what do i think about the arch in dc?

the us capital already has a giant penis. they should really leave it up to the first female president to build a giant vagina, and cancel the plan for the arch.

trump should focus on updating the washington monument, instead, perhaps by installing a statue of arnold palmer next to it.

polling for the us congress has small sample sizes, poor methodology and large margins of error. results are highly inconsistent and poorly predictive. averaging it out into aggregate is not a good methodological approach.

the way to read these polls is like this:

1. if the polls all say the same thing, the outcome is clear.

2. if the polls are variable, it's a toss up.

the polling in texas, alaska, iowa, maine and ohio is fluctuating but the republicans are always ahead. there is little to no reason to expect the democrats to be competitive in these states.

rather, it is michigan, new hampshire, north carolina and georgia that are producing variable results, in wide swings, with huge margins, which makes the result less certain.

i think this is a more realistic map and i don't think control of the senate is likely to shift.

the house is harder to predict because the ridings are all cut up like swiss cheese but the trend has been for the media to predict a democratic win and for that not to happen.

i see little reason to think the house is about to swing but i'll stop short of predicting a republican hold. i'm going to state with confidence that the senate is extremely unlikely to swing to the democrats.

can somebody run that through ai for me?

you know who sets the price for bananas, right?

bob dole says the price of bananas is just right.

the saudis have a problem on their hands with the houthis, huh?

pity.

that's a shame.

i would encourage a regional coalition to wipe the barbarians out. i've said that.

....but maybe everybody should wait until riyadh falls, first, and takes the saudi monarchy out with it.

the saudis are the biggest problem in the area and create the most amount of instability. everything from 9/11 to isis to the failed state in lebanon to the dictatorship in egypt traces back to saudi arabia as a regional decision maker. getting rid of the saudi state would be a massive benefit to the region and the world. they're also a huge liability to the us central command, which is being clearly demonstrated.

if saudi arabia loses to the barbarian houthis, the americans will necessarily have to go in to protect the weapons in the desert from being taken by the iranians or the chinese, which would be very bad.

maybe the region should let the iranians overthrow the government in the uae, too.

this is not a change in positions on my behalf and is in no way a show of support for the iranian state, which is still a terrorist death cult and should still be wiped out. i have been in favour of regime change in saudi arabia for years.

do not google evariste galois, who you've never heard of.

At the time of writing, details have not been made public regarding exactly how Alpöge prompted the AI model to produce the Jacobian conjecture counterexample and what its output looked like.

my second year calculus teacher would be heartbroken, if he didn't already die of a heart attack. i mean no disrespect to dr bose or his family and that was a long time ago. it's a good line. admit it.

like navier-stokes, this is again the kind of thing that you can solve with brute force with enough computing power and getting a counter-example is probably more accurately described as a reflection of the parallel computing power of the ai systems as functional mainframe super computers (something that is perhaps being downplayed) than it is described as advanced intelligence. 

they really could have just written a simple program in basic with a few counting loops, fed it into the mainframe and waited for it to halt. doesn't halt? conjecture is true. halts? conjecture is false, print n1, n2...nk. the only reason you could do this now and couldn't do it 50 years ago is the difference in raw computing power. it's no advancement in the algorithm.

they'll have to rewrite a lot of calculus textbooks.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260804034634.htm

this is interesting (it looks similar to galois theory and could potentially be formulated as a branch of galois theory) and i'll give the method credit for drawing connections humans missed but it's still not doing anything novel and the suggestions that it is should be retracted by the people claiming as much. what the machine was able to do was tell us that the answer was right in front of us, but we just couldn't see it.

the square root of negative one, i, has turned out to be an amazingly powerful abstraction that has helped us solve a myriad of problems.

the computer didn't solve the conjecture, it pointed out that we had already solved it, and the answer was in it's database, we just didn't realize it.

great. that's useful. but it's advanced pattern recognition. it's not a creative, ingenious solution.

https://openai.com/index/model-disproves-discrete-geometry-conjecture/

i just want to clarify that this isn't reflective of advanced intelligence, it's a reflection of extreme computational ability. the ai didn't find an ingenious trick to get an elegant solution, it ran zillions (a zillion is defined as a big number) of mundane, simple computations and came up with the answer via brute force by just doing the calculation over and over. this is how humans have been dealing with solving differential equations (which is what this is) for a long time. the tactic is called numerical methods. again, if you had a million calculus doing monkeys on a million typewriters, you could solve navier-stokes, but you'd have to enslave millions of humans for millions of years to get an outcome. this is a valid use of super computers, and it's a great result, but it's a function of the power of the machine to do rote math and not of any deep intelligence.

and i want to propose some caution. in fact, computers are very bad at rote math and need to do tremendous amounts of error correction. the results need to be double checked by humans. people that work with this kind of thing will tell you that normal logic gate binary computers - not quantum computers - make an uncomfortable number of mistakes that are essentially reduced to round off errors arising from the need to convert from binary to base 10 and the fact that the computers do all of their math in base 2, which is necessary but crazy.

in fact, there's some circular logic here that i might be cautious about. i haven't looked at this and i'm not going to look at it but computers use euler's method to do almost everything because they need to constantly approximate solutions and are constantly cutting off rounding errors. this is called floating point error.

i would strenuously recommend that the math be doublechecked by hand for errors in arithmetic resulting from floating point errors. if it holds up, i might even suggest it's dumb luck. if it doesn't, it demonstrates the limitations of computers in solving math problems.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2588063-openai-has-solved-the-navier-stokes-millennium-problem-using-15m-of-ai-effort/

the simple english tl;dr on ai is this:

there's going to be some subset of ai alarmists that are trying to profit from this and some subset that is legitimately concerned. the legitimately concerned should understand that by focusing on the threat that an out of control ai may cause, which is science fiction, they are distracting from the much more real threat that an ai directed by malicious, nefarious or otherwise bad faith human actors, or just basic human incompetence, may pose. activism should be focused on regulating human behaviour and on ensuring that governments aggressively mandate that systems are thoroughly tested before they go into production.

this is a different question than i looked into, but the google algorithm threw it at me (after i blocked a million young turks network videos trying to tell me how trump was DESTROYED by natalie harp scandal, or whatnot. this is a better suggestion, google. thank you for improving under human direction.) and i think it's worth posting here. the issue i was looking into was the question of misalignment and i determined the potential threat comes from poor programming and insufficient testing. it was much like the nuclear threat in the cold war. of course nuclear war was a serious threat, but there were efficient systems in place (including the mutual use of game theory, which is something the americans abandoned under reagan) to minimize it. the biggest threat was always that somebody would make a mistake, make a bad decision, and then we're all dead. 

once again, the issue being exposed is that ai is a legitimate threat due to the potential of human error, rather than the machines evolving beyond us. the latter is not something grounded in science. the former requires some careful regulation to ensure that ai systems are rigorously tested and have sufficient error correction before they are put into use and the evidence i've seen suggests that the private sector is failing at that task (where is the profit in that?) and needs governments to do the regulatory work for them.

i suppose you need to be in a specific age range to get the joke.

it's the kind of elementary mistake in basic economic theory that is rampant amongst stupid conservatives but that liberals just have not made in this country for decades. 

in fact, the grocery store collusion was the exact example that we used to talk about oligopoly in first year economics. we went through this exact issue. no, the stores aren't going to compete. are you nuts? they know better than that. they will instead fix prices, and there's a mechanism in which they do this.

what the fuck are you talking about? oligowhatchamasay? i'm talking about competition!

right.

what is an oligopoly?

