again: is listening to a podcast or watching a documentary as good as reading a book?

i previously said no - but that it's also the next best thing.

but, i guess it depends on the podcast and the book, to an extent.

i can multitask when i'm eating, and i realize the importance of doing it.

i'll write something up after i eat...

i was hoping to train the youtube suggestion algorithms, but it's really pointless. they take ridiculous guesses based on fake vloggers and paid accounts. so, i've avoided this yanis varoufakis guy because i think he's a neo-liberal, but youtube keeps sending me link after link about him. i think zizek is a pseudo-intellectual dunce, but they keep pushing him on me, anyways. and, jordan peterson? really? jordan fucking dumbass peterson? almost every refresh, unavoidably...

years ago, i had this really long youtube watch list that i sorted through when eating that was based on loading up entries from a long series of channels that i had actually mostly built up over facebook. what actually happened was that i got really far behind on the newsfeed, then went to each of the sites and just added all of the videos at all of the sites to it. i never got my way through it...

i'm going to be a little less systematic about it this time, and i don't intend to vlog about it. but, rather than rely on these awful algorithms to sell me garbage i don't want (both literally and figuratively. you don't think youtube manufactures consent?), i'm going to pick out some specific channels and run through them.

and, then i'm going to subscribe to them. 

so, i'm not adding my fake youtube account to the side, or at least i'm not until i upload anything to it. but, it seems like that's where i'm commenting from, for now - by necessity, if not by choice.

i will get back to the stanford lectures, but perhaps not just right now.

this is the first channel i'm going to key on, and i'm going to move backwards because i just watched the byzantium documentary. i can't say i learned much from it, but i enjoyed watching it and talking to myself in reacting to good or weak points made by it. and, we'll see how i react to the rest of them.

i am 100% self taught in history. well, i took a classics 101 (we read homer.) course and a third year course in byzantine history as a breadth requirement for the math degree. yet, i have little if any direction in the topic - despite clearly having substantive knowledge. there are a few topics that i preferred to avoid at school, because i consider studying them recreational, and you only get so many time slots at school. history was one of them, for sure - don't let my complete lack of education on the topic trick you into thinking i haven't read any history. like, i've read tacitus. and gibbons (can you tell?). for fun. how many history majors have actually seriously read tacitus?

i had this genealogical project i used to work on where i was trying to create a constructive proof for a theory of class dominance. my intent was to demonstrate that class mobility just doesn't happen in this society, by tracing virtually everybody of any value back to a global ruling class, with roots in the various ancient civilizations. i don't know even know what i wanted to do with this; i told myself i wanted to do statistical analysis on the dataset, but i was really more interested in the anthropology. so, researching the genealogy gave me the excuse to  do research on a huge array of topics, from reading gimbutas directly to the genetics, the linguistics, and history of every place and every sort imaginable.....except that of normal people, who i didn't have much time for, as it turns out. i kind of reversed the contemporary trend in teaching history, but then i avoided the academy on purpose, didn't it?

so, this is how i taught myself much of what i know, and it means i have a sort of hard block somewhere around the indus river, where the genealogies really flip over and dry up. i've argued repeatedly that islam and iran are inherently western civilizations, and it has a lot to do with these bloodlines - you can see how the culture really saw itself by seeing how it married, and the arabs and iranians alike clearly saw themselves distinctly as westerners. the broader iranian cultural sphere includes most of central asia (up to the desert and the mountains) as well as the northwestern part of india, and it's only here that the thing really flips over into something else - and where my understanding dries up with the blood. i have an outline of indian history, and it's really pretty blurry when it comes to southeast asia, india, korea and china - let alone subsaharan africa, which was an entirely different universe until a mere few centuries ago.

there is some value in watching these, for that reason - i know all about the byzantines, and a bit about the han and the aztecs, but i'm likely to learn a fair bit by watching documentaries on the khmer or the songhai, although i can at least say i know where they all were and a little about what they were all about.

so, here's channel #1:

https://www.youtube.com/c/FallofCivilizationsPodcast/videos

and, i should try to stay caught up when i get caught up.

it is fair to say that the turks wanted to  be romans, but the romans did not want to be turks. so, the turks tried to model themselves after rome as a successor state, but what was left of the population got up and left - some of it returning to rome (where it kickstarted the renaissance) and some of it fleeing north to russia. i hold to the historical idea of moscow as the third rome, and see the russian empire as the continuation of byzantium. as such, the fall of constantinople was not the end of the romans, exactly - so much as the loss of the capital to the persians. empires shift over geographic boundaries and ethnic groups, but very few are ever truly destroyed.

yeah, the going price seems to be roughly $10/stick, meaning it would cost me $40 to buy a backup set and $80 for two. and then i need to pay shipping...

what am i willing to pay for 25 year old ram? about half that, max - but something close to $2/stick would be reasonable, and feasible to find if you search around enough.

i'm going to need to make a pawn shop rummage run for old ram when i can.

i don't need the ram enough to pay $100 for it...

but, i'll keep an eye out for it.

no sd ram for sale in windsor or ontario, for that matter...

this is a 1998 model board. i need to get it while i still can, because it wont boot at all when there's no more ram to kickstart it with. and, let that be written of these asus boards, as these macs and dell and hp laptops pile up in landfills - they last until you can't find any ram for them anymore.

that's impressive. truly.

so, i went to boot the reconstructed machine and...

nothing.

shit.

no beep codes? no pc speaker.

so, i had to build a new pc speaker out of electrical tape and a piece of cardboard (i exaggerate only slightly.) to get the beep codes to figure out why it wasn't booting. and, it was ram.

so, i stripped the thing right down and did a component-by-component test to realize that....everything works after all.

hrmmn.

so, did it just need a reseating? that's maybe an oversimplification. reseating it on it's own didn't help. rather, it seemed like once i triggered the circuit with a 65 mb chip that the 256 mb chips started flowing, too - meaning it's more like i had to warm it up than that i had to reseat it.

the machine is currently sitting at the bios screen with just a video card and hard drive, in addition to the maxxed out 1 gb of ram. so, it works. hooray. 

and, it's quiet - which i don't even understand. it should be as loud as it ever was. but, i'll take it.

i need to check kijiji for 256 mb pc100 sd ram. that's the most the device can take, and a little back up will definitely help.

it's otherwise nice to get things back and running again, even if everything around me remains in disarray.