may 1, 2023
Three minutes into his remarks to the Saturday night festivities, Biden declared, “Journalism is not a crime.” The formulation seemed a perverse restatement of a declaration issued by a half dozen major world newspapers, including the New York Times, last December, when they called on the Biden administration to drop charges against Assange because “publishing is not a crime.”
this is how the sitting centre-left in countries like the united states and canada react to every criticism, via deflection.
7:26
coming up on six weeks, the observation of substance about the hair is that, while it is still very short, it is just transitioning out of the "buzz cut" mode and into the "short hair cut" mode. i can now run my hands over my hair and discern that i have hair, rather than stubble. this will be one of the hardest parts of this process, but i am hoping it quickly develops shape and shifts out of this stage relatively rapidly.
9:04
this is obviously a non-starter and really just simple stupidity, at this point.
may 5, 2023ford needs to pull his thick head out of his fat ass and give it a good shake. this would be a tremendous step backwards that would harm every aspect of the economy and every component of the environment.
while he campaigned on some blatant idiocy, and he's certainly made some bad choices that i don't like, ford has largely avoided being outright dumb, to this point. this would be a dive head-first into the shallow end.
bill davis had a good idea: ontario should build more hydro plants.
11:17
i wrote and recorded this song when i was 18, in 1999.
this isn't the bill i'm opposed to; it's the bill ordering google to pay subsidies to journalists that is unacceptable.
as with the rest of my 90s material, the nature of the source required me to remix it in such a way that you need sufficient volume to get back the headroom and should only listen to it through headphones.
it has remained oddly relevant to my existence, for many years.
23:51
may 2, 2023
my grandmother thinks gordon lightfoot was lame.
7:24
ms. atwood owes her career to cancon and she's long been bitter about it.
i'm both old enough to remember cancon on the radio and tv and young enough to know how youtube works and if it's anything like the radio and tv implementation, it will be left up to the individual channels to determine how to implement the rules. for small channels, it should be largely an irrelevancy; my channel, for example, is 100% canadian content. how larger channels react will be up to them to ascertain.
there was a time in the early 90s when the radio station in ottawa played the same bryan adams song every hour, and reminded everybody it was cancon when they did. a little after that, what muchmusic would do is play the canadian entries in the top 40 lists, which wasn't a terrible thing as it meant you could tune in and reliably catch a tea party or i mother earth video and in fact mostly instead of american rap music, which sold well but got very little exposure in mainstream media because it's what got systematically pushed out as "uncanadian" due to cancon.
canadian musicians have tended to hold their own and don't need the extra promotion, but the cancon system is a substantive part of the reason that canada used to have a discernible indie rock scene until the mid 00s, when the harper government started cutting arts endowments. if you don't understand why your favourite underground canadian band disappeared c. 2010, it's probably because the government took away their art grant, which is what allowed them to actually exist in the face of low sales. a better criticism is that pushing cancon without facilitating arts funding is like watering a pile of dirt and getting confused when nothing grows (or, literally, "leaving it to the market"). this system will create more bryan adamses (or shawn mendeses), but it won't create the conditions that allowed for a godspeed you black emperor or even a broken social scene, which was the government arts funding brought in during the 90s and not the legalistic market manipulation of the 70s.
some radio stations reacted by playing nothing but canadian music from 2:00-6:00 am. teenagers alive in the 90s may also have notice that leftfield video classics like our lady peace's hope and bruce cockburn's if i had a rocket launcher tended to get played a lot during off hours. i have to admit that i actually enjoyed that.
comedy channels should also have little difficulty finding canadian content. we're very, very good at being funny.
there are some channels that cover ideas that are global or technical in scope and that may legitimately find this frustrating. a technology channel may find itself posting reruns of documentaries on corel draw or blackberry, and it may have the actual effect of making canada look inadequate. however, for most "content creators" that exist in canada, fulfilling minimal canadian content requirements of 5-10% is not an onerous regulation and will largely reduce simply to actually existing in the world around them.
yeah, they played this on muchmusic in the middle of night all of the time. for years.
you would only see this late at night after it's initial run, too, but it hung in rotation for years. it's a very weird song. it's a shame that they lost their weirdness.
7:51
may 3, 2023
well, somebody managed to get a drone very close to the kremlin before it got shot down.
it doesn't make sense for ukraine to waste a drone on a reconnaissance mission to the kremlin. i recently saw an interview with the perpetually completely fucking wrong michael ignatieff, where he argued that ukraine and nato have different goals because ukraine wants to win and nato wants the conflict to drag out. why does nato want the conflict to drag out, iggy? the reason is that washington wants boots on the ground in moscow and thinks russia will weaken itself enough in a drawn out conflict to allow for a new operation barbarossa to be successful, to finish the job that hitler failed at. all hail the fourth reich of america.
he was right that they're seeing past each other, but he missed the point, as he always does. ukraine wants a return to the status quo; washington wants a new world order, where russia is broken up like the soviet union was and russia proper is reduced to a weak client state of the western order. that's the point, and it's what they want to do solely because they think that they can.
there is some possibility that the russians staged the attack as a false flag and will use it as an excuse to escalate, but the pentagon appears to be correct in pointing out that, notwithstanding russian strategic objectives to avoid damaging infrastructure it wants to take in tact, the russians are not advancing because they can't. that narrative is consequently flawed. the pentagon is the most vicious war-making machine that the world has ever known and it will go into kill mode if it smells blood, simply because it can.
what we're witnessing is core nato - the uk and the usa - testing russian defenses. that doesn't mean they'll strike tomorrow, but it means that they'd like to and are trying to ascertain whether or not they actually can.
16:14
may 4, 2023
the problem with "bidenism" is that it isn't going to actually work.
the article is characterizing the policy as an embrace of the hard left, but all that really demonstrates is the absence of a political spectrum in the united states, where both of the major parties exist on the extreme right. in most places in the world, tax cuts with the intent to incentivize growth would be considered a right-wing and free-market economic policy, not some kind of socialism. in fact, that policy would be called "reaganism" in most places that wouldn't call it "thatcherism", instead.
i'm not sure what the author proposes the difference between what he calls "bidenism" and what people recognize as "reganism" actually is, as everything he attributes to "bidenism" is what most people would attribute to reaganism.
Milton Friedman stated, "Reaganomics had four simple principles: Lower marginal tax rates, less regulation, restrained government spending, noninflationary monetary policy."
that is exactly what the inflation reduction act is; biden's climate policy is to lower taxes on companies (instead of regulating them) that might create more sustainable products, in the hopes that they will voluntarily create growth and the subsequent benefits will trickle down. this is the policy that exists in opposition to centralized government spending, and has been chosen to prevent increases in government spending.
that is the fatal flaw in this so-called bidenism, it is trying to let the market deal with something that needs to be fixed by government, or it will never get fixed at all. biden's rhetoric about government building things is nice to hear, but it is not consistent with his policy of tax cuts to try to convince private companies to build them for him. those tax cuts are not going to fundamentally change anything. the market is the problem, it's not the solution.
in fact, the substantive component of the "inflation reduction act" was subsidizes to oil and coal, and that is the part of the act that will have a substantive impact. it should increase american domestic oil production, but it should not have an effect on much of anything else. in five years, nobody is even going to remember that these tax cuts were legislated at all and we'll still have all of the same problems and discourses we have in front us, right now. i would expect no substantive impact of the legislation on american production of "green manufacturing" at all. it's a non-solution.
i would support massive government spending on carbon transition, which wouldn't even be socialism, but would at least be something a socialist government would do. alas, no government wants to do it.
2:56
i bought a new tube for my detroit bike (a 24" big kids mountain bike) a few weeks ago; i actually forgot that there was a hole in the tire, so it didn't take long to explode. that bicycle was something like $35, in early 2019 (i'd have to look it up). i only got one year out of it, but it was still a good buy. new tires are going to cost me $30 each, and it's got rust on it. i don't want to throw it out, but if it's going to cost me $60 to replace the tires on a slightly rusty bike, can i just get a new bicycle?
the answer, right now, is "no". there were some options a few weeks ago, and there might be some options in a few more weeks, but i cannot find something for sale in windsor for less than $60 that i would purchase, right now.
how much is a new bicycle?
the answer is less than i thought, and enough that i'm thinking about it because i'd prefer to have a 26" bike as my backup bike.
my windsor bike (a 26" hybrid) has been sitting soaked in motor oil for months. this bike also has a tire with a hole in it, but i have a spare time for it. rather, i think the motor oil damaged the gear shifting. i keep intending to buy wd-40 and clean it, but i haven't gotten around to it. the wd-40 was recently ordered from amazon, but is on backorder. yes, wd-40 is on backorder at amazon. it should be here soonish, and then i'll need to clean it first and see if i can screw it back together afterwards. it was not clear if the bracket was broken or just damaged; i might be able to screw it back together, if i get the right tool, but i have to thoroughly clean it first. this is a project that i might have spent the winter doing, but didn't and that isn't really my idea of a good time, regardless. again, i don't want to throw it out; i'm going to fix it. it could be a slow project.
the hybrid has been falling apart for a while, anyways, and if i'm going to take the time to fix it, it's going to need a lot of work. i might need to change out a lot of the hardware. i bought new brakes recently, but they don't work as well as i'd hoped. a better date for reassembly is next spring.
how much is a new hybrid?
it won't be as nice as the one i have now, but the one i have now is not rideable and won't be for a long time. the answer is, again, not as much as i thought.
so, i think it's time to buy some new bicycles.
7:30
after thinking about the amount of effort and cost that it's going to take to fix my broken hybrid bicycle, i decided to purchase a new one:
i am not purchasing a new bicycle instead of fixing my existing bicycle, but i have to come to terms with the fact that my broken bicycle has a substantive amount of problems and it's going to take a lot of effort to fix all of them. i kept intending to buy some wd-40 when i was out as a first step, but then i never did. it's on backorder at amazon, but it's in the mail, at least.
the fact is that i've been riding that bicycle since 2012 and it was just time to get a new one.
now, somebody is going to criticize me for replacing my fancy italian bicycle with a walmart bicycle, but the reality is that the walmart bicycle has exactly the same shimano components (maybe not exactly but very close to it) and exactly the same architecture as the fancy italian bicycle. the only discernible difference is that the walmart bicycle has a shimano twist shifter, whereas the fancy bicycle has a regular shimano gear shifter. they're otherwise completely identical bicycles, up to minor variations in frame design.
is that because my fancy italian bicycle is less fancy than i thought, or is it because this walmart bicycle is of unusual build quality? i think it's neither; i think we need to acknowledge that the manufacturing is so standard, and that shimano has such a monopoly on bike parts, that this idea of "build quality" has become a canard.
macs are changing their processors as of late, but there was a time when macs where literally made in the dell factory and the only difference was the brand name. macs were just dells with different corporate logos on them, and a different operating system on them...unless you bought a dell running linux.
is the difference between a $300 walmart bike and $1000 road bike nowadays really just the corporate logos? in some cases, it might be.
that said, the $3000 bicycle is going to be lighter and faster, so the question of whether you're wasting money buying into the system or not is dependent on how much you're buying into it. if you're walking into the specialty shop and buying the entry model, you're probably wasting your money, as you're probably getting exactly the same thing you'd get at walmart, nowadays. that might not have been true 10 years ago, but the supply lines seem to have converged.
the bike will come half assembled, and i will need to finish assembly myself.