“A rule of thumb is that an oligopoly exists when the top five firms in the market account for more than 60% of total market sales,”

https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2023/may/what-makes-a-market-an-oligopoly

Characteristics of oligopolies

edit

Some characteristics of oligopolies include:

• Profit maximisation
• Price setting: Firms in an oligopoly market structure tend to set prices rather than adopt them.^[22]
• High barriers to entry and exit:^[23] Important barriers include government licenses, economies of scale, patents, access to expensive and complex technology, and strategic actions by incumbent firms designed to discourage or destroy nascent firms. Additional sources of barriers to entry often result from government regulation favouring existing firms.^[24]
• Few firms in the market: When there are few firms in the market, the actions of one firm can influence the actions of the others.^[25]
• Abnormal long-run profits: High barriers of entry prevent sideline firms from entering the market to capture excess profits. If the firms are colluding in the oligopoly, they can set the price at a high profit-maximising level.
• Perfect and imperfect knowledge: Oligopolies have perfect knowledge of their own cost and demand functions, but their inter-firm information may be incomplete. If firms in an oligopoly collude, information between firms then may become perfect. Buyers, however, only have imperfect knowledge as to price,^[23] cost, and product quality.
• Interdependence: A distinctive feature of oligopolies is interdependence.^[26] Oligopolistic firms must take into consideration the possible reactions of all competing firms and the firms' countermoves.^[27] Every oligopolistic company with strong commodity homogeneity in its industry is reluctant to raise or lower prices, as competing firms will be aware of a firm's market actions and will respond appropriately. Anticipation among firms about potential counteractions leads to price rigidity, with firms usually only willing to adjust prices and quantities of output in accordance with a price leader.^[28][29] This high degree of interdependence stands in contrast with the lack of interdependence in other market structures. In a perfectly competitive market, there is zero interdependence because no firm is large enough to affect market prices. In a monopoly, there are no competitors to be concerned about. In a monopolistically-competitive market, each firm's effects on market conditions are so negligible that they can be safely ignored by competitors.
• Non-price competition: Generally, the oligopolistic enterprise with the largest scale and lowest cost will become the price setter in this market. The price set by it will maximise its own interests, such that other small-scale enterprises may also benefit.^[30] Oligopolies tend to compete on terms other than price, as non-price competition, such as promotional efforts, is less risky. Along non-price dimensions, collusion is harder to sustain.^[31]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly

that's what i learned in school. i don't know what they taught you at the ayn rand school for homo economicus tots.

so how do you get grocery prices down via competition, then?

you don't. you're stupid.

you need to reduce input costs, which in most cases, in canada, has to do with high transportation costs. further, the cost of fertilizer has been spiraling out of control for years.

you overcharge for bananas, you might wake up wearing some cement shoes, and sleeping with some fishes.

in theory, if you set up a freshco across the street from a food basics  they might compete with each other, but i can point you to several intersections where there's a freshco on one side of the street and a food basics on the other and they tend to engage in price setting rather than competition. the difference is that they don't buy food from each other, they both order it from their own suppliers, so they in theory might compete. but it's the same suppliers, the same labour costs and, therefore, the same price. they're not going to compete - that would harm both of them and they both know it. things like condiments move in lock step. i've basically never seen them compete, but have noticed prices are usually the same for most things on both sides of the street (and i'm picky so i'll go to both stores and actually shop).

then there's the cartels, like bananas. bananas are always exactly the same price everywhere. no exceptions. ever noticed that?

you could say "but the store will stop them". they might. they probably won't. what does the cashier care? what difference does it make to the produce manager?

that's what the fucking clause was for, you dumb fucks.

where do you imagine that the convenience store gets it's food from?

it buys it at the grocery store and then charges you for gas and labour to go get it. that's why it's twice as much; it's the unwritten relationship. it's cheaper to just use instacart; it's the same thing, and fresher produce.

if you get rid of these clauses, you're allowing third parties to step in as middlemen and hike the price. it will create inflation, not lower costs.

this is utterly irrelevant and has nothing to do with prices. small grocers source from large ones. i walk by people selling fruit outside the stores all of the time and the prices are generally higher because they just bought it at the store. what this is actually going to do is lead to more resellers and may create problems with people buying up stock in bulk, clearing the stores out and marking it up down the street. there's now nothing stopping them from doing that, so why wouldn't they? those clauses are broadly reasonable and something i'd mostly support as they ensure price stability, which tends to keep prices lower. this policy is utterly wrong, economically, and will likely completely backfire.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/competition-bureau-empire-property-controls-deal-9.7356543

a smart analyst should have looked at the vulnerability nafta has inflicted on canada and decided we're too reliant on foreign investment. it's not the americans that are the problem, exactly. it's the amount of foreign control over the economy.

to react to the tariffs with more foreign investment is to suggest an inability to understand, to analyze and to learn. it is to completely miss the point.

something that we've heard frequently recently from mark carney and his cronies is the idea that they can only plan around and focus on what they can control. it sounds reasonable on it's face.

then he calls a conference trying to get a trillion dollars of foreign investment, which is basically selling the country off to the highest bidder.

this week, canada has seen two foreign investors in the auto sector, both european, completely bail on their commitments. auto companies from korea have likewise been sketchy. it would seem as though foreign investment is unreliable and unpredictable, wouldn't it?

if the government truly wanted to focus on what it could control, it would be building crown corporations, funding r&d and engaging in massive keynesian spending to get the economy working. instead, it's trying to balance the budget.

that's not adding up, is it?

people did have pcs in the 80s and 90s. this idea of the digital native should really be pushed back to most of gen x it's just that the computers were hidden out of sight. in the 80s, wealthy families may have bought apple computers for their kids, but the family computers, which were probably amigas or ataris until they turned into dos pcs and then windows pcs, were generally left in the basement. i grew up pretty poor and everybody i knew had a pc, but the family matriarchs didn't want them in the living room, and the reality is that they mostly went unused. you would give your kids gaming consoles and let them set them up with old tvs in their rooms, but the computers went in the basement, in the utility room, where nobody could see them, and they just sat collecting dust. they were in theory bought for work but you never used them for work.

the first 486 i'm referring to was my stepfather's and it was set up in a corner of the basement behind the hot water tank and across from the standalone freezer and the washer and dryer. it was supposed to be his "office" but he would go in there once a month to type something. no internet access. my bedroom was behind a wall on the other side of the basement. so, i would sneak in there after dark and play civ until 5:00 am, as though i was a rich kid, which i wasn't. the rich kids had their own 486s in their actual bedrooms and played civ until 5:00 am while typing in their beds.

there is a long stalled music project that i can insert in before 2cc and am going to, as i reboot and do a second completion run. that means this will be the new first project and i'm actually starting it from scratch. years before anamanaguchi or chiptune or "nintendocore" became popular ideas, i was planning on recording a guitar-based video game music album. i think i still have tapes of samples recorded about 1998 and a very small amount of it was used on the first inri cd on connecting tracks like "abusive". there's not going to be any more inri, but as i go through this all one last time with a careful analysis, there may be more projects like this that fall out and spin off into their own projects.

i don't have any developed demos, but the earliest sampling i did for this project (i didn't have a gaming console at the time and it was still the 90s. digital recording existed but was expensive. i was sampling my friends' nintendos with a handheld tape recorder.) would be dated to around 98 or 99. i would, however, want to date the project to the time frame that i was playing old games, instead, which would have been more like late 80s and early 90s.

i don't remember exactly when i got the nintendo in the basement but it would have been after the snes had been released so it was probably christmas, 1991. the nintendos were marked way down because the stores were selling super nintendos. exactly. i had, however, already been sneaking in to the office to use the 486 (which ran dos) for a few years before that and my dad's atari 2600 (which had space invaders and pacman) was probably there when i was born.

i definitely had a guitar by mid 1991. i played stairway to heaven at a local talent show in 1991. if i'm going through this pre-inri period, i'd like to potentially make an acoustic guitar demo of what some of the earliest versions of some of these songs would have sounded like, so that's something else.

