'23

In preperation for the new year, I've moved over the blog archive pages to accommodate for the 2024 blog archive page. reoccuring themes...?

12.20.23

LOTS of little updates I've been doing here over the past day or so. the extras page is being changed a little bit. I just added a show I went to two days ago, so that was fun. I plan on fully going with making little blogs about live shows I go to, it's something I've been wanting to do for a year, now that I'm seeing bands more often. The only thing that kept me from doing it was the fact that talking about the venues, bands, cities for where I go would reveal a lot of information about me, but to be honest I don't really care and just want to have fun on this website. I've already mentioned the city I live in...!

I take 90% of my inspiration for this idea from Sid Sowder's Too Much Rock website. I love browsing this website whenever I'm bored, it's got tons of info about shows spanning back to the late 90s with some pretty sick band photos attached. Check it out!

It's kinda crazy that I managed to fulfill my "resolution" that I uploaded to here back in January '23. I actually DID reach version 4. Haha.

So yeah, more tweaking of this website to come, I'm just done with finals so I'm free for the next month.

12.16.23 ... '23 almost over already?

100k hits has been reached, thank you all!

I've made so many mentions of my hitcount milestones that I'm probably going to save the next one for 200k or 500k... Welp, while I'm here, might as well chronicle them.

80k -- 8.29.23
50k -- 3.11.23
40k -- 1.20.23
30k -- 9.12.22
20k -- 3.20.22
10k -- 11.21.21
7k -- 8.25.21

Sometimes I forget how long I've been here.

11.28.23

Welp, I am feeling better (as of a few weeks ago) so back to some work on the website. I haven't bothered any kind of journal entries to the extras section, so I might write some up. The last ones that I wrote were made a whole year ago... To be fair, nothing was really going on in my life in the first half of 2023 that warranted me to feel the need to write, I didn't even pick up my personal journal during that time. A lot, however, has happened in the last half of 2023, so I do kind of feel the talk about stuff...! I might just first finish the gig diaries and upload the photos from them, just to get that out of the way.

I didn't give an update for this, but I did upload some new film photos. They're from a hike I did back in May, and a trip to Niagara Falls in July. Perhaps I'll upload higher quality scans in the future, my scanner and photo editor compresses photos to an almost indiscernable degree...

11.14.23

Today's word of the week is... SUFFERING! Whatever the fuck got into this new COVID variant has had me bed-ridden and feeling like total shit for a week. Had to miss out on some midterms. The absolute weirdest part is the fact that for the 3 years that COVID has been around the world, I've been totally asymptomatic, or lucky. Never had an adverse reaction, not even the slightest cold symptoms. This one, however, really fucking got me. I'm healing up now but I'd rather not list off the symptoms I had so just bear with me when I say that it got me really badly. Stay safe!

I just finally finished up the write-up of one of the gigs that I went to back in September. Find it on the extras page.

10.13.23

Did some fun rearranging. I want to use tables more instead of just floating everything down on my site. the links page and the extras page should look much neater now. I also added something new to the extras page -- A new column on gigs I went to that I want to write about, and to show some photos I took from them. I may include recorded audio from those gigs but I don't entirely know Neocities' policies on bootlegs, but I should be fine.

9.27.23

My website is approaching it's 5 year anniversary... And just in time, I hit 80k hits... very close to 100k, which is jarring and amazing to me.

8.29.23

Well... Seems like a new semester is starting in a few days! Fun.

To any other Neocities users in college (or just starting) -- Join your campus's radio station if you love music. You won't regret it.

8.18.23

Jejune - Coping With Senility
Ribbon Fix - Some Saturday
Merchant Ships - Sleep Patterns
Merchant Ships - Good Weekend
Frodus - There Will Be No More Scum
Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts - Everyone Asked About You
Joshua Fit For Battle - Oh Good It's One of Those "Reality" Shows
Shotmaker - Archaeologist
Faraquet - Sea Song
Cave In - Brain Candle
Shiner - Pills
Shiner - Glass Jaw Test
No Knife - Academy Flight Song
Burning Airlines - Outside The Aviary
Cursive - The Martyr
Chavez - Pentagram Ring
Don Caballero - Sure We Had Knives Around

Bowery Electric - Under The Sun
Bowery Electric - Let Me Down
Stars of the Lid - Tape Hiss Makes Me Happy
Labradford - Preserve The Sound Outside
Christoph De Babalon - High Life (Theme)
Sweet Trip - Kate
Rumskib - Think Eyes Away
Southpacific - Datura
Roy Montgomery - The Soul Quietens
Ganger - Anomovieshot
Ganger - What Happened To The King Happened To Me
Do Make Say Think - The Fare To Get There
Pele - nude beach. pinhole camera
Windy & Carl - Elevation

(Artist - Song)

8.3.23

Check it. I got a fuckin NAVBAR now. Something my website needed a LONG time ago. Still needs some implementing.

