2024-11-17 21:00:00
I hosted another post- EAG music party, and we ended up singing a lot of things out of my secular solstice songbook ( making of).
This prompted me to make a few fixes: ~~break
Previously I only showed the chords for each section the first time they appeared, which meant that (a) a small screen the chords would scroll out of sight, and (b) if you don't know the songs well it's not obvious when to play which chords. I've now manually duplicated them, fixing both of these.
But this then makes the chords take up a lot more of the screen, so I've added a checkbox that lets people hide the chords.
I've added a few songs: Bold Orion, For the Longest Term, You've Got A Friend in Me, Give My Children Wings.
As you can see from the previous bullet, now you can link to
specific songs via URL fragments. This also simplifies my JS: for
some reason I'd written code that called scrollIntoView
when people clicked links. Now the JS annotates each header with
id=name-of-song and inserts links that take you to
#name-of-song, and the browser does the rest.
I'm still liking the combination of simple HTML for the authoring format combined with a little bit of JS for navigation. Each song is:
<h2>Title</h2> <h3>By Author</h3> <div class=song> <pre> chords go here </pre> lyrics with linebreaks preserved </div>And then at the end a bit of JS:
for (const h2 of document.getElementsByTagName("h2")) {
const btt = document.createElement("a");
btt.href = "#top";
btt.innerText = "return to top";
h2.parentNode.insertBefore(document.createElement("p"), h2);
h2.parentNode.insertBefore(btt, h2);
h2.id=h2.innerText.toLowerCase().trim().replace(
/[^\w\s-]/g, '').replace(/\s+/g, '-');
const li = document.createElement("li");
const a = document.createElement("a");
a.innerText = h2.innerText;
a.href = "#" + h2.id;
li.appendChild(a);
toc.appendChild(li);
}
show_chords.onclick = function() {
for (const pre of document.getElementsByTagName("pre")) {
pre.style.display = show_chords.checked ? "block" : "none";
}
};
Happy to take suggestions on how to make it more useful!
(This is an example of a post where I'm glad I can author with the
xmp
tag.)
2024-11-16 21:00:00
Recently a bunch of my friends, primarily in the contra dance world, have decided to give Bluesky a try. I think a lot of this is a post-election reaction to Musk and X (Twitter), but since I'm not on Twitter I'm mostly seeing the Facebook side. Regardless, I'm happy to see energy for migration: I'm pretty unhappy with FB [1] and if we can get critical mass on a better platform that seems good.
Playing with Bluesky it seems fine. I turned off Reposts (Settings > Following Feed Preference > Show Reposts) because otherwise my feed was full of things from people I don't know that I wasn't interested in. I like that it seems to be run by people who value openness. Not sure yet whether it's default algorithm is any good, but I like that I can experiment with other algorithms or (if I'm willing to put in a bunch of work) I could write my own.
If I end up liking it I'll write a comment bot like I did for Mastodon. Speaking of which, I'm still cross-posting there [2], from a previous effort to move to a more open platform, and I'm still reading it with with Shrubgrazer. But more friends have joined Bluesky in the past few days than ever joined Mastodon, so this seems more likely to take off.
If you'd like to add me I'm @jeffkaufman.bsky.social.
[1] Very high ad load, keeps trying to push reels and groups,
increasingly buggy (for months long comment threads only load if I
switch each one from the default of "most relevant" to "all
comments"), doesn't show me posts from most of my friends, still quite
bad at predicting which of my friends to show my posts to, broke my
comment bot enough times that I've given up on it, doesn't support
good search because people find it creepy, terrible flow for review if
one of my posts is accidentally removed, etc.
[2] As platforms proliferate I'm glad to be using a POSSE ("Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere") strategy.
2024-11-15 21:00:00
This year's Boston Secular Solstice will be on Saturday December 28th, and again I'm organizing the music. Are you interested in singing or playing? A wide range of instruments work here: in the past I think we've had people play piano, flute, guitar, mandolin, and cello. This isn't a large time commitment: we typically meet once or twice before the event for an evening to run through songs.
Here's something I wrote up about last year, with links to the songs we did: Boston Solstice 2023 Retrospective.