one way i could do this is to do albums for each of the platforms and date them to when i played the platform, and it would be restricted to very old platforms - atari 2600, dos pc games, 8 bit nintendo, sega genesis II.

another idea i've had for years is to make concept albums for the kids books as i work through them and that's something i could look at as well but i would want to date that to the current reality and it would mess up the chronology. nor would it be connected to any specific musical idea.

the anamanaguchi-style midi guitar project is something i wanted to do in the mid 90s and didn't so it makes sense to pencil it in to the reboot, even if it's an anachronism.

for the night, i want to sleep the filth off a little more, wash the rest of the soap off (and the acne with it) and make some salsa a little later.

i got a lot done in the garage yesterday evening and continued the giant sleep-off by going to bed a little early, around 1:00 am. the idea was to get some extra sleep, wake up, wash the soap off and get something to eat. it's gone according to plan except that the weight is remaining a little stubborn so i've slept most of the day again, as well. i feel better than i did a few days ago, but i remain exhausted as a result of getting drugged. it's clearly putting a lot of strain on my kidneys, which is draining me of energy.

after i fixed the cardboard, i got the two tables that were out there already in place, put the lights up on the wall, moved two more small iron tables with a wood dining top out there, moved many things in the garage or the front entrance to the tables and vacuumed repeatedly in between steps. i want to wait before i put the carpet in. i will get some pictures up soon.

i'm going to seal up the steps with cardboard to create a barrier that can insulate that region a bit better. it was over 20 degrees in there last night despite barely hitting 20 today for the first time in over a week and the temperature falling to around 10 degrees overnight so the things i'm done have worked in retaining heat. it's ready to put the aluminum up but only if i still have some left after doing the rest of the basement, and i think i will. the heater doesn't need to come on yet, clearly.

the couch that was here when i moved in, and has been clawed by cats and soiled by rodents and smelled awful, isn't going to fit in there and i'm going to get it out of there over the next few days. it had aired out with the windows open, but the landlord installed an a/c in a dumb place and the couch absorbed most of the condensation. i could probably save it but i have no incentive and nowhere to put it. maybe the africans want it for the yard. i'm going to get some kind of smaller bench or reclining chair for in there instead that is less gross and fits better. i'd like to read in there on warm summer nights with the windows open and some candles burning, and maybe some music playing. it's a nice atmosphere. the neighbours regularly go to bed very early so it's quiet in there at night. it's like having a covered patio, in some respects. there's also more than enough space for yet another computer system, which i'm considering because it would throw off heat, but i'm considering getting something very old for the journal project. my first computer was a 486. can i find one?

i have never thrown away a computer, but i lost access to a few. i'd like to rebuild a 486 with real dos, civilization and duke nukem. there was also a windows 3.1 pc in my bedroom for a while, which was replaced with a windows 95 pentium 166, that was upgraded to the pIII 500 that i still have and still dual boots into 98/xp. so, that's three extra systems.

i had an atari when i was very young, a nintendo that i had grown out of before i got it for christmas and a sega genesis that i played only sporadically. i was not a video game focused kid. i liked reading books and playing guitar more. but i would like to rebuild these systems for the journal. i did not own a game console at all after the sega genesis (which i rarely touched after about 1992) or play video games at all past the age of about 15. i really firmly grew out of playing video games by my mid-teens. the last pc games i remember playing were civilization 2, wolfenstein/doom/quake and a very small amount of half-life. after 1996, the pcs were used strictly for recording and for messageboards, and never for gaming. but those three old computers were used mostly for video games and didn't even have modems or sound cards at all.

the garage won't be completely finished for a while. the landing on the other side will be used to grow plants (it's a greenhouse space), including edible plants and that will require some effort. the seating isn't a high priority, either. i will get to it in sequence. 

but once i get these last steps finished and finish cleaning, the shape will be in place, a lot of clutter will come out of the main unit and into there instead and i'll be able to use it for what it's for - soldering, cutting wood and fixing and building things. 

the first thing on the list is cutting some shelves for the kitchen, and finishing the kitchen then shifts to the main priority.

canada should completely ban the import, manufacture and use of diesel.

i would consequently be ecstatic if the americans refused to sell it to us. good.

keep your coal to yourself, too.

https://globalnews.ca/news/12069994/diesel-export-ban-canada-impact/

the realty is that virtually nobody pays enough taxes in canada. the only demographic that pays close to enough taxes is the super rich. that's ok when we're talking about very poor people, who get subsidies and need subsidies, but it's really not ok when we're talking about a middle class that could pay for itself but is instead being massively subsidized. this is the result of decades of income tax cuts on the middle class, which has reduced the middle class to a bunch of welfare cases that need government subsidies, when they used to be the economic engine that generated wealth via a stable tax base.

canada has cut taxes on the middle class for too much and needs a substantive income tax hike for middle class earners, or at the least a long term moratorium on further tax cuts for the middle class. 

i would rather outright ban the tfws. but there's absolutely no factual basis in her concerns.

1. tfws pay taxes like everybody else.

2. it is true that the taxes tfws pay don't cover expenses. that's also true of canadian citizens. virtually nobody in canada actually pays their own way and the premise that they do is one of the biggest and most malicious lies on the right. these calculations also rarely include money for things like roads. the gap is filled by corporate taxes, consumption taxes and taxes on the rich. the idea that canadian workers subsidize immigrants is false; the rich subsidize all workers in canada, and that's how it should be.

3. there's no real revenue deficit. you could bullshit numbers to generate a scapegoat, but it's general revenue. you could just as easily make the opposite argument - that tfws are subsidizing canadian workers - and it would be equally valid and equally specious and equally dubious. at the end of the day, there's no loss to recoup and no issue to address.

i would be concerned that this is step one to introduce a health premium on domestic workers.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-danielle-smith-health-care-fee-9.7354117

what's my take on the quebec election?

i may not get time to do the writeup but i will post it if i do.

the caq is a weird entity. it's certainly a conservative party, but it had an unusual support for secularism. secularism is generally more of a liberal idea, and religious ideologies are generally considered to be more in the realm of conservative value systems. the fact that this was all mixed up in quebec was an idiosyncrasy of quebec politics and a result of the absence of a real spectrum for several generations due to the sovereignty question stagnating the local political spectrum.

christine frechette strikes me as more of a traditional conservative than legault and as such i'm skeptical of her ideological support for secularism. in the quebec spectrum, that aligns her more with the liberals (who are conservatives in quebec).

if you want to ensure quebec continues forwards towards secularism and isn't driven backwards into some mushy concept of multiculturalism, i would vote for the pq instead.

i agree that artificial intelligence should be renamed and have posted those thoughts here previously but it's not the artificial part that is misleading - ai is absolutely, certainly something that is completely fake, a total illusion, overwhelmingly misleading - but the intelligence part that is misleading. ai as we're currently using it is not anything resembling intelligence, it's just a search engine. they should rename it so that people understand that it isn't intelligence.

a more accurate proposed renaming would be something like "advanced algorithmic search", "probabilistic web scraping database query" or "script-based search engine application interface". 

ai is certainly not supreme intelligence and the premise is overwhelmingly ignorant and amazingly stupid. there is no computer in operation today and never has been that is supreme anything except supremely incompetent. this suggestion is a reflection of the president's low intelligence level.

it is true that artificial intelligence will calculate probabilities as it responds to database search queries, and this may produce a level of personalization and randomness in the responses, but that is not intelligence, it's just math. the truth is that it's a completely fake impersonation of intelligence. it's utterly fraudulent and it's only convincing to the ignorant because the gui is realistic. despite the calculations made, the ai is inherently incapable of generating novel strings of text. every single response from the ai, every single thing the ai says to you, was written by a human. no ai has ever written a single sentence on it's own and if it were to try it would be mathematically equivalent to monkeys mashing keys on a keyboard. yes, you'll get some dickens (or maybe some joyce first) if you run infinitely many experiments. it's just math; it's not intelligence.

