Monday, April 19, 2021

i will read it.

just not yet.
i'm not into reading a 780 page budget right now. sorry.
if i had stopped and talked to them, i might have very well been told i was lying and then attacked and framed, anyways.

it's why i had to react.
this is just an illustration of why i chose not to stop as i was being chased down the street by some hooligans that worked for the local freshco, and why i'm filing a human rights case against them.
you're talking like there isn't a thousand years of jurisprudence to help figure out how to respond to scenarios where speech may be harmful. and, this is the problem - you asked a media critic to discuss a legal issue. and, we're asking corporations to play the role of the judicial system. because property - as always.


fwiw, the laws in canada are not very different than the judicial precedents in the united states. it's not precise, but it's not a bad approximation. there have been some embarrassing decisions, but that is true in the united states, as well. hate speech is broadly free speech in canada, so long as nobody is in imminent harm. we also have more or less the same constitutional protections. that said, i would personally like to see the laws liberalized substantially as they provide for the possibility of abuse of power.

in order to be prosecuted for hate speech in canada, the crown needs to show:

1) that the communication was public. so, private communication isn't covered.
2) that the communication is likely to lead to a "breach of the peace". which is a generalized concept of harm.

in order for somebody to get prosecuted under that law in canada for posting things to social media, they'd have to be a public leader of some sort. a facebook or twitter post is arguably even private communication, and if you can convince a judge that it's public communication, you'd have to convince them that the person has enough influence to actually generate a crowd.

about the only person in the country that is going to care much about somebody running their mouth off on social media is the prime minister.
shit.

you know, if i didn't know any better, i might think that biden's actions suggest he wants to run again in 2024. and, that's probably a good thing, even if he dies before then.

see, the idea of a one-term presidency - a lame duck presidency - is that it can go either way. you can either get a guy that is going to do what he always wanted to do, and fuck it because he's not facing reelecion, anyways. or you can get a guy that doesn't give a fuck because he's done anyways, and see you later guys...

but, biden seems concerned about re-election.

oddly.

which maybe brings up the actual point: he doesn't have a list of things he always wanted to do, because all he ever wanted to do was get elected.

i don't suspect this lasts long - he's going to figure it out one way or another, or somebody is going to figure it out for him. but, so long as he genuinely seems concerned about popular opinion, now's the time to get at him, somehow.

that window is likely minimal - i suspect he'll be golfing soon.
i need to get this point across, because it's not getting across.

i was born in 1981 - not 1991, not 2001. 1981. so, how old am i? who are some other people born in that year?

1) beyonce, and google images of her at the grammies to see that she's now an older lady
2) britney spears, who has looked older than her years for quite some time, now. i don't have wrinkles like that, thankfully.
3) paris hilton, who has aged relatively well, but is definitely not going to pass as a young person anymore
4) meghan markle, who has maybe aged better than all of them, but is definitely not going to be mistaken for a young person
5) natalie portman, who appears to be experiencing hair loss.
6) ivanka trump, who is actually the counter-example, here.
7) jessica alba
8) serena williams

these are women that are, without exception, entering or already in middle age - and that cannot pass as young people.

and, if you want to be silly and compare me to a dude, look up how old these guys look

1) justin timberlake
2) tom hiddleston. yes. i'm the same age as tom hiddleston.
3) casey neistat
4) devendra banhart
5) brandon flowers

and, you'll note i was born 13 days into 1981, so who was born in 1980?

- kim kardashian
- christina aguilera
- win butler
- tegan quin
- jessica simpson
- conor oberst

i'm trying to pick easily recognizable people. i'm not really a fan of any of these people. but, look at those people - or bring your existing preconceptions of them to your mind - and then look at me and put the proper references into place.

i wasn't born in the 90s. i was barely even born in the 80s.

so, congratulate me for looking young - thank you.

but, understand that i have the health requirements - and habits - of somebody that is a little older than i look, and not somebody that is literally half my age.
i don't know exactly who's doing this - if it's the local cops, csis, the cia or some combination of the bunch, but they seem to honestly think i'm up to something that i'm not up to at all.

i can only guess, but they seem to think i'm a russian spy of some sort.

like, i'm not joking. and, i think it's just utter incompetence that's driving it.
unfortunately, it doesn't want to read the backup drive on the ancient hard drive after a reboot. that's fine, i'll try again later.

the second disk i'm checking is the hard drive i was using up until last summer, when i decided it was hopelessly compromised, and i'd have to winlite the os to make the laptop usuable. i don't have any reason to think the situation has improved much, but i'm at the point that that's something i'll need to do. for now, what can i get off of it?

