Elon’s Twitter finally does something right

I joined Twitter in 2009, and over the span of a decade amassed over 40,000 tweets (and just over 500 followers, most of whom I believe were real humans, as I actively culled the obvious bots during my Twitter heyday). But when, around 2015, the site became a platform for would-be fascist authoritarians, I began to lose interest. I pretty much left entirely in 2017, and after a brief re-emergence in 2019 (which only served to confirm that the place was a rage machine hellscape I was better off avoiding), I decided to delete my account entirely.

But for some reason, the Twitter of 2019 labeled my closed account as suspended — with their standard message about violating terms of use. Absolutely false. And while I was briefly outraged, I eventually saw it as a badge of honor. Twitter was an apocalyptic dumpster fire long before Elon Musk was forced to buy it, and I became almost proud to have people think I had been kicked out against my will.

Periodically over the past 3 1/2 years I’ve gone back and looked at my account page to see if it still said I had been suspended, which it did. Until now. I just checked it today, and at some point in the last month or two, since I last checked it, my account page has — finally? — been updated to the correct status:

More Gutenberg madness (“This block has encountered an error and cannot be previewed”)

The WordPress Gutenberg project (a.k.a. the Block Editor) is supposed to make building WordPress sites faster and… well… once you get the hang of it, that often is the case. Recently I’ve actually marveled at how quickly it has allowed me to build out a site, now that my base theme is getting a bit more polished. And creating block patterns in WordPress 6 is super slick, after you learn a few of its quirks.

But then, the Block Editor will throw me a curveball that can derail things for days. For instance, there’s this:

I have a site using my custom theme that all of a sudden started throwing out this message after a recent update. It’s on the Separator block (a.k.a. a glorified <hr> tag). I took a look at the code, and there’s nothing overly complicated going on. The best clue I had to the problem was that it may have something to do with the .has-alpha-channel-opacity CSS class getting applied to the tag.

Then I noticed that in a child theme I’m building for another site, the error didn’t occur. I tried switching between the child theme and parent theme, and sure enough — with the parent theme, I get the error; with the child theme, I don’t. So… what is it?

Well… with almost any type of problem solving, it’s about trial and error, finding differences, ruling things out, and narrowing your search. But it was really hard to find anything between the parent theme and child theme that might cause this. Certainly there were no differences in how they treat Separator blocks.

I came back to that CSS class. Why is that there? Where Gutenberg is concerned, when in doubt, it’s always a good idea to have a look at the theme.json file. And, sure enough, that’s where the difference was. In my parent theme, I had this (note line 13):


But in the child theme, I had this:


Yes, for some reason, an empty array for the color.gradients setting allows the Block Editor to properly parse the Separator block, but a null value causes the error.

WHY???

I don’t know. I don’t really care. At least I was able to fix it. But this again makes me question the wisdom of the entire Gutenberg enterprise. I still don’t really buy the rationale that this JSON file is the way to go, although I am at least starting to understand why it was chosen. However I think this example illustrates some of the negatives of the approach.

Solid Gold Countdown ’82

Last week my wife tipped me off to this amazing artifact on YouTube, the broadcast by Pittsburgh’s channel 11 of the special Solid Gold Countdown ’82, which is… just… well… I can’t even put it into words. We watched the whole thing.

There is so much to unpack here. If you didn’t live through 1982, this will feel like it’s from another planet. As for me, it feels like going home.

But, I just have to say… of everything in here, the little nugget that has stayed with me for days after watching it is the commercial for a local car dealership, offering the low low interest rate of…

11.9%

“The House the Street the Room” Gentle Giant bass transcription (updated with chords)

A few weeks ago, after I learned Gentle Giant bassist Ray Shulman had died, I posted this YouTube video:

The video featured a transcription of Ray’s bass part from “The House the Street the Room,” a song on Gentle Giant’s 1971 sophomore album, Acquiring the Taste. The transcription was one I had made in a music notebook shortly after graduating from college in 1996.

The House the Street the Room (1996 transcription) [PDF]

In the video, I pointed out a few errors I had made in the transcription, and then I proceeded to play along with the recording, correcting those mistakes.

A commenter on the video asked me to post my corrected transcription, so this morning I decided to do just that! Of course, not being willing (or able) to just leave it at fixing a careless time signature error and a few inaccurate rhythms (plus actually counting the number of times the vamps are repeated), I probed the original recording deeper, with the greater (though still limited) music theory knowledge I possess today. There were two things that bothered me that I really wanted to address:

  1. Chords. Yes, there are long stretches of the main (A) section where the instruments are playing a unison line and chords are only implied, but then there are some chord hits. And the B section definitely has chords and generally a more “functional harmony” kind of feeling. So I wanted to determine what all of those chords were.
  2. Time signatures. Yes, there’s that one odd 3/4 measure, but when I listen to it, there’s a bit in the middle where it feels like there’s an awkward beat thrown in occasionally. Then when I worked out the chords, I realized that one of those keyboard hits comes decisively on beat 4 of a 4/4 measure… and the result is that it feels more like a measure of 3/4 and a measure of 5/4. That also makes the transition into the B section a bit more logical, in that it’s returning to 4/4 on the 2nd ending, rather than throwing in a single odd measure of 3/4.

I also added tablature because, why not? (It’s really easy in MuseScore.) Note that I have no idea of these tabs are correct to what Ray played; it’s just how I played it when I recorded the video.

I’ve posted the score file on Musescore.org, and here’s a PDF version:

The House the Street the Room (2023 transcription) [PDF]

I want to talk more about those chords, because they’re very interesting. When the actual chords do hit in the A section, they perfectly match the notes the bass is outlining. You could think of the B diminished 7 chord as an F diminished 7 — they contain the exact same notes, and the piano/vocal parts really do feel like they’re just descending by a half step, but since the bass hits B on the downbeat, I went with that. (Plus, it’s kinda-sorta almost functional?)

Those C minor-major 7th chords — definitely just implied — arise from a double harmonic minor (Hungarian minor) scale. It’s a minor scale with both the 4th and 7th degrees raised, creating leading tones to both the root and the 5th. It’s a mysterious, yearning kind of sound, which fits well with the somewhat (?) ambiguous lyrics about a house where people go to safely engage in activities that would be frowned upon in public.

Anyway… that B diminished 7 chord really feels like it’s hitting on a downbeat… which is why I decided to switch from 4/4 to a measure of 3/4 and a measure of 5/4.

Now I just wonder if I’ll look back on this new version after another 27-year break (when I’m… yeesh… 76 years old) and find just as much to criticize as I do in the original today. Maybe I’ll even finally transcribe the fugue section.

Sports commentary quote of the year

“Tadej seems to — along with Eddy Merckx — have torn that script up and tossed it in the bin, and lit the bin on fire and threw the fire into the mouth of a volcano.”

—Bob Roll, during yesterday’s broadcast of La Flèche Wallonne, talking about how Tadej Pogacar seems to be defying all understanding of what’s possible for a rider during the course of a cycling season