Ran Prieur

"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."

- Terence McKenna

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February 28. Some smart articles for the weekend. The man who destroyed America's ego is about the rise and fall of the self-esteem movement of the late 20th century. The evidence favors a picture so obvious that it's embarrassing we ever lost sight of it: 1) Low self-esteem does not cause violence -- it makes people meek and cautious. 2) High self-esteem is good when it follows from actually being good at stuff. 3) Artificially pumped up self-esteem is like a drug: it makes people feel good in the short term, but over the long term it has no benefits, and it causes pain and aggression when people's high opinions of themselves are challenged by reality.

The Obesity Era is an article from last year that compiles evidence against the popular idea that obesity is caused by moral weakness, and looks for other causes that we're only beginning to understand, including industrial chemicals, epigenetics, and economics. Personally I know weight is not about self-control because I've never had to use a shred of self-control to remain skinny my whole life.

The Mammoth Cometh covers many angles of the movement to bring back extinct species. One thing it doesn't mention is the evidence in Charles Mann's book 1491, that passenger pigeons had a relatively low population that only exploded after European diseases wiped out the Indians. Anyway, I'm looking forward to the age of synthetic biology. I see computers as humanity's suicide, and biotech as humanity's gift to the future.

Finally, something fun for the weekend: The 2014 Hater's Guide To The Oscars.


February 26. Some good news about local politics and food. In my own city, Rule changes could increase urban farming options. And in Austin they're planning a food forest. You should already know about the one in Seattle.

Another angle on local politics, a plan to nullify the NSA by working with states and cities to block the water they need to cool their supercomputers. How close are we to supercomputers that don't need cooling? And if that's a long way off, then how close are we to a conflict between the water needs of computing centers and the water needs of agriculture? [Update: Joel mentions that, for nearly incomprehensible reasons involving information and thermodynamics, supercomputers that don't need cooling are at least as difficult as perpetual motion machines. Also, agriculture can easily use the wastewater from computer cooling so there's no conflict.]


February 24. Today, some weird stuff, going from less weird to more. A linguistics professor claims to have made a breakthrough in the Voynich Manuscript, identifying some of the words as names of plants.

He also speculates that the reason this work is written in a language never seen before was that it was made by a small group of people who belonged to a culture that didn't have a written form. They created the text, borrowing some European, Middle Eastern and Caucasian elements, to help preserve their knowledge about nature. He adds that "given that the 15th century was a time of upheaval... it is plausible to consider this 'cultural extinction' to be a possibility, with the group in question developing a script and literacy, only for it to be extinguished."

Physics and the Demiurge is a brief blog post with this stunning idea:

Wave-particle duality makes most sense in the context of being a form of data compression. Essentially, the function only collapses if someone's looking, meaning that the simulation doesn't eat up infinite amounts of memory. That's an interesting point in itself, because it's a strong argument in favour of our reality being a simulation in the first place.

But there's an interesting corollary here. If you're religious, it's a strong signal that the creator is not omnipotent. If the universe had to be built in a way which was resource-constrained, then it implies that the entities doing so were not possessed of infinite resources.

Writing The Snowden Files: The paragraph began to self-delete. A reporter covering the NSA describes a bunch of strange experiences, from obvious encounters with spies to bizarre computer anomalies. This is going to sound crazy, but this is my number one area of specialization, and where can I write about it if not on my own blog? If you study the fringe, you see this again and again: through a combination of heightened awareness and isolation, it is possible to veer off into a reality that cannot be reconciled with consensus reality. You can say there was a crumb under the delete key, but this untestable conventional explanation serves to protect consensus reality from the phenomenon, making the experience possible. It didn't happen because the NSA was watching -- it happened because nobody was watching.


February 21. A few months ago I read an argument that the 1800's really started in 1814 (I forget why), the 1900's really started in 1914 (World War I), and something this year will draw a clear line between the century before and the century after. I was skeptical, but it might be happening. Over the last few days, protests in both Ukraine and Venezuela have been met with live bullets. These conflicts seem to be about repression vs democracy, or left vs right, but I think they're about food.

Check out the chart in this article, The Math That Predicted the Revolutions Sweeping the Globe Right Now. There is a strong correlation between high food prices and political unrest, and the crazy thing is, cheap food is usually not what the protesters are demanding. Instead, hunger is the catalyst that makes them finally take the streets for other grievances. More generally, hungry people take bigger risks, so there will be more crime, more fights, even more accidents.

