ok.

so, i really was finishing that gear writeup, seriously. it's a lengthy post, clearly. but, it's necessary to rebuild the 98 machine, amongst other things.

that might actually be why my white blood cells were high...

yeah.

you could take your serum levels up over 65 by popping pill after pill, but that level is considered to be "saturated".

that is, that's the absolute upper range of normal c serum levels - any higher than that, and i'd be overclocking myself.

i got my vitamin c back and it's 65 umol/l - that's about 1.15 mg/dl, which is actually only on the moderate side.

it's a reminder that your body only absorbs so much c and discards the rest, which is the actual reason that trying to take it in large doses via any means other than injection isn't helpful, and just leads to kidney problems, instead.

i take about the maximum healthy amount possible and that's where i'm at...

you can have your opinions and that's whatever - i don't care.

but, there's going to people that are going to fight this. and the state needs to pick it's battles in what it considers a worthwhile use of it's resources.

vaccine certificates are a losing battle for the state that will be defeated by a constitutional challenge, and it should avoid wasting everybody's time with them.

"why did we do all of this, then?"

i dunno.

why did we do this? you tell me - i'm still trying to figure that out.

"was it all for nothing?"

apparently, yeah.

listen - if you don't want covid, then get vaccinated.

personally, i'm not expecting this disease to go away any time soon, and i want to catch a few variants and beat them when i'm young - so i'm more prepared to beat newer variants when i'm older.

if i can cross over into the states without being asked for proof of vaccination, i will.

and, if the canadian government wants to restrict my s. 6 rights by demanding i show proof of vaccination on the way home, i'll see them in court - and i'll win that case, because it's not ambiguous.

the pmo needs to drop the stupid bullshit, stop wasting everybody's time and just open the border without restrictions, immediately.

i'm a canadian citizen, and that gives me the right to leave and re-enter the country at will.

i take that seriously. and, some dead old people aren't a good reason to take that away from me.

listen - i don't care about people coming into the country in any way at all. make them dance the hokey pokey and turn themselves around - i don't care.

but. i have travel rights under s. 6 and i want to exercise them in being able to leave and come back, again. and, i'm getting frustrated and impatient with these continued restrictions on my rights to leave the country.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trudeau-international-visitors-restrictions-1.6056584

i ordered my blood tests for bone density.

a big part of the reason that they put menopausal women through hormone replacement therapy is to keep their serum estrogen levels high enough to prevent bone loss, as they can fall to almost zero after menopause. men have a normal range of up to 200 pmol/l, and that is enough for normal bone health. my worst test was 363, which is higher than any cismale could ever expect.

so, this idea that i'm losing bone density due to falling estrogen levels is...i'm not actually there yet. i'm probably not even close.

in fact, with calcium serum levels and serum estradiol levels as high as they are,  i should probably be gaining bone density - if moderately.

if i was losing bone density right now, my alp would be high, and it wasn't.

it's probably from smoking and malnutrition, and it's probably longstanding.

i still need to address it aggressively, though - including total cold turkey until i get it back over -1. 

alright, let's hope that stays put until i'm finished doing what i'm doing, at least.

what else could be wrong?

i think the drives are fine, but i'm a little iffy on the processor.

and, i vaguely recall needing to reinstall cubase after the script, due to resetting some system files...

well, i recently bought some new lithium batteries, so why not try a brand new one?

no, that didn't do it...

the only thing that ever seems to work with this thing is flashing the bios, and i wish i understood why, exactly.

i messed around with the page file and environment variables, and i'm running a defrag.

i know these are old timey concerns, but it seems like it's either that all of the ram is bad or none of the ram is.

it was stable with 3 gb for quite a while...

yeah, i'm far less convinced that the issue with this thing is related to ram...

i got the board to read all 4 gb, and i'm going to stick with that for a bit. instead, i've unplugged the card reader, because i don't use it in that device anyways.

nobody knows how or why these kids died, or how many years worth of dead kids the mound represents, or really anything, and it's sort of a part of the problem. a good guess is that they probably died of malnutrition, and it's probably decades worth of dead kids, but the reasoning underlying it isn't understood. and, you have to understand that child mortality was a lot higher back then...

i'm not making excuses, it could very well be the worst thing imaginable, i'm just pointing out that you can't jump to the worst conclusions in the absence of any evidence at all.

it would be very useful if the church would share any information it has to set the record straight, if it can - because there's people out there that seem to think that the bishops mowed them down in cold blood with ak47s, or something.

you know, it's really counter-productive if you want to raise awareness around who this guy was and the system he set up.