it's left how i found it - with a chkdsk that found the email box i was sorting through and the registry that kept corrupting. this was part of what made me convinced i was being attacked - it was, specifically, the registry that kept "corrupting", and usually when i'd left the house, or sometimes even when i was in the shower. i think it was even once when i was sleeping.

let me just back this all up first and then deal with winlting (or vliting it) later. i specifically need to completely wipe out anything related to any sort of remote access or domain access, as it seems like they were trying to slave the machine to an external domain by using remote access as a backdoor.

and, i need to be able to set it up so i can reinstall it quickly, as well.

while i want to get that laptop back online, i'm not at this point convinced that it'll be safe to do it.
yeah, i'm fading. but, somebody smoked a joint upstairs, too. am i losing hemoglobin or reacting to second-hand marijuana? or both?

i'm preparing for a disaster in my blood test this week.

for now, i need to clean up after it every time it happens and hope it pisses him off enough that he stops doing it.
you do know that when i do meet my end, it's going to be completely absurd and ridiculously ironic, right?

i'm prepared for that.

and, it might mean outliving everybody around me in order to do it.
if i end up dying from this - or even suffering serious health consequences from it - what kind of conclusions do you draw from that? what kind of investigation needs to be done?

- i went to the hospital because i was suicidal
- they didn't take me seriously and called the police to drag me out by force instead
- in the process, they rupture my spleen
- i file a complaint against the police, only to have them delete the video, apparently maliciously
- i then die from the injuries ten months later

it's so absurd, i'd love it - if i wasn't the victim of it.
no, really.

it's an answer that actually makes sense.

as i was getting dragged out of the hospital by the police (for "upsetting" people for being trans.), my spleen may have been crushed. since then, i've been dealing with falling ferritin levels because i'm slowly bleeding to death. and, now the fact that my shoulder hurts and it won't go away is a symptom of that.

how's that for retarded? huh?
if my spleen is in fact damaged, the only physical confrontation i can point to is when the police dragged me out of the hospital for refusing to leave after indicating i was suicidal, and not being taken seriously.

in neo-liberal canada, police injure you!

in neo-liberal canada, you go to hospital to get hurt!

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

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

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

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

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

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

i have a large amount of these drives to sort through, and this is the kind of thing i'll be doing for the next couple of days.
thankfully, i think i'm more bloated than gaining weight, which seems to be why iron pills produce (short term) weight gain - they kind of plug you up a little bit. it's starting to clear, and i'm seeing the bloat come down. 

but, that upper back pain around my shoulder won't go away, and googling "pain in left shoulder" on google brings up a burst spleen as a potential cause. ack. the scary thing is that this does add up. and, if my spleen is busted, i'm done for, right? the only positive thing i have to say about that is that i should be dead by now if that's it.

it's just something else to bring up at the next appointment. is there a test for that, or something?

i'm not having difficulties breathing, either. maybe it's just a little burst? a half-burst spleen? ugh.

i got to sorting through these files and the first drive is being annoying in throwing out a crc. i wrote this drive off some time ago, but can i get anything off of it? but, i'm doing something, at least.
ok, i think i'm awake. let's give this a shot.
today's post is inri030, and we pivot dramatically tomorrow as i move into grade 13 and start to pull things together better.

=====

this little sample collage went a long way over the years...in the end, it needed a home of it's own. 

the initial collage, from september 1997, is actually the first computer music experiment that i have. years of addiction to 'civilization 2' had me imagining soundscapes during events, and they began to arrange themselves in my mind, in patterns. if you were even alive in 1997, you might want to think back to the realities of technology: i had a dial-up internet connection, trivial access to software and little idea of what i was even looking for. when i finally did find a shareware copy of cool edit '96, i realized what i was looking for. at this time, what i had available to me was what windows came with, and what windows came with was the windows 95 sound recorder. 

it would be harder to find this executable nowadays than you might think, unless you have a windows 95 cd (or perhaps a set of windows 95 floppy disks). it was clearly not designed for sound art, but it did have a crude copy and paste operation. really, it had some potential, it just lacked a tactile gui. 

i'd like to pretend that the poor syncopation is some kind of artistic statement, but the truth is that it is a consequence of the interface. you could tell the program to loop or to slow or speed down samples, but you had to make a good guess as to where to paste it in - often with the aid of some napkin math. what i was able to get out of the program is perhaps wholly idiosyncratic, but i would not recommend it at all. not even in the conscientiously goofy retro sense. 