11:41
may 5, 2023
for those following the trudeau foundation drama from a distance, it is widely understood that alexandre trudeau's father was a russian diplomat, alexander yakovlev. that is the reason he looks so suspiciously russian. it is also widely understood that justin trudeau was passed over by his father because he knew he wasn't his, although the parentage is less widely known (my theory is that justin trudeau is likely the son of the aga khan, and the aga khan knows it). pierre seems to have thought michel was his, but that is also up to interpretation.
you'd have to ask margaret.
0:23
i just bought a restored 1995 aluminum alloy mongoose switchback for $85 canadian. the bike is 26" but seems a little small, so i'm going to need to make some adjustments. this is intended to be my backup bike, but it is likely going to be the main bike for a while because i'm deciding to turn one of the hybrids into a stationary bike, so i can stay in shape in the winter and haven't decided which one yet. i want to clean the fancy italian bike up first and then take a look at them and determine what is better suited for each task. i'm having some buyer's remorse about the walmart bicycle, but my expectations for bicycles are also a lot lower than a pro rider. i'm not racing, and i'm not hiking. i ride for transportation and i ride for health reasons, but i mostly ride for fun. the consensus is that you can work with some of these walmart frames if you swap a few parts out, but i'm not racing or hiking, so how relevant is that to me? i'm never going to ride down a mountain, and i'm not going to sprint at 60 km/hr. i will be riding 100 km at a time at the largest extent, exceptions notwithstanding, and at an average speed of about 20-30 km/hr.
it seems obvious that i should use the italian frame for the stationary because it's already damaged, but that logic might be backwards. i need to clean the frame up and evaluate it first. the walmart bike might end up as stationary.
the switchback came with original 1995 tires that say mongoose on them and that seem fine but may need replacing relatively soon. it also came with ancient cantilever brakes and what i think are the original shimano shifters. i feel differently about replacing tires on a vintage mongoose than tires on my $35 huffy, which was bought for kicking around in detroit and is worth precisely nothing.
this mongoose switchback was built in the period between the time that bmx sold it and the time that mongoose was bought by pacifica, so it's not a classic bmx mongoose but is not what you'd call a big box store bicycle, either. the switchback started in 1988, which was after mongoose was sold, so there are no classic switchbacks. this is nonetheless a bike that retailed for $300 in 1995, which would be about $600 in today's dollars. you'd never sell it for that today, though.
we'll see what needs to be done with it, but it's a better backup, at the least. most people would consider it to be a hybrid, nowadays, and i'll no doubt use it that way, as a backup.
i may buy one more. i'm still thinking about it.
19:14
may 6, 2023
this is a disturbingly low level of discourse.
as a voter, i'm turned off by the juvenility and find the spectacle to be outright boring. if it continues in this manner, it may have the effect of suppressing turnout, which usually helps the conservatives, although that may be flipped in canada, nowadays.
observers should take note that this is the kind of political discourse that happens when democracy is on the brink of collapse because the political spectrum doesn't offer a real choice. establishment parties are forced to resort to name calling instead of discussing issues because they have no discernible political disagreements and are essentially the same, in every substantive way. polievre and trudeau even look similar. i mean, polievre might have shit for brains, but he's got nice hair, right? sound familiar? they're both airheads. polievre is trudeau's mini-me. this is the kind of setup where you see parties outside of the spectrum begin to overwhelm the establishment parties, as frustrated voters are forced to look elsewhere to find new ideas to fix problems that the consensus parties won't address.
as i said when i was a kid,
never mind, you'll never learn.
(as always, you need to turn the volume up to hear it, and especially via the stream, otherwise it just sounds like some boring rap music. it's not. there's a lot of guitar work in the composition, which is the most interesting part of the presentation. at low volumes, my voice also sounds creepily low and boomy; it should sound tinny like a nerdy teen, because that's what i was. that's a good measuring point; if i sound nerdy then you've got the mix right and if i sound boomy then you've got it wrong. i've noticed recently that bandcamp is boosting the bass on it's streams, and i wish i could turn it off. there's enough bass in the mix that flooring it server side just drowns out the actual music. this is experimental industrial music, influenced heavily by die warzau and early nine inch nails, it's not boring rap music.
i mix everything to listen to on a flat eq. don't run my music through bass boosts or subwoofers, it will just ruin it. it's mixed to be sent as a flat signal to an amplifier, turned up via the amp and sent out through headphones, to be listened to at high volumes. it is not mixed for loudspeakers or to be played in large rooms or clubs.
it sounds best locally on my chromebook when i max the volume out on the flac player and increase it to around 80-90% in the system tray. that gives it enough gain to pull the highs back into the mix. you can't control the volume of the stream at bandcamp or most streaming providers, which is the reason it's going to sound dull, in addition to the mp3 compression and whatever bass boost they're adding, server side, to compensate for the compression. i don't floor my mixes into the red like shit contemporary metal bands do, you have to turn it up at the source or you won't be able to hear it.
so, should i upload floored mixes to bandcamp? no, because then you're going to download them floored. i adamantly don't want that.
i could remix them for youtube, but it's not something i'm excited about.)
7:59
may 8, 2023
it's always been strange to me that anybody would conflate criticism of islam with nazism. there are a lot of bad historical analogies out there, and this is truly amongst the worst.
the comparison probably originates from the observation that islam is derived from judaism and that jews and muslims are in some way similar. this is a very odd perspective that could only be made by actual nazis, but the historical nazis would have never made it.
in fact, almost the entire arab world was firmly aligned with the nazi state in world war two and german fascism (going back to bismarck) actually had a longstanding admiration of islamic despotism, for the reason that they saw a cultural affinity to it. the edward gibbon text is historically central to this perspective; a brutal sultanate of total state power designed strictly around the military is not a poor description of what the nazis wanted.
like finland, they make excuses for it. the british aligned with the arabs to overthrow the turks in world war one, but by the time of world war two the arabs were aligning with the nazis to overthrow the british. it's a poor excuse, but it's the reason that so much of world war two was fought in north africa and the middle east.
i've previously posted lengthy comparisons of islam and nazism in this space, by drawing attention to the fat that they are very similar ideologies.
1:24
it's coming up on seven weeks, and i'm already entering into the "bedhead" phase. the hair on the sides of my head is just long enough to almost pull behind my ears. i've known for years that my hair grows fast, but this is a level of growth that people my age usually see after four or five months, according to the internet. the hair was shaved with a leg razor, so there wasn't a setting; it was as close as you can get, with scalp showing over most of it. no cuts.
i know my hair grows fast because i bleach it every year and watch the roots come in. i would need to do my roots every week to seriously keep up with it; i don't, i die it once a year. i skipped the pandemic years 2020 and 2021 and have a picture from late aug, 2020 of my dark hair growing in as far as my shoulders. so, i can measure a period from may, 2019 to aug, 2020 as the length of time required to grow my hair to my shoulders, which is only about 15 months. when i shaved it, the roots were up to mid-ear, which was after about eight months.
it may be presentable by early june, but i expect it to be ear to shoulder length by the time i die it again next april or may.
4:05
i support removing all religious symbols from the coat of arms in principle (do take note of the liberal government's position on this issue. let us hope they are consistent about the enforcement of state secularism and seek to remove all religious symbols from government, including those in the workplace, and are not merely seeking to remove christian symbols from heraldry), but it seems rather incomplete and trivial to remove the cross from a design that includes both an angry looking unicorn that is ready to scrap and a very sexy lion wearing nail polish, ready to pounce. this obviously isn't something that ought to be taken very seriously.
it is clearly preferable for the unicorn to be the one wearing the nail polish, to begin with.
the crown should be removed from the coat of arms, altogether. also, the lions should be replaced with animals native to canada, like the beaver. narwhals are more canadian than unicorns. the motto also contains neither of canada's official languages and should be stripped of the violently enforced imperial latin motto (which is more offensive than the religious symbols) and replaced with languages relevant to canada's history, like english and gaelic.
7:58
who would win in a fight, a narwhal or a beaver?
discuss.
8:25
wait. government doesn't want facebook to block news links?
i vehemently reject the concept of property rights as intellectually specious, but the issue of intellectual freedom and freedom of speech and association are of paramount importance and i am on facebook's side. however, the goal needs to be to defeat the legislation.
18:16
is it just me, or does danielle smith, of late, constantly demonstrate the weird, creepy googley-eyed facial expression that is similar to the machine whore of babylon in metropolis, as compared to 20 years ago, when she just looked clueless?
i don't know if she's on drugs or just bad with eye makeup, but it makes you wonder what evil plan she's working on.
her opponent in the election, bryan adams, had better be careful.
she's brainwashing the workers to kill themselves off!
19:55
may 9, 2023
the democrats really need to be compiling footage of trump having senior moments and appearing senile and getting it out there.
the idea that it's some kind of discrimination to attack a political leader for being too old is a losing argument. rather, they need to escalate. trump is no less senile, and unquestionably in worse overall health.
trump will almost certainly die before biden does, and they will probably both be dead eight years from now.
1:55
the guy that once lived upstairs has sold his house to some investors from toronto and some very stupid children have now moved in. this is my first interaction with what is called generation z, as i stopped going to concerts when the pandemic started and they would have been either too young to get in and/or not going to the places i was up until that time.
the overarching empirical analysis that i'm taking note of in observing them is how remarkably ignorant, overwhelmingly obnoxious and incredibly stupid they are. they seem to be rebelling against the identity politics of the millennial generation, which is the age of the new owners; the new owners seem to be appalled by them, as am i. they're about to experience somewhat of a mind fuck, because i'm not millennial, i'm gen x; i don't give a fuck what they think, and i'm not even going to give them the time of day to tell me what it is. they have every right to be idiots; they just need to learn that i don't give a fuck what they feel, think or believe and am not going to react to it in any way, at all, because i legitimately don't fucking care.
this is going to be interesting, as they are intent on flailing against their parents, and i'm culturally more akin to their grandparents. i'm not what they're reacting against, and i'm not going to behave like they're expecting me to.
the new owners are what they're flailing against, and we'll have to see whether i become a bystander or not. i suspect that that is what actually happens, as i don't have any interest in the culture war between the two younger generations and don't understand why they don't just ignore each other.
in some sense, all young people are stupid, but this generation z has no excuse to be ignorant, and certainly has no excuse to be more ignorant than their parents. it's the ignorance that is more offsetting than the stupidity.
6:19
millennials raised their children using the buddhist idea of right thinking, so that they were constantly trying to control their thoughts and feelings in a manner that was deemed to be correct and free of error, like they were the thought police. the new owners are very much the thought police; they come off like an artificial intelligence chat robot spewing out millennial cliches. it has made me laugh a few times, in the sense of how deadpan it is, and that is coming from somebody with an exceedingly dry sense of wit.
i, on the other hand, as a no-fucks-given gen xer, have no interest at all in policing their thoughts; i will just ignore them, because i don't actually care about their feelings. they can be wrong and suffer for it all they'd like! they're just future of piles of compost to push out of the way, if i need to to get to where i'm going.
that is going to be an alien occurrence for them, as they are used to adults cherishing them as special and trying to change them for the better rather than disinterestedly throwing them away as inconsequential and disposable, because they really don't care at all about them. in the end, i suspect we're going to see who the real snowflakes are, as these kids throw temper tantrums for not getting the attention they expect from their outbursts.
that is the parenting tactic millennials wouldn't implement, letting their kids have their tantrums and cry it out until they're done, empty-handed. they will get nothing other than that from me. at all.
i'm the helicopter that said "fuck this" and flew off to leave you on the island to starve, kids.
