Music and more with claudecat17 (aka Chris Davlin)!

It’s been quite a day friends! Until late afternoon I was in full panic mode, as the evil stepmom was still hoppin’ mad and came at me with real venom, demanding my immediate exit from the premises, and “get out of my car!” like a maniac. I did so and stayed in my room for a while as the guy worked on putting in a new hot water heater, the latest thing to fail after decades of neglect. I had to find her a repairman once for the ancient Caloric oven, and got lucky. The guy was like a Caloric enthusiast, had parts in the truck! It was back to its glorious gaseous self! No more waiting 25 minutes for it to light! We’d worked around that for years before she finally called someone, or had me do it, a rare instance of something resembling trust.

Anyway, by the time I emerged hours later she’d cooled down. Mainly she realized she still needs me for lots of things, of most immediate concern taking stuff to the dump, as covered on the ephemeral yet gripping front page today after an initial panic posting and front page revision, since deleted. So I’m back for a while, and what’s more I’m gonna see if she’s okay with me taking her precious Escape on a journey north to visit folks I haven’t seen for decades, with zero contact with the ex or my daughter in even the planning stages yet. Grudges? I got ’em baby!

I’m tired of nobody caring about my point of view or even my well being. No family member has ever really reached out to me aside from the bad guy faction, my dad and his second wife and my one brother who married a crazy woman, a big component of how I ended up in this mess. Everyone seems to have taken the ex’s side in the whole divorce thing without even talking to me about it! I was friendly with my mom for a long time, but it was always me calling her, going over there, although she did step up big time and help with both financial and seeing my daughter often enough concerns. I don’t think any of them, her and my other brother that I haven’t talked to since he skedaddled from dad’s post-memorial cookout at our place, having claimed he was going for ice, have ever once tried to hear my side of things. Haven’t seen or talked to him since the ice disappearance, and what’s more, I called him a few times today and emailed too. No response whatsoever to a genuinely panicked me seeking shelter for the night. What!?! This is my family folks…

Yikes, that got a little raw, huh? Fuck ’em. And I hope they see this! Anyway, my intention with this post, before it got so creepy, was to rave about my ultra-wonderful and ever so carefully curated music collection. I’m extremely happy about it, and proud too. I’ve become very good at finding anything I might desire through a few different methods of what was once called “piracy”.

Most of what I grab, or have in the past anyway, I’ve paid for at least once, so the weasels got what was coming to ’em. I’m now free to roam the entire music landscape as far as I’m concerned. Come get me! I have a VPN motherfuckers! See I do movies and TV this way too, almost all of that by torrent, which I’ll leave it to you to learn more about if necessary.

For music it gets more complicated, as torrents will cover you for the popular stuff, even jazz and blues and other great stuff, but it gets thin when you start looking for anything too obscure. That’s where something known as Soulseek comes in. It was and still is a Windows program, and there’s nothing wrong with any of that. Haven’t used either Windows or the main Soulseek client there in decades really, but I’m sure the main product is still fine.

I’m a Linux user, Arch, btw (that’s a real knee-slapper in geek circles!), so I have a few choices. There’s the SoulseekQT client or a more robust application called Nicotine+ that’s what I use. Nice name! It does everything you’d want it to do and is pretty intuitive once you stick with it. I stayed with SoulseekQT far too long. I works but is less powerful and less than perfect in several ways.

It’s hard to describe the power you have using Nicotine+. You can find people that share your taste pretty easily, then browse their shit and start grabbin’. Of course, you need to be sharing stuff yourself in most cases, though you can get away with a random folder at first. The more you share the more people will let you grab their shit like crazy. You can fill up several hundred GB in no time if you’re not careful!

Here’s a tip I’ve only recently implemented: Tell it where you want the files before you grab! That way you don’t have to move shit around later. I used to sometimes forget entire folders of crap, but now it’s where it should be already. I can be dumb, I know…

I’ll grab anything really. My taste goes everywhere from Bulgaria to Cajun country, from Woodstock to Jamaica, etc. Only opera, rap, metal, most show tune/Broadway kinda stuff, and much of modern country music are off limits automatically. And disco of course, unless done for kitsch value. Huh, so that’s how you spell kitsch! The red squiggly teachin’ me shit here! Love that!