How hard is it to feed everyone? Right now the obstacles are mostly political. Ukraine is a massive wheat producer but most of it is being exported as a commodity. This leads to my favorite definition of the difference between a free market and capitalism: in a free market, money is used to convert one commodity into another commodity; in capitalism, a commodity is used to convert money into more money. Protesters are being shot because in the logic of the global economy, turning money into more money is a more important use of food than feeding people. This system is locked in hard, and I don't expect it to change until the economy (as we know it) is in ruins and different economies grow through the cracks.

Even if we could magically convert the whole world to zero-growth socialism, it is still becoming physically more difficult to feed everyone as populations rise and climate disasters destroy crops. I don't know how much room there is to increase efficiency, for example by feeding grain straight to people instead of feeding it to cows to make a much smaller amount of meat. Realistically even these reforms are difficult, and we are facing decades of global hunger and violence, and maybe history will mark this year as the beginning.


February 19. Today, three links about work and money. From Peter Frase in Jacobin Magazine, Work It analyzes three meanings of "work", and eight possible permutations of those meanings. The whole thing is worth reading, not only for the ideas but for a refreshing example of someone thinking clearly. The conclusion:

What we need is not just less work -- though we do need that -- but a rethinking of the substantive content of work beyond the abstraction of wage labor. That will mean both surfacing invisible unpaid labor and devaluing certain kinds of destructive waged work. But merely saying that we should improve the quality of existing work and reduce its duration doesn't allow us to raise the question of whether the work needs to exist at all. To use Albert Hirschman's terms, giving workers voice within the institution of wage labor can never fundamentally call the premises of that institution into question. For that, you need the real right of Exit, not just from particular jobs but from the labor market as a whole.

The Economics of Star Trek does a beautiful close reading of the Star Trek canon, to argue that it's a valuable example of a proto post scarcity economy. Basically the Federation is like European socialism with such massive benefits that nobody has to think about money, but there are still private currencies that you can play with on the edges of that system.

I sort of love that Star Trek forces us to think about a society that has no money but still operates with individual freedom and without central planning. I love that democracy is still in place. I love that people can still buy and sell things. It's real. It's a more realistic vision of post-capitalism than I have seen anywhere else. Scarcity still exists to some extent, but society produces more than enough to satisfy everyone's basic needs. The frustrating thing is that we pretty much do that now, we just don't allocate properly.

Finally, this reddit comment explains how hunter-gatherers were more free than us, and why this freedom was linked to mobility, lack of storage, and a social taboo against hoarding.


February 17. I don't feel qualified to judge whether Woody Allen is a child molester. As far as I know, the worst thing he did to little girls was that creepy Chiquita banana scene in Everyone Says I Love You. Instead I want to write about his movies. Here's a Joan Didion piece from 1979, Letter from 'Manhattan', in which she has great fun bashing three movies that are often considered the peak of his career:

The characters in Manhattan and Annie Hall and Interiors are, with one exception, presented as adults, as sentient men and women in the most productive years of their lives, but their concerns and conversations are those of clever children, "class brains," acting out a yearbook fantasy of adult life... These faux adults of Woody Allen's have dinner at Elaine's, and argue art versus ethics. They share sodas, and wonder "what love is." They have "interesting" occupations, none of which intrudes in any serious way on their dating.

This is related to my own complaint about Woody Allen: he always writes about rich people. If I'm going to watch something as fantastical as hopping on a transatlantic flight without thinking about the cost, I'd rather see wizards or spaceships or time travel.

Actually, my favorite Woody Allen movies are about time travel, and maybe he has accidentally seen the future. I know we're facing serious crises in the 21st century, but suppose we muddle through them and continue with "progress"? Of course it's a good thing to eradicate polio and slavery, and next we might have self-driving cars that never crash, and an unconditional basic income. What happens when we have so far reduced the danger of anything bad happening, that nobody has had to face any physical risks or overcome any serious challenges? Will the whole human race turn into permanent adolescents indulging their obsessions with trivial emotional problems? Or maybe that's more a 20th century thing, and the 22nd century will be immature and solipsistic in ways that we cannot yet imagine.


