tuesday, january 2, 2022
i've been dealing with a migraine today, and didn't get anything at all done. but i just blew a glob of blood out my nose, and i feel better already.
is that serious?
i'm probably at a relatively high risk for brain cancer, and i'm not going to make the mistake so many do - i'm just going to ignore it. it's incurable, there's no point.
i feel better; that's what's important.
0:49
so, it's updated up until the end of section V.
there's a lot of ranting between V and VI and then sections VI and VII.
i'm uploading it now because i'm actually expecting it to change. i wish it wouldn't, but it's predictable.
i'm really stopping now for a few hours, though - i want to at least test the sound card.
9:24
monday, january 3, 2022
i wanted to do a quick copy/paste, and shit.
this post is a good example of the kind of mindfuck i'm putting myself through:
this is the post that i have at my site and in my email and backed up in several places, all consistent with each other:
===
i had to nap this afternoon, so i'm behind schedule, but i certainly think things are balancing out. i'm about half-way through the dr. calvin (the make believe one, not the one he makes fun of in
reason) section and i want to stop for a minute to address a specific question:
are the three robot laws a parody of thermodynamics?
sort of, i think. but, not really - it's more general.
i mean, it's a reasonable hypothesis. asimov was, of course, a chemistry prof. but, i think the three laws of robotics are a more general critique of axiomatic systems, including euclidean geometry, both newtonian and relativistic physics and secular humanism's roots in aquinian natural law theory. the framework is one that's been sort of lost post-heisenberg, but was really at the crux of the historical debate between science (which was not logical, but empirical) and philosophy (which was strictly logical, and disinterested in empiricism). with the retreat of physics from strict empiricism to largely unfalsifiable theoretical models, and the more recent embrace of empiricism by any philosopher worth listening to, this distinction has been blurred. nowadays, we tend to lump philosophy mathematics & science in together in the "pro-reason" category and throw away religion philosophy as "irrational" or "emotional". and, this has taken on, like, greek overtones of masculine v feminism, which is daft. but, that wasn't the world asimov lived in - he would have seen science and what was called the british school (which actually included marx as well as darwin and bacon and turing and the rest) on one side of this, and the broad swath of philosophical doctrine, which included both religion and mathematics, on the other side of it.
you also have to realize that asimov was very much the archetype of the self-deprecating science nerd, and he was perfectly content to make fun of himself, if it resulted in a good punchline. it's a mark of a mature writer, and especially of a liberal one in the 1900-1950 period, that people often miss - he's offering a lot of criticism of ideas he supports, because he's not trying to advance an argument so much as he's trying to push the needle forward. it's actually a black mark on our own era that the idea of somebody being more concerned about the general advancement of knowledge than he is about personal ideological bickering comes off as bizarre and unrealistic. but, you see this with the likes of asimov, russell, sagan - they're just not driven by their egos, so they don't care if they're right or not, and are happy to admit they were wrong. so, they invite a critique of their own ideas to try to strengthen them. we'd do well to get back to that, both in science and on the left.
when i was a math student, i spent an unusually large amount of time on axiomatic systems, so i sort of get this a bit better than most. i had to make the same point of correction when we did gulliver's travels in the science fiction course i took years ago, because i was able to identify a critique of pythagoreanism that most people today would have missed for a critique of "science", entirely - but that would have been painfully obvious to swift's contemporary audience.
what asimov does with the three laws is actually relatively soluble and transferable, and he's consequently able to use the mechanism to criticize a wide variety of applications of logic in place of empirical study. it's that general critique of reason (in a very non-kantian sense) that is what he's on about, not a specific critique of the laws of thermodynamics. i actually haven't come across a story that is specifically about thermodynamics quite yet, but i'm sure one is coming.
and, hey - if you can disprove thermodynamics, go for it. nobody's succeeded yet, right?
everybody knows it's all wrong, though - and it has to be, because it's axiomatic.
===
is that post written clearly, in your opinion?
when i read the conclusion, it reminds me of things i'm sure i wrote into the post, but i can't find, and this is often the clue i use to remind myself. whatever editing i think is happening seems to remove sentences and paragraphs, but doesn't seem to be concerned about cohesiveness. so, they leave relics that allow for reconstruction of the thought.
i scratched out two words and replaced them. while i admit i'm partial to brain freezes (i seem to frequently post antonyms in place of intended words and don't understand why), the actual words in the posts badly obscure what i'm getting at. the point i'm trying to get across is that we used to see philosophy as logical, back in the day, that it was it's historical definition, and not the half-formed pile of nonsense we broadly see it as today. and, we used to understand science as empirical - in opposition to reason. is that a fluke? i could accept the brain freeze, a priori - because i seem to have little choice.
but, as the next paragraphs unfold, it's clear that i'm missing context. the bit about asimov being a self-deprecating science nerd would have to follow from questioning if the robot laws are self-parody, or it lacks any context. i'm missing a discussion on asimov not caring if he's right. the part about disproving the laws of thermodynamics comes from nowhere.
see, and i remember writing the parts that seem to be missing. this is a draft of the replacement text:
===
i had to nap this afternoon, so i'm behind schedule, but i certainly think things are balancing out. i'm about half-way through the dr. calvin (the make believe one, not the one he makes fun of in reason) section and i want to stop for a minute to address a specific question:
are the three robot laws a parody of thermodynamics?
sort of, maybe. but, not really. it's more general.
i mean, it's a reasonable hypothesis. asimov was, of course, a chemistry prof. but, the three laws of robotics are really a more general critique of axiomatic systems, including euclidean geometry, both newtonian and relativistic physics (and also quantum physics...) and secular humanism's roots in aquinian natural law theory, in addition to the laws of thermodynamics, as some examples. the distinction is one that's been sort of lost post-heisenberg, but was really at the crux of the historical debate between science (which was not impressed by the types of arguments that deductively reasoned perceived truth from sound axioms using logical syllogisms, but was rather focused on understanding the world via empirical observation, as conducted by experiments) and philosophy (which was a lesser form of epistemology that was about advancing usually unfalsifiable theories via argumentation built strictly via syllogism, and disinterested in empirically demonstrating the truth of any of it in the universe we inhabit). with the retreat of physics from strict empiricism to largely unfalsifiable theoretical models, and the more recent embrace of empiricism by any philosopher worth listening to, this distinction has been blurred. nowadays, we tend to avoid the deductive/empirical distinction and instead have constructed a rational/irrational categorization. so, we combine mathematics & science together as being in the "pro-reason" category and then do away with philosophy by expelling it to the religion pile, which is "irrational" or "emotional". and, this has taken on, like, classical greek undertones of masculine v feminism, which is daft. but, that wasn't the world asimov lived in - he would have seen science and what was called the british school (which actually included marx as well as darwin and newton and bacon and the rest) on one side of this, and the broad swath of philosophical doctrine, which included both religion and mathematics, on the other side of it. it is easy for a modern reader to conflate logic with science, but asimov wouldn't have seen it that way.
so, the robot laws become a general criticism of philosophy (including mathematics) from an empiricist, rather than a specific parody of any specific axiomatic system. you first have to understand the historical conflict between science and philosophy to understand where asimov is really coming from with this, and you then have to put it into the context of the academic tradition he was raised in, which is one where empirical science was seen as forward thinking and "progressive", whereas deductive philosophy was seen as outdated and "backwards". standing in the 30s and 40s, western culture was leaving the baggage of it's foundations in philosophy and religion behind and embracing a new world of empiricism and science. all of the old axiomatic systems were being discarded, as wrong. euclid was wrong. aristotle was wrong. newton, even, was wrong. the way forward was to leave our old assumptions - and our old systems of deduction - behind and embrace the new world of the future, defined by measuring the world as it actually is, and not by imagining how it ought to be. in 1931, at the height of the optimism for a post-philosophical scientific future, came godel's incompleteness theorem, which proved, basically, that all axiomatic systems are either false in their deductions of the world around us or incapable of understanding the world in a sufficiently interesting manner. so, philosophy was from that point forever dead; empiricism was truly the only way forward. our choice was starkly clear: we could embrace the empirical future, or we could retreat inwards and board ourselves into a sanatorium of the philosophical past.
now, that's not to say that asimov was opposed to the use of logic as a tool to inform an empirical analysis of the world around us, and he quite clearly wasn't, even if he routinely points out the problems in doing so via plot twists in his stories, where he makes fools out of specious logicians deducing truths that don't hold up to empirical analysis (baley's repeated false deductions in the caves of steel and the naked sun are maybe the most obvious examples of this mockery of logic, if not the only examples). it just means that asimov is taking a clear stand for empiricism over logic in terms of which has primary importance in analyzing the world around us, and is doing so by mocking the use of logic as a tool of epistemology in his rather developed long-running satire of axiomatic systems and deductive logic as a tool of reasoning, of which the robot laws (which are frequently pushed to their limits) are the centre-piece. at the end of the day, empiricism still requires logic to make sense of the observations, after all.
