Frosted Echoes

Last year, for the first time, I fasted during Lent. I made Friday my fast day and fasted from sunup to sundown. It was an interesting experiment. Some days it wasn’t too hard, other days the hunger was intense, or I would get a bad headache by the end of the day. The point of fasting (especially as part of Lenten devotion) isn’t for it to be easy, though.

This past month, I spent 3 weeks sick with the flu and then bronchitis. During that time, I had little energy for anything and an appetite to match. Every day was difficult and it was even hard to sleep thinking about the things I had to do with such little resources. As I thought about fasting for Lent this year, I felt like I had already been through a fast-like experience. I wasn’t sure it would be good for my body as I healed to put it through the physical fast, so I decided against following the routine I began last year.

As I was searching for alternatives to the Friday fast, my wife passed along this list from Pope Francis to which our Associate Pastor had posted a link on Facebook. I’m trying to keep these guidelines in mind as I go through the season of Lent.

• Fast from hurting words and say kind words.
• Fast from sadness and be filled with gratitude.
• Fast from anger and be filled with patience.
• Fast from pessimism and be filled with hope.
• Fast from worries and trust in God.
• Fast from complaints and contemplate simplicity.
• Fast from pressures and be prayerful.
• Fast from bitterness and fill your heart with joy.
• Fast from selfishness and be compassionate to others.
• Fast from grudges and be reconciled.
• Fast from words and be silent so you can listen.

A few of these, such as “fast from pressures and be prayerful” and “fast from worries and trust in God,” are especially meaningful to me this season. I hope I am able to keep them in my heart and mind and continue to cultivate habits that make them part of my life.

Most of the Record Store Day exclusives recently have not been my cup of tea. However, this year, one release in particular caught my eye after the tragic death of Richard Swift.

Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard will pay tribute to friend and collaborator Richard Swift with a new 7-inch split single featuring two unreleased tracks recorded by the pair. The A-side is an unreleased demo of “Me and Magdalena” which Gibbard wrote for The Monkees’ 2016 album Good Times!. The B-side is an alternate unreleased version of Teenage Fanclub’s “The Concept” from Gibbard’s cover of the band’s Bandwagonesque album, which he released in 2017. Limited to 1,600 copies, with proceeds benefiting MusiCares.

I can vouch for the quality of the album version of Gibbard’s cover of “The Concept” from his full-length take on Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque. It will be interesting to listen to the alternate version. Many times, with Swift’s production, you can hear his style in the recording. I think I get just as much of Swift as I do Jurado on Damien Jurado’s “A.M. AM.”.

A lot of people these days are worried about the demise of Tumblr. The product has changed hands a few times, and neither its Yahoo! parents or its Verizon parents seem to have paid much attention to it. M.G. Siegler took his concerns to his Medium blog, 500ish Words. In the post, he evaluates the current alternatives to Tumblr. What is most interesting, to me, is his quick dismissal of Micro.blog, the platform that hosts this blog. He writes, “And other things such as the newer Micro.blog are almost too spartan.”

Micro.blog started out fairly limited, but has steadily built on a solid foundation. Truthfully, that’s the way most software developers believe products should iterate. The rate of iteration for Micro.blog has been fairly aggressive lately. So while I might have agreed with Siegler a little more than a week ago, when his post was written, I no longer do. In the past week, Micro.blog rolled out major improvements that put it on par with Tumblr for personal blog hosting.

The most important of the new improvements was a most from being built on Jekyll to being built on Hugo, and with that, the inclusion of the ability to customize the design of your blog. This in itself is a huge step for Micro.blog, which previously allowed very limited customization options such as simple CSS overrides and footer design. Now blog owners are free to customize their entire themes, as well as share those customized themes with others on GitHub.

One ancillary benefit to the switch to Hugo, though, which I haven’t seen anyone on M.b. mention yet, is the ability to use Hugo shortcodes. Shortcodes elegantly allow for embedded content, the thing for which Tumblr is perhaps best known. They do so in a minimal way that fits in nicely with the markdown language that powers posts on Micro.blog. Previously, you could use embedded content on Micro.blog but it was not guaranteed to be responsive (a limitation of the Jekyll backend). Sure, you could embed a YouTube video, but switch to a mobile device and that thing would go right off the page. To properly handle embeds such as YouTube videos in Jekyll, you would have to install a plugin, something that wasn’t supported by Micro.blog. Even on Jekyll’s preferred hosting site, GitHub Pages, you would have to use a solution like this. In other words, such a common blogging use case as YouTube embeds was pretty challenging on the Jekyll platform. Now, many popular embeds (YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter and Instagram) are supported in Micro.blog by using Hugo shortcodes.