6:49
7:00
it's actually a serious problem, here. the city is full of museum pieces that create horrific amounts of carbon and noise. most of these vehicles should be taken off the road and impounded, but this is a start.
13:50
i deleted everybody on facebook in early 2014 because i was fed up with correcting bad information posted to it. i continued to use it for show listings for years, but stopped posting anything there because facebook apparently doesn't want to be a text platform. i realized that what i wanted was a blog.
it is destined to become a graveyard, as the boomers die off. what i mean is that facebook will become a site full of memorial pages, with very few active users. however, it hasn't actually been replaced by a writing platform and this is a problem. instagram and tiktok are fun when you're 15....or 24 and very immature. in a post-facebook reality, where do the children record their thoughts?
do they get blogs?
or do they not record their thoughts at all, because they don't have any?
14:25
may 10, 2023
i'm putting together the walmart bicycle and i'm understanding the criticism of it.
the frame isn't the prettiest, but who cares. the reflectors are cheap, but they're going to fall off anyways, and i won't replace them. bolt on wheels are harder to steal, which is a benefit. i have never understood a functional difference in expensive v cheap shimano gears, in terms of what i use them for, which is commuter and exercise bicycling. so, it's not fancy, but who cares? it's efficient, economical and practical. that's more important to me.
the baffling thing about the bicycle is the use of plastic in key parts. i can even accept cheap plastic for the seat clamp, so long as it stays put. i can't and won't ride a bicycle with a plastic axle, and wish that was documented in the specs. that is not efficient, it's unsafe. it makes the bike less than a toy, but a decoration in a garage.
so, i'll need to buy a new axle before i ride it and i'll probably need to buy a new seat clamp very soon.
the italian bike is going to take a long time to fix as i've decided that i'm going to fix all of the broken parts on it, like the broken chain protector and the gear shifter protector that fell off, etc. it's going to take months, probably. i was hoping the walmart bike would get me through that phase and that i'd be able to stationary it after i've got the italian bike back and running. that would let me wear the walmart bike out to it's lifespan, and would probably require replacing a few parts. i'm reconsidering that; i may stationary it immediately, and use the mongoose for commuting until i can fix the italian bike.
3:40
the "plastic axle" was actually packaging. it does have a metal axle. further, upon closer inspection, i think the seat clamp is flimsy aluminum (almost pop can aluminum) rather than plastic.
i can predict which parts are going to break, but i think it will be ok for a few months. i'll have to compare the two bicycles in terms of enjoyment riding, before i decide which to stationary.
i've also decided that i can't use the mongoose as a detroit bike, which is what i was actually thinking. i'll have to use that as backup. however, the mongoose rides almost like a hybrid, if you get it at the hardest gear; when the tires go, i may put something smoother on them. i can use this to get around if i need to, which is what i wanted. i haven't had a bicycle in months, which was a problem; i needed a backup bike, and the vintage mongoose for $85 will do nicely.
4:51
should i just throw the other detroit bike out and buy a new one?
it depends on if i can get tires or not. the gearing is also misaligned. it was great for what it was when i got it, but maybe i should donate it and get a 26" detroit bike instead.
yeah.
so, i'm going to end up with four bicycles:
- i'm going to stationary the walmart hybrid, eventually. for now, i'm going to try to ride it, at least a few times.
- the italian bike will return to the commuter & outside exercise bike when fixed.
- the mongoose is backup.
- i need a cheap supercycle or something for detroit.
the border re-opens for me on may 11th and i need to go over to update my nexus card fairly soon.
4:59
it's my fault, but i'm going to need to rebuild the rear bike cable from the box. the cable was too long, so i tried to reduce the size by snipping it and i just broke all the cheap parts in the v-brake. i think i can fix that easily, but it demonstrates the point; you want your brakes to work.
i like my brakes very tight. the bike was probably built for much younger hands than mine (they are likely not smaller hands, as my hands are freakishly small), that need looser brakes and drive less quickly. i need to stop quickly, and i need to apply varying levels of brake when riding quickly down hills.
13:18
it actually seems as though the front handle brake grip was installed improperly at the factory and the cable got bent up. it doesn't matter how i tighten it at the wheel end.
i'm going to get a new cable. that's cheap, right?
i may install new back brakes while i'm at it.
everything else seems usable, and we'll see if it falls apart quickly or not.
15:54
may 11, 2023
i can't work with children that want to make generic pop music for queer little boys. it's not something that most adults or most serious musicians would be interested in, it's a daydream that kids have in their teens and grow out of by the age of 25, which for me happened in 2006. i had personally grown out of it by the time i was 20, which was early 2001, and severely alienated myself from people my age as a result of it. i was more interested in people that were 10-15 years older than i was, while most of my peers were actually interested in people younger than us. i am the last gen xer, and was forced to watch in horror as the people around me started befriending people increasingly younger than them, until it got to the point where parties with my friend group consisted of a handful of people i went to school with and a dozen literal kids ten years younger than us. the cultural brainwashing machine cut us off at the cusp and strongly coerced us to lean towards the younger rather than the older, but i was not interested in being coerced in that way at all and firmly rejected it. for that reason, i have little to no shared cultural memory of the people that are my age and the people that are my age suffer from clinical arrested development.
i'm used to being annoyed by young people; i didn't even like young people when i was a young person.
i was never somebody that wanted to be a rock star; what i wanted when i was young was to make creative and artistic music that was out of the mainstream in a collective that was able to generate a small audience and that played sparsely attended bar shows. i was never able to find what i was looking for, where the streets have bright name signs.
here are some of the records that i actually spent time listening to near the end of high school, which was 1999-2000 and during the time frame when emo/nu-metal was the popular type of rock music:
i mail-ordered three of those (i had a certificate of provenance, but it's been lost) and bought slow riot at the show. yes, i saw gybe! at the babylon in ottawa on the slow riot tour in 1999 and went with my dad because none of my friends wanted to go because they thought the music was "weird" (and then realized it was not an all ages show, and i needed my dad to come with me to get in, anyways; i would turn 19 in january, 2000. it was a good thing he was there, or i wouldn't have been able to get in. he remarked that it reminded him of larks era king crimson.). my friends were more interested in emo than slow riot, unfortunately.
i was still listening to 90s rock bands like pearl jam and rem, but it had run it's course by 1999/2000. the wellwater conspiracy seemed promising, but it disappeared before it reached it's potential. i am a fan of the live record released in 1999, the distance to here. all of the artists responsible for creating 90s rock music had either died or moved on by 1999/2000. industrial music, which hit a peak of artistic creativity about 1995 and was something i was heavily interested in in the 90s, had entirely ceased to exist.
i was in the collection of people that thought the popular rock music of the late 90s and early 00s was the onset of the apocalypse. it was so bad it hurt to exist; i was embarrassed by the music scene that my generation was forced to endure, coming out of the much more interesting 80s art punk scene. i thought that emo was stupid and that nu-metal was retarded. the punk rock of the period was so idiotic that it should never be spoken of ever again.
the five minutes that garage rock was popular was a breath of fresh air, but it didn't last. i liked the white stripes. really. the strokes were pretentious, over-rated garbage.
i then turned dramatically inward; the music that i listened to from 2000-2010 was nowhere close to the popular culture. i listened to a lot of 70s fusion and instrumental rock (music labelled as explicitly "prog" is not something i'm interested in), such as mike oldfield and the mahavishnu orchestra. post-rock had a moment during this decade, and i was there for it. i also listened to a large amount of "classical" music from the romantic and impressionist periods. industrial music had ceased to exist, so i listened to a lot of warp records style idm (like autechre) instead. songs with choruses that were played on the radio or tv (or not played on the radio or tv) were of no interest to me.
the truth is that i don't actually know anything about 00s rock or emo or metal, at all. i was so disinterested in the contemporary popular rock music that i couldn't have a coherent conversation about it. this was my 20s; i had no interest in what was then contemporary rock music. nor do i think that was a mistake; none of it comes off as more interesting in hindsight than it did at the time. this was the absolute low point of western culture, which was unfortunately the period i happened to live through as a young person.
i mostly stayed inside and mostly avoided human contact.
what i need and want - and i've made this point repeatedly clear - is not some dumb kids that want to copy their heroes and be rock stars and make music videos and have their songs played on the radio, but an older drummer with some experience as a creative musician that wants to make abstract art for the purpose of creating art and doesn't care if it sells or not. i need somebody that actually wants to make challenging music for the sake of it. this is hard to find. the only person i'm aware of in the area is jeff burrows, and i've thought about it, but he is clearly strictly interested in doing local charity work. the drummer for human eye that i was interested in is actually in jail.
i've posted links.
get over my hair; you're not going to get me to be something that i don't want to be.
fuck off.
1:31
you don't believe me.
this is the slow riot cd, with the original black packaging, and unfortunately looking a tad mouldy, that was purchased directly from the hands of mr. aidan girt after the show at the babylon in 1999.
the opening band was labradford, but it was initially booked in reverse.
2:46
what i'm trying to do is show you what i actually like, which is not what people thought i liked and is even not what people wanted me to like.
11:21
the idiotic, thuggish children that moved in upstairs really enjoy randomly swearing, in drunken fits.
ugh.
this is somewhat of a nightmare scenario. given the market, it's going to cost a lot of money to get me out of here. if it comes to that, they're going to regret not simply renting to a responsible tenant, but i also comprehend why they would try to cram 8 children into a space meant for one or two people. it's profitable.
the city of windsor just passed a bylaw that prohibits this kind of situation. my unit is legal. i don't know exactly how many idiot children they crammed into the place up there, but there are at least five cars that come and go regularly.
that's going to make legal action on their behalf essentially impossible, because they're breaking the bylaw. they might not be aware of the bylaw. however, calling the city is one way to put an end to this, once i can figure out how many people are actually up there.
i should casually ask if they know about the bylaw.
22:51
Number of unit residents complies with habitable floor area minimums prescribed in the Property Standards By-law.
Number of unit residents in each bedroom complies with floor area minimums prescribed in the Property Standards By-law.
i would suspect that neither of these are going to pass the check, which will dissolve the lease at the owner's expense. the idiot children will get free money, to spend on drugs. i will be rid of them, though.
23:13
A room used for sleeping purposes shall have a minimum floor area of 6
square metres and shall not be occupied by more than 1 person for each 4
square metres of floor area thereof.
i was able to find pictures of the listing, and there are at most three bedrooms in the unit. there should be six people in there, maximum, but i suspect that two of the rooms are much smaller than 10 square feet and the actual maximum would consequently be four people, but may actually only be three people.
23:20
they will need to get the place inspected in order to get a license by june 1, or the city will retain the right to inspect it, if i make a complaint. fines are on the order of $50,000. oops?
23:22
i would rather they do it themselves than have to call them in. as noted, they may not be aware of the bylaw. they have a short window to adjust to it.
23:24
i don't know how many people are up there, but four would be a minimal estimate. i'm thinking it's likely in the 6-8 range.
23:25
may 12, 2023
there's at least three people, and i think i've counted four.
0:16
one of the drunken idiots just fell down the stairs.
2:35
i'm actually not convinced that either of the two "bedrooms" on the main floor are even six square metres at all. that's about 10x6.5. my room, which is bigger than either of them, is barely that size.
the inspectors may decide the house can't be rented at all.
2:45
it's supposed to be three bedrooms, and i don't think any of them fits the definition of a rentable room. neither of the two rooms on the main floor are large enough, and the room on the top floor doesn't have high enough ceilings. i'm sure there are more than five people living there; if they are lucky, they could get away with renting to three, but they probably will be fined for renting it at all.
if these idiots do not immediately grow up, i'm going to have to force the investors to sell to somebody that wants to actually live there. this was a mistake, for them.