really. don't do this. i plead of you... 

once the background collage was completed, i initially intended to turn the track into a goofy electro-swing thing, with punk rock guitars, but i found the out from the computer to be noisy and the in from the 4-track to lack dynamics. so, sending the track to tape created too much noise and trying to record in over cool edit seemed to suck the life out of the guitars. i would later realize that this was gear specific: i was using a stock soundblaster from c. 1995 and a stock floor digital effects processor that needed to be warmed up by the tape. a version with vocals was recorded in january of 1998, but it was discarded in favour of the pure collage, which i decided worked well enough on it's own, in a quirky, yet subversive, kind of way. when i burned my first demo cd in june of 1998, i used the strict sample collage (shaped slightly for continuity). 

i was assigned an electronic music project in the winter semester of 1999 and intended to use this track, as it narrates the absurdity of a war situation (and even kind of sounds like the 30s). however, i couldn't hand in the first part of the collage because it was lifted directly out of the sample. in the initial context it didn't matter - it was entirely atmospheric, purely conceptual - but it was imperative that it be removed in the academic context and be replaced with something i could assign myself writing credits to. so, i took an isolated experiment with score writing off of the first demo and fused the tracks together, creating a fully original hybrid written/sample piece. this was done twice due to reasons that i don't fully remember, but partly to remove the glitchy cricket sounds in the background; in the end, the second version did not have the sample overlays that the first did, which are only available in the 'early warning' version. 

the track was remastered in 2013, along with the rest of the early material, but it didn't work out for any of it, in the end. at the end of 2014, i was able to recreate the originally intended version (with punk rock guitars) by taking advantage of a much newer soundcard, as well as noise reduction and digital mastering software. it was this version that was used in the reconstruction of my first record in january of 2016, but i again had to modify the lead-in; this time, i created an ambient sample collage to rise from the ashes of what i had to destroy. 

meanwhile, the initial sound card experiment had also been dramatically updated by the newer technology. the lead track was created on oct 26, 2016 to simply explore the idea of what merging the two completed components together would sound like. in the end, it seemed necessary to release this, in order to be comprehensive. 

the track is really more about mental journeys undertaken during long overnights of civ 2 than it is about anything explicitly anti-war, although the ideas intersect and the latter certainly evolved from the former. this is really actually a little bit of a window into what is going on in my own mind, as i'm conquering alien land masses at 3:30 on a wednesday morning. 

initially created in sept, 1997. remixed and reimagined repeatedly over 1998 and 1999. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. partially reclaimed dec 8, 2014. rebuilt and resequenced on jan 9, 2016 out of material that had been remastered over 2013-2016. reimagined again on oct 26, 2016 out of material that was created in jan, 2016, but not released (and finalized) until sept 13, 2017, in order to properly fit into sequence. as always, please use headphones. 

the album version of this track appears on my first record, inri (inri015): jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-3 

this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (1997, 1998, 1999, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017).

released july 1, 1999 

j - guitars, effects, bass, orchestral sequencing, windows 95 sound recorder, digital wave editing, sampling, production 

the rendered electronic orchestra includes piano, electric guitar, orchestra hit, pizzicato strings, violin, viola, cello, contrabass and synth pad.


i don't think that anybody wants to increase consumption taxes on online purchases, do they?

i mean, if you're going to tell me i can get a 15% discount by walking to the store, i'll gladly go for a walk, instead.

while i understand that taxing businesses is sometimes going to result in higher prices for consumers (it depends. it's not this monolithic thing, like conservatives would have you believe.), these taxes should really be made hidden, so as to allow the companies for flexibility in pricing. otherwise, online retailers will be forced into an uncompetitive status quo where they can't compete with brick and mortar stores because there's an extra tax added on to the digital purchase. is that intended?

erecting the "trudeau tax" and creating a distinct line item for it is also a great way to lose an election. just ask brian mulroney.

i'd rather see broader increases in corporate taxes than focusing on tech companies, but they currently take up a lot of the market and it's a step in the right direction. this may be political rather than economic, but i'll take it.

i'm happy to see them move away from the unworkable idea of a "wealth tax", as well, as the reason people like warren promoted it is was to allow for an escape mechanism. concrete and easy to calculate proposals like increases in corporate, income and property taxes are good enough - we don't need these weird, esoteric ideas like wealth taxes.

but, they should seriously reconsider whether they think it's a good idea to have a line item for the tax anywhere. just tax them at the profits stage.