what i'm getting at is just that asimov came into existence in a reality where all the historical axiomatic systems were crumbling and being jettisoned or replaced, where the approach itself was being put away as untenable and where deductive reasoning was finally being widely understood as a way to prove things true that were easily empirically demonstrated as absolutely wrong. that was his frame; that was his world. so, you'd expect it to be reflected, and it is. but, he still did his chemistry homework using the laws of thermodynamics, and he still did his physics homework using newton's laws (or einstein's laws, depending on the course). therefore, if robots are to have laws, they should surely be wrong, right? i mean, how can we take einstein seriously, while dismissing euclid so thoroughly? see, and, that opens up a broader point: at the end of the day, all science is necessarily wrong, and it has to be in the sense that it's deductive, at some point, in the place of raw empirical observation. there's no way out: that's godel's insight. but, we continue to take it seriously anyways, even though we know it's all wrong, and just waiting to be proven wrong. philosophy tries to determine what is true and what isn't, but science is not anything close to truth, deductive or empirical, and makes no such claims for itself; science is a collection of increasingly less crude approximations waiting to be thrown away, as deprecated. all science is always wrong, all of the time.
if you're going to spend time doing it, you really have to have a good sense of humour about it. if the robot laws are a parody of axiomatic systems, it would follow that asimov is, in good part, making fun of himself.
so, it's worth realizing that asimov was very much the archetype of the self-deprecating science nerd, and he was perfectly willing to make fun of himself, if it resulted in a good punchline. you could almost imagine him sitting in his room saying "this is bullshit" as he works out some problem i relativity from first principles. so, of course robots have laws, and of course those laws are wrong - that's how science works. it's a mark of a mature writer, and especially of a liberal one in the 1900-1950 period, that people often miss - he was perfectly content to criticize his own ideas, if he thought it would advance the state of general knowledge. he didn't care if he was right or wrong, he cared about the discourse around the process of coming closer to truth. so, he would frequently invite and offer criticism of ideas or ideological positions that he fully supported, and would do so within the context of his own writing, because he wasn't trying to advance an argument so much as he was trying to push the needle forward. this contemporary idea of "admitting weakness", which is in truth a viciously barbaric form of toxic masculinity, did not exist in asimov's intellectual tradition, which instead sought to objectively determine truth from empirical evidence in a manner free of any sort of bias. it's actually a black mark on our own era that the idea of somebody being more concerned about general intellectual advancement than they are about "winning" at personal ideological bickering comes off as bizarre and unrealistic. but, you see this with the likes of asimov, russell, sagan - they're just not driven by their egos, so they don't care if they're right or not, and are happy to admit they were wrong, if they were. to them, "winning a debate" is a collective process (the socialization of knowledge?), where we learn and advance and move forwards together, and not some barbaric triumph of the individualist ego over one's enemies, or some juvenile enforcement of one's will over another. so, they invite a critique of their own ideas to try to strengthen them. we'd do well to get back to that, both in science and on the left.
when i was a math student, i spent an unusually large amount of time on axiomatic systems, so i sort of get this a bit better than most. i had to make the same point of correction when we did gulliver's travels in the science fiction course i took years ago, because i was able to identify a critique of pythagoreanism that most people today (including the prof) would miss for a critique of "science", entirely - but that would have been entirely obvious to swift's contemporary audience. if you think that science and math and logic and reason are all the same thing, you're not just missing the basic point of what science actually is (and why it was such an important intellectual break), but are going to miss out on the context of a lot of historical literature, not just swift and asimov. if you get nothing else from this, it's the importance of enforcing that historical distinction: science was developed in opposition to logic as a tool of epistemology, and not in conjunction to it.
so, what asimov does with the three laws is actually relatively soluble and transferable, and he's consequently able to use the mechanism to criticize a wide variety of applications of logic in place of empirical study. it's that general critique of reason (in a very non-kantian sense) that is what he's on about, not a specific critique of the laws of thermodynamics. i actually haven't come across a story that is specifically about thermodynamics quite yet, but i'm sure one is coming (edit: i think he only really gets there at the very end, in robots and empire, and only really as an afterthought).
and, hey - if you can disprove thermodynamics, go for it. nobody's succeeded yet, right?
everybody knows it's all wrong, though - and it has to be, because it's axiomatic.
===
i'm admittedly taking the opportunity to add extra ideas in that i certainly didn't add in in the first place. but, i do remember writing a fair amount of that in...
so, what is really going on, here? is some automated process editing posts? is there some way i can figure that out?
i think it's a simple request to ask that google tell me what it's editing, if it's editing anything. i just wish i could find some evidence to back up my intuition, and i can't.
3:55
they insist it's not them:
i don't think it's google....i think it's a government agency...
but, all evidence tells me it's me.
ugh.
4:02
*sigh*.
so, i'm not going to do the copy/paste.
i'll have to let that sit.
i am going to check my soundcard right this minute, immediately.
4:05
my brain is in too many places at once, and i just don't multitask well. i really don't
i was in such an awesome place at the start of 2016, but i had to stop to quit smoking, and i never got back to where i was. i can at least say i've completely quit smoking at this point. it's been months and months and months since i even bummed a smoke. but, dammit.
everything was totally ordered and progressing well, and i've just created such a mess, since then. and, i can't figure out how to reorder it. every time i try, i get stuck. it was easy when i knew i had to start from scratch, but i've just got layers and layers now, too many narratives.
i keep telling myself to start from the beginning, but i can't order the beginning. and, every time i start in the middle, i have this urgent feeling that i'm missing something.
so, the machine hasn't crashed yet, but i'm feeling sort of empty doing it. like, i'm almost nervous, which is weird. i know what i want to do, but i don't have the excitement i had at one point to do it.
i'm working on what i've called a "soul swap" piece, and i think a part of the empty feeling i'm having is that...this doesn't mean anything to me at this point. i'm trying to describe something i've been dead to for years. and, that might be a part of getting over this hump in the discography.
this is going to be a bizarre piece of music, and it essentially has to be, given the conceptual purpose of it. there's going to be two components - entirely out of sync with each other - that are going to merge and separate. there's a backstory to that that i'm not getting into.
i was considering building something in audiomulch, but i'd rather use the raw noise that existed in the 2004 build and take it from there.
6:24
i'm astoundingly
overwhelmed.
i'm not used to that.
but, i think that's why i keep defaulting to the filing, because i want to make sure i've got a proper grasp on it - i want to properly understand it before i get to it.
but, i just need to focus and do it.
6:27
i think the anxiety i'm feeling is actually disappointment in myself. i'm coming face to face with the fact that i haven't gotten more done, that i'm working out things i should have finished, by now. and, i'm trying to figure out all of the thing i need to do by 2026 and sort of short circuiting.
i can tell myself that i've gotten plenty done, and that it was just of a different nature.
but, i can't hide the fact that i'm disappointed in the amount of music i've produced, recently.
and, now that i'm typing that, it's resolving.
how do i actually get this done? that's the question i need to answer. the written component is just so fucking time consuming, and i wanted it to be the fast, easy part. as it is, it's just cutting into the production time...
6:40
ok.
if the machine is broadly usable, i need to do everything i can on there, first. that's what i was doing, but i stopped to do some reading, and got distracted. like, ridiculously distracted.
it's not like it was unproductive, i would have to do it anyways, but i really want to reassert some direction in what i'm doing. i was laser-focused, then - i knew exactly what i was doing.
let me try to multitask on the machine, at least, and see if i can file and do this at the same time.
as mentioned, this is a noise piece. it's not going to have much live music, and may not have any at all. i'm going to be creating weird noises in cool edit and putting them together...
6:53
it's only once i feel that the machine is in order that i can get back to the alter-reality and the asimov reviews.
the reason for that is that the process of rebuilding from 2013 relies on the machine being in better order.
but, i'm just circling around again, i get it. i get stuck doing something, and i move to the next thing, and get stuck, and move again. i'm not finishing anything. it's frustrating, but so be it.
6:55
is it weird that i get so upset about this when faced with a lack of productivity?
well, this is how i've defined my existence. if i'm not getting things done, i'm not existing with any meaning. it's the absence of purpose that's getting under my skin, and i'm expressing a sort of remorse at not fulfilling my potential, as i've defined it.
there's no point in getting emotional about it.
the flip side is that i get a feeling of euphoria when i finish a project, that's connected to a feeling of fulfillment at my purpose and identity.
it's almost like i'm a robot, right? it's those positronic potentials.
but, in all seriousness, this is what and who i am and if i can't get something done, i'm not existing in a meaningful manner. this is why i exist. i need to actually exist.
calm down, jess - you've been working, even if you don't have a completed project to show for it. even if it's been frustration, for too long. keep struggling - there's some completion at the end of it.
there's no reason, right now, why i can't get things in order, except the time required to do it, and the fact that i can't listen to eight things at the same time.
