oh there we go, the qemu script for booting the original liveCD host was pointed at a wrong image, not the staging image, because that wasn't the one we'd been using lately

we wish we could manage qemu from the command line, typing these by hand every time, instead of saving our invocations in scripts. like we'd still have the scripts, but the act of pasting the relevant pieces of them would help us be aware of what we're doing and avoid mistakes like this