using the term "intelligence" to describe a graphical user interface that is just searching databases of human written information is exceedingly disingenuous and should stop. it should be renamed so that the word intelligence is removed from the description and the reliance on scripting, probabilities and databases is made more apparent.

there is already a term in use for what ai actually is. current "ai" would be more accurately described with the acronym api, application programming interface.

i woke up around 14:00 after consuming the minimum meal and i feel better. i went out to get a parcel and noticed a lot of the cardboard i put up the other day has been torn off. it didn't fall down. it was ripped off. i'm also noticing some fresh nails in the woo. so, i may have found an entry point.

these people are not invited into my space and are not welcome in it.

i'm going to redo it with some braces in some key spots and see what happens. this is a big place (for one person) and i'm slowly sealing it up but it's in poor condition and i'm beginning to understand where the access points are a little more clearly.

the good news is that i seem to have slept it off. my weight is falling again.

the bad news is that i'm completely exhausted. i feel like i'm waking up from a three day bender - sore body, headache, acne (the soap helped but i still have to wash the soap off), balance issues, coughing, sre throat, difficulty staying awake. i've been sleeping almost nonstop since about 2:00 on tuesday morning, which is almost 30 hours. i don't think i'm done yet.

jocks are retarded; steroids are poison. testosterone makes people stupid. i simply don't want this filth in my body. i don't care about gender identity in clinical terms at this point, i'm too old, what i care about is my physical and mental health. this is an unhealthy chemical with extremely negative primary and side effects, both mental and physical, and i want it eliminated from my body. i've been on suppressors for decades. i've had surgery. drugging me against my will is unconscionable and these shitheads will get what they deserve for it in the end.

i expect minimal to zero long term damage.

but i do not want this to happen again.

today was a wash. literally. i've got my heavy acne soap on and it will peel off in a day or two. i guess i'm inside for the next week.

i tend to get hacked at the same time as i get drugged and i don't entirely understand what the purpose of it is but it's consistent. the new mac address - which is a brand new device - is starting to do the same thing as the old one. i'm going to need a couple more of these anyways so i should buy a few and start rotating and see if it makes a difference. i may need to do some kind of mac address spoofing and constantly swap it out.

they seem to be trying to block me from accessing the internet. it's not clear if they intend this to be successful or are trying to be annoying, or what the purpose of that would be, if they were to succeed.

i have a broad understanding of what these people are doing but i find them to be utterly irrational and completely baffling. i consistently don't understand why they're doing it and when i'm able to piece together bits of reasoning it's consistently illogical and incoherent. they don't make the slightest bit of sense to me.

i'm ultimately left to conclude that they're irrational, illogical, incoherent and stupid people. 

the problem i'm having is that is that when i call police or try to present an argument in court, and i try to explain that i don't understand what the point is, i get accused of being the one's that incoherent, as though every criminal is perfectly rational in their behavior, and all criminal acts have clearly rational explanations. the cops want a rational, clearly thought through motive formed by an intelligent, intellectually capable criminal.

the reality is that they're dumb thugs. what they're doing doesn't make any sense because they're idiots and the cops won't build a case around that. it's very frustrating.

the great wash-up back to being normal again began yesterday morning but these disgusting drug addict loser faggots won't let me clean the space and won't let me clean myself. these abjectly disgusting queers keep breaking in here to drug me and will not leave me alone.

i am not queer. i am not l. i am not g. i am not b. i am a heterosexual female that transitioned from being a male. i have no interest in gay people, no interest in queer identity and no interest in queer rights. i have very little respect for gay men, particularly, and think gay male culture is revoltingly disgusting. i do not identify as a string of letters. i'm just a normal, straight woman. i don't want anything to do with the gays, their culture, their lifestyle or their politics. i do not go to gay marches. i do no gay to gay bars. i don't have any gay friends, and i don't want any gay friends. i don't respect gay people very much. i just like to go to concerts. 

i did another round of spot cleaning in the morning and succeeded in getting essentially all of the acne off my face and then succeeded in getting most of the knots out of my hair. the idea was to finish washing up after the last unwanted drugging event, to do a couple of remaining things in the garage and the kitchen and then to get in the shower. but i noticed when i was putting items back in their place that some faggot loser had broken in through the side, left a disgusting faggot mess on the floor like the disgusting faggots do because they're disgusting faggots and probably drugged me again on saturday when i was fixing the front door. these idiots are horribly desperate to prove something and horribly pathetic in their refusal to accept basic concepts of agency and free will. if i get the chance, i will slit their worthless faggot gay throats and flush their worthless queer bodies down the toilet. 

they're not human beings.  they're worthless queer fags. and i'm going to have to end their worthless queer lives. they've left me with no choice.

i'm almost done in the garage. i'm confident i sealed the door up well over the weekend, so i put the insulation in yesterday afternoon and the first layer of cardboard over the ceiling last night. i stopped a little after midnight to get some sleep and will finish cleaning and moving items in there today. the windows are closed and sealed up. 

i'm going to have to react to the steroids via reduced caloric consumption for the immediate short term in order to prevent them from working. they won't be effective if i starve myself to prevent them from working. i don't want these garbage male hormones that cause brain damage in retardedly stupid faggot jock men in my body. testosterone causes brain damage and makes people retarded, it's established science. testosterone reduction promotes higher levels of brain development and leads to higher levels of intelligence. the brain damage caused by steroid use is reversible with estrogen therapy.

i may start vomiting up my stomach contents if i notice problems as i work through the remaining food in my pantry.

the only remaining entry point is the side and they're pitiful enough and faggot enough to aggressively break in here so i'm going to have to address that, and i'm going to have to get some cameras set up once i'm sure the inside is secure.

this is going to cause me to lose another couple of days, but it wears off relatively fast, and washes off within a week. i take a lot of estrogen. i will recover. these faggots won't recover - they're dead as soon as i get the chance to slaughter them, and i want to bring the issue to the court as it exists. i want the issue of self defence against aggressive faggots to be tried in court and for the rights of heterosexuals to defend themselves against faggots to be upheld in canadian law.

i have filed dozens of police reports. i have filed claims for civil damages. i have field at the ltb. i cannot get the court to protect my rights. i will need to react in self-defence and i will demand that the court acknowledge it failed to protect me and asserts my right to protect myself against the faggotry and against the drug use.

and i'm warning them. i've warned them verbally. i've told the police i will react violently if they fail to intervene. i'm warning them in writing. i'm not a fucking faggot and i don't want anything to do with their faggot fantasies. if the only way to end this is to kill them, i will gleefully knife their jugulars out and feel no shame or remorse in it. they're consequently going to get slaughtered if they don't stop, and a civilized society needs to uphold my right to do that and in general to protect the rights of heterosexuals to defend themselves from queers using violence, if necessary. there can be no place for this kind of disgusting male faggotry in a civilized society. it's revoltingly gross and unacceptable to straight people in straight culture. and there can be no place for this kind of open drug use. they need to be rounded up and gassed.

i do not want a donkey.

at all.

yes, you should be nice to your donkey, if you have one.

not too nice.

but the donkey probably wants to be your friend because it's lost massive amounts of it's cognitive abilities through domestication. the donkey has little to no intelligence and is reliant on you like an autistic child. you have a clear fiduciary responsibility to be nice to your donkey. you should respect that and treat it with kindness and love.

i did read the bible from front to back when i was a kid because i was that kind of kid. i even have a favourite bible quote:

