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Wednesday, April 24, 2024

Chocolate Tuba

A couple of years ago, I registered a domain name and put up a placeholder that consisted of the site name and a photograph that illustrated it. Now that I’m not working, I took some time and actually built the site.

Chocolate Tuba is about music that crosses cultures, combines disparate genres. Two things that are great individually, but you would not expect to see them put together. And yet, they can be surprisingly delightful!

The idea here is that music that combines genres unexpectedly is like a chocolate tuba.

I built the site using Eleventy, a static site generator. My first attempt a couple of years ago was with Gatsby, but once I saw the code it generated, I discarded it. There was a lot of crud that I didn’t write that was necessary for the site to operate. I didn’t like that. Eleventy doesn’t insist on using a particular Javascript framework like React; in fact, you don’t have to use Javascript at all. I have a bit of Javascript in the build process, but the output doesn’t include any all, because it simply isn’t necessary. All I’m doing here is writing a little text and including an embedded YouTube video (using the no-cookies approach to embedding) of music that fits the criteria established, that the music combine two approaches or genres or cultures in a way that is unexpected and that works.

Yesterday I saw a post shared a few times on social media about how the web used to be "fun and punk and ~weird~"". Now that I have some free time on my hands, maybe I can help bring a little more fun, punk, ~weirdness~ back to the web.

Posted at 6:35 PM

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