7:18
so, is the problem the video card?
i haven't tried cubase, yet.
one thing at a time.
7:20
yeah, i expected this to be relatively quick as i had the files already put together. there's going to be a first draft done son, and i'll have to decide if i want to add anything to it or not.
9:04
so, i'm releasing this as a double ep today, although i'm going to need the add the extra two tracks as they come up.
that means inri076 is now done. i have inri075, inri077 and inri078 left to finish to complete period 3.1
as mentioned, the lead track is very strange. it's meant to represent a soul swap. i'll get into this later.
12:26
wednesday, january 5, 2022
so, what am i doing?
the pc is working. so, i need to get to the next step, which means installing cubase (i haven't done it yet). i took notes over may and june about what i was doing, and wanted to check them...
so, i'm rebuilding the music journal, specifically, over that period, so i can consult those specific notes.
clearly, i'm fighting with some entity regarding the asimov posts, so i'm going to put it aside for a bit and come back later. maybe they'll get bored and leave me alone. i don't have a desire to struggle like this over my own writing, it's just time consuming and stupid.
so, i'm going to be putting a total focus on the recording for now, and will get back to the alter-reality some day, maybe, whenever. i've just lost all excitement around it, because somebody is ruining it for me :(.
2:03
sunday, january 9, 2022
so, i've got cubase installed and was able to add the album mix as well as a vocalized album mix to the single:
the two 16 minute versions should be seen as final.
i still may add a percussion mix of into oblivion, but that will probably rather end up on the isomorphism single.
23:30
monday, january 10, 2022
the album mix has also been added to the record i'm now working on, which is the long overdue double triival group lp.
0:17
so, i'm going to start doing something a little different, which is mass mailing completed recordings.
let's get the link in first:
this isn't intended to be a detailed updates list, just a notification that the package is finished. i've tended to avoid doing this sort of "spamming", but i've at this point lost touch with virtually everybody i used to know, and i've stopped using social media altogether, so there isn't a feed to post it to. i've really retreated strictly to email and strictly to total isolation.
if you don't want to receive these updates - which i would not expect to be frequent - then ask me to remove you from my address book. it's a housekeeping process in that sense, as well. i will maintain a bcc.
the context is that, since i moved to windsor, i've been focusing on finishing a large body of musical projects dated 1996-2011 that were left in a partly or mostly incomplete state. inri076 means it's the 77th (starting from 0) recording in the catalogue, but inri075 is not done yet and inri079-inri081 are done. finishing inri075, inri077 and inri078 will take me to the end of what i'm calling period 3.1, which is materially initially started between 2003-2004. period 1 is from 1996-2000 and was completed in 2016. period 2 is from 2000-2003 and was completed in 2015, but updated in 2017. i was working on the written component of my discography between 2018-2020, and fighting with old, finnicky gear.
inri076 is an expansion and completion of the first piece that was recorded when i got back from british columbia in mid 2003 and now forms an extended conceptual double ep. the second and third tracks were recorded in 2003, whereas the first and sixth were recently created in 2021. the fourth and fifth combine parts from 2003 with parts from 2021. this recording is intentionally difficult and esoteric. the album version will appear on my next record.
as this is the first of these, i'll also point out that inri081, which is my 7th lp, was finally finished in june, from material started between 2001-2004 and completed from 2014-2021:
also, my sixth lp (inri063) was completed in 2015, from material started between 2001-2002 and completed from 2014-2015:
...my fifth lp (inri052) was completed in 2014, from material started between 2000-2001 and completed from 2014-2015:
...my third lp (inri033) has actually not been altered since it's completion in 1999 (except to remove the last track, now on the outtakes compilation, inri042):
...my second lp (inri021), initially created in 1999, was remastered from scratch as an instrumental recording over 2015-2016:
...and my first lp (inri015), initially created in 1998, was also remastered from scratch as an instrumental recording over 2015-2016:
i will be working on inri077 next, which is a collection of demos from late 2003 that were initially recorded on a 4-track cassette deck and were never completed.
j
0:47
tuesday, january 11, 2022
publishing inri076
period 2 ends when i left for bc with sarah, and period 3 begins when i got back, after having left her in her home town on the way home, and with the previous recording (inri075) acting as a bridge between the two periods. so, this begins period 3, which was a time of great uncertainty and instability in my life that ends only when i move into a new apartment on bronson in early 2007.
that said, what the trivial group project documents, in hindsight, is the period where sarah existed in my life as a physical and emotional entity, which really starts back around inri064 and culminates, in it's iniital phase, in the last recording of period 2, the reflections ep (inri074), so, the story is also picking up a part of the way through. while essentially none of my music up to this point had a romantic slant, and the political themes will pick up again when sarah is no longer a physical or emotional entity in my life, she was really the dominant influence on my mental state over period 3, and these recordings are consequently almost entirely about her, in some abstraction or another.
we didn't stay in bc long when we got there. as mentioned, we didn't really have a plan, other than to get there and hope it worked out. but, i think the reason we didn't have a plan is partly because we had our own plans and were kind of using each other to get there; my plan, which i don't think i ever told her, was that i was looking for a place to transition in, and i suspect she was ultimately looking for a home to wreck, figuratively speaking. but, the lessons from the grapes of wrath, which i had read as child, became more and more apparent as i stumbled through the okanagan valley, and the depth of the mistake i had made in leaving a comfortable existence in ottawa started to become apparent to me. i certainly needed to find some way out of the empty, "normal" existence my family was trying to push on me, but i wasn't going to find it in these rolling fields of sage, or in these camp fire orgies of the lost and dispossessed. i didn't know what to do next, or how to assert some kind of meaning in the emptiness of ubiquitous market capitalism, but i knew i needed to go home to sort it out - and i knew the value of stability, for perhaps the first time in my life.
so, i'm actually the one that decided to go home, and i didn't expect her to follow me. but, she did.
there's a story she told me years later, and i came to realize that it had a lasting effect on her that i wasn't aware of at the time. after an argument about monogamy (one of many...) outside of a work camp near osoyoos, i told her i was leaving her there for good and stormed off down the road. i quickly hitched a ride towards penticton, where i was strongly considering transitioning, and didn't intend to come back. that was that: bye, sarah.
but, rather than go to penticton, i stopped in oliver, and hitched back the other way, instead. i found myself in the position of needing to reconsider my course of action: i couldn't just leave her there, i had to go back to get her. when i got back to osoyoos, i found her in exactly the same spot that i had left her, roughly eight hours earlier. she told me she just froze solid - she was overcome with fear, and didn't know how to proceed, however many thousands of kilometres from home. she was sure i'd come back. so, she waited for me, and just passed the time by picking wild sage in the fields.
so, maybe that's why she followed me home, in the end, after i followed her so far away from home, to begin with.
one of the last stops on the way back was in newmarket, ontario, where we got into a shouting match minutes before we got into the last car. we didn't talk on the way back to ottawa; she got off in her home town, and i kept going. it was mutually understood that the relationship was over.
i still remember the date in late june when i got back to ottawa, getting off the queensway just before fisher, hobbling down the ramp, walking by the civic hospital (and bumming a smoke outside it), smelling the experimental farm again for the first time in months and collapsing on the couch when i got in, for a very long sleep, for the first time in some time. my dad, always one for sardonic jokes, woke me up by blaring the classic kansas tune, carry on my wayward son, on his high end stereo system.
so, that is the context for this song, which was written and recorded over the summer of 2003 (my files are all dated to august 30th and 31st, when i seem to have reset the volume for the purpose of remixing it), as i was facing my first time away from sarah in roughly a year and struggling with the separation. i was undergoing a conflict between my brain (which told me to get away from this girl because she's bad news) and my hormones (which were experiencing symptoms of attachment) which i had undergone many times previously and would undergo many times again. it's not an exaggeration to suggest that sarah sort of drove me crazy, that she sort of broke my brain a little. i can only hope that the resulting art is substantive, as best as i can present it.
but, if it's not clear, the song is intended to be darkly sarcastic. the reference is to "all you need is love", but it's a warped one, and the influence is "love will tear us apart, again". what i'm reflecting upon is the state of delusion that we enter into when our faculties for reason become degraded by the intoxicating influence of hormones. it's really a state of impaired thinking that should be seen as psychotropic - we should talk about being under the influence of love, of being inebriated by oxytocin. a person that is truly in love could have their heart ripped out in front of them as they're breathing, and not be able to react coherently to it, as it's happening. this is a dangerous chemical, indeed.