What got me thinking about this as a topic was the prospect of using a program for Linux called Strawberry, which is a database and player all in one, and quite powerful. I’ve had it handle hundreds of thousands of files without any issues, though it can take a long time to process everything. Once it does though, you have tons of things to play with. Playlists? There’s any possible playlist option you could ever even think of. You want to search the entire collection for keywords, the reason that got me here writing about it? Easy as shit, and real handy for special occasions, holidays and whatnot. For example today I want something with homeless in it. I haven’t looked yet but I guarantee there’ll be something! Let us check, shall we?

I’m heading into the closet for a few, then I’ll fire up Strawberry, right on my taskbar here in beautiful KDE’s Plasma Desktop, my favorite DE, or desktop environment. Told ya I was a nerd! I’m decades deep in with Linux now and have tried them all. I have 8 different Linuxes and Windows on this PC, a Beelink SER9 mini-PC with as much storage as I can afford and soldered on RAM that’s more than enough for my needs. It’s like 28GB I think. Great product and great company! They made an exception for me when I returned another model due to botching a BIOS update. I was set to send it to China but they let me send it to California instead, where they fixed it. I had to strip out the memory and storage due to Ebay madness but the husk is currently on its way to an Ebay buyer with a keen eye for value.

I had one guy buy a laptop once that I’d very clearly specified was free of all RAM and storage. He got pissed and wanted to return it when it wouldn’t turn on. I know enough to realize how dumb this guy was, though you need to know PCs intimately I guess to know this. All he had to do was insert a bootable flash drive with Linux or even (God forbid) Windows and Bob woulda been his uncle. I guess he figured it all out after I explained that to him calmly, dreading yet another refund. It stayed sold anyway. I was almost hoping to get it back. A Thinkpad, though not one of the metal ones. Real nice though, and expandable. I like my new-ish one though. The Thinkpad had a weird BIOS/setup environment where you use the mouse. This Nimmo, with a little fish logo, is much less idiosyncratic, just the normal text mode BIOS screens and no surprises. A keeper!

So yeah, smoke, then Strawberry… am I annoyingly long winded or what? Don’t answer yet! Be right back!

And I’m back, with results. It wasn’t too surprising really, just three main choices, then a bunch of things only vaguely related that contain the word homeless in the album or folder name. There’s a whole collection I have called Strike a Deep Chord: Blues Guitars for the Homeless, but no specific tune related to homelessness that I recognized.

The top three were a Bessie Smith tune, a badly recorded one at that, a tune by Willie “Long Time” Smith with homeless in the title that was fairly uninspiring, and finally, our winner, Josh White, about whom I’ve written before but am too lazy to link. He was a fascinating guy! Former bluesman makes real good, hobnobs with Presidents and kings, eventually gets blacklisted, lives and works overseas doing music still but not really blues. Had the first million seller by a black artist by some metrics with the huge hit “One Meatball”, kind of a comedy thing later covered by Ry Cooder on his first album I believe.

The Josh White tune is called “Homeless And Hungry Blues” and was recorded between 1933 and 1935, while White was still a blues singer. It’s nothing special, just a good solid effort similar to his other output from that era. He’d do all kinds of material as time passed, including some really odd things, cabaret type material you don’t typically hear from a blues guy, or any black guy for that matter. He was Ben Vereen before Ben Vereen! Weird!

That right there illustrates the importance of a good collection first of all, but how important it is to be able to work with it in various ways, playlists, tagging files, etc. Strawberry can do a huge number of things, including interfacing with the major streaming services, directly editing audio files, organizing the collection in a wide variety of ways, etc. It’s almost too much!

I barely take advantage of any of that stuff, just the search and maybe fixing a tag here and there. It has the handy ability to classify whatever you tell it to under Various Artists, which really comes in handy at times, especially right after the first full library scan, when you may have lots of stuff under “Unknown”. A mouse click or two and it’s under Various Artists.

