i've re-ordered this substantively.

we'll get there with this, in the end.

the essential asimov

book I: the substantive robot. 

 (story is about the slow humanization of robots. includes some multivac stories. set before robot novels.)

- it's such a beautiful day

- the fun they had

- jokester

- all the troubles of the world

- franchise

- key item

- someday

- robot al-76 goes astray  

- the feeling of power

- light verse

- robbie

- runaround

- reason

- catch that rabbit

- liar!

- satisfaction guaranteed

- lenny

- galley slave

- little lost robot

- risk

- escape!

- evidence

- the evitable conflict

- feminine intuition

- ...that thou art mindful of him

- the bicentennial man

(the positronic man may enter here, but i'm apprehensive about the silverberg texts)

book II: baley sequence (robot novels written before 1980)

- caves of steel

- the naked sun

- mirror image  

book III: giskard sequence (robot novels written after 1980)

- the robots of dawn

- robots and empire

book IV: empire series

- the stars, like dust

- currents of space

- pebble in the sky

book V: gap texts. short stories relevant to asimov's broader universe. should be read here. loosely organized.

a: appendix to the robot novels & empire series

- trends

- heredity

- not final! + victory unintentional 

- mother earth

- green patches

- hostess

- in a good cause

- shah guido g  

- sucker bait

- living space

- each an explorer 

- strikebreaker

- profession

- founding father

b: appendix to foundation series

- black friar of the flame

- homo sol

- the imaginary

- the hazing

- death sentence

- blind alley

- breeds there a man

- c-chute

book VI: foundation novels

- ...

book VII: unrelated short stories of value

- the weapon too dreadful to use

- half-breed 

- the secret sense

- nightfall

- super-neutron

- no connection

- red queen's race

- youth

- the martian way

- the deep

- sally

- kid stuff

- the immortal bard

- dreaming is a private thing

- the dead past

- the dying night

- the watery place

- let's get together

- the gentle vultures

- the ugly little boy

- eyes do more than see

- segregationist

- 2430 ad / the greatest asset

- the winnowing

- old fashioned

- marching in

- too bad

====================

throwaway:

- callistan menace

- ring around the sun

- the magnificent possession

- half-breeds on venus

- history

- christmas on ganymede

- time pussy

- the endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimiline

- the little man on the subway

- legal rites

- darwinian poolroom

- day of the hunters

- what if

- button, button 

- monkey's finger

- nobody here but-

- flies

- everest

- the micropsychiatric applications of thiotimoline

- the pause

- foundations of sf success

- lets not 

- the last trump

- the message

- hell-fire

- first law

- gimmick's three

- the last question

- the author's ordeal

- blank

- does a bee care?

- i'm in marsport without hilda

- insert knob a in hole b

- spell my name with an s

- i just make them up, see

- silly asses

- buy jupiter

- the uptodate sorcerer

- a statue for father 

- unto the fourth generation

- rain, rain go away

- rejection slips

- thiotimoline and the space age

- what is this thing called love

- the machine that won the war

- my son, the physicist

- author! author!

- prime of life

- exile to hell

- the proper study

- waterclap

- take a match

- thiotimoline to the stars 

- stranger in paradise

- the life and times of multivac

- a boy's best friend

- point of view

- birth of a notion

- tercentenary incident

- think!

- true love

- christmas without rodney

- robot dreams

- robot visions

uncatalogued until last:

- marooned off vesta  - asimov's mysteries

- the weapon

- belief  - winds of change

- the singing bell - asimov's mysteries

- the talking stone asimov's mysteries

- what's in a name - asimv's mysteries

- pate de foie grras - asimov's mysteries

- dust of death - asimov's mysteries

- a loint of paw - asimov's mysteries

- ideas die hard - winds of change

- anniversary - asimov's mysteries

- obituary - asimov's mysteries

- star light - asimov's mysteries

- the key - asimov's mysteries

- the billiard ball - asimov's mysteries

- the dream - ?

- benjamin's dream - ?

- party by satellite - ?

- benjamin's bicentennial blast - ?

- half-baked publisher's delight - ?

- heavenly host - ?

- big game- ?