it may come off as intentionally defiant, but it's intended to be unintentionally deluded.
i saw sarah a few times that summer. she called me on canada day, and i biked out to her home town to see her on her birthday, a few weeks later. but, i was lonely that summer without her, and that is really what the song is expressing. i hope that the guitar part is particularly expressive.
the initial intent was for the first part of the song to be this sarcastic commentary on the concept of love, and for it to open up into a sort of dance punk thing (i guess it sounds like john mcentire remixing the strokes) that represents the shift away from feeling and the shift into numbness and obliviousness, but i separated out and shelved the first part because it was just too difficult. so, the second part of the song - into oblivion - is a first draft of the interplanetary isomorphism, a 33 minute symphonic piece and the first part - all you need - has been a stranded demo, since 2003.
is the first part really that difficult? well, if you can find me a more raw piece of music, i'd like to hear it. but, 20 years later, that's an asset more than a drawback. i mean, it still hurts a little to listen to it, but i can listen to it at more of a distance, now, and realize the artistic value of it. so, the point of this is in large part to salvage something that has always had value but was previously a little too raw for me to share.
in mid 2021, i remixed the first part - all you need - to turn the vocals down a little. unfortunately, some of the sarcasm ends up lost in the new mix, but it sounds a lot better and i'm happier with it. i think the sarcasm is heavy enough to not require the use of tone to demonstrate it, but the initial mix makes the sarcasm in the line "yeah. all you need is love." quite a bit more apparent.
in early 2022, to salvage the concept and complete the recording, i added a lengthy "soul swap" piece to the beginning of the track. this stems from a number of discussions i had with sarah where she tried to convince me that she would make a better jessica than i would and that i should go back to jason, something that perhaps ended up being sort of accurate (in terms of her being a better jessica). i can't know how much that thought guided sarah in the years to come, and she wouldn't admit it to me if it were true because she'd realize it would upset me, but that's the idea, here. of course, we don't actually have souls and can't actually swap them, although i'd love to shapeshift into a new host as this one becomes old and unusable. it's strictly a poetic suggestion, to extrapolate on the idea that sarah and i, in some ways, changed places. i don't know how long a soul swap ought to take, but i made it lengthy enough to be a difficult piece of music, and tried to present what i imagine it ought to sound like. so, yes, the 40+ minutes of noise flipping stereo positions is meant to abstractly represent the sound of souls changing hosts, however silly the idea may be in real life. the female channel in the soul swap was also isolated and added to the end of the collection as a 40+ minute drone piece, as it has an aesthetic interest on it's own.
i also wanted to reclaim the piece as a segue between the 8th symphony (reflections) and the 9th symphony (interplanetary isomorphism) for the trivial group double cd, which meant removing the vocals and manipulating the soul swap so that it is of a length that fits on the first cd. but, then, i decided i should also have a vocal version of the album construction. so, these tracks were added to close the disc a few days after the soul swap was built.
unfortunately, i got into a fight with my stepmother in the fall of 2003 and could no longer stay there, something that may be a consequence of leaving over that summer and assuming i could just come back. i was only back in town for a few months before i was thrown out, something that i'll pick up on in the writeup for inri077. so, this is the sum total of material worked on in my parents' basement when i got back from bc before i got thrown out, completed in 2021/2022 to be a standalone conceptual ep, and a component of my next full length record.
initially written and recorded over the summer of 2003. track 2 was remixed on june 14, 2021. tracks 1 and 6 were created on the morning of january 3rd, 2022 from the base of an aborted noise piece that was last edited in early 2004 and contained samples of the recording of all you need. tracks 4 and 5 were created on the evening of january 9th, 2022. released as a two volume set on jan 9, 2022. as always, please use headphones.
the album version also appears on my ninth record, {e} (inri08x): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/e
the condensed version also appears on the fundamental theorem of poeticity:
jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/the-fundamental-theorem-of-poeticity
this recording is a part of the following collections:
1) flac dvd disc vol 7
2) mp3 dvd vol 3
3) trivial group box set
4) blu ray disc vol 2
5) period 3
this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (2003, 2015, 2017).
disc one:
1. soul swap
2. all you need
3. into oblivion (initial construction)
4. all you need (album mix)
disc two:
5. all you need (condensed)
6. her
released september 1, 2003
j - electric guitars, effects, electric mandolin, analog synthesizers, drum programming, sound design, tone generators, cool edit synthesis, digital sampling, digital wave editing, vocals, production, composition
21:40
wednesday, january 12, 2022
so, what's going on with me, then?
i want to rewind to last wednesday to tell the story about the soy milk, which i put off a little. that will help explain what's been going on over the last few days.
so, i wanted to get out early on wednesday morning to do all of the shopping for the next month or so. i got out around 6:45ish and was surprised to see a lineup at the blood lab (which i skipped) but got a big run done at the second store (there's no cereal anywhere in windsor, right now. it's weird.) before going to the far store to get a few things i only get there, which is actually where i got most of my vegetables this time through. but, i took a look through the soy milk aisle, only to realize that it wasn't just the vanilla flavour that was moving to lower fortification but all of the versions. they didn't have any boxes of the fortified product. this put me into a state of panic.
it was a few months ago that i decided i had to move from my preferred brand of soy milk (soy good, manufactured by an australian company) to natura for the reason that the soy good got bought out by this piece of shit canadian brand called earth's own, which basically ruined the most healthy product on the entire market in order to make a profit. that's the kind of assholery that earns a special place of contempt in the mind of j. so, now i'm realizing that natura is doing the same thing, probably because the fact is that all of the soy milk in the country is now made in the same factory. it's like beer - it's all just rebranded 50. you bought a budwesier? in canada, it's a 50. blue? it's a 50. canadian? it's a 50. coors? it' a 50. etc. if you want to buy a non-50 beer in canada, you have to explicitly ensure it wasn't manufactured here.
so, am i going to need to buy imported soy milk, then? i'm actually not sure it's even possible. what i'm actually thinking i might do is just move to buying soy protein in bulk and fortifying it myself.
but, after the second run, i had to take a run out to the shoppers, the close grocery store and the bulk barn. thankfully, i found a large amount of actually fortified soy at the close store, so i had to take a few runs to clear them out. in the end, i spent about $100 on roughly 35 cartons of fortified soy milk, and it should be enough for the salad and the coffee until the middle of the year, which essentially puts the problem off. by then, will there be a better option available, or will i have to fortify my own homemade soy milk?
the problem was that the extra runs to the close store put my run to the very far store to get the last bit of soy milk off into the late afternoon, and after eight hours of walking with groceries, i was a little too exhausted to continue. there was also a short cold snap coming in on wednesday night that was supposed to clear by thursday afternoon. so, i decided i had to get inside and get some sleep, and intended to get out the next day, after the mild cold snap had passed. but, unfortunately, it didn't quite warm up enough for me to go on a three hour walk with a grocery cart to get as many cartons of soy milk as i could find, so i had to put it off until saturday, instead...and didn't want to tell anybody what i was doing. so, this is why i kind of lost thursday and friday, on top of just being overly tired from the walking.
however, i got a bit of a start on clearing out my facebook page on friday. i'm going to be moving the music page to the releases blog (where i can actually use the timeline feature, which i actually like) and the pictures to this google photos share, instead:
the weather was warming up saturday afternoon, and overnight on sunday, but i had to get to the blood lab before 15:00 on saturday. so, the plan was to get to the blood lab first, then go to the very far store with the shopping cart, bring home as much soy milk as i could get, and then bring the cart back, before taking another run to the second store, and hoping that keeps me inside until the end of the month, or close to it. that took me until late on saturday night, when i had to come in to get something to eat and finish cleaning.
so, it was sunday afternoon, after i'd finished most of the sleeping and taken a couple of naps, that i said to myself "ok, but i'm going to install cubase and see what happens", partly because i wanted to sit down for a minute and have a coffee and partly because i wanted to actually get something done for the weekend. i mean, the computer works, right? let's use it. so, i was hoping to just get the software installed first and sort of take it from there, but then i sat down and started working and actually got inri076 updated in relatively short order:
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/all-you-need
i also updated the {e} album:
at this point, i decided i was going to do something i'd been thinking about for a while, namely mass emailing the release to my entire address book. well, i'm not using facebook anymore. how do i get the link to people? i made a tactical decision to go ahead and send it to everybody, then delete all of the bounces from my address book, thinking it would be quick. by monday afternoon, i was still doing that, when i stopped to take a shower, with the intent of getting some real sleep after.
and, sleep i did - 15 hours. that's ok, i needed it. i wasn't up until close to noon on tuesday.
i've spent the day doing loose ends regarding the mass mailing and the inri076 release, including finishing the write-up for the release notes. i'll do that in more detail as i get through the process of rebuilding the music journal, which i need to do to get to inri077, so i'm sure i haven't lost my train of thought. so, i'm about to click back into that.
i've also put up a skeleton for the third vocal disc, which is called the fundamental theorem of poeticity:
so, that was a bit of a detour, but it was helpful, and i got a release finished for the first time in a while. that's got me feeling good.
i initially wanted to get in for thursday morning, finish the cleaning and then get to doing some legal stuff by monday morning, but all of these detours mean i put the legal stuff off for a few days. that's fine. i actually got some progress on the karen case (the one where i'm challenging the legality of the arrest, rather than the one where i'm suing the karen, directly), so i need to do that, as well.
so, i'll be focusing on the legal stuff for a day or two, and then attempting to shift to inri077 for the weekend.
