1. ‘Tis the Season for Album Lists
As 2023 winds down, we are excited to see folks flocking to Album Whale to compile their “Best of” lists! There really is a lot to discover, and it doesn’t all have to be albums released in 2023. I get to things slowly and I’m all aboard on lists like Best New To Me Of 2023:
And this favorite forty album list by Mark Harrison is 🧑🍳💋!
It’s time for you to put up your Best of 2023 list on Album Whale. And if you haven’t signed up yet, well, correct thyself! For inspiration, visit the Discovery section to find your next favorite album. —Barry
2. The Week That Was
While much of this Maelstrom year has been scattershot, this week we decided to all focus on one product: Letterbird. As we suspected, focusing together as a team felt great! Expect more of that next year. Here’s what we did this week:
Embedding is now available! Bring your Letterbird contact form to your very own site with a simple copy→paste one line script.
We made the form a little more resilient, in case someone accidentally closes it mid-message-writing.
We did some light things to both mitigate spam and give us some insight if spam is occurring.
We fixed a couple bugs in the matrix, and wrote a good number of tests to avoid breaking things in the future.
We added a simple translation feature for any user who wants to offer their form in another language.
And finally, we found a new mascot! Meet Sylvie Skyletter, who is SO happy to be delivering your messages to you via email:
You might be seeing a lot of Sylvie soon. Or maybe not—she’s going to be pretty busy after all!
3. Photo Boards
Last weekend I went to Philly to attend PAX Unplugged, a huge convention for tabletop gaming of all sorts: board games, card games, miniatures, RPGs… a veritable paradise for nerds like myself. There was also awesome cosplay, events, panels, and more. While I enjoy some amount of all these things, the focus for me and my friends this year was board gaming.
Over the 3-day span, we played about a dozen new games, were introduced to a couple dozen more, and saw from a distance even more dozens. It was both very fun and also overwhelming. A few standouts this year were Art Society, Black Mold, Parks!, and Summit, and we learned the basics of Mahjong 🀄️!
For some reason that I didn’t entirely plan, I started live-Instagram-storying my experience of the event. I don’t post on Instagram much, but I do post a lot on vacation. I suppose it’s like a vacation photoblog for me, a catalog of this thing I’m doing that’s outside of my day-to-day. Instagram stories have the benefit of being fast to post to, visual-by-design, and I have an audience there already: my friends and family that might actually be interested in my life. And some of them enjoyed following along! The downside is that it’s all gone now, just a 24 hour fleeting glimpse of a fun weekend I can personally go find in my Photos app, but you cannot. It doesn’t exist anywhere linkable anymore.
Is that a problem? I don’t really know. I guess I can’t share a link to my experience here in this newsletter, so there’s that. After reading the above, do you want to see the pictures? I guess I could blog about it, but I’m lazy. You’ll just have to trust me: it was fun. Play more board games. —Lettini
4. In Conclusion
That does it, and oh what doeses we did. It feels good, folks! A scant two weeks remain in our work-year, and we have more fun things that we’d like to present before the holidays hit. Our (Letter)bird is free and you’ll be hearing more about it in the new year.
Patrick says: Impressive! But there’s a reason it’s played on a guitar. 😆
That’s it. The newsletter is done.