- about nothing-  winds of change

- good taste - winds of change

- to tell at a glance - winds of change

- sure thing - winds of change

- found - winds of change

- fair exchange - winds of change

- nothing for nothing - winds of change

- how it happened - winds of change

- it is coming - winds of change

- the last answer - winds of change

- for the birds - winds of change

- death of a foy - winds of change

- the last shuttle - winds of change

- a perfect fit - winds of change

- ignition point - winds of change

- lest we remember -winds of change

- winds of change - winds of change

- one night of song - winds of change

- hallucination

- feghoot & the courts

- left to right

- the fable of the three princes

- the smile of the chipper

- the instability 

- good-bye to earth 

- fault intolerant

- in the canyon

- kid brother

- gold

- cal

- prince delightful and the flameless dragon

- frustration

fwiw, i consider the term "marxian" to be bourgeois and reject it outright.

"marxian" is what upper class university profs say. marxist is what workers say. so, i'll stick with marxist, thanks.

i'm not a robot - despite frequent accusations to the contrary.

but, what does the zeroth law say about assassinating joe manchin?

how do you think asimov would have reacted to this, anyways?

what would happen if an actual robot came across this? they couldn't do it. well, unless they had to to uphold the first law.

i fear that robots would have great difficulty using the internet, then, wouldn't they?

one could even argue that the recaptcha system is discriminatory against robots, and that such a system needs to be changed to allow for greater robot participation in society.

well?

so, i wanted to finish eating and then do some cleaning, but i crashed pretty hard, instead. i didn't wake up until after 9:00.  the cleaning's mostly done now, but i need to wait for my towel to dry before i can take a shower.

my d came up slightly to 71, which is still low. i'm actually more concerned about my pth than my d; the mild boost might be a reaction to half a pill every second day, or could be random, but understand that i didn't realize my d had been cut from my soy milk until after the test. i couldn't get the pth done at that lab because i scratched it off the rec (oops). it will come up in early january. i'm still waiting on the rest. for right now, i don't have a valid baseline, so i'm going to stick to the half a pill per day and focus on getting my dietary d back up by replacing the crappy soy milk variety with the better soy milk variety. what the change in fortification does is break the control, and without temporal bounds, so it means i sort of have to start all over again. i can sort of guess that my dietary d crashed at the same time as the sunlight decreased, although i don't know by how much. we'll see what happens in a few weeks.

it makes it harder to interpret the previous results, because i don't know when the control shifted. i still think that i decreased d absorption in the fall due to too much calcium intake (the mechanism for this is in the kidneys), so i don't want to overdo it with the pills. my understanding is that, broadly speaking, the science is that vitamin d pills act as worse than useless placebos for most people - it's actually harmful, unnecessary strain on the kidneys, and the kind of reaction i'm describing (where your body actually ends up pingponging d release) is probably pretty normal, in scenarios where dietary vitamin d intake is actually sufficient. i've made sure to get d pills that are just d, magnesium & fibre. that said, in contrast to the studies. up here in the northern latitudes, it becomes harder to get enough d in the winter. vitamin d deficiency is common in not just canada but also scandinavia and russia. the endocrinologist i spoke to suggested that the baseline used by these labs - 75 - is higher than should be expected by most canadians, due to the lack of sunlight for most of the year. his view was that vitamin d deficiency is widespread in canada and that i should be happy if the number is over 50. my gp, on the other hand, wants to see the number over 100, which i suspect might create a calcium overdose for me if i actually sustained it, due to the very high amounts of calcium in my diet. i've seen studies that suggest that almost a third of canadians have serum d levels less than 25, which is what the canadian government actually defines as critical. that number is clearly far too low. the numbers i've tested for are in the 60-110 range, which the endocrinologist would consider sufficient, and the gp would consider too low. so, the data i have available to me is sort of all over the place - i can put it into a broad framework (i want to get it over 75, if i can. at least.), but i have to experiment on myself to see what's going on. and, that means the pth is of more utility to me than the d.

so, remember: what i wanted to test with the d was whether i think i'm getting enough via fortification in the winter or whether i needed the extra bit to compensate for the decrease in sunlight. it initially seemed like my d probably went down due the decrease in sunlight, but then i realized that my dietary d also went down at the same time, so now i don't know. so, i can't do that experiment this year, because the control broke. i'll have to do it next year, instead. and, i should stick with the half d, for now, to be safe.

i'm still planning on getting through the empire series in one go tonight, but not until i get out of the shower. 