0:07
friday, january 14, 2022
my main focus right now is legal, but i'm also moving into the weekend, and i want to get something or other down over the space, as well.
i just want to point out that i'm finally at the point where i'm going to be doing the lost symphony, which is going to plug many holes.
1) inri077 will contain a "completed-in-place" mix of the lost symphony, and probably a few snapshots of it, in the process. i'll be doing this in cubase on the production machine (so long as it holds), but it will need to sound like a 4-track demo. that is the opposite of what i did with the inriclaimed project, where i was converting 4-track demos into digitized projects. i want to get a start on this over the weekend, but probably won't come close to finishing it.
2) i will then take those "4-track demos" and use them to build a full digital mix of the lost symphony, which only has a low quality digital guitar mix, as of now:
inri079-inri081 are already done, so that will close period 3.1 [the next project will be doing inri075 on that new acoustic guitar, which is really a segue between 2.4 and 3.1]. inri082 & inri083 are compilations to end period 3.1. there may be others.
the interplanetary isomorphism then is the focus over the summer of 2004, whereas xenophanes is the focus over the fall. but, both symphones are essentially done up to finalizing finishing touches and potential remastering steps. these will require some work, but they're basically done.
so, the means that finishing the lost symphony also basically finishes my 8th record:
this is consequently really massively key in terms of pushing through not just period 3.1 but period 3.2 as well, and i've got an algorithm worked out to do it, too.
xenophanes is a mess. i'm going to date it and the record to mid 2004, but the truth is that i spent most of 2005 working on it, and never really finished it. there are already many snapshots and there will be more as i get the files in order. but, it's going to be a little anachronistic for that reason. but, it will let me leave this project in sandy hill with period 3.2, and move into period 3.3, which then becomes a series of loose ends to finish, with more clarity of thought. ideally, i would have finished xenophanes before i moved to prince of wales, and then i would have finished the handful of loose ends there, instead of developing this backlog. i guess that's an easy way to put it - i ran into a bottleneck with xenophanes in late 2004, and it created a backlog that i'm only finally sorting through, now. leaving it on sandy hill clears the backlog for me, opening up 2005 and 2006 for these pieces that only barely got started.
so, the main focus of period 3.3 then becomes the cycles per second recording, which means finally building the 64 bit machine and installing matlab on it. i will likely expand the scope of the project to use programs like reaktor and max, but the primary focus needs to be building sound objects directly into matlab. and, i may use the outcome, in the end. for all the noises and abstract sound design in my compositions, i don't actually do any programming in the computer science sense until about 2004. i want that to be a more dominant focus of the next period, moving into 2005 and 2006.
there is also a stranded throatmotor piece that is the last thing that has anything to do with the arrogant ass guitarist, jon. he rented a place with some people he worked with in the chinatown area and ended up meeting a kind of pop punk singer that lived across the street from him, named trrevor. trevor's musical alterego was throatmotor, which seems to be a crude reference to oral sex. in hindsight, what jon actually did in this band was double trevor's guitar parts, almost exclusively. he might have added two or three short parts, in total, to an hour's worth of pop-punk songs. i'm actually not sure why trevor decided he needed him at all, other than that maybe jon had an amp and trevor didn't. but, i got called in to play bass, after the existing bassist (who i believe was trevor's ex-boyfriend) walked out. this wasn't a genre of music i like much, it was something like blink 182 with a drum machine; i really just filled in as jon's friend, because he asked, more than anything else. i mean, i expected that they'd find a new bassist in short order, i thought it was very temporary, like a show or two, but it dragged out for quite a while. i did on the order of 10 shows with them, including two pride slots, before i had to tell them "i'm not into this, you need to find a bassist". jon got his girlfriend, mandy, to play bass for a while, but the thing fell apart fairly shortly afterwards. my perception was that jon wanted to rewrite trevor's songs, rather than write his own songs, and trevor more or less told him to fuck off.
but, i played bass for a while in a different band with the same jon, and i have a track meant for that project that i'll have to finish. i figured that if i was going to fill in on bass then i'd might as well do something interesting, so i made a conscious intent to try to orchestrate the pieces. the bass part for to spin inside dull aberrations is a rough approximation of the type of bass parts i wrote for throatmotor, but i never recorded any of them, and have long since forgotten them. i wouldn't really be able to release any of them in this space, anyways - these were songs that were written by trevor and belong to trevor. i was at best credited as an arranger, but was really just a fill in bassist.
i'm actually not sure what trevor really thought of the bass work. i could tell that he found me confusing, because he was attracted to me as a male, but was supposed to accept me as female; he wanted to fuck me, and was visibly perturbed by my complete disinterest. while his ego wasn't quite as absurd as jon's, he clearly felt threatened by me coming in and noodling all over his tracks. but, that aside, i think he put up with it because he actually did like it. so, when i tried to present a track to work on, he wouldn't entertain the prospect because he didn't want to lose control. it wasn't long after that that i told them to find a bassist more into what they were doing.
so, this is probably stranded, but becomes a 2005 piece that i need to work out, as well:
but, clearing out 2005 really clears out space for the impressionist jazz punk, which were pieces i was writing, mostly over the summer. this is a link between the trivial group and proverbs, and i'll want to polish and complete these, and date them to that space.
so, getting through the lost symphony opens up a lot of space and should get me over a major hump.
3:05
9:50
again - i don't know why it sounds like somebody mastered that through a broken speaker, all of a sudden.
ugh.
just turn the bass way down and the treble way up.
9:56
my files are all ruined.
i'm going to have to star from the beginning and redo everything from scratch.
10:09
so, unfortunately, i'm unpublishing all of my music at this point because i feel it's been altered.
if you have copies of the altered mixes, they are not mine. i disown them. i condemn them.
i will need to start from the beginning and fix everything, track by track. i may need to remix specific items. i'll have to see.
or, i might decide something else has gone wrong, i don't know.
i know that i don't want my name attached to mixes that are not mine, so everything is likely to stay unpublished for the foreseeable future.
if it's still possible to simply replace the corrupted files with the original ones, i insist that this is done. otherwise, i'll need to remix it all from source.
the primary problem is that the bass is too loud and the highs are too low.
10:33
what i'll need to do is carefully check everything as i'm archiving and rebuilding. and, in a sense, i just ordered things, for myself, as i can no longer work on period 3.1 for the foreseeable future - now that i'm back to remastering periods 1-2, it will need to be my total focus.
this sucks.
but, blame the fucker at the mixing desk.
this is no way my fault at all. and, if it's fixed quickly, i can push through it quickly.
i can't leave bad mixes of my art online, it's not acceptable to me.
10:47
this isn't a game and it isn't a debate. this is harassment. and, there is no excuse for it.
10:49
the machine seems stable, so let me try to install drivers for the mixer and take it from there.
as i get through everything for each item - remastering, liner notes, archiving, etc - i'll republish.
10:51
for today, i'd like to get through some loose ends, first - taking down my facebook page, etc.
10:53
again - the basic problem is that the mixes are too bassy, and the detail on the high end is no longer clear.
so, i'm going to have to take note to turn down the chunkiness - something i would never mix into my own tracks - and reintroduce the prettiness and the sparkliness.
10:55
i'm not intending to add anything, but we'll see if decisions get revisited, i guess.
but, i have a special disdain for bassy guitars and i'm very upset that they somehow ended up in some of these tracks. i didn't do that. and, i don't know the extent of the problem that needs to be erased.