And the angel of the LORD said to him, Why have you smitten your ass these three times? - numbers 22:32

i read it like an anthropology text book. the truth is it's a good story. it's perhaps not particularly accurate, but it does provide some historical information on the levant during the period after the iron age collapse, through to the persian conquest, and all the way to the roman occupation. it's not devoid of value.

but i've been a staunch atheist ever since.

to suggest that the bible is completely ridiculous and you'd have to be a retard to take it seriously would be a politically correct understatement. these people should be rounded up and put in asylums.

these aren't the types of people we should be deporting, they're the types of people we should be providing asylum to.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-faces-questions-over-treatment-of-iranian-conscripts-as-u-k-australia-take-different-approach-9.7346224

 carney actually went to st pierre and miquelon and said 'vive le st pierre libre". that actually happened.

mark carney is really demonstrating by example how unrestrained capitalism brings out the worst tendencies and most contemptible human behaviour in all of us.

he now has premier doonesbury campaigning on introducing fracking in quebec, where it's been banned for years. 

c'est incroyable.

i'm noticing that the somalis (i have confirmed they're somalis) upstairs are progressively becoming less muslim and more african, which i'm taking in with curiosity and a little bit of optimism. it would be helpful to canada's future if canada acted as a place of decolonization for colonized muslims. if i saw a lot of evidence that that was the way things were going, i'd be a little less critical about continuing immigration from that part of the world. the problem has been that they consistently resist assimilation. if they started assimilating more fully and more readily, with less push back, i'd be less concerned.

i can hear much of what they say, and little of it is in english, but i have overheard that they seem to have faced some racism at the local mosque. they were apparently told they aren't real muslims and rejected by the mosque because they're black. while this isn't exactly surprising - arab society is brutally racist and amongst the most racially exclusive societies on earth - it's also a little ironic, given that the original muslims were probably east african, based on historical descriptions of early muslim raiders as being as "black as the night". the classical and pre-modern sources had a different word for black muslims, called "saracens". over time, the word lost it's meaning, and came to mean arab muslim, but the original sources were clear to separate between the dark-skinned saracens, who probably crossed from east africa into yemen and moved up the red sea coast, and the people living in the arabian desert, who spoke an african/semitic language due to previous waves of colonization but were mostly caucasian in ancestry. if mohammed existed at all, which i find to be doubtful, he probably looked more like a somali than an arab. 

however, if jesus existed, which i also think is doubtful, he probably did not look like an arab but rather probably looked like a persian.

it hasn't happened instantly, but i'm noticing less head scarves. in fact, they showed up in canada in full body niqabs and moved to headscarves after a few months and now are going out more confidently without them. i haven't said anything to them about that, but i am in favour of them burning their hijabs and it's nice to see some recent immigrants adjust and try to fit in rather than dig in and try to stand out. i've also noticed a decrease in muslim music and an increase in african music, and even heard them dancing and chanting recently, like the indigenous people that they are, which i actually think is great. it means they're using the freedom of thought they have in canada to decolonize from their muslim colonization, which i'd very like to see more of amongst east africans, indians, indonesians/malaysians, north africans, syrians and other groups that were colonized in the arab expansion. i'd even support inviting people from regions colonized by arabs to come to canada to decolonize, build a diaspora and rebuild a reconstructed culture to bring back to their homeland, like the jews have. the jews are the first indigenous group in the arab colonized world to decolonize from islam and come back to their homeland, but they shouldn't be the only one or the last one.

it's not that the process of dechristianization is any less important than it's ever been in the broader decolonization project, it's that the dechristianization of the west is largely complete. to continue on with decolonization in the 21st century, the biggest remaining target is islam, islamic colonialism and the areas of africa, europe, the middle east, india and southeast asia that were colonized by muslims from about 700 to about 1500, before the end of the reconquista shifted the balance of power to europe. the century of arabic colonialism was also the true start of many of the targets of anti-colonial theory, including slavery and what we today call capitalism. while modern scholarship traces the beginnings of these things to renaissance italy or early modern spain, the scholarship is decidedly racist in it's eurocentrism - it ignores who the italians were trading with, and the reality that they imported much of their methodology and ignores the role that the existing islamic slave trade network, which was inherited intact by the spanish, played in the development of the atlantic slave trade. the eurocentric history just kind of stops between 476 and 1492. but in reality much of what happened in the colonized world after 1492 was imported from existing arabic colonialism, and was an extension of existing arabic colonialism, which started to fade in the later dark ages and had collapsed by 1452. the europeans replaced the arabs as the dominant colonial power, but they didn't invent or originate much of any of the colonial behaviour or the systems of exploitation and economics that developed from the colonial period. this stuff is all arab in origin, but the arabs have evaded criticism due to the eurocentrism, and the orientalist racism that has accompanied it. history just cuts the period of arabic hegemony out. it just starts with columbus and cabot instead and rewinds back to the romans when pressed for context.

it completely cuts the vikings out, too. it's not just eurocentric, it's also christocentric. while the europeans and chinese were both struggling with remembering how to read their own books, colonialism was being invented and implemented by the vikings and arabs. but it's only the arab colonized areas that have not resisted and re-secularized themselves.

i'd like to see more colonized africans disregard their arabic colonization and reconnect with their indigenous roots, as i'd like to see more colonized europeans disregard the christian colonization and reconnect with their own indigenous (germanic) roots.

i'm in favour of restricting muslim immigration to canada because they threaten to replace secular germanic law with middle eastern legal ideas and i think that's worth opposing and struggling against, but i probably wouldn't agree with jake lang on very much, including his views on 9/11:

https://forward.com/news/850037/jake-lang-nazi-protest-911/

but i don't understand why there's so much igorance about the nazi position on palestine.

nazis have consistently been pro-muslim (because it's a militaristic and masculine culture) and consistently supported a free palestine since the 1930s:

https://time.com/4084301/hitler-grand-mufi-1941/

in fact, most of what you hear from "leftists" nowadays about historical israel is in truth nazi propaganda, more or less verbatim.

we're walking into this ignorant.

we don't understand what we're doing.

newfoundland did not join canada until 1949.

all three islands were under literal american occupation during the second world war, when denmark and norway were both under german occupation, finland was a nazi client state and sweden was supposedly neutral but functionally nazi.

if i was the united states, and i was worried about a military alliance between canada and europe, i would consider both greenland and iceland (and potentially newfoundland) to be key - invaluable - strategic objectives. i would be willing to shoot to take control of these areas by force.

there's two more videos at the end of this, updates for the bathroom.

   

i didn't forget the corinthian columns.

corinthian columns are bourgeois.

i just did a second run in the bathroom with the electric spin scrubber steam mop and it really has made a gigantic difference.

i was intending on cleaning up the first two rooms and organizing in the front before i settled in for the shower but that no longer makes sense given the extended detour waterproofing the front, which i'm confident is mostly done. i should do the work with the electric saw next, so i can vacuum before i put the carpet down. i did design it so that there's a sawdust collection area, but it just doesn't make sense to put the carpet in first. i have several shelves to cut in the kitchen and two very big ones to cut in the bedroom. i'm not totally confident that the ones in the bedroom are going to hold. i may need to use some kind of poles. greek columns. should i make them dorian or ionian? send me an email.

i also have a lot of the structural finishing touches in the kitchen either in place or on order. i wanted to set up magnetic hooks for hanging pots and pans on a part of the ceiling that comes down and opens up in a vertical face but the magnetic knife holders i bought are too weak. that makes sense, in hindsight. you need to be able to remove the knife from the magnetic strip without using a crane. don't visualize that. don't visualize a young arnold coming in and helping you pull the knife off. or jackie chan kicking the knife off and catching it. you have better things to do with your brain than this.