2:51
may the people of constantinople gather in and reclaim gezi park this weekend, as they re-establish the legacy of ataturk and course correct back to a future of secularism, freedom and democracy.
reclaim your agora.
19:12
it's a good thing that polievre parts his hair on the opposite side of his head to trudeau (and he does.), otherwise they'd be impossible to differentiate.
trudeau brushes his hair to his left, whereas polievre brushes his hair to his right.
this is what "choice" means in late capitalism.
19:55
the question as to whether i might want to go out much this summer, which i was toying with, is resolved by the presence of the idiot children upstairs.
i'm going to need to stay home as much as possible for the foreseeable future.
20:49
may 13, 2023
i don't know how old these idiot children are, but they must be going into first or second year because they're really acting like little kids; they will chase each other across the house like they're playing tag and squeal at each other, like ten year-olds.
there's been a lot written about the juvenilization of society. it's startling to experience the level of decay, first hand. these are not young adults, they have the mentality of grade school children.
i'm waiting for them to start watering pot plants with gatorade.
i certainly remember getting stoned and acting goofy like that, but i was 14-15. i had certainly ceased to behave like that by the time i went to university. when people talked about legalizing marijuana for adults, and when people continue to talk about legalizing psilocybin for adults, it has always confused me because the reality is that almost nobody over the age of 20 does psilocybin, except extremely infrequently. a right of passage for people in the west for the last 100 years has been smoking marijuana when you're a teenager, and growing out of it at the university stage. people stop smoking pot when they turn 19. if they actually succeed in stopping kids from smoking until they're 19, the results are going to be either that (a) nobody smokes pot anymore because you can't get it until you're too old to want it or (b) mass arrested development, as university becomes the new high school, the latter of which has been becoming true for some time, regardless. does that mean that high school is the new grade school, and grade school is the new kindergarten?
more worrying is that mdma becomes the new marijuana, as it becomes easier to access than pot. mdma itself is of least concern, but it's a unicorn; you end up with kids on meth, instead, and meth is bad news.
7:19
which war is more retarded: the battle of artemovsk or the battle of the somme?
talk amongst yourselves.
21:07
you know you've been cooped up too long when the machinery and foot traffic around you starts sounding like a band jamming, and you only realize it isn't when it clicks that the loop is too long to be real.
"that snare can't be...wait, it's a fan."
when your married and gay landlord starts talking about "bi laws" (rather than bylaws), do you interpret that as a typo or a freudian slip? i'm a little worried about the femme one. that's, like, the last thing i need right now.
i won't post the stp song again. but, i think i was the primary sale item and the house was thrown in with me. it's not entirely clear why.
22:54
may 14, 2023
the idiot children upstairs were playing some garbage techno music designed for idiots, so i had to blare some koyaanisqatsi.
they seemed not to like that.
that's a shame.
it's a fitting commentary to what they're trying to impose on my life, though.
i'm an artist/activist. this is how i react to bullshit.
16:58
this guy put a smelly, loud engine in his like 90s honda accord and revs it after dark, like the winning twit in the upper class twit of the year awards. i can't tell what is more disgusting, the cigarettes he smokes or the car he abuses. then, he starts with the douchey techno? no sir.
with that combination, his penis must be microscopic and his behavioural problems must be that he's constantly compensating for erectile dysfunction.
17:10
he's very good at the waking up the neighbours category.
17:13
oddly, the original version of the i'm afraid of americans single seems to be hard to find on the internet, nowadays. was it out of print? i still have a cd of the original version.
they might have actually liked that one, but i hope they understood the irony.
the video is up, which features trent reznor stalking david bowie.
(reznor tends to get credited for writing this song, but it sounds to me like it's mostly eno)
18:39
a little culture will be good for these idiots, but only if they fucking learn something from it.
18:40
may 15, 2023
this is an opportunity to include the kind of conditions that our neo-liberal governments have avoided for ideological reasons, such as taking on part or full ownership of the plant.
i don't care if government spends the money, but i don't want to see it waste the money on what amounts to gifts and bribes. the lack of commitment from stellantis demonstrates the folly of buying into the globalist economic model, where foreign corporations take advantage of governments and then just get up and leave when they feel like it.
the solution to this is local rather than foreign investment. if taxpayers are going to spend billions of dollars on this plant or plants like it, we should own a part of it so we can assert operational control over it and so this anti-social behaviour by opportunist corporate actors can't continue to happen.
we should build the plant and should build it at public expense; we should not then hand it over to the foreign company, we should maintain some level of ownership over it in order to maintain some influence over it's operation.
14:56
this is an extraordinarily dangerous bill that will inevitably be struck down as unconstitutional but which a working and functioning senate would reject on it's face.
we are innocent until proven guilty, and the issue is not up for debate.
19:59
the united states has spent roughly $100 billion dollars on handouts to military contractors to send guns to ukraine to fight the communists, and it's congressional leaders want to cut social security to prevent it from going into too much debt.
this is retarded.
20:52
reports of fraud, intimidation and other irregularities are pouring in from turkey, which is not exactly unexpected but is certainly an escalation. the secular democracy in turkey has been on the brink of collapse for many years, but it has to this point held. it is likely on the brink of implosion.
the freedom of the turkish people to re-establish a path to secular modernization and freedom of thought aside, this was the path of least resistance for powerful actors that want erdogan removed; turkey is a rare scenario where the interests of the global elite happen to align with the interests of freedom and democracy, by sheer chance. removing erdogan by force is a good idea.
if erdogan is going to rig this election and refuse to step down, the next step is that he will need to be disposed of, and i would expect some shooting in constantinople for the purpose of achieving that end relatively soon. it is probably no longer as easy as triggering a coup because he has purged the military. yet, he needs to go, and he will be removed by whatever means are necessary.
22:41
may 16, 2023
the idiots upstairs were having a hard enough time understanding that i'm trans; after blaring mt zion, i think they figured out i'm also a jew.
yes i'm a queer tranny jew, as well as partly mikmaq.
the only person i can think of that has more intersectionality than me is lenny kravitz.
going my way?
0:07
nice to see hendrix on the internet, finally.
i'm letting my freak flag fly, bitch.
suck it.
0:18
yes.
it should not have been legalized in the first place.
6:04
this is not unexpected. in fact, it took longer than i thought it would, but it was a predictable turn in the curve, given the fundamentals. the decrease in inflation was not due to the rate hikes, but due to a series of government policies like ford manipulating the gas tax, as well as bottlenecks subsiding in supply lines after covid and the shock from the war.
likewise, the bank only raises interest rates after the housing market slows down, so that it can maintain profit levels on existing customers in the absence of new ones; if there are to be less new customers, the bank must raise the rent on their existing customers, or they will lose money relative to projections (they aren't actually losing money, technically). the way that capital defines loss in the modern economy is insane. if the housing market is heating up again, the bank has no reason to raise rates.
this bump in inflation is likely due to the carbon tax, and is in line with estimates as to what a carbon tax would do to inflation. opec also cut production at the start of april, and that will likely be a substantive factor moving into may.
as stated previously, you should look at credit card debt rather than inflation to understand the effects of the rate hikes.
17:31
i'm starting to understand that i was purchased so that some insane people could move some idiot children in that are supposed to become my friends.
ugh.
fuck off.
i cannot and will not cohabit in a space where people are trying to be my friends. i need a wall of separation from reality. sending people in here and setting them up to be my friends is an algorithm for conflict, and potentially for violence. i am likely to snap if they get too pushy.
i hate humans and want as little contact with them as possible. this is irresponsible.
i
do
not
want
to
be
your
friend.
i liked the old man upstairs, who was usually gone. it was peaceful and solitary, which is what i like and need and want.
20:27
when i first came to windsor, i met some people that i knew from the occupy movement. one of them was a talented musician that i hoped to work with and the other was an abject loser that i hoped got hit by a truck. they were trying to get a house with three or four people in it. while i went along with them in order to get a couch to surf, i never had any intent of moving into a house with other people, and my mental health could not handle living in a rooming house. i instead found my own place.
the reason that the rooming house did not happen is because i did not want it to happen.
your opinion on the topic is not interesting to me.
20:43
if i have to move out of here to get away from these losers trying to be my friend, i'm going to sue everybody and anybody i can on my way out.l
fuck off.
20:50
i don't "play guitar" and i don't like rock music or want to be in a rock band. i might even go so far as to say that i hate rock music culture.
i'm a composer of contemporary art music that uses some rock/jazz instrumentation but is largely electronic in scope and falls most appropriately under the category of "modern classical music".
have you even listened to any of it?
21:48
i'm wondering if i should keep my hair short so people stop misinterpreting me.
21:50
the recording archive of my music is here, and you should start from the bottom if you want to understand it.
my initial training as a musician was as a blues guitarist, and you can still hear the dominant influence of jimi hendrix in my guitar playing, but i spent the 90s teaching myself grunge and alternative rock and i later took about a year of classical guitar lessons. it is true that i write some of my compositions on guitar, and this was especially true of the earliest material.
i also play bass, drums, flute and keyboards and would consider myself to be as much of a producer/engineer as i am a guitarist. most of my recordings use drum machines and synthesizers as much or more as they use guitars. in terms of sheer bulk use, the most frequently used instrument in my discography is the midi sequencer, not the guitar.
in later recordings, i would make use of the sound libraries available in cubase sampling through software synthesizers to compose larger works with full electronic orchestras. while i may only actually play guitar, bass and synth controllers on these pieces, they have the sounds of string and wind orchestras, as well as many abstract electronic flourishes.
while my main instrument remains the guitar (excluding the studio or the sequencer), i do not identify as a guitarist and do not create what would be called "guitar music"; i am a composer of abstract sound for ears that don't exist and create experimental, contemporary classical music for future listeners that have not been born yet.
22:05
it's not just that rock music is over. i don't care much for fashion.
rock music sucked, to begin with.
22:15
this is the irony of 90s rock music that young people may miss, in context; 90s rock bands were making fun of rock music. they were trying to be uncool on purpose. it was tongue in cheek, post-modern. if you watch a nirvana or a weezer or a smashing pumpkins video and you don't grasp the goofy irony of it, you've missed the point. these were people trying very hard to be losers, and succeeding with flying colours. it was not punk music, but it was the apex of punk ideology. in the process, they wiped away rock music, and it never came back because it had gone through the process of absurdity and arrived at the logical endpoint of irrelevance. the self-importance of boring 00s indie rock (which was a bunch of rich kids doing covers of songs their parents liked, and for an audience composed more of their parents than their peers) was the stake in it's heart.
22:21
so, i mean, we could have a discussion about relevance, and it would have some value. your'e not getting anywhere in the 2020s using rock music as a vehicle; this is dead and done. i wouldn't care, that's not my point. my point is that the only rock music i ever liked in the first place was the kind of rock music that made fun of rock music, for the reason that rock music is inherently retarded and unsalvageable except in the form of parody.
22:24
for that reason, the most important artist in rock music history is really weird al yankovic.
22:25
i don't want to move. i want them to leave me alone.
they know i'm going to stand my ground. moving is the last resort, after every other tactic has been brought to it's conclusion.