10:57
i've unfortunately been distracted and agitated today.
i've got a coffee, let's sit down and get some loose ends cleared up.
i'm all legal-stuffed out for a few days. but, i need to do some typing this weekend rather than recording.
see, if i'm going to keep everything unpublished for a while as an incentive to not fuck with it, it makes sense to republish it in line with the liner notes. i wanted to do that, anyways. that means i'd be starting in 2013 for the republishing push, and i'd be republishing it in that order.
but, i don't want to totally lose track of the new material, either, even if i keep it offline.
so, my three-part schedule - which i've been trying to click into for a year - is going to be:
1) weeks: starting at 2013 and pushing forward on republishing
2) fridays: alter-reality
3) weekends: period 3
but, as has been the case for too long, i need to get some filing in order, first. if i'm productive, i can maybe get it done by the end of the weekend...
18:49
so, where was i?
i wanted to get to doing the legal stuff on the 10th, but finished inri076 on the 9th/10th and got distracted until about the 12th, when i started uploading documents to caselines for the karen/cop case. then, i had to go through the notes to build a motion record for the reply factum, which i tried to do on the 13th and 14th, but i had to stop due to a pre-migraine (that never triggered) from the drug addict. i also wanted to upload something over the weekend. but, i slept all weekend instead. well, mostly. i was also doing a little research on vavilov and post-vavilov decisions. the headache cleared a little on the 18th, but i just realized i had to add backsheets to everything. then i was out early on the 19th, lost a few days, did the odsp stuff, got the motion record finished...
so, i've been doing court stuff non-stop since the 12th, broken only by sleeping, cleaning and grocery shopping - which was substantive interference. but, it's been two weeks.
i left off on the week previously doing two things:
1) updating the music journal with posts over the last year and a bit so i can easily reference it without sorting through this messy main blog
2) dismantling my facebook page
that's the weekend, and i'll have to get back to legal stuff on monday.
19:17
i have not used facebook to communicate with people since about 2014ish. i found that it was a bad source of information, and i was just wasting my time arguing with idiots. in hindsight, i guess it reflects a little on my friend list.
on top of that, what i found was that the algorithm was removing items i liked in order to push ads i didn't like, and it sort of clicked where the platform was going. you can sign up to get posts from antiwar.com if you want to, but the algorithm will just decide it's not popular enough and send you links to funnycatpictures.com, instead. i know there's this narrative about the site being taken over by bad political actors, but my concern was actually that the things i was interested in were going to get drowned out because they weren't paying customers, and i just didn't have the interest in being force-fed the ads. i guess what's happened since is that these bad actors have gamed the system by buying all the ads, which puts them ahead of funnycatpictures.com in the algorithms. but, either way, i'm not getting hits from antiwar.com, which is what i actually want, because they're not feeding the dragon.
so, my critique of facebook is that it's been overrun by ads, not that they're not censoring it enough. if anything, i then found myself annoyed that they were trying to censor some of my album art, which i find unacceptable. soup is good food, kids. but, i'm not dealing with that kind of bullshit.
the one thing i couldn't peel myself away from was the show listings, as facebook was the tool used most by promoters in ottawa, and then in detroit. nobody posted things to websites in the mid-10s, it was all done over facebook events. so, i didn't really have the choice.
a combination of factors - i'm now in my 40s, and the pandemic restrictions, rather than the pandemic itself, combined with what is a cultural shift to the authoritarian right that i am at this point unclear of the depth of - means i'm not likely to use that tool in the near future.
i haven't decided if i'm going to actually delete the page or just gut it. but, it's of no utility to me because you essentially have to pay to use it and i'm not selling hour long noise compositions by competing with funnycatpictures.com for ranking in the algorithms.
i will need to readdress the point of marketing at some point. my sneaky plan of trolling the youtube comments section seems to have been shut down by the youtube algorithms, who shut me down and told me to pay for ads. i'd even pay for them if i didn't think they were useless. i mean, if i'm selling things to myself, i can tell you that i don't watch any ads, in any medium, and i never have. my target audience is unreachable via advertising, i have to use word of mouth. and that threatens the business model of the people that own the boards.
so, i'd actually like to see something like facebook nationalized to take the money out of it. governments should actually see the benefit of that, as these supposed russian bots are really just buying ad space in a system designed to reward the biggest buyers. all they're doing is using capitalism to their advantage. it's not a conspiracy theory, it's just an ad buy. but, i don't want to sign up to a service that sells me ads, whether it's these suppose russian bots, or whatever other stupid thing. i want to sign up for a site that lets me communicate with people that like my art, and doesn't try to push down ads by paid sponsors, instead.
you'll notice that there are no ads here, and i'd like to keep it that way as much as possible.
but, there's also very minimal traffic.
for now, i want to move off of facebook because it's just not useful, and it's cumbersome to use. i'll see what happens after that.
the picture share is here:
the blogs i'll be moving data to over the next few days are here:
let's begin the begin.
19:48
saturday, january 29, 2022
i've republished a very minor skeleton of the discography. this is not an invitation to fuck with the files, but i can't have
everything unpublished for the next six months or longer...
so, i've republished my records sequence, including:
0) inricycled:
1) inri
2) inriched
2.5) inrimake (covers/remixes)
3) inridiculous
4) deny everything
4.5) inrimoved (outtakes)
5) jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj
5.5) the wave (kosmiche piece):
6) jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj^2:
7) ftaa
...as well as the period 3.1 skeleton, for now.
2:45
monday, january 31, 2022
- was rebuilding blogs with the diet document, start again in 2013. need to properly file computer for this purpose - yes, that's...ok. this is why i'm doing this. so, the filing is the fundamental task for both weekend and weekday activities.
- was also working on the payhip uploads, had to stop at the aleph-disc. need liner notes, first. so, need blog completion phase, first - including alter-reality.
- blog items list:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2021/03/this-is-draft-item-dated-to-august-31.html
- mar 17th
so, those unexpected reboots. i don't know what the idiots are trying to do, but it's often frustrating in terms of losing trains of thought. and, i'm going to construct that, now.
- i was going through from sept 24th, 2018 ----> now and rebuilding the four blogs, along with several side documents at one drive.
- but, i wanted to go through and understand what files may have been removed, if any. so, i rewound back to early 2018 and was reading through them, forwards.
- i decided i can probably build the dtk blog up as i do that. at least.
- but i needed to go back and reread the components i added to each of the vlogs to understand what should and shouldn't be added.
i was going through the travel blog when the machine rebooted. and, this is why i'm not using my normal pcs to connect to the internet.
- mar 26th previous attempt at this:
- mar 29th previous:
- mar 30th was aleph-0. wanted to build html front-end, but wanted to update existing liner notes. went back to update to double check, got lost. some concept of aleph-0 should update as i get through quintuple check on first reconstruction phase (but then it's done). need to test html frontend with updates (typo fixes) as well. can compare. time to winlite windows 7 for laptop? virtual machine?
- mar 30th:
tiktok site?
- april 3rd:
there's apparently all kinds of files missing on my backup drive...
ugh.
i thought i left it in good order; it's in total disarray.
i know i had deleted some files i wanted to replace, but i've lost my train of thought around it.
i really do have to start from scratch, now.
what that means is that i don't see the point in doing these aleph discs yet - i'm just going to have to redo it all because some of the liner notes need to be rewritten.
so, i'm going to have to take a step back, and i'm skipping everything else and going right back to 2013/2014 first. once i get those items fixed, i can finish the frontends properly and go from there. they should hopefully be minor changes.
and, i have to do this first - i've put it off for far too long.
that means everything is on hold until i finish this, but it should hopefully not be too long.
...everything except the alter-reality. i need to start that next friday.
- april 3rd:
so, going back to the july music journal.....
- the master document, which includes all files related to the journal, is dated to mar 31, 2019
- the bandcamp archive is dated to april 14, 2019
- the deathtokoalas file is dated to april 14, 2019 - and has apparently not been touched at all since
- there is a pdf for the politics blog dated to april 27, 2019 but the word document is dated to aug 14, 2020
- the blogs.7z file, which includes the blogs saved to html format, is dated to aug 22, 2019 - which is wrong. i never updated it. i can be sure of that. i need to do that.
- the smashwords upload of the music and politics journals are dated to june 6 & 7, 2020, which is right after the noise trade site shut down.
- my most recent download of the bandcamp archive is dated to july 27, 2020 but probably includes updates from the other blogs (travel blog, etc)
- the music journal document, travel blog document and politics document are all dated august 14, 2020, but there is no pdf for the music journal or the travel blog
so, if i were to take that at face value, it would suggest that i left three of the four blogs in an unfinished state, possibly because i updated them, but didn't move those updates into the other files.
the first thing i need to do is make sure that the complete archive is the same as the master document and i can do that fairly quickly in notepad++.
...so quickly that i'm already done. good. so, that means i haven't added anything to or deleted anything from that section of the master document since mar, 2019.
now, i need to rewind all four of the blogs that are online to the start of each of them in july, 2013 and make sure each is complete relative to what i want them to be, while cross-referencing the master document on the other machine. when that is done, i'll be able to close the july portion of the blog and move to august.