one solution would be to glue pieces of steel to the wall instead and i will probably end up doing that, just not there. it might make more sense to use the hooks to guide ethernet or usb cables around the apartment. i will find something to do with these things, i always do.

i just bought some adhesive pegs instead. they're rated for 44 kg; i need around 5 each, max. i also bought some rotating hangers for spatulas and other kitchen devices i can hang, which will conserve some space.

i can't remember if i posted about amazon haul, which is the amazon service where you buy items cheap from asia, as though items for sale directly by amazon for higher price weren't made in asia. amazon is just letting you cut out the middle man, who is the most egregious actor. the slave is the victim, and the chinese capitalist is a monster, but the american go between that marks it up is even worse. it's not like i have a choice to buy these things from domestic manufacturers anymore; as it is, it's the american intermediate i want to avoid paying. i wish i could pay the guy that made the thing a fair wage instead of paying the importer, and paying the tariff rates on top of it.

so, i don't have an ethical issue with this or, at least, i don't have an ethical issue that has a solution. i'm going to buy items made in china, anyways. the question is whether i can get around the middle man or not, and i would pick avoiding the middleman as more ethical and not less ethical.

what i have to say about these cheap items, which are mostly small items you could make yourself with a 3d printer, if you could find one worth buying for less than $10,000, is that you get what you pay for, sometimes. sometimes you get a good deal, and i've got a few. sometimes you get something that is $1.50 for a reason.

for example, i bought a towel holder for like $2.00 or something. it's two plastic hooks and a plastic bar that constantly fell out....until i glued it together. now it's great.

i bought a universal jar opener that worked on the jalapeno jars, which are small, but flat out broke on the much larger pickle jar. it's easy to put back together. i'm not sure i can glue it without damaging the cogs.

however, i posted about the shelves i had to glue together, which i bought on sale at normal amazon. i've bought other items for sale on normal amazon at bafflingly low prices. some of the haul items - the scissors for example - have been good products for a very low price. it's probably worth guessing on a few sketchy things if you get a large order and are willing and capable when it comes to fixing things.

right now, i'm waiting for the floor to dry. when that's done, i'm going to pint over some baseboards, and then take some pictures of the laundry and washroom for the coffee table book, because i didn't do that. then i'm going to cut some shelves for the kitchen and hope the concrete is dry by the time i'm done. if it is, i could conceivably get the insulation in and the cardboard ceiling up by the end of the day, which is waiting for an aluminum layer. i should then be able to move the remaining tables and potentially the rainbow carpet into the garage, which will let me close the window and install the heater.

i'm going to aim for 15 degrees in there. it's on the other side of a properly insulated door but it's sealed and partially insulated. i think i can do that so long as it doesn't get to -30 overnight, in which case it might dip a little. 

i have lights and a stereo system to install in there as well.

the last thing to set up in the garage will be the bike rack, after i get the couch out, and i'm not sure which side i want it on yet. i'll decide after i get the carpet in.

once the tables are out of the front entrance, i can clean the floors in there and get the remaining tables and shelves set up, get the shape of the front entrance finalized and start to get the studio set up.

the kitchen won't be done for a while so the video update for room 3 has an eta of early spring at this point. the reason is that i have some extra appliances coming, maybe. i am probably not going to get a dishwasher, but i could get a cappuccino maker. i won't be able to do that until i get the $4000 transferred to my rdsp.

i consequently am making progress and i am still aiming towards getting in the shower and then shifting to typing but the list of things to do before i shift direction has gotten a little longer. when the weather does shift, i will be shifting to the bedroom and the studio; i always do, that's predictable. i don't like the cold weather, so i'm hoping i can maintain a moderate temperature in the garage and don't have to actually go outside much.

it is possible that i could start buying items for the garage. i probably don't need a fridge in there but you get the idea.

it's starting to look like we're going to need to call a general sit down strike in canada to address the government's vicious attacks on labour rights.

these proposals are blatantly unconstitutional and should be ignored by all. they are illegal proposals; they have no legal force.

when a government abandons the rule of law, it's citizens must abandon the pretense of civility and shut the economy down until it relents. 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/section-107-labour-code-hajdu-right-to-strike-9.7350619

i think it looks better the way it is than it would if somebody went in there and made it look mowed over and chopped down and fake, like some bourgeois golf course or something.

landscaping is almost always hideously ugly. things tend to look better when you let the weeds grow in and the ecosystem thrive.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/town-residents-demand-action-over-060605130.html

ok, i got the front door waterproofed. i'll need to do a second concrete run a little later tonight, but that's the last time i should have to go outside for the foreseeable future, meaning i should be able to completely lock this place down and lock these losers out.

the next thing to do is spend some time in the shower - a lot of time in the shower.

during the 00s, i had to either go to very small venues or to house shows to get interesting music (in ottawa) because the standard venues would only book garbage. there were better concerts happening at the legion than there were at the local club. the city hired better djs to spin at the beach than the nightclubs did to spin at the bars.

why don't i do it myself?

because i'm a contradiction. i'm complaining that the music scene sucks (which is not the same thing as arguing that there are't any good albums being released), but i have a large, sprawling discography that i couldn't possibly perform live in any way other than pressing play on a playlist. in theory, i should benefit from the shift to personalized streaming, except that i'm violently opposed to reducing my art to content to act as a medium for ads. 

i've been trying to find a drummer that i can work with for years and have mostly given up, but i don't want to show up with a drum machine, because i think that's lame. i understand how to adjust, but i don't want to adjust, i want to go do something else.

you can stream my recorded music on the links on the side. i have some live music written that i'd like to perform for you (it's not the same as the music on the side), but i have to find some like-minded musicians that are willing to shut up and do what i tell them, first, and i haven't been able to do that. i can't do this alone; i'm not very good at meeting friends. i don't play well with others. i can be extremely mean and not very nice.

i want to post some suggestions as to what the young people can do to save their music scene, if they want to. i'm not convinced they want to, but here's how to do it if they do.

1. bring back house shows. by house shows, i don't mean house parties. i don't mean "block parties". i mean concerts in basements or backyards, where bands perform live music (they can be electronic bands) and guests pay a reasonable amount to get in, of which most goes to the band and some goes to the house. this is necessary to blunt the profit motive to rebuild the scene. the venues are either owned by large promoters (this is a big problem) or have huge rent bills to pay and can't gamble on art over profit. the only economically feasible starting point is the house show. prioritize creativity over marketability. don't overcharge. pay the artists. take a minimal cut and operate at cost. you're in this to save the scene, not to put your kids through college. if the venues start to realize that the house shows are cutting into their audiences because there's a market for better music, they'll adjust to it. further, it's ok to book multiple genres on the same bill and is even recommended. some of the best nights i've had start with a punk show in the evening and turn into in all night rave. a 12 hour party that starts with a good rock set and turns into a bumping techno party before shutting down with an ambient set when the sun comes up would be an awesome house show.

2. reclaim college radio and step away from internet streaming. your spotify playlist doesn't have an audience and isn't going to get one. it's not somewhere that a community of people can go to and listen to the same thing. you have to realize the value in people listening to the same stream and try to get control of the means of production in a way that can actually broadcast. you could in theory hook your spotify playlist up to an fm signal, and maybe that's how you do it, but you need a physical place on the dial. the internet isn't good enough and the whole industry is going to collapse if you don't realize that and take a step back from it.

3. stop selling commodities and start selling art. you're not a fashion designer. you're not doing marketing for the paperclip factory. this isn't a hustle to profit off a third party product. it's about the music, so make it about the music.

4. get rid of the moderators. let the shows be open spaces and stop trying to control the behaviour of concert goers (within legal bounds). if people are assholes, confront them on it, but don't police them over it. you will lose more concertgoers by moderating the space than you will attract by creating "safe spaces".