February 14. As usual, personal stuff for the weekend. Yesterday I did my first landblog/houseblog post since August, with a photo of the bees coming out with snow still on the ground. Looks like they've made it through the winter.

And my girlfriend introduced me to an obscure Egyptian/French author named Albert Cossery. Last night I finished his wonderful novel A Splendid Conspiracy. Here's my review on Goodreads and a longer review with more info. I wish I'd discovered Cossery years ago. So many political radicals and cultural outsiders feel like they have to be puritanical, or angrily focus on victimization and injustice. Cossery's characters, while condemning the dominant society in the strongest terms, cheerfully let go of any hope of changing it, and remain committed to having a good time on its fringes.


February 12. Today, technology. This article, 10 Futuristic Materials, is utopian because it's childish. Aerogels could insulate a dome on the moon, carbon nanotubes could make towers that reach up to space, metamaterials could make invisibility cloaks, we could fly diamond fighter planes and live in metal foam floating cities and swing transparent swords. Sure, but once the Christmas morning novelty wears off, how exactly will this stuff improve our quality of life? There is a hint of intelligence in the final paragraph: "We'll develop clothing that can constantly project the video of our choosing (unless it turns out being so annoying that we ban it)." Yeah, remember when TV commercials were so annoying that we banned them, and now there are no more TV commercials?

In practice, technologies will be used by control systems to maintain their power and stability. This is especially true of weapons, but even information technology is in danger of being used this way. This reddit comment makes a thorough critique of ebooks, which can be locked down, controlled, and leveraged into economic domination in ways that paper books cannot. The author continues:

Let's say we invent the Star Trek replicator. Finally -- goods can be made out of thin air. Food can be made out of thin air. Replicators would be a scarcity destroying machine with the possibility of both destroying labor AND ending world hunger. It'd be a major shift for society. But insert the corporation and the capitalist who would wrap this machine's usage up in license fees, laws restricting usage, etc. They would use it to destroy labor, but they would prevent the device from destroying scarcity. It's too threatening to the power structures that control capital. You'll never technologically innovate yourself out of the exploitation of capitalism.

What about just using technology to make ourselves happy? Here's an article, illustrated with a great comic, about a Dutch biologist and his research into supernormal stimuli:

Tinbergen succeeded in isolating the traits that triggered certain instincts, and then made an interesting discovery. The instincts had no bounds. Instead of stopping at a 'sweet spot', the instinctive response would still be produced by unrealistic stimuli. Once the researchers isolated the instincts' trigger, they could create greatly exaggerated dummies which the animals would choose instead of a realistic alternative. Songbird parents would prefer to feed fake baby birds with mouths wider and redder than their real chicks, and the hatchlings themselves would ignore their own parents to beg fake beaks with more dramatic markings.

Of course the point is that humans play these tricks on ourselves when we eat junk food and watch TV and so on. The conclusion is that we have to learn the awareness to hold these urges in check. But as technology continues to make stimuli more powerful, can our awareness keep up? Here's a 2007 article on the subject, Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization.


February 11. Thanks Jef and Yelena for a $20 donation.

And another reader contribution: a long subreddit post about extraterrestrial biology.


February 10. So it's probably a permanent change that I'm writing more about culture and sports and less about politics. I want to explain this, but first I need to distinguish between different levels of politics. Local politics is where the action is. If you have great social instincts and high energy, you should get involved in local politics and maybe even run for city council. You could lead a movement to deregulate small-scale urban farming, or change the building codes to allow rocket mass heaters, or start a local currency, or build free municipal wi-fi with net neutrality. If you're really good, you might even make a difference at the state level. But as you go farther up the hierarchy, there is less freedom to do or say anything that doesn't reinforce the control system.

The only reason to follow national-level politics is for the stories. A good story can broaden your perspective and deepen your understanding and motivate you to live better. But the stories in high-level politics are almost completely scripted, and they're scripted badly. It's better to watch a good movie or read a good book where the stories are well-written and honestly fictional. And it's better to follow sports, where the rules are set up so that great stories emerge unscripted. Even the stories around sports are better than similar stories around politics, because sports reporters have not been conditioned to coat everything in bullshit. For example, the NFL is about to get its first openly gay player, Michael Sam. If you follow this, you will see more clearly and learn more than in any story about a gay politician.