- was trying to update the liner notes to add to the aleph, but had to file computer, first
- reposted july docs on april 6th. went to file correctly, filed whole computer instead.
- never got to august, which needs to be where i started with the weekly
- apr 18th:
yeah, so that's what i'm doing this morning, if i can stay awake - i need to get back to organizing the pc, and then to finalizing the journal for august, 2013.
- i need to organize the pc before i can get to working on period 3 over the weekend, and that's very soon. next week, potentially.
- i need to organize the pc and get the master document up before i can focus on the blogging section, which is the weekly task
- and, i wanted to scour documents before i got back to the alter-reality
the landlord and i decided that if we're going to defrost the fridge then we should do it at the end of the month. so, i'm going to put cleaning on that side on hold until then.
let's hope i can get something done this morning.
- spent some time copying data to pc, organizing it
- pc has odd issue causing reboots, gave up on perfecting it, decided to be pragmatic
- only installing programs required for recording, one at a time
- april 28th:
i'm less sleepy tonight, and making progress on the filing.
let's remember why i'm doing this.
so, i finished the july, 2013 archive and went to file it, but realized i couldn't do it because my filing apparatus was all in disorder. i then realized that in order to get the filing apparatus back in order, i'd have to get the laptop back up, but i can't do that until i get the filing apparatus back in order. ack.
so, i went through all of the loose media i have, copied it all over to the music pc and now need to put it all where i needs to be. then, i can build a copy of the laptop's backup drive, and then i can file the july archive and move on to the august one.
in the process, i should be able to build the alter-reality as well as get the machine in order for inri075.
...which means a reinstalll of the disc is imminent.
if i can sort through and finalize the material from mid 2003 to mid 2006 before i face another disruption, that's serious progress.
-
i guess my system started collapsing in mid 2015, and i've long concluded that i only have marginal control over it - that somebody basically doesn't want me on the internet, and doesn't care if they have to ruin my tools in order to do it. i mean, i'd guess i'm dealing with the kind of people that reject the concept of art as vocation. the idea that i'm just an artist seems incomprehensible to them - i must be working for somebody. so, they just want me offline, and all they interpret this gear as is as a means to corrupt the youth. and, they just want to listen in, and they don't care how badly they have to screw all the signals up in order to do it.
have i shaken them yet? i might never....
but, it means i have this giant pile of electronics that the cia has rendered inoperable in a flatly stupid attempt to shut me down and that i'm going to have to slowly try to salvage.
one thing at a time. i can connect to the internet using the chromebook, and i need to get the recording pc up. i'm minus a stick of ram and will want to replace it soonish; it looks like concerts are probably cancelled for the year, so the next thing to spend money on is replacement parts for all the gear that was broken. the windows 98 pc is working, as well. and, finally building the 64-bit pc is no longer a distant task, but coming up when i work on the matlab project.
i'm not going to replace the backlight on the laptop as it's too risky, but i'll need to reimage the laptop with a customized windows 7 to rip out all of the networking apps, so they can't slave the machine.
slowly. slowly....
==
- last diet updates:
- was working on dirty diet run through over mid may before rewinding to 2013
diet update post:
- may 19th:
i mean, i initially couldn't do the time division thing because i had to file the computer, first. it was a huge bottleneck..
but, if i'm doing the diet before i rewind back to 2013, i can click into the schedule, immediately.
and, i'm going to have to start here and reread forwards, for friday:
Sunday, May 23, 2021
so, i spent the morning filing and tried to stop to nap before i ate, and then eat before i napped, and it ended up a confusing mess, but i think i got enough sleep to carry forward for the night, so long as the air quality in here doesn't degrade too badly.
the guy is supposed to be gone, but his replacement cop and/or daughter and/or mother seems to be up there instead, and she's the actual source of both the smoke and the other smells and the vicious a/c. i actually asked him to turn the a/c off before he left; so much for that, huh? it's freezing in here :(.
the guy i interface with is broadly reasonable, but this woman that fills in for him is a horrible, self-centered piece of shit that should be dragged through the streets attached to the back of a car.
i know this person is female because i can hear them and because i can smell them - they smell like a female, and not in a good way. but, they smoke, so they have no idea. again - it's the worst undercover cop in the history of the world, which i suppose is why she does these substitute roles.
i mean, we all remember how bad the substitute teachers were. imagine substitute stakeout cops.
"officer malone is gone, parrrrtaaaayyyy!"
and, i'm only slightly exaggerating. she seems to be entirely retarded, and that seems to be roughly her level of operation.
so, because she cranked the air up as soon as he left (despite repeated requests to not do that and...why would somebody pay to run an a/c in an empty room? that alone makes it obvious somebody is up there.), i had to start filling in the baseboard cracks with sealer to stop the place from condensing up. i'm also going to go in the next few days and get some vinyl mats for that corner. and, we'll take it from there for the next round.
if i can potentially get through this stack of cds by the end of the night, i'd consider that massive progress.
may 24th:
alright, so i got through one stack of cds and all of the cassettes, save one, and i'm deciding to go ahead and reinstall rather than continue filing because i have to to archive the cassette. there have been some minor hardware changes that will require updating the script, but i guess i'll have to just deal with it.
this machine has been in a broken state for years, as i spent a very long time troubleshooting what i decided in the end was an environmental signals problem. so, i ripped everything to do with the windows xp subsystem out and just finished the last mixes i was dealing with over asio drivers. and want to put it back, now.
i simply don't know what the signals are like down here, and am long overdue to find out.
the install is automated but it's lengthy so that's likely the morning.
- then focused on cleaning and installing the tarps
- finished downloading emulators for old hardware for 16-bit machine:
june 4th:
ok, so i've got the machine installed, finally. i still have some filing to do, though.
i need a nap...
june 8th:
alright. so, i don't really want to troubleshoot this machine, but i unfortunately have to as it keeps freezing, and i'm not convinced it's hardware. i simply don't know what the problem is.
there were some periodic freezing issues back in 2015 that i thought was ram, but i'm no longer convinced is. there were also base issues with chipset drivers when i first bought the machine, years ago.
what i'm going to do is reinstall the machine in the most minimal way possible - just the programs integrated on the disc + the drivers for the most minimal hardware configuration possible. and, then i'll bring things in further as i need them, rather than all at once and carefully observe what happens.
i suspect i may need to reprogram the board again like i did in 2014. why do i have to keep reprogramming the board, pigs?
the reality is that there's a lot of software on here that i barely use and that the next phase is not going to be heavy on things like vst synths so much as it's going to be about guitars, actual hardware (like drum heads) and abstract sound design. so, i shouldn't get caught up in getting all of these virtual vstis to work, because i'm probably not going to use them much anyways.
and, once i'm convinced that i've found the problem, i can rerun the script again.
and, before i do that, even, i should run chkdsks on all four drives in the machine.
it might be bad sata cable or something stupid like that, but i have to strip it right down to figure it out.
---
ok.
so, what i wanted to do was organize everything perfectly and completely (i've never been diagnosed with ocd, really) before i got back to recording, so everything was perfectly functioning and i could just quickly get through everything. yes, it would require some time invested upfront, but it would be with the payoff of efficiency as i went.
as the machine has some kind of unknown problem, that's not actually feasible. instead, i should do a quick and rough organization upfront and file things as i go - which means i can be back to work within a day or two, but will need to stop frequently to reorganize, until i'm done.
i have to adjust. so be it.
so, i'm going to take the audigy back out (soundblaster installs are just loaded with bloated drivers, and it's a perfectly plausible cause), disconnect the front panel (i'm not using it) and even unplug the blu-ray burner (which was added years after i constructed it) to start.
i'm also going to hold up on the deletion script, for the reason that the machine is no longer on the internet so i don't have to worry about locking it down as hard as i did. the machine will still run faster with as much of windows taken out as is possible, but i'm going to slow down and take things out one piece at a time.
and, i'm just going to get right to it, so i'm back in order for the weekend, which is the schedule i want to click in to.
i have every reason to think i'll be able to get back to normal rebuilding on monday, and to the alter-reality not this friday but next friday. and, if i'm productive, i can hopefully get tons of stuff done by labour day.
posts about new (old) releases:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2021/07/i-couldnt-sleep-this-morning-because-it.html
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2021/07/this-was-taken-in-lower-mainland-of-bc.html
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2021/07/this-is-landscape-shot-of-ottawa-river.html
- need to sync & file hard drive with external drives
- june 15th:
so, i'm going to create a separate blog just as a timeline for release dates.
this will replace the facebook page, which will be shut down relatively soon.
i'm a good chunk of the ways done what i was doing.
there's a lot of data....
june 25th:
- updated timeline release [had spent week working on period 3.1]
- cleaning took a lot of time this summer....
release timeline:
- had worked backwards to the end of 2018 (the 12/2013 journal), started adding special categories - houses, gear. started buying gear. left off there. did i get all the gear in?