5. no open mic nights. they promote mediocrity and destroy the venue, turning it into a place where people go to get drunk, rather than a place where people go to interact with artists. they build the wrong kind of community space. 99% of people that show up to an open night could not get booked and should not get booked and should not be on a stage, anywhere. adopt filters. it's ok to tell somebody they're talentless and suck and should get a job at mcdonalds instead of pretending to be an artist.

6. no drugs in the house. at all. no smoking. no marijuana. some social drinking, maybe, not too much. and you have to be willing to enforce it - especially the pot. throw the potheads out and tell them why. tell them to go to the bar to get stoned, or to go smoke in the park and come back. the drugs make people stupid, dimwitted and uncreative. you're not hosting an opium den, you're hosting a venue. it's not about the drugs, it's about the music.

i think you'll find that if you build it then they will come, so long as you make it about the music, and make sure the music is good.

so, i mean, i'll keep an eye on it.

if it does flip back, maybe i'll start going out more again.

right now, i'm planning a future around staying in and focusing on my own reading and writing projects, by myself.

the culture might come back. i'm just pessimistic right now because it's not like it was before.

i went almost nowhere through most of the 00s, because i didn't like the kind of rock music that was popular at the time. that shifted around 2008 or so and all of a sudden there was more music that i liked showing up in more venues so i went out more. venues seemed more interested in booking more artistically interesting acts. i'm not going to pretend i fully understand why that shifted in the late 00s.

a part of it is no doubt just cyclical. i've posted before that i didn't like the music that was popular in the 80s or the 00s but did in the 90s and 10s. the 20s seem to be a rehash of the 00s, which i didn't like very much and thought of as a cultural lowpoint. on that level, it's not surprising that i'm bored with the events lists i'm seeing, and would rather stay in than go see some shitty 00s indie band or some boring folk music. i tend to like rock music that is more dissonant and dirty and experimental and abstract. that's not in style right now; what's in style is boring rolling stones style three chord rock bands with stupid vocals, which sucked in the 60s, and has sucked every time it has come back, since.....or pretentious twee-folk that is so goddamned boring that your grade 12 english teacher would like it (or might even be in the band). just like the 00s.

but it just seems different this time. it seems like something's broken and that there doesn't seem to be an appetite to fix it. it seems like people are happy with and want the status quo of low quality live music. that wasn't the case in the 80s or the 00s - people then were cognizant that the status quo sucked, whereas people today seem to have nostalgia for exactly the eras that i'm so heavily criticizing as low points.

i acknowledge i could sit down and sort through bandcamp links, and my own email lists, and it wouldn't take me long to find some records i like. further, i acknowledge that most of what i'd pull out would be pretty obscure. that's not the point i'm making.

the point i'm making is that from 2014-2020, it was relatively easy to find a show to go see on a friday night in detroit. now, half the venues i would have gone to are closed and the other half are booking things i have no interest in at all and that are broadly speaking largely aristically dead.

the algorithms have made it hard for creative or interesting music to get enough of an audience to get a venue to book them, and the shift in culture has made a lot of the venues disinterested in holding events. i would be less concerned if i saw new venues popping up, as the issue is easily resolvable, but i'm not. what it suggests is that there's a lack of interest amongst young people in underground culture as a gathering point, that young people would rather chat online than go to an underground concert, which is going to kill the industry. bands can't survive selling music. they need to perform to exist and if there's nowhere to perform they don't exist. it doesn't push things to the margins (what i'm pointing out is that there are no margins, that the margins are disappearing), it pushes them into the centre. it doesn't create heterogeneous, idiosyncratic art, it produces homogenization and commodification, because you can't exist at all unless you reflect a cliche, because nobody wants to organize anything anymore.

and what i'm ultimately pointing out is that what it means, for me, is that there's nowhere to go anymore, so i'd rather just stay in and read a book.

when even resident advisor thinks techno is dead, it indicates a crisis point.

this is like rolling stone writing a eulogy for rock music, which has already happened (correctly) more than once.

i think the future is in bands like son lux, who released a new album today. but they aren't young, they're my age. in fact, i hope i'm still able to be creative, myself. there aren't many innovative actors in today's music scene and it's because the media landscape discourages it. the video doesn't talk about the way that streaming sites like spotify place everything into extremely narrow demographics and then nail the listener to those demographics via aggressive personalization. once the marketing algorithm decides you listen to a specific subgenre, it will flood you with music that sounds exactly the same.

if we want to talk solutions, it should be in pushing back against the personalization. ai is going to intensify personalization, not break it. because you're just a money machine, in the end.

it's up to listeners to break this in the end. what's worrying me is that i don't see a lot of evidence that the market is unhappy with the status quo. that wasn't the case in the late 80s, when there was a real revolt against corporate radio and mtv.

the irony is that it's easier to revolt now than it was then. but i just don't think these kids want to revolt, i think these kids like the corporate commodification. i consequently think we're looking at a lengthy period of stagnation.

i've had a really boring, tedious week. i have a lot of work i have to get done in here before it gets cold, but i've been forced to spend the time scraping off acne and dead skin instead.

i do at least feel better now than i did last week, but it's been a lot of wasted time cleaning up the mess. if i get the chance to smash these idiots' brains in, they'd better fucking run, because it's going to be a brutally violent outcome if i catch them.

i just want to write this down while i'm thinking of it.

something that's different about this place and every other place i've lived in since bronson - which was from 2007-2011 - is that i have my books unpacked and on a shelf, here. i had a handful of the books out and on a shelf in the last basement i was in, and i had a part of the apartment put aside for building shelves in, but the basement turned out to have some weird water issues and i never got around to setting anything up in there. i intended to build shelves in the basement i was in from 2013-2018 but my focus was almost 100% on my discography at the time and i never got around to it.

the reality is that the culture on this continent has changed enough for the worse over the last 5 years that i'm not confident i'm going to find myself very interested in the nightlife in detroit or windsor. i've scanned. it's truly gone to shit. i've complained before about the ubiquity of folk music displacing more interesting genres that require higher levels of musicality, but the techno scene has also gotten horribly boring. something i'm learning about the young people via proxy is that they're incredibly shallow, because they live in a world where nothing exists except marketing demographics. the idea of creating something new or creative is just beyond them and from what i can see from sorting through shows, they even seem to inherently resist the idea of novelty on it's face. to the younger generation, everything is a cliche, because all they've ever known is a cliche. you can do rock music, but only if you're a novelty act. rock music was heading in that direction anyways, but the cliche-ification and memification of everything means electronic music also only exists as cliches, which means the concept of music is running up against a brick wall of commodification. i'm not even sure much of this is being grasped. i think sitting down and trying to explain this might result more in blank stares than any sort of creative spark. i see a kind of dead end of ultra-commodificaton in the near future (commodities are not art), which was about where we were in the late 80s, but the difference between gen z and gen x is that gen x realized this was bad and resisted it and gen z doesn't seem to understand why that would even be considered something to criticize. the fucking fuckers seem to have finally succeeded in completely brainwashing the kids. 

there's no underground left, post-pandemic. it's ok if things shut down. but nothing's replaced them except social media, which is not an underground in the same sense, it's just hyperlocalized cliques. all of this networking should be making it easier for people to find each other, but it's instead made it harder.

and, from what i can see, the venues are just confused that their marketing isn't working when they pump out cliches over tiktok and nobody reacts.

what we're going to need is raw unfiltered venues and it may require a generational shift, as young people seem to be afraid of the idea of this on it's face. who will protect them from getting offended? it's common sense to them that a venue should have a moderator and somebody to kick-ban anybody that doesn't fit in. you can't have a counter-culture, then. it's a contradiction.