23:59
may 17, 2023
could i even find another basement apartment that is quiet, non-smoking and with more mature tenants?
i may have to move a little out of town. the pandemic forced me out of the concert scene, and i'm now conceding i'm too old to go to the places i used to go. i legitimately don't want to spend time with young people at bars anymore; i've grown out of it. i'm not remotely interested. you'd have to drag me there, at this point.
moving further away from the river is no longer the disincentive it used to be, which gives me a larger surface area to work with than previously.
0:05
as stated, if i get there, there's going to be multiple legal actions first and i may be looking to move right out of town. rent might be cheaper towards sudbury.
0:06
these are my official records:
0) inricycled is my 0th record, and contains segments of my first two demos, which are very amateur recordings. these are mostly little guitar solos in a blues punk style, as my guitar work was semi-pro at the time and the rest of it is pretty cringe. the demos were recorded in 1996 and 1997, when i was 15-16 years old and the compilation was compiled at the end of 2013 in a manner reminiscent of a zappa or kenneally guitar shorts record. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording.
1) inri is my first record, which mostly contained synth-pop reversions of the demos on the first two cassettes but also had a few new tracks. yes, it sounds like nine inch nails, but not really; other major influences at the time were joy division, genesis, tears for fears, david bowie, the smashing pumpkins, the tea party and skinny puppy, and what makes me different than most industrial artists is that i'm a guitarist first and can actually play a little bit. industrial guitarists tend to just chug, and i transcend that. i was not influenced by swans or the legendary pink dots at this point, but realize the sonic similarity to them, in hindsight. the ry30 drum machine used on this record was also used to substantive effect by autechre around the same time. this was recorded to tape on a 4-track and digitally mastered very badly in 1998, when i was 17, and then restored from the original cassettes and the same 4-track (which i still had) in 2015, and then digitally remastered as a strictly instrumental recording, including updated soundfonts for the midi sections and amp simulators for the bass parts. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording.
2) inriched is my second record, which (like most second records) is half outtakes from the first record and half new recordings. it is, sonically, a continuation of the first record, but is also more experimental than the first record. this was finished in early 1999 (when i was 18) and remastered in 2015 and 2016 using the same process as the first record, which required me to remove the track "too cold". i am the sole writer and performer on this recording.
[ 2.x) at the end of 2013, i compiled a glitch record containing experimental remixes of pieces worked on over 1998. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording.
2.y) this compiles the actual songs (minus the noise collages) that were remastered from tape for inri & inriched in 2015. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording.
2.z) inri & inriched were remastered in 2015 as instrumental recordings. this compilation mixes the vocals back in, for select tracks. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording.
2.5) i consider inrimake to be a semi-official record, but it is a covers and remixes record [abstract remixes, not dance remixes] and i have had to handle it at arms length for copyright reasons. these covers and remixes were created over 1998 and 1999, when i was 17-18. it includes reworkings of songs by the offspring, god lives underwater, skinny puppy, the smashing pumpkins, nine inch nails, stabbing westward, andrew lloyd webber and rem. a version of this was first compiled in late 1999, but this version was reconstructed in early 2014. i am not the sole writer or performer on this recording because some of the tracks contain samples of the tracks being referenced.
3) inridiculous is my third record and the last under the moniker inri. it is a compilation of noisier recordings influenced by weirder industrial music like coil, swans, thirwell, nurse with wound, download, dead voices on air and negativland and was compiled in late 1999, when i was almost 19, from source material dating from 1996-1999. i have not altered this since it's initial release, except to remove the last track, book it, in 2014. this was intended to put inri down, as i was shifting focus towards a more symphonic sound, as per the covers disc. it is intentionally ridiculous. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording.
[ 3.x) ambient works vol 0 is a mix tape of ambient sections from 1996-1999, compiled in 2015. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording.
4) my fourth record was released eponymously under the moniker deny everything at the end of the year 2000, when i was still 19. it was intended to be a substantive change in direction towards a bigger and more developed sound and includes a half hour conceptual piece at the end. the initial release had samples and vocals, which were slowly removed until they were almost completely gone for a final release in early 2014. this is the only deny everything release, and it both has characteristics of the inri experimental synth pop style and the electronic classical style of the next project, jjjjjjjjj. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording.
4.5) while i was able to remaster almost all of the inri material, there were three tracks that i did not have source tapes for and could not convert into instrumental tracks, and wish i did. i initially dumped them each into singles, but decided in late 2017 to pull them together into a compilation of unsalvageable vocal outtakes called inrimoved, all from 1999 or early 2000. as with inrimixed, i consider this to be semi-official and also note that it's one of the more challenging lps in the list. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording.
5) my 5th record (jjjjjjjjj) was written and partially recorded over the years 2000 and 2001, when i was 19 and 20, but was not fully recorded and finished until the summer and fall of 2014. the long incubation period is partly due to needing to wait for the technology to catch up, as several of the tracks were written into score writers and i did not have access to the kind of rendering quality through software synthesizers that was required to make professional sounding recordings until around the year 2010; even so, it was a challenge to build these tracks in cubase in 2014. the first side of the record mixes electric and classical guitar work with experimental soundscaping and electronic scorewriting to create a series of little experimental guitar concertos. the second side features a piano concerto, a conceptual synthesizer piece and a demonic choiral piece, in what is a 40 minute block of dense electronic music. an electric folk song with a wacky poem separates the sides. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording.
5.5) around christmas of 2001, i started on an hour long kosmische [the politically correct revisionist term for what was at the time called kraut-rock] piece that was intended to be a symphonic poem, with words supplied by my lyrical collaborator at the time, who had the name of sean. the music didn't fit with the lyrics, in the end. i added the lyrics to the start of the piece (as read a cappella by sean) in 2017, but the piece is otherwise unaltered from early 2002. the wave is also a semi-official release. the wave, itself, was written and recorded by myself.
5.x) from the fall of 2001 until the summer of 2002, i was working with a singer named sean on a project with shifting goals that ultimately fizzled out. four of the six tracks on this demo were completed as instrumental recordings on my sixth or seventh records, a fifth was remixed for the first official ambient works and the track psi was left here, as a strictly rabit is wolf piece. i have not edited or updated these recordings from their versions in 2002, but the tracklisting was changed in 2014. in late 2014, i also created a follow-up acoustic demo that includes tracks i started with sean that were not demoed further in their original forms, but in some cases were reworked for the sixth or seventh records. sean contributes the vocals and some soundscapes for me to manipulate, in addition to providing creative input into the recording process, which i took into consideration. i also recorded my friend greg playing drums and cut it up into loops for two songs on this recording. i wrote almost all of the parts and recorded almost all of the instruments. these demos are considered incomplete, but they also are the final vocal versions of the songs.
6) my 6th record (jjjjjjjjj^2) was written and partially recorded over the years 2001-2002, when i was 20-21 years old, but was not fully recorded and finished until the spring of 2015; final work on the record was conducted from the summer of 2014 until the spring of 2015. all of the songs on this record were intended to be used in a rock project that included the singer sean and (initially) a guitarist named jon and were left in varying states of completion over 2001-2002 before being completed or remixed over 2014-2015; the first track was built as an industrial punk song entirely over 2014 from nothing but an ry30 sequence that was saved to mp3 around the year 2002 and my memory of how to play it, the 2nd, 3rd and 4th tracks were rebuilt as instrumentals without sean's vocals and completed and remixed using the updated technology available to me in 2014, the 5th was orchestrated as a guitar concerto by using the score that i wrote in 2002 and the new rendering technology (as per the 5th record) and the sixth, which sean never recorded vocals for, was finished in the state it was initially intended, then remixed as an instrumental. sean's harmonica part remains in clarity and greg's drums are taken to a different place in this remix of time, but i am otherwise the sole writer and performer on this recording. the genre references on this record are particularly diverse, but the writing is geared around the electric bass guitar because that was supposed to be my role in the project, initially. i was the only one that could play bass; you could throw a dart and hit a guitarist. from each according to their ability. hey, the best rock bands have good bassists, and the outcome is some good bass-driven songs. for that reason, i should acknowledge charles spearin, roger waters, flea, tony levin, krist novoselic and, of course, sir paul mccartney.
[ 6.q) this compilation take austere versions of songs recorded from 1998-2002 that only include the electronics of the piece. it showcases the ry30 (which i no longer have) & my jx-8p (which i still have). this came out of the 2015 remastering project. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording.
6.r) my 4th & 7th records are linked in being sample-driven works that eventually had the samples taken out. this record, constructed in 2017, collects the sample collages in their initial state, reclaiming the initial intent. the mixes here are all unedited, from 1998-2002. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording, except for the background parts on trepanation nation.
6.s) i spent much of 2014-2017 remixing old recordings and wanted to retain some document of what was actually added to them. these are the parts of the songs that were actually recorded from 2014-2017. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording.
6.t) this is compilation of technologically focused guitar work, created in early 2018 out of the pieces i had been working on in the years leading up to it. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording, except for the noted background parts.
6.u) this is a 2xlp created in 2015 that documents what the jjjjjjjjj period works sounded like as i was writing them in 2000-2002, compared to the upgrades in sound fonts over 2014-2015. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording.
6.v) this 2015 compilation collects ambient remixes of material written between 1999-2003 and finished between 2014-2017. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording, except for the noted background parts.
6.w) this 2015 compilation collects orchestral remixes of material written between 1999-2003 and finished between 2014-2017. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording.
6.x) this 2018 compilation collects string orchestra remixes of material written between 1999-2003 and finished between 2014-2018. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording.
6.y) i hitchhiked to bc in 2003 with my guitar and a friend. this recording, still incomplete, documents the songs i played on the road. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording.
6.z) this 2004 demo was created for use in an art installation created by a friend of mine in downtown ottawa and is uploaded here, unaltered. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording.
7) my 7th record, ftaa, was initially released in the summer of 2004, when i was 23 years old. the initial concept for this recording was noise + anarchy, but i've since stripped out the samples; i have retained the vocals in the first track. the initial release had samples and vocals, which were slowly removed until they were almost completely gone for a final release in mid 2021. the 2021 release also includes rebuilt and remastered versions of tracks 1 & 5, completed in waves from 2014-2021, and an instrumental version of the single-only track atom's, along with it's b-side. this is in some ways "deny everything 2" due to the overlapping concepts, and it may be noted that both records end with half hour epics. i am the sole writer and performer on this recording, except for the noted background parts in track 5.
[ 7.v) i rebuilt my first two records in early 2022 to include the vocal versions i had removed in 2015 and put them together as a double:
7.w) also in early 2022, i rebuilt the original versions of my 3rd record and the cover record and put them together as a double.
7.x) also in early 2022, i decided to rebuild my 4th & 7th records in their initial forms, but it is not done yet.
7.y) also in 2022, i decided to re-add sean's vocals to the final versions of the tracks on my 5th & 6th records, but it is not done yet:
7.z) this is inricted pt 3 (after inricted, inrimoved) and will be a compilation of sparse vocal works from 2001-2005.
===================
8) my 8th record ({e}) is a 2xlp record that was written and partially recorded over the years 2002-2004, when i was 21-23 years old, and is still in the process of final completion. tracks 1&2 are done and tracks 3&4 need to be remixed while track 5 needs to be recorded from first principles.
9) this is a tease for my ninth record, which was written in 2004 when i was 23 but which recording has barely begun on:
[10.x) this is a collection of guitar pieces i recorded in 2005, when i was 24, some of which will become a 10th record, which will be more like a rock record.