so, i'm finishing up robots and empire and this is a much better written text than robots of dawn, as well as being much more identifiable as asimov. gone are the gratuitous sex and awful attempts at stimulating an identity response in the reader, although there is obviously a large inverted influence from return of the jedi. it's like asimov said "ok. i don't actually mind if you steal all my ideas. but, like, can i write my own screenplay?".

it's probably best interpreted as asimov reclaiming his own franchise.

but, it's obviously written to close down the robot universe and transition into the empire universe - intentionally. conscientiously. - so i'm actually going to hold off a little on the write-up. i mean, it's sort of the last robot novel, and sort of the first empire novel. that means i need to frame it properly, which means i should probably do the review last.

that said, i want to reframe my project goals on this. how many books can i read on fridays? i decided on two, but that's too vague - i can read two 200 page novels (as the first two robot novels were), but i can probably only get through one 500 page novel, which is closer to the length of the last two robot novels. i'm not altering the idea of one book per week, in the journal phase. but, i'm setting myself up with 500 pages max per week on the catchup run, until i'm caught up.

that means the robots of dawn can be dated for the 3rd, robots and empire can be dated for the tenth and i still have at least two empire novels to get through this weekend, although i'll probably do all three.

when i'm done with that, i'm going to focus on doing one journal write-up a day for the next week.

so, that's what i'm doing this week - and i should hopefully be caught up in a few days.

what is this text about, though? it's actually the only one of the four with legitimate depth. if the first one was a heavy-handed allegory about a conflict between utopian socialists and an elitist vanguard that ended in a dialectic of cooperation, and the second two were looser allegories about alienation and hedonism, the fourth finally pulls it together and takes it to the next step: historical materialism enters in the technologically determinist mechanism (and marx was a teleological technological determinist, despite his empty pleas to the contrary) of a mind-controlling robot that is opening the way for proletariat settlement across the galaxy. it turns out that the spacers are actually under the control of the technology. asimov develops this in multiple directions that i'm going to wait to discuss much more because i think he makes some confusing allusions (carthago delenda est is difficult to put into broader context), but i'm going to answer the question in a way that i think is not what many people want to assume - i think he's converting the vanguard spacer worlds into a historical coalition of greek city states, and contrasting it against the proletariat settlers, who he's casting as early romans, before they become too imperialist. so, this isn't just a story about technological determinism guiding robots into playing the role of historical materialism in guiding the vanguard out of the way to make space for the proletariat; it's also a discourse on why the greeks failed and the romans succeeded. there's layers here, and a lot to deconstruct, but asimov can be inconsistent at the best of times, and i want to work out the contradictions and inconsistencies before i do this in too much detail.

it doesn't really make sense to think of the spacers as romans and the earthlings as carthaginians, for example. the carthaginians were the older power, to begin with - the more civilized state. it was the romans that were the upstart. nor did the romans and carthaginians have common origins - they were distinctly different races of people, in just about every way. but, the romans and greeks had common origins in the proto-germanic powers to their north. the spacer confederation seems more like something like the delian league, trying to react to the rise of the barbarian romans.

i'll note, though, that asimov is pretty vicious on the settlers, who he is constantly disparaging...

anyways, that's just a stop-gap update, for now. i need to eat, and do a little cleaning, and i'll get to the next batch after that.

in robots and empire, giskard emerges as an allegory of historical materialism, who guides the vanguard spacers into clearing a path for the proletariat humans to take over the galaxy.

it's pretty neat, and pretty heavy-handed.

unfortunately, i slept all day, again.

let's get some reading done, first.

i'm not rich - i'm dirt poor.

i can't just throw out a built-to-fuck machine that's run like a tank for years without at least understanding what's wrong with it, first.

if i can prove to myself that there's a short in the board, i can justify tossing it. but, every test i've done tells me there's not a short in the board.

remember: while i was archiving my scattered internet writing over 2017, and focusing on a journal-writing phase over 2018-2020, and i spent the end of 2020 building a diet, i have been trying to get back to recording since early 2021 and have been unable to because the recording computer is broken in a way that i do not understand.

i thought it was ram, but it's not.

i can't convince myself that there's a short in the board.

the machine exhibits unusual network behaviour (despite being air-gapped), and there are symptoms of a "bios virus" that seems like a government attack. it has frequently randomly installed netbios, using a process i don't understand. i've wondered if somebody is utilizing a hidden wifi chip, or hacking me using microwave technology.

