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.

"but, i have the greatest script."

yeah?

fuck your script.

i've proven it's superfluous. you don't need it.

you just need some sneaky error handling.

that's right - my html5 audio player does not require downloading any scripts.

you need javascript turned on - that is all.

....just load the page in your browser, and everything is hardcoded directly.

actually, i should be able to install a newer version of firefox in the virtual machine and test it to make sure the frontend works properly.

what i'm doing is essentially busting the underlying javascript - it's a hack, and if you abuse it, you could create a buffer overflow. so, it's possible that some future or existing version of firefox might plug the hole i'm exploiting to allow the thing to work without a specialized script. but, i'm obviously not on the bleeding end of things, and i'm not going to be concerning myself with this too much until it shows up in front of me - all i can do is test it on the equipment i have, and point out that the nature of the player is that it is a hack and it might not work in the future.

i'd call on the html5 standards people to integrate playlist functionality naively, so i don't have to break it to get it to work without a script.

i still have the html files for the first period 1 disc, which i had to put on pause because i couldn't embed the flac in html. this was 2015, and that problem has since been fixed. but, i've revamped the early part of my discography since then, adding about 20 releases in the form of eps, singles and remixes. so, the presentation, as it is, will need to be entirely rewritten...

the way i did it back then was as a page by page exploration, by what was then facebook post and what would now be blog post. there were only about 100 odd posts, in total - including one for each song and one for each record. from the record page, you could open pages for each song; from the song page, you could find links to the different remixes. it was connected together in a linked list, with arrows in the corners of the html page allowing you to move back and forth. further, you could enter the list via two index pages - one a listing of the release by inri number and the other a comprehensive list of all posts, ordered chronologically.

these journals are 50 pages long and have dozens, if not hundreds, of posts, each. i will not be arranging the items in this manner, but i kind of like the deeper presentation for at least the period discs, as well...if not most of the alephs....

the initial presentation did have the full journal (what i'd now call the master document) as a component, but it was just as a link off the html document. the html presentation was essentially a condensation of the journal. 

i think i'm going to want to salvage something like that for the period discs when they come up, but does that make sense for these flac discs, which are supposed to just be a convenient way to combine these collections? i'm going to say it doesn't.

there's also the issue of the ability to embed flacs, which i have now and did not have then. so, when i loaded the album page then, it seemed natural to click the track title and have it launch a different document; now, that seems cumbersome - now it seems like clicking the track title ought to actually play the track, and that's what the player does. that said, what i'm thinking going through this is "ok. but, what if somebody just wants to stream the record without reading a book, first?", and i think the answer is just to add a separate page that is the player and the player only. in fact, i'm considering adding that to the bandcamp package.

and, now i'm not. 

the html frontend is really just supposed to be a mirror for the liner notes. if you're downloading something in flac or mp3, the notes are presented in doc or pdf primarily, and the html is just a convenient way to make it interactive. these are liner notes, though, they aren't anything else. if you want to listen to the record without reading the liner notes, just load them in foobar or whatever you're using; if you want an interactive experience with the liner notes, that's what the html presentation is for.

with the aleph discs, though, the html front-end helps as a filing mechanism, and it could get cumbersome to have to sort through and load these journals just to get the player to run.

this shouldn't be a complicated problem. i just need to fix the links, copy the html file as it exists and delete everything except the player. then, i can add a quick link to the front-end.

so, the way these flac and mp3 discs (rather than the period discs, which will be something else) are going to work is that you'll load a simple start page with a list of items, that will look something like this:

flac dvd disc #1

inri000: liner notes (html, pdf, doc), player, playlist

inri001: liner notes (html, pdf, doc), player, playlist

.

.