11) this is a tease for my eleventh record, which was written in 2006 when i was 25 but which recording has barely begun on:
12) this is a project that was written by 2007 and which has one piece completed and one piece started:
13) this is another concept record started in 2010, which has barely been recorded:
i was without access to gear from 2011-2013, which is when the loop flips over.
i am actually so far spun around that i'll have to start over again in 2013, very soon. i have a lot of writing to do before i can back to the 8th record.
i'm currently working on court documents.
1:19
i don't think that this idiot with the muscle car is a student at all, he's a grown-ass man listening to music written for a 12-15 age demographic at 5:00 in the morning in a room he rented with actual students (who may not be so bad after all), while smoking out the window in a non-smoking house.
this is the definition of a loser, and he probably belongs in a jail cell.
19:46
mississaugua is a city unlike any i'm aware of, in the sense that it is a suburb of toronto with a million people in it. technically, it is a suburb of brampton, which is actually a city, but whatever you want to attach it to, mississaugua lacks almost all of the characteristics of a city, including what might be called a downtown. as such, it's a tax base without a municipality to support.
the logic of this seems to have to do with white flight, and with protecting caledon from brampton's encroach. it is predictable that the region will be majority south asian in the near future, with current immigration policies and birth rates and it is up to interpretation whether that is a desirable outcome or not. it's not the polytheists that frighten me, it's the monotheists; nonetheless, i don't discount the reality of national identity or think that questioning if the future ethnic make-up of canada that we're on the path to is desirable is invalid. i think this is a valid topic of discussion, not something that is taboo. whatever your view on this topic, an ethnic policy of this nature shouldn't be forwarded without looking at the fundamentals of city planning.
mississaugua, as a sprawling suburban tax base, should have a municipality to support. for that reason, i might rather propose discussions about amalgamating both mississaugua and brampton into a larger city, like toronto, and letting caledon devolve into a township.
23:02
may 18, 2023
i have a physical copy (a shiny cd.) of every commercial release (and a large number of non-commercial releases) created by the smashing pumpkins from 1988 to 2001, ending with rotten apples. i did not purchase the zwans lp (it sucked.), but i did pick up the future embrace. that is the last smashing pumpkins record i purchased, which was in 2005.
if these kids want to listen to the pumpkins, we can do that; i've got a 50 cd playlist ready to go that is fully comprehensive from 1988-2001.
it is true that i grew up enough after 2005ish that the smashing pumpkins were no longer of interest to me, but i will also stand by the argument that none of their post-reformation records are good enough to purchase. by contrast, i have picked up a couple of nine inch nails records since 2005.
there is enough strong material in their post-reformation work to create a solid 2xcd, maybe.
i have not listened to the new record yet. i'm afraid to, frankly.
queue 1 (pre-gish):
- 05/10/88
- 03/16/89
- the two 1989 smashing pumpkins demos on one cd
- 06/16/90
- 02/09/91
queue 2 (gish)
- 02/12/91
- gish
- lull [rhinoceros single]
- peel sessions [siva single]
- i am one single (3 track 1992)
queue 3 (siamese dream)
- singles soundtrack (includes the track drown, amongst other things)
- cherub rock single (3 track)
- siamese dream
- today single (3 track)
- disarm single (3 track)
queue 4 (pisces iscariot)
- no alternative (includes the track glynis, amongst other things)
- a condensed version of mashed potatoes to one cd-r that focuses on the outtakes
- earphoria
- pisces iscariot
- double door show that premiered mcis as acoustic tracks (02/21/95)
queue 5 (mcis)
- sequence 4 (mcis early mixes)
- 666 (mcis session work)
- mcis demo tape
- dawn to dusk
- twilight to starlight
queue 6 (the aeroplane flies high box set)
- bullet with butterfly wings ep
- 1979 ep
- zero ep
- tonight, tonight ep
- 33 ep
5:43
what this means is that the rate hikes are working.
just as soon as people have so much debt that they lose their cars and houses, inflation will collapse and we can have a massive recession. hooray!
20:58
i've been in a few debates with meghan murphy and her clique of terfs, and what people don't realize is that they are in truth a bunch of misogynists; their psychological condition is that they hate women, and as such hate themselves. freud's observation that the homophobic are secretly gay is not broadly extendable to the transphobes and haters, but every terf i've met is a repressed ftm that hates women and can't handle it.
21:09
gender is a definition, and we can define it how we want. it's not out there somewhere in the ether to find, it's strictly a human construct. the idea of attaching gender to physical sex organs is one way to define it, but it's not something that has been constant through history in the west or adopted by every culture in history. it's not even particularly scientifically informed, as sex organs are only marginally linked to other characteristics of gender (like chromosomes and hormones), and plenty of species are born with both or can change back and forth.
in humans, we have two different chromosome types, but the chromosomes don't actually code for the sex organs, they code for the sex hormones. if you take an xx (female) embryo and you flush it in testosterone, it will develop male characteristics; conversely, if you take a male xy embryo and flush it in estrogen it will develop a vagina. the science is pretty clear that gender is hormonal, rather than chromosomal, and that, to the extent that behaviour is correlated with gender, the dominant factor is also hormonal.
i would consequently define gender as being hormonal, which means it is changeable. how that interacts with individuals is complicated. given that my body wasn't able to produce enough testosterone naturally, there's not really any reason why i couldn't have taken testosterone instead of estrogen, other than that i felt my personality leaned towards estrogen and made that decision. that in itself is the definition, not anything else.
we can argue about that, but we're arguing about first principles, which isn't a logical debate. i mean, if you insist on defining gender as being connected to the sex organs you're born with, all i can do is disagree with your definition; if i accept your definition, i accept your conclusions. that's not catastrophic, either. people that work with logic or axioms nowadays don't accept the kind of kantian idea of absolute truth, it's all rooted in godel and hilbert and acknowledges that reality can be interpreted via different axiom systems, simultaneously, without any being more correct than the other.
it is both true that i was born with male sex organs and that i'm currently estrogen dominant; those are both facts, and being absolutist about either is considered dense by modern logicians. one fact is not more important than the other. the axiom systems both exist independently abstractly, and neither is more valid than the other.
contemporary science would certainly lean more towards the idea of gender as hormonal than it would towards the idea of gender as a physical appendage, but i don't have a monopoly on axiomatic systems and i can't define terms for other people. other people just have to understand that i don't fucking care how they define things, and i'm not going to let them define concepts for me, and especially not in ways that are counter to what the scientific consensus is.
21:51
may 19, 2023
terry fox was a failure.
i've been arguing for years that canadians need to stop glorifying somebody because they failed. it's reflective of the national identity.
running across the country is a difficult feat, but it's been done. why don't we elevate somebody that succeeded, instead of glorifying somebody that failed?
8:54
i'm not pro-putin. i'm an anarchist. i am a pan-slavist and think that is a position worth holding to. however, there couldn't possibly be anything less punk rock than aligning with nato enlargement or western colonialism in eastern europe, regardless of your views on the current government in russia.
i spend more time dismantling western propaganda and frequently use russian analyses as aids in doing so, but the russians have their own propaganda and cannot be taken at face value, either. i don't need to be reminded that russian media is not any less unreliable than western media, but i insist that nuance and balance requires a broad information base. america and russia are, fundamentally, the same; neither should be prioritized over the other.
i do agree that the basic position of the russian media, that nato enlargement poses an existential threat to russia that requires a mobilization in self-defense, is correct. nato is, in fact, trying to conquer russia and russia will, in fact, be destroyed if it does not defend itself.
i'm not particularly aligned with western culture, in the sense of it being italic or romanic. i am culturally aligned with north germanic barbarism, in the sense that it was less statist than the imperialist societies in the south, with their judaic religious values. i am an atheist, but i would rather live in a pagan society with pagan values than in a judaic society with judaic values. my narrative of european history is one of the north uniting to overthrow the yoke imposed upon it by the south. for that reason, i have no cultural allegiance to a war by the west against russia, or have any interest in dismantling russia. if anything, i see many commonalities between north germanic and russian culture; russia is, itself, largely a north germanic culture.
the valid historical narrative that will persist will be that the west is the aggressor in eastern europe and russia is doing what is required to defend itself, as brutal as it is. we would do the same thing if the tables were turned.
if the shit hits the fan, i'm going to be more interested in tearing down my own government and replacing it with a socialist one than i am going to be in fighting a foreign adventure in order to "save western freedoms" or some other such nonsense.
9:25
may 21, 2023
this chart places the breadth of ukrainian nominal gdp in the context of other economies.
neither canada nor italy are technically g7 countries, due to the rise of india and china, and russia is currently sitting in 11, behind brazil in 10.
the idea of including ukraine in the g7 meeting is a clear statement that the west is intending on this war ending with kiev in control of the former russian empire.
7:21
in recent years, a discourse has developed around whether gay people and trans people should be grouped together or separated as distinct groups. this discourse is missing the context that has come with the normalization of homosexuality into a part of the existing status quo, and what is really homosexuality's subsequent exit from the queer community via it's absorption into patriarchy. the mechanism by which this has occurred is state recognition of the idea of homosexual marriage, which has slowly converted gay families into something that is indistinct from hetero families in every measurable way except empty identification for marketing purposes. this segment of the gay rights movement would even see that as a form of hegelian progress, because what they've been arguing for for years is inclusion; they want a way in. fine. my only reaction and pushback is that wanting to raise children in an essentially nuclear family, investments, jobs, etc is actually remarkably normal and not remotely queer at all, and that if this segment of the gay community wants to be so remarkably normal and patriarchal then it should really hand over the queer flag to the trans community, which continues to seek an identity through individual expression that is identifiably queer and discernibly not normal, by seeking and desiring to remain outside of the status quo. we want a way out; being queer should be defined by wanting out of patriarchy, not wanting into it. gay families that want in to the patriarchy should realize they are in, and stop pretending they're out, or criticizing groups that broadly want to stay out for actually being queer, in the strange orwellian exercise that is occurring as of late, which now defines being queer as being normal and not wanting to be normal as not being queer.
i should begin by pointing out that i don't identify as gay and don't go into gay spaces or try to speak for gay voices; i identify as a heterosexual (trans)female and largely prefer to go to heterosexual spaces and present in them as a female. when i've gone to gay bars in the past, it's always been as a straight female and for the same reasons that other straight females go to gay bars, namely that i don't actually like getting chased around by dorky guys when i want to go dancing, i just want to have fun. i do identify as queer. other trans people may identify differently, but suggesting i'm not gay enough to call myself gay is a strawman because i don't actually call myself gay; i do, however, call myself queer, and i must actually insist that i'm far more queer than the homosexual normies questioning my gayness, which i don't actually even claim. there's not really any disagreement here, on my behalf, except who is properly upholding the legacy of queerness and who should start to realize that they should put it down and move on from it.
i am opposed to heterosexual marriage, and by extension am disinterested in the idea of homosexual marriage. i am not any more or less opposed to homosexual marriage than i am to heterosexual marriage; i can agree that if we are to have heterosexual marriage, then there is not any good reason why we shouldn't have homosexual marriage, too. as i am not gay, i have not spent much time concerning myself with activism around gay marriage. i do not want to get married to anyone at all, myself.
