Day: December 27, 2020

It’s this one:

Why this one? For several reasons. One, it’s a whole mood; they’re beautiful flowers, but they’re already beginning to fade and wilt, a reminder that beauty is transient. Two, the light and shadow here is almost painterly, which is partly due to how it’s shot and partly the magic of Photoshop. Three, the photo is well composed. Four, I took it with my phone camera and feel pretty smug about coaxing a photo like this out of it (again, Photoshop helped). Five, as soon as I took it this song started playing in my head, no doubt due to the similarity of this photo and the cover of the album the song is on:

So, yes. All of those reasons. I hope you like it too.

As long as we’re on the subject of photos, here are some other photos I took this year that I believe have not previously showed up on Whatever this year. Enjoy.

— JS

Basically, Google Chrome changed the way it caches images and information from the internet, which is generally a good thing — it means the browser is marginally more secure — but as a result using web fonts is kind of broken. Pages don’t necessarily show up in the typefaces I’ve chosen for them, even after I clear the cache and do a hard reload of the page. I was checking to see if changing the typefaces would have an effect one way or another, and the answer is: No, not really. What the actual solution is: Downloading the typefaces I’m using as my headline and body typeface and putting them in my local font folder so they show up every time.

If you have noticed that the typefaces on Whatever have been a bit erratic in the last month, here are the ones I am using so you can download them for yourself and have a more consistent experience: Abril Fatface for the headline typeface, and Libre Baskerville for the body text. Both are available for free at Google Fonts.

Also, on the mobile side of things, and as a response for the folks who were having difficulty posting comments, I’ve reverted the mobile theme back to a variation of the desktop theme, which is AMP compatible in any event. I may change this again at some point in the future but for now everything should be functioning just fine.

That concludes site tweaking for now. More updates when necessary and/or inevitable.

— JS