Other than that I do my own folder structures, everything by artist name, then individual albums under that, with a gigantic VA folder to hold most of what Strawberry classifies as Various Artists. That seems to work well for me because I also like to flip through folders manually in a file manager sometimes, Dolphin in my KDE implementation. Also very powerful, the best GUI file manager around as far as I’m concerned. It’s all free! That’s the greatest thing about Linux, and nobody’s talking about money, just freedom. I’ve even interacted with one of the KDE public facing tech guys, Nate, and he’s real nice.

The whole point with open source is that there’s a world wide network of geeks and coders that actually work on whatever, together, always learning and teaching. Things are constantly being updated, and with my particular Linux version, or “distro” (short for distribution), Archlinux, being what we call a rolling release, you get it too. With a rolling distro you install it once and it constantly updates itself day by day. It works great but you do have to pay attention. Every so often Arch will have a fix on the front page of the site for something that could potentially mess someone’s shit up. Rare now but it still happens.

I’ve also submitted bug reports and tried overall to be a good Linux citizen. And though it’s still necessary for most folks to use what they call “proprietary (not-free) blobs” in the kernel or the firmware folders themselves, it’s getting better and better every year. I need Intel wireless for example, and lots of folks use nvidia graphics cards, still one of the biggest sources of frustration for users due to the company’s refusal to cooperate with Linux and the wider free and open source software communities. Freedom rubs weasels the wrong way despite all the flags they like to festoon themselves in.

I can’t think of a less patriotic thing to be than morbidly rich, like the people currently siphoning up your Doordash money and blaming it on the war. A month from now they’ll report record profits and nobody will remember or care. We’re far too easily fooled, again and again. Won’t we ever learn? I mean, this happens with some regularity, even within America’s very brief history. I think we’re ready for another Roosevelt, right? Teddy did it to the train people, then the guy in the wheelchair not only pulls us out of a depression but wins the fucking war too?!? C’mon.

The only Republican anyone cares about or can even defend without ridicule really is Lincoln, and they were a whole different party at that time, obviously! They slowly evolved into the party of racism and giving your money to their rich buddies. It’s that simple as I see it. Reagan? No sale… racist motherfucker with a wife willing to cozy up with Gary Coleman on national TV to keep you from injecting weed into your baby or your dog or your neighbor’s baby’s dog. Poor little fella must be scarred for life. Gary, not the dog!

I’ll say it. She was a cunt! You heard me! A cunt that was deep into psychics and astrology and all that bullshit. At least mix in the I Ching, right? One hexagram. But nope, she chose Gary, psychics, a single facial expression that conveyed nothing, and the fucking Gipper, almost humanizing him with her reptilian nature, primordially obvious to most humans. Cunt. Say it with me! No? Alright.

Two felt about right. I mean, she was no Jaye P. Morgan, with her string of Midwestern savings and loan robberies right in broad daylight. The Gerald Ford mask wasn’t enough to hide her true nature, that of a callous plunderer of elderly people’s nest eggs. No wonder she hated Chuckie baby so much. He was a true American hero, fearlessly protecting those all important Dating Game winners in like Bucharest or something. He coulda died and then what? No more Gong Show at all? What kind of world would that be? I want no part of that reality!

Okay, that was fun, wasn’t it? I needed that after this day. I get paid tonight at midnight too, which just happened, and again the next day! I think! And that’s not even counting the $244 on hold until delivery, which went out Sunday. I think! I could be caught up in mere days if I keep selling. New inventory still to buy, but it should arrive by mid week I hope. Just gotta keep the butter churnin’…

Let’s see, did I cover everything? The collection, why I love it, how I use it, even how I get it… I think I did! I’m sure I could go on for a few more paragraphs but I’ll spare you whatever that would have been, probably a lame humor attempt again… Is that the right level of self deprecation Jerry? Jerry? Oh Jerry! Not gold, huh?

There it was! And here I go, feeling somehow therapized. Thanks for listening doc! The Czech is in the male, as they say in old Vladivostok, without a trace of irony mind you! I’m spinning out now. (…glorg…)

Later!