This brings me to today's link, an exceptional epic blog post, The Big Book Of Black Quarterbacks:

It took a long time and some real work, but we were able to put together what we think is the most comprehensive list of black NFL quarterbacks ever compiled. More than a compilation of names, this was an opportunity to find and publish these men's stories. Some are brief; others are long. We penned longer pieces on the most notable players, like Fritz Pollard, Warren Moon, Steve McNair, Michael Vick, the immortal Akili Smith, and many more, but every player on this list is part of a broad narrative that traces the history of football and its relationship with the broader society.


February 7. Some personal stuff. I never got called back to jury duty after being dismissed the first day, which was lucky because over the next few days we got snow and then very low temperatures. The night before last it got down to -3F (-19C), and it's not going to get above freezing until Tuesday. So we've been holed up in the house, making pizza and watching Netflix. I didn't know this before but Netflix streaming has almost every good TV show and almost no good movies. We did watch a great indie film called Safety Not Guaranteed, and we just finished the final season of Fringe, which I highly recommend.

I'm worried about my bees. They're still alive, but they should be eating through their massive honey stores and instead they're staying at the front of the hive and their population is steadily dropping. I wonder if, when I took out a few frames in August to keep them from swarming, I accidentally took all their pollen. If they die, I'll still get lots of honey and can buy a new package of bees, but it's unlikely the next queen will be as good as this one.

Leigh Ann and I have been working out using the book 7 Weeks To Getting Ripped. It takes way longer than seven weeks because unless you're a super athlete you're going to be repeating weeks, but it does work well for a modest time investment. My weight is over 155 (70kg) for the first time ever, and last night I did seven pull-ups.

And some music for the weekend. Fuck Buttons are an English electronic duo. Their latest album, Slow Focus, is their best, and my favorite track is Hidden XS.

The Black Heart Rebellion are a Belgian band. Their first album, Monologue, was mediocre post-rock with death metal vocals (or maybe black metal, I'm not a metal specialist). Their second album, Har Nevo, has a good sound that's harder to classify and much better vocals. Maybe the best song is The Woods I Run From. I learned about them and Fuck Buttons from this reddit comment.


February 5. Two smart links about technology from last year. Thanks Kevin for this transcript of a speech by Bret Victor on the future of programming. He argues that just as programming languages made direct binary coding obsolete in the 1970's, in the future programming languages will themselves become obsolete. To understand what's going to replace them, you'll have to read the speech, but there's some stuff about computers figuring out what to do from operators declaring goals and drawing pictures. My favorite bit:

So the most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think that you know what you're doing. Because once you think you know what you're doing, you stop looking around for other ways of doing things. And you stop being able to see other ways of doing things.

In terms of what computers will actually do, that guy seems to be a naive techno-utopian. Here's something smarter from Norbert Wiener in 1949. The NY Times asked the famous mathematician to write an essay on the coming machine age, but mistakes by editors kept it from being published. In 2012 it was rediscovered. My condensed excerpt of their condensed excerpt:

These new machines have a great capacity for upsetting the present basis of industry, and of reducing the economic value of the routine factory employee to a point at which he is not worth hiring at any price. If we combine our machine-potentials of a factory with the valuation of human beings on which our present factory system is based, we are in for an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty.
...
Finally the machines will do what we ask them to do and not what we ought to ask them to do. In the discussion of the relation between man and powerful agencies controlled by man, the gnomic wisdom of the folk tales has a value far beyond the books of our sociologists. There is general agreement among the sages of the peoples of the past ages, that if we are granted power commensurate with our will, we are more likely to use it stupidly than to use it intelligently.

Moreover, if we move in the direction of making machines which learn and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes. The genie in the bottle will not willingly go back in the bottle, nor have we any reason to expect them to be well disposed to us.

Completely unrelated, today I made this quick reddit comment about a dumb article arguing that globalization has reduced poverty:

Dollars per day sounds like a good definition of poverty, but it isn't. Globalization goes with monetization: goods and services that were formerly outside the money economy are brought into the money economy, so now you can't get them without money. Having more dollars per day is meaningless if the things you need for quality of life also cost more dollars per day.

