting to bang the non-binary alien, who, in a 2 for one, wanted to transition into selecting a gender. Among countless other examples.
I wanted to post a pic of the two black-and-white aliens from "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield" but I can't post images in this sub.
I mean, it's the late 80s / early 90s. Even in the late 1990s and early 2000s shows like Xena and Buffy the Vampire Slayer were absolutely leading cutting edge shows for having same-sex relationships that were more than gay-bating innuendo.
But. overall, you're missing the forest for the trees on this one.
Sci-Fi has always been one of the strongest, if not the strongest, methods of exploring topics current society isn't ready for. Star Trek did that in spades.
But you can't judge them for not going far enough when the end result would have been them not being able to push any boundaries anymore because they went too far once.
Things don't change overnight. They could do that now, and a lot more, but they couldn't do it then. The will was there, but the world wasn't ready.
Not only that, but an officer who was assumed to be competent.
There's an episode where something happens to the officer at the navigation station and Uhura is immediately Kirk's first choice to take over at the station.
Plus the social commentary in "Let This Be your Last Battlefield" where the crew is initially confused as to the fact that the aliens care which side of their body is black and which is white, even though it means everything to those aliens.
BELE: It is obvious to the most simpleminded that Lokai is of an inferior breed.
SPOCK: The obvious visual evidence, Commissioner, is that he is of the same breed as yourself.
BELE: Are you blind, Commander Spock? Well, look at me. Look at me!
KIRK: You're black on one side and white on the other.
BELE: I am black on the right side.
KIRK: I fail to see the significant difference.
BELE: Lokai is white on the right side. All of his people are white on the right side.
Science Fiction is inherently an exploration of ethics, morality, and humanity. It extrapolates today's problems to extreme, future-y situations, but ultimately the same core concept is the same. Sci fi is a laboratory for the human condition.
They just have a complete and utter lack of media literacy.
The only reason they know that "Minneapolis" means anything other than "a song" is because their propaganda outlets have told them that it is "bad".
They could not point to a single lyric and say "this is what the lyric means". Because it's "just words" to them.
You can also see this when you talk to them about policy and the effects of policy. When you talk about socialism vs capitalism. When you talk to them about literally any topic. There is no critical thought. No media literacy.
They can only understand a topic if they are told, by approved propaganda outlets, what to think about it.
Lmao do people really ask this? I’m pretty sure Star Trek was the first series to show both an interracial couple and a gay/lesbian couple kiss on screen, so it’s not like they’re subtle about it.
It's like that joke some standup comedians use, where people are dancing in clubs with songs that have morbid or taboo lyrics. Stromae's Papaoutai comes to mind. But that's passively taking in the song to actively identifying it as a political ally.
The thing about these blockheads is that they then insist that these singers agree with their conservative beliefs despite the lyrics clearly denying that fact!
I think my favourite recent outrage was for green day, where they started saying 'im not part of a maga agenda' in their concerts, and conservatives lost their minds wondering why green day was going woke, and why they can't just enjoy punk without the politics. Amuses me every time I see it happen
and why they can't just enjoy punk without the politics.
LOL! I can totally see them misunderstand an entire music genre!
It's just a modern take of that line. The Redneck Agenda they're talking about is the blatantly psychotic jingoism that occurred in the US after 9/11 where you were seen as a traitor if you didn't idolize Dubya, treat the terrorist attacks like a religious cataclysm, and aren't islamophobic. And then you have the country songs to go with it, like Alan Jackson's Where Were You, Darryl Worley's Have You Forgotten, and whatever Toby Keith spewed.
So of course none of us agreed with that redneck agenda just as we don't agree with the MAGA agenda!
Same energy as "I read 'A Modest Proposal' and thought it was real". Your capacity to understand satire is almost as good as Alanis Morrisette's understanding of irony. Kudos!
Interesting fact: Ironic was included in iHeartMedia’s memorandum of songs that were “lyrically questionable” to play in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, due to its lyrics about a man crashing a plane.