i'm not as opposed to these things as a lot of other people are, and i don't really care if you find that upsetting. there's a kind of middle point here that i think is the right answer, in the sense that i'm a strong advocate of public education, and i recognize that these cultures....these people believed a lot of things that were not true, and there was a public responsibility to teach them that the things they believed were incorrect. the way it was done was pretty terrible, and how the church of all institutions ended up in charge of it is beyond me, but the premise of public education is sound. and, you can yell and scream at me if you want, but i don't give a fuck.

and, this isn't something that's going to go away - there's always going to be ignorant people, they're always going to congregate in rural or semi-nomadic societies and there's always going to be a need to send them to school. we can't give up on that ideal - we'll be plunging ourselves back into the dark ages. we just need to be more humane about the way we do it, and actually live up to the ideals we're trying to espouse.

again: i don't know who's bright idea it was to put the church in charge of this, but....

yes - if the issue were put up to a vote, and i happened to be around, i'd vote to move the statue into a museum. it's not appropriate to have a statue of this guy much of anywhere.

but, if we forget who this guy is, and what he promoted, and the way he did it, it's just going to happen again. so, we want to preserve these kinds of things in backrooms, and not destroy them.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/statue-of-egerton-ryerson-brought-down-1.6055676

yeah, it seems better after doing that. good. 

it sucks not having confidence in your hardware, but i haven't been able to demonstrate that there's anything wrong with any of it, either.

i'm trying to remember if i had this problem before and i don't remember.

however, i vaguely recall figuring this out a while back. i backed up my appdata directory so i copied it back over and the load process was instantly different.

i don't need every single plugin to load every time i launch, what i need is to figure out if i've got a ram issue or not, and there's no easy way to do that....

the immediate concern is just making sure that the plugins i recently downloaded actually launch. so let's hope i can get through that without it freezing further, then try to bring some more ram back in.

of course, the idiot cops seem to think i'm hiding secret messages from the kremlin somewhere, and they seem to keep fucking with my bios, so i might need to get in the habit of clearing my cmos whenever i come in from somewhere in order to get the machine to run properly.

*sigh*.

i've swapped the ram around and it keeps halting, so i'm going to have to shut everything off in cubase to start, then bring it all in one by one.

naw, it crashed with 2 in it, too...

i know i have a questionable stick, but i lost track of which one it was.

so, let's try with 1.

of course, i could also have some unstable plugins, right.

so, i launched cubase to check to see if the eax plugin was loading, and it froze with the third stick in.

i took it out, and it booted.

here's what i don't know right now - is the stick bad, is the board funny or is cubase having difficulty with this hybrid ram channel thing? what i mean is this - if i have two sticks in, it loads them together and if i have four sticks in it loads them in parallel. but, when i put three sticks in, it does this weird in between thing.

i have to experiment with it, but i want to make sure everything is loading first.

in the end, if i decide that one of the sticks is bad, i might have to choose between 2 and 4 gb if i want the machine to run. but, i should be able to get 2x1 gb of ram relatively cheaply nowadays, right?

so, like everything else, the next process is going to be a little bit convoluted.

i want to finish my train of thought regarding all of the extra plugins before i do a narration of the last week of events. so, let me rewind to about ten days ago...

what year is it?

fuck.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/us-sells-off-iranian-crude-oil-seized-off-77997885

there have been these periodic reports of mysterious tankers showing up in the gulf from iraq or kurdistan for years, and it seems like what's been going on since at least 2003 is that the oil is being sent to the united states under the radar.

then, america claims it's a net producer, supposedly due to fracking. right.

when trump said they should have stolen the oil, maybe he missed the obvious - maybe they did. and, maybe they still are...

so, let me get this straight.

iran is shipping oil to venezuela. 

????

let's remember a few things.

1) venezuela is a major oil producer.

2) venezuela's primary customer is the united states.

3) that fact gives the united states tremendous influence in venezuela, regardless of the propaganda otherwise.

4) iran is supposed to be under a fuel blockade.

...and...

5) joe biden was one of the insider democrats that was always suspected of having something to do with iran-contra (and, i suspect there was something like that going on during the obama years, too)

so, while i understand that the narrative here is inevitably going to be about iran defying american hegemony in sending a ship across the ocean, and i even concede that there are reasons to look at it as an act of defiance, the premise of iran risking a nuclear war to send oil to venezuela (of all places) is beyond dubious to the point that it needs to be discarded.

my best guess is that this oil is destined for houston, via venezuela as a stopover.