It's true that global poverty is decreasing, but you measure it with stuff like infant mortality or access to clean water. An article that measures it purely in terms of money changing hands has no credibility.


February 3. One more football link: From a UK perspective, American football looks downright socialist. Basically he admires how our draft system, which gives the best players to the weakest teams, creates parity and makes better games. Since 1992 there have been only five different winners of the English Premier League, and 14 different Super Bowl winners.

And a reader comment on Friday's post:

I've seen that strategy referred to as "Leading from the Middle". In the middle, you can have as many leaders as there are things that need some leading. Instead of relying on very few hierarchically placed Leaders to lead on all fronts at once all the time, you can have the best person at each time and for each purpose, working in an over-lapping and hopefully non-competitive, collaborative, fluid, organic, ebbing and flowing kind of way.


February 1. So the Superbowl is tomorrow, and it's strangely related to yesterday's post about "building the alternative that the centre has to contend with." That's what the Seahawks are doing, except what they're challenging is not the NFL control system, but the usual NFL team culture. Here's an article from the beginning of the season, The Seahawks believe their kinder, gentler philosophy is the future of football, describing how they use meditation, positive reinforcement, staff psychologists, and cutting edge technology to maximize everyone's mental and physical health. This article from last week is about how much fun the practices are, calling the Seahawks "the Google of football." And in a recent survey where players were asked which head coach they would most like to play for, Seattle coach Pete Carroll was the overwhelming winner. Of course this can all be dismissed if they don't win, but the more they win, the more other teams will want to follow the same path.

American football has been described as "chess with giants". Here's a mind-blowing reddit comment about communication before the snap, in which the offense and defense go back and forth making high-speed and extremely complex adjustments. Denver is in the Superbowl because their quarterback Peyton Manning is the best in the game at this. This is the first Superbowl where the top offense (in both points and yards) has faced the top defense. Seattle defensive back Richard Sherman is famous for his trash talk, but he's also the best pass interceptor in the NFL. Here's a great video, Richard Sherman - Student of the Game, about how he meticulously studies film and tricks quarterbacks into throwing interceptions. Somewhere I read a quote from Sherman about how he likes to get inside the heads of quarterbacks, but he can't do it with Peyton Manning because you just get lost in there.

This game was supposed to be interesting because of the potential for extreme winter weather, but it looks like NYC will be a balmy 48 degrees tomorrow. The other big factor is Seattle wide receiver Percy Harvin. He's an incredible athlete but very delicate, so he'll probably leave early with an injury, but if he plays the whole game he'll be MVP. (Update: after the total thrashing by Seattle's defense, they had to give MVP to a defensive player, but check out Harvin's kickoff return. The way he accelerates between the 20 and 30 yard line, it's like he's a different species.)


January 30. Stray links. First, a great reddit comment by Erinaceous on how to change the system. You should read the whole thing but here's a condensed excerpt:

Resistance only defines the edge of the system. It might be important to define that limit but it's just the limit. And the social limit is a hard place to be. What defines the centre is the institutions, the permanent effective networks that are space filling and area preserving. More interesting though is that the control points in these hierarchical systems are not the centres. They are lower down. It's the sales guy who moves between the management and branches and talks to all the people on the shop floor. It's the minor bureaucrat who actually makes the government run. It could be the bottom up institutions that people know to go to because they are so much more effective than the government services that are constantly cut back and falling apart. The ones that make them less dependent and more capable of being fully realized people. The institutions that are working to put themselves out of job instead of trying to maintain their power. So taking the centre is not really the strategy either. It's building the alternative that the centre has to contend with.

In case you missed it, Cannabis during pregnancy endangers fetal brain development. I've also seen studies about mild brain damage if you use it as a teenager. Still no evidence that it's bad for adults, and I'm looking forward to buying it legally in a few months.

And a reader sends this good news link, School ditches rules and loses bullies.


January 28. Obama is giving a State of the Union speech tonight, and I'm wondering: how bad would things have to get for a president to stand up and say that the state of the union is bad or weak or desperate or anything negative?