the idea of monogamous homosexual relationships is something that came out of the victorian era. a lot of people don't realize that nobody would have called themselves straight or gay before about 1850, when some theorists doing what is now understood as pseudoscience started looking for a way to classify sexual orientation via darwinian evolution and linnaean classification. prior to 1850, heterosexuality was something that existed as a church enforced necessity in order to carry through with the obligation of creating children, and homosexuality was thought of as a deviant behaviour that some people engaged in under the chagrin of the authorities (like oscar wilde) and others didn't, out of fear of repercussion. the idea that there was some natural reason for homosexuality was considered crazy; it was temptation by satan. the clinicization of homosexuality that sought a naturalistic explanation and created it as a grouping actually coincides with one of the worst periods of oppression against homosexuals, such as the british government's treatment of the legit genius and legit war hero alan turing, who was diagnosed with homosexuality and forcibly given hormone treatment, which lead to a suicide. eventually, liberalizing attitudes about the lack of harm caused by homosexual behaviour (and, quietly, population control policies) led to states ceasing active oppression of homosexual behaviour and the clinical interpretation, as specious as it was, became converted into an identity, with some even speciously arguing it must be genetic, rather than a behaviour. the activist community has been slow to recognize that the science actually upholds the idea of homosexuality as a behaviour rather than an inborn characteristic, and that the grouping of homosexuality doesn't actually even exist except voluntarily, even if some people exclusively prefer that behaviour, for whatever reason. up until as late as the 1970s and 1980s, homosexuals largely embraced the idea of being queer; they didn't want families and monogamy, they wanted freedom from patriarchy. they wanted out of the system.
perhaps the devastating effect of aids played a role in the adoption of monogamy by the gay community, but it was not historically the case that gay people wanted to be monogamous or wanted the same thing that straight people want. that is a very recent change in the gay community, specifically.
is gay marriage some type of hegelian progress for queers, then? well, it depends on if you want in or out, but it is important to realize that the absorption of gay marriage into patriarchy is how judaic colonialism has functioned for thousands of years. this is exactly how saturnalia and yule turned into christmas, and how paganism disappeared. the expected development of homosexual monogamy within the system of christian patriarchy will inevitably be the reassertion of dominant gender roles, and the aggressive training of both men and women to fill each of those roles based on personality or self-identification, rather than birth sex. this is actually more flexible for patriarchy and will strengthen it. are the actual queers , who want to abolish patriarchy and replace it with real freedom, to be happy about this? is this progress? or is it co-option, and a threat to the safety of queer communities?
i'm not exactly calling on married gay people to go out and cheat on their spouses, but a little reflection would produce some levity. it's not some accident that they've got their recent converts, the normie married gays, out fighting the crusade against the queer trans, and attacking us for not wanting a way in, and wanting to stay out; this is how colonialism works.
23:26
there was that one time at the gay bar in detroit where an old guy that claimed he worked with david bowie in the late 70s starting followed me around and became confused by my lack of loose sexual mores (he seemed to think i'd just jump on his cock at the mention of david bowie), and i laughed at him as a poseur trying to get laid before i sought protection from an arab gay guy who tried and failed to fuck me before he admitted he was turned off by my hair and then drove me back downtown, but i'm wondering if i might have actually been chased by some early techno pioneer that i didn't recognize, in hindsight.
that was unusual. they usually left me alone; they were clearly not into me.
in fact, on two separate occasions, i was actually taken aside at the detroit gay bar and scolded for invading gay male spaces, as a way too girly transfem. i was there to avoid getting chased all night, which is what often happened at the hetero bars, but i didn't realize that the actual gay guys would actually be upset by this blonde trans chick dancing in the corner. it demonstrates the point i'm trying to make.
the drag queens around here won't even let me in to their shows as an observer or ally, they just look at me in this pedantic face that is something like "you're too transitioned" or "you're going to make the girls here feel insecure". they're right; i'm not a drag queen, but it's a little frustrating that i can't be a female ally. i do have a couple of things in common with them. they block me entrance at the door and chase me off.
23:56
may 23, 2023
i caught a whiff of one of the idiot children upstairs smoking something chemical (i don't know what meth smells like. at all.) and it resulted in an 18 hour migraine that i'm only clearing out now.
it looks like i'm going to have to file a hefty human rights complaint against the new owners for moving a bunch of loser junkies in, and use the money to move out.
0:54
there's a new bylaw in windsor that i mentioned that they're in contravention of. i'm going to let that process play itself out first and carefully document everything happening around me. the hrto will hear the issue before the tenant board gets to it, but it will lead to a tenant board case.
i've decided to try to wait the owners out and bleed them out to hurry it up and whether that happens or not depends on how bad the situation gets. the worse it gets, the stronger my human rights complaint will be.
in liberal jurisdictions like bc, ontario and california, and increasingly in other places, not only is it not the case that smokers have some kind of rights, but the right to fresh air is increasingly being recognized as fundamental. under this framework, coming into the place i live and smoking on me is not an assertion of their rights but an infringement of mine. i agree with this, as it is a more libertarian and less nihilistic approach towards balancing issues around smoking; their rights end where mine start, and they don't have a right to pollute in a way that infringes on my right to fresh air.
the impression i'm getting is that the new owners are themselves junkie losers and that i'm not getting anywhere expecting them to do anything about the situation without two or three civil cases to force them to. it is more likely that they're going to come here and smoke crack with the idiot children.
welcome to canada.
1:19
may 24, 2023
this isn't what was officially supposed to happen.
however, it's exactly what i predicted would happen.
humans are very stupid, and canadians are amongst the dumbest. i think that analysts would be shocked to find out how many people prioritized paying for hockey tickets over paying their mortgage.
what that means is that we're on the brink of a recession due to the rate hikes, which is what they claimed they wanted, which should finally cut actual real inflation.
0:43
i'm 90% sure i had an accidental meth overdose from secondhand smoke coming in from upstairs on monday, and i won't let that happen twice.
the fridge sounds like layne staley. it's not the worst outcome, granted, but it's certainly not a correct one. this is symptomatic of lingering meth overdose.
21:02
"no, layne staley is talking to you through the fridge! listen up!"
yeah, let me just eat this jesus chip first.
21:04
i don't know why the fridge sounds like layne staley, either.
i'm just listening to it.
21:09
i'm really not trying to sell meth, honestly. i never touch the stuff.
it's poison. really.
unfortunately, some people i don't like much have moved in upstairs. as stated, that won't happen again.
21:11
it's not just the fridge. the hum of existence is unusually harmonic; it's somewhat industrial. fans, water, everything is a bit more alive, as though i woke up a schizophrenic.
i wouldn't recommend this, but it's certainly worth noting.
21:14
it is not surprising me to that lesbian women are the people that i'm least likely to get along with. you can deconstruct this in a few ways, but i've long known that i don't get along well with lesbians, with rad fems or with terfs (by definition).
the easiest deconstruction is to realize that lesbian women define themselves as being a part of an in-group, whereas transwomen are entirely about trying to escape being a part of an in-group. transwomen are almost strictly about abolishing identity. for that reason, and i'm generalizing, lesbian women tend to have status quo and conservative perspectives, because they want in, where transwomen are about smashing all of these structures up and burning them to the ground, because they want out. lesbian women are reactionares trying to uphold the system; transwomen are revolutionaries trying to tear it down. the realty is that lesbian women tend to be pretty normal, well-adjusted people that fit into society with minimal conflicts. they're not very queer in a literal sense, they're much more normal, which is what i was getting at in my last post. lesbian women want to build their way into the system via wealth generation and by starting families, whereas transwomen are trying to get out of the system in order to live more freely, in parallel structures. the last thing that most of us want is to get married and have kids.
another contradiction between transwomen and lesbian women is personality in terms of gender identity, which makes quite a bit of sense. transwomen are exactly what lesbian women seek to abolish. in a very real sense, transwomen are everything that lesbian women want to destroy. it is easy to understand why lesbians hate the pretty transwomen the most.
when these concerns and others are placed against each other, it's easy to predict that lesbians and transwomen are going to usually be unlikely to avoid arguing with each other.
i'm cognizant that there is a longstanding misunderstanding regarding my sexual orientation. i'm not just into boys, i'm into boys that are ecologically conscious, drug free and physically well taken care of. musical talent helps a lot, too. i'm not going to relate well to lesbians in their attitudes towards women, as they reflect everything i despise about men. i never acted liked that before i transitioned, and i didn't get along well with men that did; it doesn't make sense to think that i'm all of a sudden going to get along well with lesbian women that think and act like the men i spent years trying to avoid, which is almost all of them. i didn't go through transition just to end up hanging out with the same losers i was trying to get away from, but now with lip gloss! lipstick on a filthy, disgusting pig is still a filthy, disgusting pig. lesbians are assholes.
lesbian asshole lip gloss comes in it's primary flavour of brown nosing patriarchy. greasy!
i'm more likely to get along well with gay men than lesbian women and i've known that for years, which is why i've always gone out of my way to avoid lesbians in social situations, even when they're chasing me around. i've always gone to gay bars, periodically; i've never been to a lesbian bar. i tend to prefer the company of straight (albeit unusual) people and present as a straight transfemale, in eccentric company. give me your freaks and weirdos, yearning to breathe free. i don't care who they fuck, or if they fuck at all.
my living situation is going to become a years long trench war unless they sell. they are the aggressors; i am defending myself. so be it.
23:44
may 25, 2023
i can cross the border now and will need to soon to update my nexus documents, even though i want to wait until my hair is a little longer. in week 9, it's getting poofy and awkward. i think i can put this off until mid-summer, right? my week 9 looks like videos of month 9 i've seen.
of course i regret it, but i had to do it.
i'm looking at show listings tonight because i wondered about movement due to the nice weekend, but the after hours shows this year look uninteresting to me (i've never gone to the actual festival and don't expect i ever will. too many people.) and overpriced. hair aside.
so, i started looking at some other shows and found, for example, $50 usd to see cloud nothings. wow. how much are tickets at the hockey arena, nowadays, if it's $50 to see a show at the local club?
venues need to take a look at that because they're pricing bands out; bands need to take a look at that because they're throwing away a lot of their audience. i'm not going to pay $50 usd to see a band in a club i saw for $20 three or four years ago.
2:36
in other news, a class action lawsuit was filed against lady gaga for medical malpractice over the song born this way. "this is the last time i'm taking medical advice from an unlicensed pop star", said one of the signatories.
6:30
i'm distinctly learning that these new landlords are decidedly unintelligent human beings.
i noticed that the radiant heaters had cold water pulsing through them, which is dangerous for everybody if one blows due to a badly set up heat or other pump. i'm sure that they didn't install an outside coil, either, meaning that it wouldn't even work. yet, they had clearly been converted.
i also noticed that the pressure in the shower was as though somebody was running the cold water, such as through the improperly converted heaters. in order to test this, i tried to loosen the radiator gasket and it literally exploded, indicating that the system may have been on the brink. you simply can't safely convert these radiators into coolers, and i wouldn't want one in my unit, anyways. i don't like or want air conditioning. i was able to bleed some more water out from the bottom, which had the effect of undoing the cooling in the radiator and making everybody safer.
when i brought this to the attention of the new landlords, they were not thankful that i brought a safety concern to them but annoyed with me and i think i understand now that they were responsible for setting up the cooling system and were annoyed with me because i dismantled it. they can be sure i will keep dismantling any and all cooling systems installed in my living space. fuck off.
a few hours later, the radiator turned on full blast and it's been that way since 19:30. my thermometer has been stuck at 30 degrees celsius all night.
i have to admit i actually like the heat.
yet, while this kind of behaviour might be appropriate of a five year-old having a temper tantrum over not getting their own way, when a landlord displays this kind of behaviour towards a tenant that tenant should file a t2 complaint. i missed a few before it was clear how retarded they are, but now that i realize they're intentionally harassing me, i will need to file as many complaints as are required to document the idiocy.