- check all files on hard drive, search by date
july 1st
so, the next thing is getting back to filing my drive. i think. let me double check that. i think i put it aside about a week ago to do the sealing.
see, i wanted to finish filing first and then do the sealing after, but i was running out of time to do it, so i had to do the sealing first, and now it's taken about a week to finish cleaning. the last music post was june 23rd.
so, yeah, that's right - now i need to get back to filing. but, i actually want to take a good run through the facebook page first and see if i can build the alternate releases blog up. so, i'm going to fast forward the alter-reality to today and then we'll do the running around on friday and saturday.
- last blood test update:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2021/07/so-i-was-able-to-get-following-done-at.html
july 10th:
so, i've been rebuilding that releases archive again all night and listening to a few things. i've got pictures of all the places i lived at up (i think this is relevant.) and the places i went to school at (i'm going to have some essays posted there, too), as well as most of the original release cycle back to 1996. i want to get that done before i stop.
july 11th:
so, i'm up to 777 posts and still have hundreds (thousands.) left to go, bhut i got the heavy lifting done for the part of the discography which was redone the most number of times, which is the part from 1996 to early 1999 (the first two demos and subsequent first two lps).
https://jessicamurrayreleasestimeline.blogspot.com/
- started updating gear about july 10th, was focus for next month
- gear posts:
takeharu:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2021/08/so-i-got-my-mini-tele-in-today-and-it.html
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2021/08/moving-to-next-basement.html
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2021/08/and-still-going.html
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2021/08/just-few-more.html
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2021/08/so-this-is-what-im-looking-at-in-total.html
july 15th:
so, i was offline all day today and i got a very large amount of filing done in the process, which was a bit out of order but a productive act, nonetheless.
so, i'm going to try to upload some temp mixes of the interplanetary isomorphism, as well as some temp mixes of xenophanes tonight.
july 30th:
so, i also picked up some c-clamps and a sanding block at home depot yesterday, and have some glue coming in the mail.
i grabbed a few more books as well, including some bradbury, which is relevant for the alter-reality.
is this going to work? i think it should.
i want to actually start writing this weekend. and, how am i going to do this? i wanted to started in 2019 and do it in real-time...
the real-time portion of the blog doesn't really get interesting until about 1993 or 1994, but i still wanted to be clicked into it by now.
if i do monthly entries every week, i can catch up by early 2022. i guess i got my first electric guitar around early 1992, so that's a reasonable catch up point.
and, these little asimov and bradbury tests can be read by an adult in an afternoon.
i needed to do the filing on the main computer before i got back to recording, and i'm actually pretty close.
and, if i can get back to the blogging process on monday, i guess i'm getting back to the diet, first.
i need to look over the last few weeks and refocus, but i think i stopped in mid-june.
july 31st:
ok, where was i?
it's saturday night (31st).
- i slept in until the afternoon today and haven't done anything
- yesterday was a short day that never got started. the one thing i did do was clean the fridge, a little more. or, try to, anyways.
- thursday, i got out to get some bloodwork, bought some books, got some clamps
- tuesday & wednesday were spent looking at the takeharu guitar
- monday, i went to get the mic stand, and got some books
- sunday was a kind of a down day
- saturday (24th) was a running around day, and i got the takeharu, the bottom of the vox (video coming...) and the mini xylophone
- most of last week (18th-23rd)) was spent sorting through kijiji, etc ads and also in researching gear
- 17th, these were uploaded, and i started working on a big post about the old gear i had and how to replace it.
- on the 16th, i uploaded a rough mix of the lost symphony to the trivial group lp as a placeholder, uploaded some rough xenophanes mixes, bought a microcasette, did some orange testing...
- on the 15th, i was looking at dna sequencing and spent a lot of time filing the recording machine
- on the 14th, i decided to get a pignose when i went in to get the mini vox (and didn't, yet)
- i got a mini vox and a mini orange to go with the mini ms-2
- on sunday morning / monday night (11/12th), i started adding gear to the alter-reality page, which included a ms-2 mini marshall amp and i started researching mini-amps for period 3 recording...
- friday the 9th was back to alter-reality,
- the rest of the week was spent looking at blood tests, genetics, shopping online & cleaning./
- i got some more bloodwork on the 5th
- i stopped filling in the blog on monday morning (the 4th)
- the bookcase (required to access cds for reviews) came in on the 2nd
- on the 1st, i decided july would be extremely productive and continued transferring the facebook page to the new blog, which was my friday project
...
i don't want to buy anything else until i can get some tickets to toronto for the orchiectomy.
and, because i think we're going back into lockdown, i need to take advantage of this time window as best i can. so, i need to call on tuesday and get this booked.
right this minute, i need to start my first post in the alter-reality and take it from there. then, i'm going to want to finish that gear replacement post. it's the end of the month, so i need to clean - although this is being bottlenecked by the fridge. and, i can get back to the blog clean-up, maybe, early in the week.
again, this is the intent:
- friday: alter-reality
- sat--->mon: period 3 recording
- tues--->thurs: liner note rebuild (and general writing workthrough)
the last diet update was on may 19th.
is this too much work?
i think so, yes.
but, i'm stuck...i have to just hit it head on and see what happens.
so, i was hoping to approach the alter-reality in a more ordered manner, but it's not going to be possible due to the disgusting fridge, that i may have to take him to court over. and, i'm apparently stuck inside until next spring, at the earliest. so, let's just try to catch up...
july kind of sucked in terms of productivity, although i got a lot of gear that i'll make good use of. let's make august the most productive month ever, instead.
old music list:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2021/07/so-i-found-this-from-1999-at-tripod.html
i'm starting in 1989, though.
what of that was relevant to me?
not much. some rem. some u2. that gowan record. tears for fears. actually, i loved that klf record...
beatles, yes; genesis, floyd, crimson...not yet.
that also seems to be a somewhat sanitized version of the list. the next oldest version i have is from 2001, and it has a lot more stuff that i didn't include....things like bryan adams cassettes.
we'll do this next week.
this week is just going to be an introduction.
aug 1
ok, so that took far longer than intended, but i've got my template down:
https://thejournalofj.blogspot.com/
the mechanism is that i'm writing in a little book, and i find it somewhere and scan it. hence, the lines - and the trouble i'm taking to line the writing up.
here's the trick - i used a 12 line image because that's when it starts to overlap, but even that will only take me so far before i need to reset. it's like a calendar - you need a leap year every four years to make up for the measurement error. but, i posted many test posts to make sure that the cycle resets on a new post, so long as i post it with a title.
i'll have to keep an eye on it and make adjustment if necessary but i think this is sufficient.
i just want to finish the template, and then i'll upload it for anybody, as i think this is useful and am happy to share it.
this will run from 1989-1996, and is intended as a preface - these are childhood year notes, from before i did any recording. the alter-reality will run from 1996-2013 and occupies the actual writing phase. and, current reality runs from 2013-death and is the cleanup and finish phase.
this is the best document for me to use to try to triangulate the things i was influenced by at that age, as the radio & television set were by far the biggest influences on me:
http://hitsofalldecades.com/chart_hits/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=2498
aug 5
i spent the last few days building the gear part of the releases blog for the basement on hilliard, and will have a "replacement" post coming soon.
- most of august was spent dealing with pre and post surgery issues
aug 9:
asimov list:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2021/08/just-note-on-asimov-reviews-before-i.html
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2021/08/actually-and-i-had-decided-this-once.html
aug 10
so, i was working on that replacement process so long that i forgot what i was doing before.
i've spent most of what i won. so, i need to make sure i get the operation done first 0 that was the point, after all.
i need to finalize the plan with the shuttle service, first.
aug 12:
i stopped some time in early july and started focusing on finding cheap gear for the period 3 rebuild. i do remember clearly that i was doing an alter-reality rebuild on the blogger timeline and entered the ms-2 as an entry. that got me wondering about other miniamps, and it went off from there.
and, i think the thing i was doing was filing the pc, and i even think i was almost done.
but, i'm going to do a quick throwback to earlier in the year and just read through the blog and go from there. i'll take notes. and, i should be back into the schedule i devised very soon.
- write travel updates from june 15th on based on vlogs
- do reviews of new gear,. based on last gear update post:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2021/07/lets-do-total-update-first-before-i-buy.html
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2021/07/ok-where-was-i-its-saturday-night-31st.html
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2021/08/so-this-is-what-im-looking-at-in-total.html