until recently, ps/2 functionality repeatedly disappeared. i seem to have solved that with repeated bios flashes.

i think it's hardware. 

but, the bottom line is that i can't figure it out, and i need very careful testing, as a result of it. i have to organize my data in a specific way before i can get back to what i was doing, but i'm going overboard on organizing it and calling it "filing" in an attempt to test the machine by using it. 

i've stripped everything down and/or turned everything in the bios off, except 

- video card (nvidia card manufactured in the mid 00s. there is no card on this board, otherwise i'd just use it. i'm not very concerned about video quality.)

- external pc sound card (maudio delta 1414 that i bought at a discontinuation sale for the rca dacs)

- one dvd reader/writer

- floppy drive

- four sata hard drives

- usb functionality is the only thing running via the bios

it's running as a single core, for example. no firewire. nothing.

i can only hope that's stable.

i didn't change anything in my install scripts, so i don't know why it would be software....

just to clarify a point: historically, i've tended to purchase and smoke a small amount of marijuana (away from the house) on and after the solstice. i have often purchased a quarter around the 20th and smoked it every day until around the 5th, saving a small amount for my birthday on the 13th. i refer to this as a end-of-the-year "head cave".

i have taken a very different viewpoint on marijuana since diagnosed with near-osteoporosis. i can try to slow down the loss of bone mass, but i can't rebuild it. smoking anything at all in any sustained manner would be stupid.

that being said, i'm also not in the right mental space to do that. in past years, i've had productive recording periods. the ends of 2014, 2015 and 2016 were very productive, in terms of recording. the end of 2017 was sort of unique, as i moved. i did not "head cave" at the end of 2018 as i did not feel like it (i smoked no marijuana over the holidays that year at all), i found myself sick with a weird pneumonia at the end of 2019 (picked up in detroit) and avoided head caving for that reason and i bought an 1/8th last year on my birthday, after experimenting with edibles around saturnalia, and being disappointed by it.

i have been trying for months to get back on track and the length of the day changing isn't an exciting thing to me this year.

i will probably spend most of the next month reading, but i want to get done the filing, too, and take the next troubleshooting step in rebuilding the recording machine in a stable way.

the machine has been stable with the sound card, so i've re-allowed for usb. i have searched the large drives without it crashing. will it crash while searching usb drives?

if it's stable after a while, the next step will to be to turn the firewire back on. i'm going to avoid those video card drivers for a while, still.

i know i look like a hardcore kid in that fuck the dead video. i always did.

it's not that i wasn't a hardcore kid. i was a hardcore kid. i was just a bit of an anachronism - i was a hardcore kid c. 1985, when being a hardcore kid was about being politically active, existing c. 2000, when being a hardcore kid was about almost the opposite of that. so, i sounded and mostly acted like one of the hardcore adults.

i really had no idea what emo even was. really.

but, i listened to a lot of socal punk, and a lot of politically aware industrial, which was just an outgrowth of punk. and i hope it's pretty obvious, actually.

scooped guitars suck.

ok.

where was i?

1) double checking today, inri002 sounds good, published. these are the added tags for inri002, fwiw: alternative, blues, grunge, hardcore, industrial, jazz, no wave, noise, punk, shoegaze.

2) double checking today, inri003 sounds good, published. these are the added tags for inri003, fwiw: aleatoric, collage, cut-up technique, electronic, glitch, industrial, minimalist, musique concrete, noise, plunderphonics.

3) i've re-uploaded inri004 a few times, and it doesn't want to hold. right now, it sounds good, published. but, i haven't stepped away and come back and found it undisturbed, yet. that's a necessity before i step away from it, entirely. these are the added tags for inri004, fwiw: alternative, blues, goth, grunge, hip hop, industrial, melodic hardcore, noise, punk, shoegaze.

i actually spent some time listening to is survived by yesterday and yelling at the wall - these aren't metal guitars, they're hardcore guitars. highs, not lows, get it. stop fucking with it. fuck.

the actual influences on the guitar part back in 1998 were more along the lines of smash and siamese dream. but, the key, central part of the song is that twangy flanged  guitar part that sounds like a pedal steel (but is just an electric run through a digital effects pedal). even the drums are mixed to crank the treble, not the bass. you should hear a subtle sweep on the noise sample, which is acing like a snare. i keep reuploading it to bring back the definition, but it just keeps defaulting to this crappy "scooped" mess.

