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....

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.

alright, so i've got all of the takeout stuff dealt with, and even organized my google drive shares a little.

in the process, i'm realizing that somebody may have hacked an address i use only rarely: jessicaambermurray@gmail.com. this person seems to be using the fake identity of "rosalie walker". as one example, they set up a fake kickstarter account that i've since deleted. they also set up an account at academia.edu that i've deleted. and, they subscribed to ezra levant, which is sort of embarrassing - that's not something i'd subscribe to. at all.

i had to change the password.

i have no evidence that this person is doing anything damaging to me, or any clues as to what the point of hacking into my email address might have been. that address is not associated with my bank account, for example...and, it's not as though there's much in there. this only seems to have started happening about september of last year.

in fact, that address is associated with my facebook account, only - an account i basically don't use anymore, and may end up deleting. i got off facebook because the ui was awful, and it's just gone from bad to horrendous.

the one extra thing i want to check is my carleton accounts.

ok, so i got through the contents of the second drive and ultimately put it away for now as an extraneous backup. i have something like ten snapshots of a 300 gb drive scattered across a dozen different types of media, some local and some not. this is partly why i'm convinced i probably haven't lost anything - it would just be hard to delete everything. and, if i catch them...

i haven't effectively caught them yet, though - i don't have that smoking gun.

but, that means i need to put it all together, now.

the other thing i spent the night doing was a takeout snapshot, and i'll have to consolidate that, as well.

while i still have a few external drives to sort through, that means i've gotten most of what i wanted to pull down off the internet for archiving and have gone through a couple of the external drives. another day or two and i'll be focused strictly on local filing, and then i think it'll pick up a lot.

i can read the data partition, but not the os partition, so i'm probably safe just getting what i can off the data partition and putting it back away, again. there's unlikely to be much useful on the os partition, but i don't want to format it, just in case.

i think i'd have to find a way to ghost it and see if it works, but it probably won't. 

the chkdsk tells me there's insufficient space, but there should be sufficient space. regardless, i can't make extra space if i get a crc when launching it. what that error actually means is that it can't read the drive, either. short of cloning it, it's fucked - and i'm not seeing the value in doing that, right now.

this was the drive that i used on my main laptop years ago, before i switched to the hp laptop in early 2014. it's the drive i was fighting with in the first part of 2014, as documented in this space (and in the music journal). after switching to the hp laptop, i briefly toyed with trying to set this machine up as a guitar effect processor, but i never got around to it. and, then the hp died, and the backlight went out in the compaq, rendering it useless as a mobile device.

the os partition should have the os as it existed last time i installed to it, in 2014. it should just mostly be program files, but what's on the desktop? 

virtually anything worth saving should be on the data partition. i just wanted to make sure, first.

i have a large amount of these drives to sort through, and this is the kind of thing i'll be doing for the next couple of days.

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.

full sets of shows i wasn't at but are like shows i was at that i can't ...

it turns out that the last step of cleaning was the most time-consuming - sorting through a giant pile of paper. it's almost done.

not only am i wide awake, but i've spent all day cleaning and have nearly finished putting everything in the far side away - a huge improvement over where i was. all that's left in the back now is recycle, wood and cds and books, which i can take out of the space and put on he shelves in short order.

i'm going to leave everything in the boxes they're in until i can get to the proper point in the alter-reality to put them away, and then slowly build up the shelves as is appropriate. i still need to get some extra shelves, and i may need a few more units, altogether. but, i can get a handle on where i want things, at least - the big one needs to be for cds, after all, and i'll place the books on the remaining units, as is appropriate.

what i wanted to do today was reduce the remaining "cleaning" to a process that is related to work. so, for example, i have some external drives to clean up before i put them away - which is cleaning, but getting me closer towards re-establishing normality. i'm almost there....

ok, so i've got my 90s laptop set up like an old timey phone over in the corner, i've got a first coat of wood filler on the bookshelf in the bedroom (and pins coming in the mail shortly) and i'm 90% done clearing off the effects pedal table...so i can fill it up with more stuff.

that's huge progress.

and, i'm wide awake, too.

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.

i think that everything is done, and it's just a perusal process, but we'll see.

how do i even do this?

it's overwehelming.

but, i think i got it, to start - and i have a lot of backups to crossreference. if somebody's been fucking with this over the last few months, i should be able to figure it out.

so, i can probably do the start of this in one giant swoop, and it might not even be that time consuming.

in fact, some of these dates don't even make sense and are making me wonder when i last edited it myself, and when somebody else might have.

fuck.

what's the point of this? i'm simply documenting my life, as an artist. who benefits from deleting sections of it? what's the fucking point?

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.