iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

Harvey and Pitpat finally succeeded at turning you into cat

Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

No one weighs down an adapter like Gaston. I respect the desire to keep a dyint piece of equipment functional for as long as humanly possible, because I sure as well do the same.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

I mostly just use YouTube if the podcast has mirrors on the site. If I really need it on a standalone site, Buzzsprout tends to be decent

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

Ooh, a North African dish my Tunisian side of the family is very familiar with. I'm going to guess the next video is about an Air Algerie incident, perhaps something about Flight 5017 or Flight 6289.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 22/08/2025

It meant she was a certified Roflfox viewer on Twitch dot tv S P O R T S

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Reposted by Zack Spades

Mondoweiss @mondoweiss.net · 21/08/2025

The Guardian just revealed Israel’s own military data: 83% of those killed in Gaza are civilians. That’s not war, that’s genocide.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

Learning Drums is for: ❌ creating original music ❌ playing in a band ❌ having a hobby to dostract from the agony of existence ✔️ playing "Out Of The Black" by Royal Blood with the detuned St Anger snare drum

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Reposted by Zack Spades

Jessica Ellis @baddestmamajama.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

If the AI bubble really is bursting, please take this lesson from it: Nothing marketed to you this relentlessly is ever worth it. If it was, they wouldn’t need to beg you.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Anyway I'm tired. This was most likely a mistake. But I had some fun in it through all the annoyance and frustrations. Moral of the story: Never butt rock. And also blame Nirvana. Because I sure do.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

That said, it's not really fair to blame them for the death of rock. That had already been happening throughout the late 90s, they were just the last group to make a big name for themselves in the dying years of rock relevance. And also we wouldn't have gotten Nickelback without Nirvana so :v

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

If I have any takeaways from this experience, it's that it's easy to hate things when they're inescapable and that's why social media sucks so much for everyone. But by the same token, time doesn't make everything look better. Just less annoying.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Nickelback didn't stop making music. Feed The Machine was a return to butt rock and at the very least, they grew out of the sleaze era and the production sounds a bit better. Look it's not good but you take what you can get. Get Rollin was easily the most forgettable album so idk not much to say

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Anyway yeah, No Fixed Address was fun to laugh at and is also the best album by virtue of signaling the end of Nickelback's reign of terror in radio play and musical pop culture. By this point, it was cooler to hate on Imagine Dragons and that continues to this day.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

If listening to approximately 7 hours of Nickelback music this week has been worth it, it is purely to have heard Got Me Goin Round. I listened to it barely able to hold back giggles and once Flo Rida got on the mic I just lost it. Absolute cinema in audio form.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

She Keeps Me Up fails at being even a funny pandering song, but there is one song off of the record that does, and it has become a guilty pleasure of mine. Got Me Going Round. Funky Nickelback. Nickelfunk. With horns. And groove. Featuring Flo Rida. Flo. Rida. hsdjgdjfdskgkjkdskjsba

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

It's also like, super weird to have the additional vocalist be a white Californian woman and then replace her with a black woman in the music video You can't do that when the chorus has the aforementioned line Like good god, whoever put together the music video should be fired for that oversight 😬

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

I'll never forgive She Keeps Me Up for failing to be a guilty pleasure because the chorus has lines like "Funky Little Monkey" and "Coca Cola Rollercoaster" Ugh it's so bad. Takes the humour out of the hilarity of macho-male Nickelback having a female backing vocalist.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

It is so funny to hear a group experiment with different styles and mostly faceplant in every single one. Be it Rage Against The Machine protest anthems (Edge Of A Revolution) or Imagine Dragons pop rock (What Are You Waiting For) or fucking dance music??? (She Keeps Me Up)

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

God I love No Fixed Address. It's pretty terrible and not in a "so bad it's good" way. But my god is it funny at times. It's not enough to suck at just heavy grunty rock bangers and sappy ballads. Now we gotta suck in multiple genres.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

It's been 3 years since the last album. All the guys have families and lives outside of music now. Their longtime producer has since moved on to ruin county music. Hell, Kroeger had a short lived marriage with Avril Lavigne of all people What do Nickelback do? Yes. They make a pop album.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

The year is 2014. Rock is basically dead as far as mainstream relevance goes. It's been 3 years since a Nickelback album. By this point it's been 10 years since Nickelback oversaturated the market. And they got absolutely roasted for cutting off the broadcast of a charity concert in 2013

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Come to think of it, if the Canadian music scene was that dire, with Nickelback, Three Days Grace and Simple Plan, no wonder bands like Alexisonfire somehow broke out in Canadian music at the time. Like maybe everyone was sick of hearing Nickelback. And this brings me to the best Nickelback album