.

inri014: liner notes (html, pdf, doc), player, playlist

inriℵ0: liner notes (html, pdf, doc), player, playlist

that way, you can get easy access to what you want from the start.  

the liner notes will be arranged in a linked list, like the items in the period disc - same format. 

you can of course also just browse the iso....

so, if i do this the fast and easy way, the result is that i'm going to be selling the bandcamp flacs on the iso. everything is hardcoded for the file names that come with the bandcamp download.

if i do this the hard way, i'll have to recode it all, but i'll be able to put locally sourced flacs.

guess what i'm doing?

i only have to do it once, and it should actually be a relatively easy ctrl+f operation.

let me tell you this, though - after almost a year on a chromebook, it's nice to get basic desktop operations back...

ok, so that's right - in order to get the html player hack i came up with in late 2019 to work, i need a newer version of firefox, which needs i need to boot into windows 7.

but, i'm kind of afraid of letting that hard drive loose on my pc.

for right now, i'm going to have faith in what i did previously and just test it tersely on the chromebook. in the medium run, it's a good reason to get my laptop running again.

and, i decided that the best way to do that was to nlite a version of windows 7 for it.

it's coming back. 

first things first, let me get a simple frontend for this iso.

and, in fact, that's only four releases - inri000-ini003.

inri004-inri014 don't exist until 2016.

ok. so, this is going to be faster than i thought, then.

ok, so i need to do some filing, first...

alright, so the "post" button doesn't click in my old version of chrome, but it works in theory.

i'll do this one day - and i may even write directly for it.

but, if i were to use a platform like that, i'd use it to post weird sample art, or stuff like this:

i'm actually surprised that nobody has taken advantage of the platform, yet.

this song, for example, is exactly one minute long:

i don't discuss it really anywhere i don't think, but the reason it's one minute long is that it was intended for a noise compilation of one minutes shorts. that was the rule.

all i see is a bunch of commercials for mainstream hiphop.

where are the weird kids at?

hrmmn.

you've got one minute, right?

that's far less restrictive than 250 characters, or whatever it is. like i say - i can use this.

https://www.tiktok.com/@deathtokoalas

i do have some short tracks, though.

unlike twitter - which i've never had time for - i actually see some potential in culture jamming tiktok with 45 second blasts of abstract noise.

hrmmn.

do i need a fucking phone, though?

the count would appear to skip aleph-zero, huh?

well, you still can't hold zero things. the infinity monster would still reject that.

sorry.

all behold the infinity monster.

aleph-one, ahahahahaha.

aleph-two, ahahahahahahaha.

.

.

.

.

.

wow, the last phase of reconstruction really was slow motion, wasn't it?

so, the most recent liner note files i have are from feb 2020, and the last journal update was from june, 2020. i was supposed to go back after and double check everything for consistency, then i got lost in the diet updates.

so, the first aleph-disc will only have liner notes for the releases that have notes completed for july 2013 to the end of december 2013. this is a flac disc, so there are no standalone journal entries and no vlogs and nothing else like that - it's just a literal combination of the first 14 downloads into one iso file, with a little html frontend.

is anybody going to give a fuck? don't people just stream everything? and i have to give you my simple response - which is that, yeah, i may stream some old favourites too (especially punk rock), but when i go looking for a new record by son lux or....i guess my list of interesting artists right now is fairly small.....but when i go looking for something that i expect to be detailed and well produced, i don't want to stream it. i don't even want to stream a screaming females record - i'd rather get it in flac and listen to it locally, on a stable system, through headphones.

that market is small, i'll grant you that.

but, listen to my music - it's not meant for taylor swift fans, and i'm not holding out for a collaboration with cardi b. i'm not going to get name dropped by beyonce. 

so, i don't know how many people are going to care, but i know that i'm not getting anywhere trying to market forty minute epics to tiktok users. i have to hope somebody is interested in the idea of downloading 4.5 gb of flacs, and finds the idea more palatable than buying a dvd and having it shipped to them.

so, i got a few hours of sleep and need to finish the first aleph disc.

the aleph concept is lifted from cantor and is a sort of a tongue-in-cheek joke, as much of what i do in pretty much any medium is. the basic idea is that the data discs are collections of records - that is, they are collections of sets. it's obviously an imprecise comparison, but it's just meant as a silly way to enumerate collections of collections. if you look too deeply into it and get mad at me, i feel sorry for you; if you need to, just look at the natural numbers as a way to enumerate collections of songs, and the aleph numbers as a way to enumerate collections of collections of songs. if the imprecise comparison to the idea of cardinality upsets you that much then fuck that crazy sonofabitch cantor, anyways - the guy was looney tunes. whacked. all your aleph counting belongs to me!

so, i'm going to wait to for today's post to  update the online liner notes. but i intend to get this done before noon.