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Finally got around to this as well (vinyl backlog yadda yadda), beautiful release. Remember to add a paper sleeve in the PVC cover or transfer to non-plastic.

Religion is the second worst and still ongoing pandemic we've ever had. Humanity itself is the worst.

Just to go further into meta (and although it has been discussed elsewhere, too), the misinformation, conspiracy theories and bullshit are information viruses, evolving and mutating and their field of study is memetics (emphasis mine): (The irony of memetics being labeled as pseudoscience - untested, unsupported, incorrect - doesn't escape me.)

I'd suggest A New Kind Of Science - it's controversial and hard, so you'll need to flex your connectome in various ways.

DEVO's Gerald V. Casale ``I'm Gonna Pay U Back``

Yes, critical and metacritical faculties are as important as the ability to assess both knowledge and metaknowledge. Metacognitive skills require learning and they're never ready nor finished, even the most intelligent people believe stupid things. To know and understand you need a mountain of base knowledge and information coupled with the ability to separate wheat from the chaff - and that takes time and dedicated work. I just turned 47 and I'm starting to grudgingly accept that I can know and do anything, but not everything.

You're discounting the over four million people who have died from COVID because you and your close family have survived it without vaccinations. That's about as callous and insensitive as you can get towards those perished - you've been statistically very lucky, but then again, as a Westerner with access to high-quality medical care you probably didn't have to worry about it that much anyway - you've played the game using the lowest difficulty setting there is, and now you're gloating. This is the other kind of bullshit prevalent nowadays, the "me and mine had the disease and it was nothing, the vaccine is unnecessary" crowd - they're equally dangerous compared to the misinformation and conspiracy theory rejects. Just because you've had good luck (or access to high-quality medical care) - or you're fabricating your story for whatever reason - doesn't mean that the rest of humanity needs to suffer and/or die when preventative medicine is available. Yes, there might be long-term effects, but I'm betting that the effect will be millions and millions of saved lives.

-- Max Planck.

No amount of evidence to the contrary will convince someone who thinks they're privy to something that no-one else knows and/or accepts as true. If anything, the voice of the overwhelming majority standing on the proverbial shoulders of giants of established science and trustworthy sources will make them dig their heels even deeper in the dirt, exclaiming that people are not ready to accept "the truth" about the world populace being controlled, manipulated and lied to in service of some insidiously nefarious entity. I'm not a scientist, I'm an autodidact (self-taught) so basically everything I claim to know is by definition suspect, but I choose to lean in on the expertise of a couple of thousand years of scientific progress instead of cherry-picked solipsistic self-claimed experts producing algorithm-friendly bullshit videos on the internet with dubious credentials and conspiracy theory rhetoric. I understand and admit that the COVID vaccines have unknown long-term effects, because there is simply not enough data to analyze and make inferences from, but coupled with active misinformation and conspiratorial campaigning from parties whose motivation for such is suspect we've ended up in a situation where a noisy, sensitive and obnoxious minority is pushing absolute bullshit wherever and whenever they can, cussing people because their beliefs are not uncritically shared - ridiculed, even. I know people crave certainty, it's an evolutionary need. I know people feel powerless against huge, global things like COVID. I know people love to feel that they're special. I know there's a lot of people spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories because they lack the knowledge to critically assess the information (metaknowledge, Dunning-Kruger being the obvious keywords here) - this is also about education: most bullshit peddlers are (statistically) less educated (so don't take this personally and carpet-bomb me in your qualifications, real or imaginary). While I subscribe to the adage "I would rather have ques­tions that can’t be an­swered than an­swers that can’t be ques­tioned" (dubiously attributed to Feynman), there is a proper way to question the answers, and it has a method - something the tin-foil helmeted cohort isn't using. Personally it's really hard for me to constantly and repeatedly encounter bullshit without saying anything, because there's so much of it nowadays. I become condescending and oftentimes even rude, because I just can't fathom wherefore people invest their time and personality into bullshit and sling it around like apes hurling feces at the spectators in the zoo. Like religious zealots they think they're absolutely right and under the impression that if only everyone else understood what they know, the universe would be a better place, all the while making the universe a worse place with their bullshit - and they take immediate offense if their views are not accepted as valid. Better living through chemistry - less than three weeks to my second jab.

We're not sharing and/or accepting the right kind of information and/or not acting in a proper way when presented with it?

As the OP you have the ability to do that, but if I were you, I would not. You might not like what's going on in the thread, but at 250+ pages it's not really "yours" anymore and besides, you're not responsible for anyone else's posts. Just ignore the topic.

Finally got around to listen to this (I've got a huge vinyl first listen backlog), a really great album. Should get the digital for easier listening, but the idea of spending another nearly 20 € on top of the over 30 € for the vinyl is painful.

Oh cool, Helva is actually an Inzec release, i.e. Repetto's own label, I have some of the early releases on it and thought the label had been scrapped years ago.

The Purple Universe is one of the RePHLeX releases I still return to every now and then, it's brilliant. Should get the semi-recent 2xLP repress, I have the original CD and vinyl and the 12" with Free Sphere and Natural (The Ono [i.e. Gregory Fleckner Quintet of Clear fame] track on the other side is also very good).

Does anyone have or know about the Third Shock digital releases Sampler and/or Mermaid/Manhole? The label's been defunct for a few years already, and as they're digital only, no shop that I know of carry them. Any pointers to downloadables, not streamables appreciated.

I'm always reminded that Kilmer memorized all of The Doors lyrics by heart and sent videos of himself singing the songs to Oliver Stone - and he actually sings all of the songs in the movie as well. If that's not impressive, nothing is. Heat is a fucking diamond of a movie, one where guns actually sound like guns and not special effects, the cast couldn't be better and the execution of the whole is well nigh flawless.

I wish the Nurture version from the other side of the vinyl with that track would be available digitally.

...aaaaaand it's gone (from Bandcamp).

If the time from contagion to death is so short, it's easier to stop the spread because the infected die so quickly. To get something that's really dangerous it needs to have a longer asymptomatic incubation period so the infection spreads abundantly before killing the host. It's easy to recognize and avoid hosts with aggressive symptoms - a real killer would be something with a long incubation period, then a short period of light symptoms one can't tell are symptoms, then remission and then a fast burst of deadly things that leave the corpses infectious if not incinerated - oh and not safely done, burning the corpses could produce smoke containing microparticles of soot carrying the disease, spreading it even further as the aerosols get pulled up in the atmosphere. One thing that bugs (LOL) me about zombie things is that in reality there are a lot of insects both crawling and flying that would have an absolute feast if rotting flesh was available in zombie apocalypse quantities - carrion crawler populations would explode and dispose of the zombies, then the populations would crash - and those still alive could just wait for that to happen. With a disease that would use insects as asymptomatic hosts alongside the disease being airborne, we would be royally fucked. Getting bit by a mosquito that had already sucked blood off a sick host... malaria would be the least of our problems.

Gabriel's been on absolute fire for the past couple of years, I rediscovered him back in 2019 (I had Voltage Control and The Other Side Project from earlier) when Planet Discovery and The Controller came out, then Peace For Thought - and now the four albums one after another. Just brilliant.

Igloo Magazine on this, although it's good even without their opinion.

A magnificent spread of musical expression in four parts with proceeds going towards Unicef. Highly Recommended - check out compilation volumes one and two, too - or just get the whole discography, which is the most affordable option as everything they've released is worth your while.

Out now.

A new album full of sonic disturbance from C. Mantle, from glitchy breaks to abstract instrumental hip-hop. Recommended.

Out now.