8:46
unfortunately, i have an unusually large amount of experience dealing with retarded and/or mentally ill and/or just plain out stupid females. i don't want to deal with this, but the stupid cunts bought my house. i can't avoid them.
8:52
what are the possible outcomes?
1) they sell and leave me here or
2) i get up and leave in some way.
in case of (1), i need to stall. in case of (2), i want to maximize my payout as much as possible. these are lesbians, remember, so they are entitled; they think i owe them something. in truth, i don't give a fuck about them at all, and i'll be looking to bleed them dry if i can. bankruptcy would be ideal.
what i want to do is to create as many documented cases as is possible.
8:55
the last place i was in was a family property going back generations that wasn't for sale. even if i outlasted the old shithead above me, his daughter was next, and that is what happened. this place is not like that. outlasting these new owners is distinctly plausible.
9:09
no, really.
i'm finnish.
i like saunas.
bring it on.
9:40
may 26, 2023
the last bus back to windsor is now at 22:00. on weekdays. it's earlier on saturdays.
therefore, all trips to detroit are all nighters until they build the new bridge or adjust the schedule.
i won't be going a lot of places this year due to the sudden seriousness of my living situation. i don't know how insane these people are going to end up. further, i frankly don't see a lot of interesting shows coming up soon. however, having the option to go over means i will go over at least a few times, i'm sure. i have to to update my card, to start, although i'm hoping to push it to late summer due to the hair, in case they need a picture.
5:58
may 30, 2023
this isn't the tip of it.
wikipedia is currently state controlled gulf emirate media. they just walked in and bought it via donations and took over all the moderator roles. i've noticed this mostly in the history section, which is the section they are primarily interested in controlling. islamic colonialism puts a high priority on controlling historical narratives, in order to place itself in cultural primacy. they think that history revolves around them (as chosen by god) and expect historical narratives to reflect that perspective. as orwell stated, "he who controls the present controls the past".
4:37
it only took a few weeks of being able to cross the border before i actually did, albeit in a purely recreational capacity. the last adventure i went on in detroit was immediately before they closed the border, in april of 2020; i was not able to enter detroit over the summers of 2020, 2021 or 2022, which made living in boring-as-fuck windsor rather tedious. now that it's over, i wasn't sure i was even still interested. i completely lost my 40th year blowout summer due to not just the pandemic but also the fact that there is nothing to do in windsor at the best of times (where the music scene sucks and the people are townies). for whatever reason, the saturday night overnight of the memorial weekend electronic music festival in detroit suddenly felt like the appropriate time to get out of the house and dance until noon.
a lot of things have changed; a lot haven't. people seemed to recognize me through the haircut (that pink tanktop of mine is not widely manufactured and is probably distinctive) and broadly seemed happy to see me. i was surprised by how many people have the same jobs they had three years ago through a pandemic in industries with high turnover rates. i've been saying for years that detroit is stuck in time and can't progress.
at 9.5 weeks since shave-off, i actually have almost normal looking hair, now; it's obviously extremely short, but it doesn't look buzzy or alieny anymore, it just looks like short hair. it is truly growing astonishingly quickly.
i started the night by purchasing a new detroit bike for $20 on kijiji, a gt palomar that ages itself by it's cantilever breaks to the mid 90s at the latest. this bike is heavy and cumbersome, but it rides surprisingly well if you can get enough inertia into it to get it going. i didn't look at the bike in the ad; i just saw it was for $20 and within walking distance and went to get it, hoping i could at least salvage the tires. i didn't make it around the corner before i realized i'd bought a nice bicycle. this was probably a $500+ bicycle in the 90s. apparently, somebody's daughter left it at home when they left and daddy just wanted it out of the garage, after however many years. this is a nice find for $20.
the bicycle's weight makes it a poor choice for an exercise bike, but the wider wheels and sturdier build also make it an ideal detroit bicycle, given the state of the infrastructure in detroit and the need to plow through hybrid terrain fairly regularly when simply transiting from a to b. i'm not racing to the bar in detroit, i can slow it down a little. i'm apprehensive about leaving this bicycle in the wrong neighbourhood in detroit, but the fact that it was $20 and is absolutely ideal for the task means i'm going to stick with it for that purpose and if somebody wants to steal the gt i bought for $20, fuck you in pre-emption and advance. the tires are fine for now, but i'll be ok with replacing these parts, as i will be with the mongoose.
if you're keeping track, that means i now have:
- a restored 90s mongoose, which is currently my windsor bike but will eventually be used as backup
- a working 90s gt, which is my new detroit bike.
- a 90s miele that needs a lot of work but that will reclaim it's place as my windsor bike if i can fix it
- an aluminum walmart hybrid bike that i have to replace the brake cables on out of the box and will either be used as a road bike (temporarily, probably) or converted into a stationary (more likely).
- my old detroit bike (a 24x1.95 huffy) has been roadsided, which is what i did with the one i had to actually leave in detroit. it would cost more to replace the wheels than the bike was worth, and i don't need it anymore. i also wanted the smaller frame gone. somebody can try to salvage it if they'd like. it's still a decent bike for a kid or small female. really.
for now, i'll take the gt or the mongoose.
the walmart bike seems like a bad purchase right now, but i'll see what i can get out of it. i guess i had to make that mistake, once; i tend not to be interested in paying for brand names and am happy to buy no name items, but that means you tend to underestimate the incompetence of mass marketed goods. it couldn't be that bad, right? well, i need to fix it, first. ask me later. if i can get it to ride relatively well for a year or two while i fix the other one and then stationary it, i'll consider it worth it. the gt and the mongoose were both steals, so if the end result of spending $440 on bicycles is that i get a gt, a mongoose and a walmart stationary, is that good or bad value for the cash, overall?
the gt looks like this one:
as stated, the bike can actually ride pretty quickly. this is not a clunky bicycle. however, those are much thicker tires than i'd normally buy a bicycle with and it's the thicker wheels, along with the bicycle's weight, that makes it ideal for the less than immaculate roads in detroit.
it was an accident created by the need to immediately get something cheap for the night in front of me, but this bicycle is ideal for detroit and i intend to keep it for that utility for some time.
when i was about to leave, i realized i had forgotten to buy a ticket so i went to the website and realized that i couldn't because they were sold out.
i immediately decided that this didn't make any difference to my plans because i wasn't going to actually go to the bar until they were clearing out anyways; i'd spend most of the night in the park, regardless. i decided quickly that the plan would be that i'd go down to the neighbourhood, spend some time out in the park and then determine if i wanted to try to get in around 3:00 or so, when they were starting to clear out.
i had to take the early bus in to make sure i could get somewhere before it closed. i was able to get to that place and purchase some thc edibles, along with a small amount of loose marijuana. i decided i'd go to the secret art park (is it still a secret?) to roll it up, then take a ride down trumbull to observe what was occurring.
the secret art park did not have installations in it when i was last there in late 2019 for an electronic music festival, which i remember for being exorbitantly hot and also for needing to roll somebody over to stop them from choking on their own vomit. kid did the wrong drugs. glad i could be of some assistance.
to enter the secret art park, i had to ride by some people with an aggressive pitbull, which i didn't like much but dealt with under the expectation it would be short-lived, and instantly realized i couldn't be rolling anything there after all because i didn't have any rollies. oops. so, i smoked the pre-roll they gave me instead and waited for the dog to leave so i could ride out.
and waited for the dog to leave some more.
now, that dog is taking a run at me. umm, guys! your dog!
they were responsive, and they were actually leaving, they were just taking a long time to do so. it's a reasonable place to walk your dog, the problem is that that breed of dog does not socialize well and will attack anything and everyone and they knew it. that was an algorithm for carnage.
once i was able to escape from the dog, the next stop was to get some rollies, but where's the best spot to roll? i went towards trumbull intentionally, intending to ride by the trumbullplex, which was completely silent (it was early). so, i rode by the actual art park to see what was happening there, and all that was there was a lone security guard. would the guard be there all night?
i took the presence of the guard as a hint that i wanted to be at the secret art park instead, so i went back there and found a group of bikers guarding the front entrance, which was worse than the dog. did i want to go back there again, after all? the thing about spaces like this is that you attract people that aren't meant for them and they're often very difficult to dislodge. if the bikers want to hang out there, i'm certainly not going to have anything to say about it.
instead, i took a ride back to trumbull because i did have an early night backup plan, which was to check out a rock band playing in a newish bar right on trumbull, down the road from the trumbullplex. i mostly wanted to check out the venue, which didn't seem right to me at first. the first band was a little too boring bro rock for my tastes, so i just skipped right in and right out, but i heard something coming from down the street...
there was some kind of band put together on the lawn across from the woodbridge pub celebrating what it called the black detroit music awards, or something to that effect. from a distance, what i heard was some jazz fusion, which struck me as a lot more interesting than the boring bro rock. after arriving on the scene, it shifted to some soul music, which wasn't quite as interesting as the fusion. i enjoyed the set from the lawn, i have to say, but i did go back to the newish bar afterwards.
i didn't have any intent or desire to see a 90s-style foofightersish alternative rock band on this night, but i needed to blow a few hours and did catch the entirety of the set by the band that was playing, called touch the clouds: https://touchtheclouds.bandcamp.com/. it was passe and cliched, but otherwise relatively good at what it did. this is a genre that is beyond dead, but it remains popular both amongst old and young people and the audience doesn't really want to hear something new or exciting, it wants to hear the cliches. i enjoyed my beer.
by this time, it was heading towards 22:00 and the early plan had run it's course so i needed to decide if i was going to the park or the bar; i decided to swing by the old park first (still just the security guard), and then stop at marble just to see what they'd tell me. what happened was that the promoters recognized me, and let me buy one of what were a sparse number of door tickets. had i shown up twenty minutes later, i might have missed that window, but as it happened to be i did get in and relatively early. the reasoning behind trying to get into the bar rather than the park is that i realized it was cooling down quite a bit, and i happened not to be wearing any pants.
the last time i was at marble was at the very end of 2019 to see the seminal idm artist plaid, which is also where i think i caught covid for the first time before bringing it to toronto with me on the greyhound the next week, but i was a frequent attendant over 2019 and in the years preceding.
the night itself was pretty uneventful. i just needed to dance; i took my edibles, i smoked my pot, i drank my beer and i danced and danced and danced, until it was 10:00 in the morning and the music stopped and i could dance no more. that was it, really; no exciting stories, and very little conversation (somebody had a nose ring and was upset that i didn't notice, despite the fact that i didn't recognize them at all. maybe they recognized me from a few years ago. i do apologize for not recognizing you back and consequently not noticing the nose ring being different.), just a lot of dancing. i think one of the bartenders does a regular hard techno set at the yearly texture show, and i have to say she's very intense; it was the best set of the night, and i remember it being the best set of previous texture nights, as well.
i was toying with going back to the secret art park to see what was there and wasting the afternoon a little in the baking heat, but that was my first night out anywhere in years and i was actually excited about going home to sleep.
it's not the most exciting detroit story i have but, in hindsight, i needed it. as for whether or not i may have any further adventures in detroit, we'll have to see what the future brings.
7:59
may 31, 2023
i don't think that chinese election interference is a substantive concern; the opposition is looking for a political angle, and the government has placed their own guy in charge as an empty public relations stunt. everything about this is a waste of time.
however, parliament should have the final say, here, and the pmo should be roundly condemned for being stubbornly undemocratic about something that is speciously supposed to be about protecting democracy.
while it's just going to waste more time, the opposition is making a valid point and he should resign, on principle. he does not have the confidence of the house.
18:44