Related: a video from last summer, Candidate Obama debates President Obama on Government Surveillance. Anyone who thinks Obama was secretly evil all along must be autistic, because if you have any ability to read people, it's obvious that candidate Obama believes what he's saying and president Obama does not. I continue to believe that Obama came into the presidency with good character, good intentions, and high competence; and this is not an idealistic position -- it's the most cynical position possible, because it means it doesn't matter who's president. The presidential race is a giant distraction, channeling the energy and attention of millions of people out into a ditch somewhere, because on the important issues the president is a figurehead and the system is completely locked down. Sure, if Elizabeth Warren runs in 2016 or 2020 I'll vote for her and feel good if she wins, but I won't expect it to make any more difference than the winner of the Superbowl. The good news is, economic inequality is getting so ridiculous that even corporations and the elite are starting to see the need for wealth redistribution. So I think that's going to happen eventually no matter who is president.

By the way, if anyone is curious about jury duty, here's the story. They sent me a summons a month ago, I had to go online and fill out a form, and then I had to check in at the courthouse by 8:30 Monday morning. There were about 160 of us in a big room. I know because they did roll calls for five groups of 30-35. After an orientation, they called up the first two groups, gave them badges, and sent them to court. Then they called names for the other three groups, sent the fifth group home because the defendant didn't show up ("he's in a lot of trouble") and told the third and fourth groups that we wouldn't be needed until 1:30. I was the only person there who came by bicycle. I rode home for lunch, came back, and they called the third group again and sent them to court. After about 20 minutes, they told us in the fourth group that the case had "gone to bench", which means the judge decides instead of a jury, and they sent us home. We all have to continue to check in every evening to see if we have to come in the next day, until our two week term is up. In this state employers are required by law to give you time off for jury duty, but they're not required to pay you, and the state pays $10 a day. Here's a comparison of the American and European jury systems, arguing that the European system of paid professional jurors is better. I'm not going to waste my time forming an opinion until there is a serious proposal to change it.


January 26. Tomorrow I have jury duty and might be offline all day, so I'm doing a Sunday post. My big project yesterday was completely rewriting my books page to reflect my current interests and views, instead of the ones I had ten years ago.

Also, this morning I read this mostly evil NYT article, What Drives Success?, co-written by that awful "tiger mom" woman. It identifies three personality traits that lead to "success" and talks about how they arise from culture, but it's evil because of the framing, taking for granted that "success" is a good thing that we should all want. Here's a comment I made on reddit:

I'm not sure that what they call "success" is a good thing. At least they admit (about 2/3 of the way down) that these three personality traits are not all good. But do we want to live in a society where the rules are set up so that people with these traits have vastly more wealth and influence than people who don't? Do these traits lead people to use their wealth and power in a good way once they have it?

Would it be a better world if we could somehow set it up so that the wisest or most generous people had the most wealth and power, instead of the most narcissistic, insecure, and self-controlled people?

And whoever is most "successful", we should ask how much of this success is zero-sum. For example, if I make lifestyle changes to improve my health, it doesn't require someone else to be sicker. But with wealth and power, success often requires someone else's failure. I'd rather live in a society that guarantees happy and comfortable lives to everyone, than one that condemns people to poverty for having the wrong personality.

Loosely related, a new video/article from the Onion: Laid-Off Man Finally Achieves Perfect Work-Life Balance.


January 24. Some happy stuff for the weekend. India's forest man is about a guy who spent decades singlehandedly planting a 550 hectare forest. That's more than two square miles.

Legal Pot: The Gateway Drug to State-Run Banking? Basically state-run banking is better for everyone because the money gets recycled inside the state instead of being sucked into the giant global pool of money that seeks only to grow itself at the expense of almost every actual person. And an unintended consequence of cannabis legalization is that states will be forced to set up their own banks because federal laws prohibit the big banks from handling pot money.

Finally, some music! My latest favorite band is a Connecticut duo called Have A Nice Life. (Thanks Leigh Ann for finding them on the postpunk subreddit.) Their sound includes elements of shoegaze, ambient, post-rock, and drone. Here's a link where you can listen to their upcoming album The Unnatural World. (Go to the upper left and hit "toggle track list".) The first song, "Guggenheim Wax", sounds exactly like Built To Spill put through a doom filter. And here's their entire first album, Deathconsciousness on YouTube. [Update: after further listening with the help of cannabis, Have A Nice Life are lame songwriters, with a terrible recording engineer, who happened to stumble on a great sound. And Fuck Buttons are absolutely brilliant.]





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