Alan Jacobs

In years of teaching, I have often been astounded at how unhappy students can be when they encounter a different Francis from the one they expect. Oddly enough, the most painful moment usually comes when they discover that Saint Francis did not write the “Peace Prayer of Saint Francis”—a popular hymn best known by its opening words “Make me a channel of your peace,” and sung to a tune written by the Anglican composer Sebastian Temple. Many are quite shocked to find that this song is not identical to Francis’s “Canticle of Brother Sun,” from which Zefferelli took the name of his movie. The “Peace Prayer” is modern and anonymous, originally written in French, and dates to about 1912, when it was published in a minor French spiritual magazine, La Clochette. Noble as its sentiments are, Francis would not have written such a piece, focused as it is on the self, with its constant repetition of the pronouns “I” and “me,” the words “God” and “Jesus” never appearing once.

— Augustine Thompson

The world is full of miserable places. One way of living comfortably is not to think about them or, when you do, to send money.

— Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains. Ouch.

The process was one of a progressive eclipse of Christendom by Europe (defined as a geographical notion in a relationship of distance with other parts of the world). The two entities differed fundamentally. Christendom claimed the loyalties of those who were baptized into the belief-community and who related to the outside world accordingly. Europe, on the other hand, claimed no unity beyond the geographical landmass that it represented and an emerging sense of the moral and civilizing superiority of the different states and peoples which occupied it. Western Christendom was a great project about European unity, over a millennium in the making. Its destruction, by contrast, was rapid and total. In little over a century, there was nothing left but the dream of it.

— Mark Greengrass. When Hilaire Belloc (famously) said "Europe is the Faith, and the Faith is Europe," he had it precisely wrong.

I just wrote a post about the many, many things I’ve come to hate about Tumblr — I say “come to hate” because many of these problems have been generated by relatively recent changes to the site. It really does seem that there are people at Tumblr who are constantly trying to find ways to make the site more frustrating to use. I am seriously considering moving everything here — though almost no one, I think, sees what I post here, and my Tumblr has a much larger audience. Life is about tradeoffs.

azspot:

ayjay:

A partial list:

1. Tumblr Radar on the Dashboard
2. Recommended Blogs on the Dashboard
3. Occasional promoted content on the website
4. Constant promoted content on the iOS app
5. When I try to post something using the Tumblr bookmarklet on Chrome, I can’t resize the posting window: when I drag it to the size I want, it instantly resizes itself
6. Once I get something posted, instead of a simple confirmation message I get an outrageously, violently animated image of celebration, complete with falling confetti and a leaping avatar, as though I’ve just won the lottery
7. Significantly inconsistent posting behavior among (a) the website, (b) the iOS app, © the share-sheet in iOS — for instance, the iOS app doesn’t recognize Markdown

I just don’t know whether I can put up with this crap any more. There’s so much of it.

Permit me to add:

1. Total bookmarklet failure for an increasing number of sites – when you click on the bookmarklet bar tab and the resultant dialog panel containing url info and highlighted text never returns. Then, I must close that tab, open up a browser tab, and manually fill in a post with all the details. Sort of defeats the raison d'être for Tumblr.
2. The act of reblogging is a far more complex one than simply posting a link or quote – often, your post type is restricted, and then there is addendum content added that grows ever more tricky to format or suppress. I dare say that Tumblr reblogging is more laborious than creating a simple blog post.
3. Default dashboard view doesn’t show my Tumblr blogs. Yes, they’re accessible from a menu pulldown, so this probably falls into the category of minor nitpicking.
4. Search, though it has improved in recent months.
5. “Activity” dashboard panel is nice, but it could be a lot more useful. Also, when you have ~100K followers, the “Latest Notes” scroll is not very useful – a simple filter where I could just see where somebody added text (or content) instead of just all the likes and reblogs would be awesome.

I suppose we all should be thankful and celebrate that since moving to the online place where things go to die, nevertheless, Tumblr is still chugging along.

A partial list:

1. Tumblr Radar on the Dashboard
2. Recommended Blogs on the Dashboard
3. Occasional promoted content on the website
4. Constant promoted content on the iOS app
5. When I try to post something using the Tumblr bookmarklet on Chrome, I can’t resize the posting window: when I drag it to the size I want, it instantly resizes itself
6. Once I get something posted, instead of a simple confirmation message I get an outrageously, violently animated image of celebration, complete with falling confetti and a leaping avatar, as though I’ve just won the lottery
7. Significantly inconsistent posting behavior among (a) the website, (b) the iOS app, © the share-sheet in iOS — for instance, the iOS app doesn’t recognize Markdown

I just don’t know whether I can put up with this crap any more. There’s so much of it.

[caption id=“attachment_15086” align=“aligncenter” width=“1800”] mjlee, “spatial outlaws”[/caption]

[gallery] drawingarchitecture:

moon joo lee, ‘House 6’. pen, color pencil on mylar, newspaper, 36"x24"

[gallery] designclever:

Ana Núñez

ananunez.rocks