We haven't finalize the song list yet, but the current draft is "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life", "Battle Hymn of the Rationalist Community", "Brighter Than Today", "Endless Lights", "Find My Tribe", "Gather Round", "Give My Children Wings", "No One Is Alone", "Old Devil Time", "Somebody Will", "The Circle", "The Mary Ellen Spider Song", "We Will All Go Together When We Go", "When I Die", "When I'm Gone", and "You've Got A Friend In Me".
Let me know if this sounds fun!
2024-11-14 21:00:00
Let's imagine you have a community where there's enough interest for something like a dance every week. What's better: a single dance with a weekly schedule ("every Friday") or multiple dances dividing up the month ("1st Fridays", "2nd Fridays", etc)? While there are advantages to both, I think the latter is usually better. And the more different the individual dance series are (different halls, parts of the city, vibes, booking approach) the better.
This is mostly based on two observations:
Even in a city where there's a lot of dance interest there are a lot of people who don't want to dance every week.
It's better if you know more of the people at a dance.
So let's say you're a person who wants to come occasionally, perhaps once a month. The experience of coming monthly to a weekly dance is ok: you know the regulars, there's some automatic coordination that happens when you and your friends like the same bands and callers, you can explicitly coordinate with your friends. But coming monthly to a monthly dance is much better: you are a regular. The more the dances are differentiated from each other the more people with a monthly appetite will end up attending the same dances each month.
Other advantages:
It makes it easier to match the number of dances to the overall demand from the community. A weekly dance can't scale up or down easily, while changing the number of monthly dances is natural.
It increases total demand for dances, by making it more likely that there's an option that's a good fit for any individual dancer.
If the dances are at different halls then you're more robust against a dance losing their hall.
It spreads the work of organizing around.
It allows more experimentation and different booking thresholds.
The main disadvantage I see is that if your community is able to support a large number of weekly dancers, there's something pretty great about how tight a weekly community can be. And the dance skill level will generally be higher.
Other tradeoffs?
2024-11-12 21:00:00
In the comments of yesterday's post on the most booked callers and bands, several people were interested in the gender composition of the bands. I looked at this in 2018, covering four years of data (2014 through 2017); what does it look like now?
I took my stats for 2023 and 2024 [1] and attempted to annotate the gender breakdown of the bands. This is a fraught endeavor: gender is not always obvious. In cases where it seemed unclear I looked at band websites, and when it was still unclear I looked for publicity that referred to musicians with pronouns.
The biggest change from last time is the number of non-binary musicians. I didn't count any as non-binary in 2014-2017 (which might have been a mistake), while for 2023-2024 I count 2% of musicians. And 10% of bookings contained at least one non-binary musician.
I'd like to plot something meaningful that I can compare across years, and it would be much clearer with two axes, so here's bookings by number of men vs number of non-men:
The total is essentially the same: 77% male in 2014-2017, 76% male 2023-2024, but the distribution has shifted in interesting ways:
There are now more than zero duo and trio bookings with no men, and a noticeable increase in trios with one man. I had initially expected to see that the overall balance had shifted away from men (which it hasn't) and I think my impression was driven by seeing these groups. The largest contributors here are Eloise &Co. and River Road.
All the solo bookings with one non-man are Rushfest, but I'm not sure the decrease there is real: dance weekends are very inconsistent at listing Rushfest gigs, and I've often missed them.
The increase in trio bookings with three men is primarily Playing with Fyre, the Dam Beavers, and Drive Train.
That these seem to be driven by individual bands suggests we shouldn't trust individual buckets too much. How sensitive is the overall ratio, though? The totals are based on 1,032 booked individuals for the smaller 2023-2024 set, so if one of the top bands (~15 bookings over two years) had a female member replace a male one or vice versa that would bring the totals up to 79% or down two 73%.
If there are other ways of slicing this data that would be helpful in answering this question, let me know!
[1] This means the same caveats apply: I'm not counting bands without
names, bands that played fewer than two weekends/festivals/etc in a
year, ways that the lineup at the gig might differ from what's on the
band website, etc.