:(.

i'm jumping to inri005, but  i'm not confident that these tracks are stable, quite yet.

i found some extra material to file, so i had to go back. i'm at inri010.

i wanted to make more music videos when i was out and about, and i think i should refocus on that:

where am i on the filing?

i have done an extra thorough run through the first 10 releases, inri000-inri009, which is also the first blu-ray disc. that leaves inri010-inri074, and the tracks i'm currently working on.

i was hoping that i could sync as i was working, but it hasn't worked out. on second thought, inri004 does not sound right and i've left it unpublished. given that it took a few tries before i could set inri002 right, and something seemed to click, i decided to re-upload inri000, inri001 & inri003. i have also reuploaded inri004 yet again and am hoping it stays in place, this time.

inri004 is a lot of things - it's industrial hip-hop, it's melodic hardcare, it's shoegaze, it's blues and it's even a bit of country. it's an experimental electronic noise piece and a grunge/alternative/punk rock song at the same time. so, it's all over the place. but, if there's somebody messing with it, they're misreading it - it's not supposed to be a dancehall thumper, and it's not supposed to sound like somebody put it through a meat  grinder. it's really pretty wysiwyg - it's a punk song with a drum machine. and it has sparkly, pretty guitars - not angry, mean ones.

i don't know why anybody would imagine they could actualize my art better than i could, but the mentality underlying it is turning it into a factory process. it is effectively co-opting my art, and destroying it by turning it into a commodity. in place of unique, individual expression is substituted a set of algorithms designed to maximize market appeal. and, i neither have any interest in it nor any time for it.

i don't want to play stupid games regarding my expression.

i expect that the files i upload will not be further altered. 

and, that is all.

i also re-uploaded inri004 to be sure, and i think it sounds ok.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/fuck-the-dead

again: i actually don't want the exaggerated boom, here. if you want to crank the bass on your system, it's there - go for it. but, for me, this is melodic hardcore first, and experimental hip-hop second. the interesting part of the track is the harmonic interplay between the guitars and the white noise. so, you want to just crank it to get that fuzzy guitar blaring at you. and, you'll notice that the bass actually comes up with the volume, when you do.

no, really.

i reuploaded inri003 the other day, just to make sure the files weren't corrupted.

these are the unedited mixes from 1997. well, almost unedited - i had to convert them all to stereo. i still have the mono mp3s from 1997.

they're mono because the samples i used were mono. in fact, they're like 56 kbps, because the samples were like 56 kbps.

so, this should sound kind of flat and dead, and it does. with the the first three recordings (the two demos and the inricycled), the sound should be trebly and sparkly and bright, partly intentionally and partly due to the fact that i was a 15-16 year old kid that was learning how to use the gear. it's important that the packages maintain that naivete, so we can't have fancy bass transforms running over it. it broadly doesn't sound that bad. this recording, inri003, is my first experiment with digital anything, and has to maintain the telephone speaker or am radio quality, even though i've long upsampled it.

it sounds ok to me. but, if you notice a dramatic increase in sound quality, please contact me. that would not be right - this is a document of a collection of primitive experiments, was isolated and released that way for that reason and needs to maintain a glitchy, low sound quality aesthetic.

the remasters for inri015 and inri021, where most of these end up, are a little thicker sounding. 

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inrisampled

alright.

i've listened to inri002 streaming from the server, and i can hear that it is good. for now. whatever was fucking with the mix has lifted.

i can't sit here and police the files 24/7, but if it was the conscious result of some external actor, they have withdrawn, for now. i can only hope it was via the persuasiveness of my oratorical prowess. as i yell at the microphone in the walls...

please leave these files alone.

and, please don't mess with anything else, either.

moving on...

it always makes me laugh when people try to associate being a rock star with heterosexual male prowess.

you realize that 80% of the actually interesting rock singers since 1965 have been exclusively or primarily gay, right? 

the other 20% were mostly skinny, nerdy losers that probably didn't have much difficulty finding sex because they were rich, but are hardly sex symbols.

the sexually attractive heterosexual male rock star is actually somewhat of a unicorn, in truth.