so, we're going to have to endure a period of 50s style conservatism by a younger generation that just doesn't know how to think and just doesn't want to learn how, and i'm going to be too old (if i'm not already too old) to rebel in solidarity with whatever comes next. if the next generation rebels against their parents by ditching tiktok and twitter and reading books and essays and blogs, maybe they'll find me and enjoy what i have to say. if not, the future is probably quite bleak.

the art scene is always the first thing to fail in a culture that is embracing anti-intellectualism and entering a dark age. ai provides a glimmer of hope in clawing out of this, but it won't save us unless it breaks the ongoing commodification and marketization of everything through the social mediafication of everything by giving us more free time to think for ourselves.

what i'm getting at is that i'm less and less interested in going out to party and more and more interested in staying in to read and create, instead. that's ok. i was maybe partying a little too much in the late 10s, before the pandemic shut me down.

i have yet to recover from the pandemic. that's where i am in life. the restrictions and changes were so devastatingly harsh that i'm still struggling to climb out of the hole i was thrown into, to die.

the first couple of years of the 2020s weren't so bad for me in terms of productivity; i changed directions, certainly, but i got a lot of writing done from 2018-2022, even if not much of it has been pulled together, yet. the data is waiting to be compiled and will be in the end. since then, it's just grown in volume and complexity, but i still have time to finish it.

the last four years, since the house i was renting got bought by investors in early 2023, have been horribly unproductive because i've been struggling to exist rather than able to focus on working on anything of value. it's been utterly catastrophic, in sum - years of constantly wasting all of my time on boring and tedious shit. i think the place i'm in is stable, so long as i can block the smokers here, and so long as i can ultimately get the stalkers thrown in jail, and i don't want to move again. so i'm intending on returning to productivity as soon as i can finish installing the place, and hoping i can turn the installation process into something productive, itself.

the fact that i have my books out and accessible and cataloged again means i want to get back to the book project in addition to the journal project, which i got a start on when i was healing from my orchiectomy in 2021, but put on hold when i was concerned about my site getting hacked by what was almost certainly the same entity that ended up stalking me, and is still trying to take control of and take credit for my writing. i haven't touched the main book report project since i put it down to focus on the discography, in 2013.

what i've learned about myself and the way i work since is that i'm not a good multitasker because i'm very much a workaholic. i find that multitaskers tend to do many things poorly all at once, and that single tasking results in lower outputs but higher quality. it's consequently better for me to do revolving tasks than multitasks, or to restrict my multitasking to one major project at a time, and a series of minor things on the go.

i've tried to build schedules in the past, but i never stick to them because i constantly run over. i tend not to want to put something down.

i'm also anxious to return to musical productivity and am struggling with finding the pathway to it. i have worked on some music since, and have further incomplete projects, but i haven't released very much since 2018 because i've been focused on other things and unable to get anything done. 

the journal has to be the main focus because it has to be a linear movement. that's not negotiable. i can't pick up in 1996 or 2004 or 2013 or 2022. i've tried and it fails. i have to start in 1989 and move through sequentially, completing projects as they finish. it's the only way to get anything done.

but, that doesn't mean it has to be the only thing i'm doing.

the seven workstations i need to set up - and i had this idea previously, but there's more space for it in here - are as follows:

- the offline web interface, connecting everything together, in my bedroom

- the journal, which reads through the fiction shelf, and connects to the book web, in my bedroom

- the book web, where i read through the reference books on my shelf, and continue to build it out, in my bedroom

- the music web, where i'm doing reviews (starting with davis), in the listening room

- the recording studio, where i'm going to need to start again with inri000, recompile and then get back to rereleasing music, in the studio room

- the eating station, connected to the oversight committee, some blogging analysis of that, and the diet vlog, in the kitchen

- the video station, in the side entrance

the book web will work the same way as the music web. this isn't a new idea for me and i've already started on it.

so, for example, i started reading the rights of man, which was in response to edmund burke's attack on the french revolution, which sent me to richard price, which sent me to thomas hobbes. i stopped there. i was also reading malaterra because of the genealogy project.

the genealogy project is not something i'm actively interested in but it will come up when i get to 2000/2001 in the journal project. i will eventually re-read everything i studied in school (that i remember) for the journal project, and will try to redo as much of the genealogy as i can using better methods. i wasn't that concerned about sourcing and eventually realized that a lot of what i was doing wasn't grounded in fact. i wasn't aware of the genealogy industry when i started (i didn't understand why somebody would fake their ancestry, so i didn't see an incentive to bullshit, and it didn't cross my mind until i began to understand that people were selling dubious books to a middle class from peasantry backgrounds that wanted to climb ladders into the aristocracy. i also underestimated the reality of female promiscuity and had to deal with that firsthand before i understood it better. an official genealogy might not be real. the necessity to find clear sources is more apparent to me now than it was then, when i just pulled data down off websites without checking it or looking into it.)

i will not start again with hobbes, but with adam smith, because the theory of moral sentiments (lcc: AC7) is the first item on my shelf. i will read through each item on the shelf sequentially, and every text cited by that item, only returning back to the shelf when i've snaked my way through everything cited. it is likely that smith will cite locke, so i will likely put the smith down at some point to read some locke, and order it when i do. i may need to put the locke down to read some bacon. etc. i will eventually get back to the next item on the shelf when i finish reading through the smith. if i read through items already on the reference shelf, i can skip them when i get there. this work, along with everything else, will eventually get subsumed into the journal project (i didn't read smith for school, i got that book for $1 at a garage sale, but there's a big psychology text at bf and kant and hegel, which were read in a course on german idealism, near the top of the shelf, in the bs)

the revolving tasks will need to be:

- one journal author (starting with asimov)

- one discography project (starting with second class citizens)

- one book on the reference shelf (starting with adam smith)

- one artist in the music web (starting with miles davis)

i will be listening as i'm reading and updating the music web throughout.

the other stations will be mote sporadic, with each new project transferred to the offline station when it's finished.

the journal project, moving forward, is now the main project, not the discography project. that is to say that the discography, while the major end result, is now actually a subset of the journal, and will be formatted and presented in the end as a component of the journal. components in the discography cannot close until i get to them in the journal. in the case of music re-recorded in the 2010s (or upcoming projects yet to be finished in the 2020s or 2030s), it could be many years before the projects close.

this will let me work through my recording, my reviews, my reading and my writing without losing track of any one thing, which i have not been able to do since i rebooted the first time in 2013/2014.

in fact, i'm currently in the process of a second reboot and what's about to come up is going to be the start of a new narrative in 2027, meaning my narratives are not going to be in the following collections:

alter-reality segment:

1989-1996 - period 0 (journal period)

1996-2000 - period 1 (inri period) <--- i initially started here but want to start in 1989 now instead. basically done.

2000-2003 - period 2 (post-inri to bc trip) <---basically done

2003-2007 - period 3 (return to ottawa, the sarah period) <---i left off here. about 30% done. 

2007-2011 - period 4 (bronson) <---not done. many demos to complete. 10% done.

2011-2013 - period 5 (occupy period) <--- many ideas, not even demos. no studio. 0% done.

first reboot:

2013-2018 - period 6 (reconstruction period) <----highly productive, but mostly remastering and rebuilding. some demos. 0% done.

2018-2023 - period 7 (reorganizing period) <----mostly writing and compiling. i will need to address this the way i addressed period 1-3 in period 6, with a later reconstruction period. 

2023-2027 - period 8 (deadzone) <---completely unproductive, totally dead period. almost a total wash. will largely skip over in the end, except to compile a linear narrative through blog posts and vlog videos. no major products started that need to be finished.

current reality:

2027-2033? - period 9 (second reconstruction period) <----hope to completely finish and close periods 0-6 at least, with further ideas put aside for future completion.