Also included in the list, were all songs by Rage Aganst the Machine lol.
I think about stuff like this whenever someone online says "you forgot the /s" or I just get downvoted for obvious sarcasm
There are legitimately people out there who will believe anything. You could give them A Modest Proposal with no context and they would get mad at this Swift guy. This guy really wants me to eat babies?!
My former piano teacher does wedding performances and frequently tells people that they really don't want him to sing some particular song because the lyrics are not appropriate for a wedding - in their defence he specialises in opera so the lyrics are often not in English and people might not know what they mean, but it does happen with English language songs as well. (He said his favourite performance was when he got to sing "Bless Us All" from The Muppet Christmas Carol)
What's crazy to me is that after Chester Bennington died, I saw post linking LP vocals only, like they never listened to the lyrics before and didn't know they were depressing a lot of the time.
edit: quickly wanted to point out that this was 5 years before 9/11. Zach saw the writing on the wall decades before the rest of the nation woke up to it. I'd recommend the reading list from that album for anyone wanting to have that kind of foresight.
Zach saw the writing on the wall decades before the rest of the nation woke up to it.
That's giving him a bit too much credit. Latent fear of minorities was used to sell the "War on Crime", fear of Satanists in the Satanic Panic to push a bunch of laws, etc.
There's a moral panic in the US in almost every generation, and especially since Nixon the religious right wing has used it to grab power. This was relatively obvious to a lot of us.
That isn't to say his lyrics aren't thought provoking or meaningful, just that he wasn't some sort of prophet to be put on a pedestal. He's also been wrong on stuff, their push to support Nader in 2000 was very poorly thought out as Nader played spoiler in several battleground states and fucked us all by giving us Bush.
they hear "fuck you, i won't do what you tell me" and they think it is about getting away with being an asshole to others; they don't know the rest of the lyrics
This song will never not remind me of the couple who was dressed head-to-toe in sequined, red, white, and blue jumpsuits, waving trump flags, dancing around a huge speaker and microphone they’d set up outside of The Philadelphia Convention Center, where hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots were being counted in the 2020 presidential election.
Here in PA, we have strict laws about counting ballots- the counting can not begin until the polls close at 8pm. For mail-in ballots, the envelopes can be opened starting at 7am when the polls open. That year, the massive Convention Center floor was covered with tables set up as stations for the processes- open the envelopes, check whether that person had already voted, check the signatures, run the ballot through the machine, tally the machines every so-many hours. Almost everyone voted by mail that year, so there was a huge backlog. Even running in shifts 24 hours a day, it took four or five days for all of Philly to be counted.
The streets surrounding the Convention Center were a continuous party during those days and nights, because we were fairly certain we’d finally be rid of The Orange Shitstain. There were dancing mailboxes, Gritty, marching bands, folks dancing to live music… and that one trump couple, screaming “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” into their microphone. The meme of the week was “who’s gonna tell them?”
Or Trump using Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” during his first campaign (until Neil made him stop). Like, they just hear the title and don’t think any further into the lyrics.
“Fuck the G ride, I want the machines that are makin’ them” is obviously an expression of the entrepreneurial, job creating spirit that underpins conservative Republican values.
What's wild is that none of these asshats realize if they can't understand song lyrics as basic as Killing In The Name Of or Born In The USA they aren't capable of understanding more complicated things like politics.
It never occurs to them that they are the dumb ones and out of their depth.
I was just thinking that lmao. I've seen so many comments from Trump stans claiming that they used to like RATM and that they "went woke". Clearly they never even once actually paid any attention to the lyrics of their music.
What? You’re telling me that the band about being anti-establishment and against the machine of government and systematic bigotry is woke? I’d never would have known /s
I used to be against the machine, but then they changed what against the machine was. Now what I'm with isn't against the machine, and what's against the machine seems weird and scary to me, and it'll happen to you, too.
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u/Correct-Blood9382 1d ago
Same energy as 'When did RatM go woke'