the next sequence in the discography is a series of compilations that put the various ideas worked out over period 2 (and, in some cases, period 1 & 2) together in a series of different thematic releases. while there's a lot of overlap, these are in some ways the more finished products (excluding the actual records - inri, inriched, inridiculous, deny everything, jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj and jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj^2, as well as the upcoming ftaa and trivial group 2xlp) than the singles as most people are going to prefer to listen to something with a varied tracklisting than a single track reworked a million different ways. i mean, i grew up listening to these abstract nin discs that took a single song and ripped it apart for an hour, and while i never get to those levels of abstraction that's where my head is at for a lot of these extended singles, but i realize that's an obscure thing and an acquired taste. you'd probably rather listen to something like an orchestral works, right? and, so i've constructed this sequence of alternate lps that take each of the official lps to these different places. call them remix lps, then, but you've never heard remix lps quite like this, trust me.

first up is the ry30 + primitive electronics disc (inri066: electronic pieces in a primitive style, with apologies to william orbit) that explores my first electronic compositions from a no-guitar, no-bass, no-vocal perspective, and sort of reclaims them as electronic music works. i made an attempt to avoid the pieces that were composed of steady loops, in favour of the pieces with more detailed programming. in the process, i'm showcasing what you can do with a serious drum machine, if you take the time to actually use it.

this is probably the last specifically delineated inri release (i could not imaging resurrecting the moniker at this point), so it is fitting that it is inri066.

=========

when i sat down to complete my discography in 2013, one of the ideas that immediately jumped out was to try and reinterpret some of the inri tracks from the late 1990s as modern pieces. as i believed that my source tapes were unusable at the time (which i eventually realized was not the case - see inri024), the conditions for this being a workable project would need to be the existence of the original drum tracks, along with the existence of some midi files. 

i was gifted my ry30 in the summer of 1997 to compensate for the loss of my drum kit and studio space, but i did not have any recording gear again until christmas. so, i spent the fall programming the drum machine and teaching myself the basics of sequencing and sound design, using the primitive tools i had available to me. by the time i got my four track, as well as my jx-8p, the ry30 was full, and re-recording my first songs was just a matter of transferring the completed material from the electronic equipment to tape. so, i initially considered making a companion ep to inrisampled that would document my time spent programming the ry30 along with my time spent learning how to manipulate sound. the difference between the drum tracks at this stage and the initial collage experiments, however, is that the drum tracks were not complete songs. so, this was abandoned due to the product being a little dry. but, i still wanted to make an ep around the ry30, perhaps by orchestrating the existing companion midi tracks. 

this idea then quickly merged with what would become thru (inri070) and eventually discarded itself within itself when it was realized that the existing midi files for the 90s material were too sparse to really utilize, especially in comparison to the midi files from the early 00s. thru was deleted and then resuscitated over the course of 2014 and 2015, eventually releasing in mid 2015 as a 2001-2003 project, leaving the 90s material in the dustbin of my own history. 

it was in june, 2015 that i realized that the source tapes were usable after all, and cycled back around to the beginning of the reconstruction in order to complete the relevant tracks as instrumental pieces. this idea kind of recreated itself in the nature of the source tapes, as i had bounced all of the electronics together into the same channel as a mixing step, back in the 90s. so, i found myself with these ready-to-publish electronic tracks right off the tape that incorporated a combination of the ry30 tracks, jx-8p parts, soundblaster programs, zoom 1010 noises and cool edit experiments. all they really needed was a little attention on the mastering. 

i flipped this over, in the end: what each of these tracks are is their final album mixes, with the guitar and bass parts deleted (unless the bass was done on a synthesizer). so, there was some post-production added over 2015 in the form of updated soundfonts, digital mastering and digital effects processing. but, these are really flourishes on the existing tracks. 

it was at the end of dec, 2015 that further similar electronics-only ry30-centric remixes were creating for some later songs, as well, thereby filling out the disc and closing the project. 

i sold my ry30 in may, 2003 to raise money to go to british columbia. my logic was that i'd really maximized what i was going to get out of it, and that i'd already discarded it, anyways: by that time, i'd been writing drum parts in the scorewriter for a few years already, and had barely touched the ry30 in a long time. but, i regret that decision, in hindsight. and, i expect to pick up another one, one day. 

originally written, programmed and recorded from 1996-2002. reclaimed & remixed from june to december of 2015. initial completion date was december 31, 2015. disc finally released, closed and finalized on nov 26, 2017. lp015. as always, please use headphones. 

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 (1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017). 

released april 22, 2003 

j - drum & other programming, orchestral & other sequencing, guitar effects, digital effects processing, digital wave editing, synthesizers, loops, vocal noises & relics, sampling, sound design, production 

the various rendered electronic orchestras include organ, sitar, bells, synthesizer effects, tuba, saxophone, flute, clarinet, orchestra hit, piano, violin, viola, cello, contrabass and various full string sections.