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

This must have been even worse for Canadians at the time, because while Nickelback were huge stateside, Canada also has CanCon rulings for radio that requires a minimum quota for Canadian acts in terms of radio runtime. And all they had in terms of radio rock at the time was basically Nickelback.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Like you can't write songs about getting people to come together with hopeful visuals of alleviating poverty and famine in Africa when your other hits and album tracks have lines like "She's gonna lick my pistol clean /She's gonna be my sex machine" Yes those are real lines. Barf.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Also can we like, just talk about the direction of the ballads at the time? This era has Nickelback making vague "songs for a cause" kind of anthem and first off they're bad because they're insincere and really are just pandering. But because they exist in this era of Nickelback music.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Dark Horse is a monument to everything a person can hate about Nickelback. Bad, generic songs and riffs, ugly vocals and uglier lyrics. It's the album you feel dirty listening to, and not in an edgy rebellious way, just the need to take a shower and go to bed kind of way.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

I remember listening to that album once in like the 8th grade and hating it at a time where I was still in a Three Days Grace and Bullet For My Valentine type of era. And I hate this album even more now.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

There isn't much I can really say about these albums aside from the fact that the lyrics get progressively worse and worse from Figured You Out Onwards, and it all culminates with Dark Horse. My god I fucking hate Dark Horse.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

And I don't think it gets said enough, but Nickelback's heavy songs often sucked just as much as their sappy ballads did, the latter was just easier to hate for the butt rock crowd. Except Photograph. I mean that was bad but at least we got a funny meme out of it years later.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Nickelback songs are super one note, riffs and structures feel almost recycled from album to album, production is loud and occasionally tinny, the lyrics were consistently awful, and boy were you made to know that Nickelback was successful and rich and famous. Hard not to hate them.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Which isn't to say that Nickelback didn't deserve the backlash or critical pannings. Clearing dogshit like Trapt is not a high bar.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Like there were worse and even more one dimensional bands in the butt rock genre. But none of them got as much fame, and prolonged fame at that, as Nickelback did. You don't remember Creed or Trapt or Train or Staind like you do Nickelback, after all.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

What Silver Side Up started and what took all the way until Here And Now to kill a decade later was the true era of Nickelback saturation. Like once How You Remind Me broke out as a hit single, it was the Nickelback decade and it's what made them so hated.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

But conversely, The Long Road also has Figured You Out, the first of the real sleazy, ugly and lyrically gross songs that really contributed to Nickelback's negative image. Weirdly enough it also comes after a song about abortion? Yeah track ordering was never a Nickelback strong suit.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

The Long Road is really where the journey started to unravel for me. Which is weird, because the first half actually has two Nickelback songs (Flat On The Floor and Believe It Or Not) that I actually like. Yeah, I genuinely like those songs. ...I singlehandedly blame FlatOut 2.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Also it's just funny to note that Silver Side Up opens with a track called "Never Again". I wonder when it released to the public. Oh, September 11, 2001? Huh. They knew /j

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Those two albums were also pre-2002, before Nickelback truly broke through to being radio mainstays and then became inescapable, and also developed their worst habits as a band. So it's almost quaint to hear Kroeger almost sound sympathetic to the women he's singing about.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

It's not deep music. It's not complex music. It's not pretty music. But if you were a fan of post-grunge and little more than gruff vocals and heavy guitars, sure, you could have some fun with them, I suppose.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

The State and Silver Side Up were almost tolerable albums, which is so say I could generously rate them as 4/10s. Still not something I enjoyed or even enough to give a passing grade to, but I could sort of see the appeal, in some way.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Anyway, Curb is a really bad album and it's hard to believe any group became famous off of that. Ironically enough, because it's such a bad bootleg of Nirvana, it makes it more tolerable than actual Nirvana for me. I mean I still hated it, but still.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

I guess it surprised me to realize that Nickelback ever had humble beginnings, given how inescapable they were in their prime,. What didn't surprise me after that was that they were basically a bootleg Nirvana during their early years. It's always fucking Nirvana. Fucking Nirvana.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Three Days Grace was a really generic, formulaic and one-note Canadian group in the post-grunge scene. And I realized the same could be said in far more prevalence to Nickelback. So why is one looked back on with some semblance of nostalgia and the other with revulsion? So I started listening.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

With certain 2000s butt rock and nu metal groups getting a gentler appraisal after time, mostly by people's nostalgia, the one I personally felt was Three Days Grace, as One X was probably the first album I listened to in full. Which explains a lot about me, probably, but then I got thinking

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

I've disliked the butt of butt rock jokes both musically and as a band of people long before I started cataloging music on RYM, and have generally refused to go back and listen to their work. But like many a 2000s kid, you look back at things you hated as a kid or teen and try to get more context.

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Zack Spades @zackspades.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Sometimes you make terrible decisions on purpose. Like this week's terrible decision of mine: Listening to every Nickelback album. Yup. All 10 of them. This isn't a "hear me out" moment, this is just me getting a better grasp on a group I very much dislike.

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