This may sound surprising, but In some ways, the new Micro.blog platform is actually superior to Tumblr when it comes to embeds. I say this as a formerly frustrated Tumblr user. I wanted to use a professionally designed Tumblr theme, but what I discovered was that embeds would behave differently on the front end of my blog than they would in the Tumblr dashboard. Some sites, such as Bandcamp, offer Tumblr-specific embedding options. Those options make the content appear correctly if you are a Tumblr user viewing it in the dashboard or if the blog is using the default theme. If you are using another theme, all bets are off for the majority of your viewers who are seeing the content in the front end of your blog. However, if you use standard embed codes, the content will probably look right on the front end of your custom theme, but it usually wouldn’t appear correctly in the Tumblr dashboard. This inconsistency caused me much consternation when I was an active Tumblr user. With a more standard set of embedding capabilities, Hugo and now Micro.blog provide a more consistent visual experience.

In his piece, Siegler also speculates on what a more contemporary Tumblr would look like.

It’s hard to know what a more modern Tumblr would look like — it would undoubtedly be mobile-first, but would it be better as a paid product these days? One major issue Tumblr had was a complete and utter failure to monetize. Ads seemed like a straightforward proposition, perhaps in a way similar to how they work on Instagram now. But for whatever reason, they never truly worked on Tumblr.

Could it be a right place/right time thing for a paid social network, truly free from advertising? There are certainly signs . Such a product would never get to Facebook-scale, of course. But it wouldn’t have to. And actually, shouldn’t aspire to. That never seemed to be the success state for Tumblr anyway.

Micro.blog is also close to what Siegler proposes as a “paid social network, truly free from advertising.” The social component that glues blogs together is actually free, but participated in most fully by using a Micro.blog paid, hosted account. Like the paid version of Tumblr that Siegler imagines, it will never get to Facebook scale, but it doesn’t need to in order to be compelling. The people who are using the platform are there because they are invested in it. The deliberate nature of the participation elevates the level of discourse in a way that isn’t, in my experience, matched on Tumblr. Not to mention that on Micro.blog, you don’t have to see repeated ads for situational teen sex games. Most months, that alone seems worth a few bucks.

After pining for the Apple HomePod last year, but feeling like it was just a bit too expensive to justify purchasing at the time, I rejoiced when Apple announced they were bringing their music service to the Amazon Echo. I even wrote a blog post about the move.

My enthusiasm may have been a bit premature. I purchased one of the new Echo Plus units, with an Amazon gift card I had received, shortly after Christmas. After initially setting up the Apple Music skill, the smart speaker was pumping music for about a week when it just lost the ability one night. It wouldn’t play music from Apple or even Amazon, instead repeating the name of the track you had requested, pausing just a bit and then saying, “sorry, I’m having trouble playing the music.” Since the main reason I bought the device was to play music, this was a problem. In fact, I’d classify it as a severity 1 defect. I may use the home automation features of the Echo, at some point, but I can always turn a light on with my hands. I can make my own music as well, but you wouldn’t want to know how that usually turns out.

After the problem persisted, and after my attempts to reinstall the skill and reset the WiFi yielded no improvement, I took to the web for some research. I found someone on Twitter who originally essentially had the same issue and was now dealing with a much more compliant and capable Alexa. I asked him what he did to fix the problem. This was his response.

Not a damn thing. It’s a very weird and idiosyncratic platform.

— Tom Moore (@thmoore) January 12, 2019

Well, needless to say, that didn’t change much, other than further deteriorating my faith in the device. I found some similar posts on the Amazon Echo forums and calling tech support didn’t seem to help anyone. After beating my head against the wall for almost a week and contemplating returning the device, Alexa suddenly became willing to play music again. This willingness lasted for a couple of weeks, then one fine day, Alexa again refused to discharge her duty. Thankfully, the next day, Alexa was back to her normal self again.

At this point, I’m pretty surprised that I’m not hearing more chatter about the inconsistency of Amazon’s platform. I’ve heard a lot about the potential privacy implications of a speaker that is always listening. However, I became a lot less concerned about that when I discovered the device had a microphone mute button placed prominently on top (although I still trust Apple much more than Amazon in the issue of privacy). The bigger concern for me is that I would consider Alexa to be flaky, at best, and that flakiness seems like it should be getting more attention.