7.23.23

Woo... Redesign..!

Remember when I said back in April that I was running for the chief engineer of a college radio station? Welp... Ever since early May, that's what I've been doing. Engineering. Audio stuff. Upgrading. Have you ever tried to reinstall Libretime on a five year old desktop PC that's failing to hell and back? That's what I'm doing right now. Thirty hours of painstaking work this past week. But, it's fine, because I love my stupid station and what we stand for. I love being a part of college radio and contributing to it, even with how strange radio seems to be nowadays.

What have I been doing for the past two months? Two jobs. Working an actual job that gives me pay on the weekends, and then my unpaid chief engineer position, which is totally voluntary. So far, I've upgraded the microphone arms (ten years old and falling apart), replaced two CD players, and I am now currently upgrading our automated-DJ-system. Up next is the power conditioner that's in our on-air studio.

Now, you may be wondering, "Why the fuck would you do this over the Summer? Aren't you on break right now?" No shit, yes I'm on break... and so is the rest of the station. I could not work on this for the life of me during the Fall with activity in the station being at an all time high, and in my case, I will be having classes by then, and I will never have the time to do anything in regards to upgrades and engineering stuff. That will be a time for me to just exist in case something goes wrong.

Speaking of which, have you ever seen a completely jerry-rigged server tower running the station's vitals? It' entire connection to the broadcast is literally a single plug into an outlet in my office. Yes folks, welcome to college radio! It's fun here.

7.21.23

Woo!! The semester is almost over. Two more finals and I can finally do nothing but work and other passion stuff. (Including this website!)

More photos are going to be added to the website soon. Stay tuned!

5.6.23

Two week update. If you're wondering how I'm updating the website... I've had a laptop. What kind of laptop, you ask? Well... a 7 year old ThinkPad with the world's worst battery! Hey, at least it's getting me through college fairly well. It was real cheap.

So yeah... shit's rough. Been unemployed for a bit and finally got a job. It's got great pay but the only downside is the incredibly long shifts. Luckily I'm only working weekends so I'm just going to take it as it is.

Also, I'm going to be running to be the chief engineer at a college radio station I've been a part of for almost a year now. It's a bit of hard work but it's a passion thing. There's a lot of bells and whistles but I'm (fairly) confident.

What's going on with the computer, you ask? Well... Here's why it may take a while. I'm essentially rebuilding it. The entire PC was just some prebuilt shit in a case that loved to collect dust. The parts are in good condition, so I'm quite literally just taking all of my parts and putting them in a case that's massive and has good airflow. Should be fun... except for the PSU transplant! I'm already terrible with cable management on my desk, so trying to do it in a legit computer case will be fun.

4.15.23

Minor update -- My five year old desktop computer's boot drive has just failed, and along with it my other main storage drive (main storage for a lot of website files). Most of my files are retrievable, but it'll put a temporary hold on website work.

3.31.23

There will be some moving around on this website tomorrow-- I'm updating a bit of my CSS and some pages on this site. Changed up the logos (yet again) and hopefully, they'll look a bit better with some of the new styling and layouts.

3.18.23

Well jesus... I am steadily approaching 50k HITS. Holy shit. That's a lot of individual people that have seen my website. Having a semi-rough semester so far, so seeing this has genuinely made my day! Gives me more of an incentive to set aside my other hobbies and get back to revamping this website.

I just added some live band photos to my website. they're linked somewhere in the extras page. If you just saw my Neocities profile page light up with a ton of added files, that's what just happened.

3.11.23

Alright. Three weeks without an update! Let's get to some... talking.

I know, I know... I did promise some new digital photos that were going to be uploaded in the gallery. That's still something I want to do. I've diverted my attention away from the website right after I said that. That being said...

I do have some live photos from a gig that I helped set up sound for. The photos won't be added to the photo gallery, I will make a standalone gallery for it. I took some great photos (I hope) on color film. They're not done developing, but will be soon. Probably Monday?

2.16.23

Well, I'm impressed and quite shocked. Last few days, the site saw a sudden influx of visitors. Managed to hit 40k hits.

1.20.23

Alright. Cool. URL should WITHOUT A DOUBT be working now. Got some shit sorted out with Namecheap but all is good now. Onto the fun stuff...

I'm too lazy to hyperlink so bear with me here.

The guestbook page of this place will now use an iFrame to open up the 123guestbook page on my site. I cannot make a return button at the moment so now's the time to love that back button. The new index page logo now shows the url name, vibracobra.net. I redesigned it! I think it looks cool. Feedback?

One of my first major plans that I'd like to do is to redesign the index page entirely. New directory, possibly new links, a whole new layout... Y'know, the works. It may still be white background, or it may not. I haven't entirely thought it out in my mind yet, but it's something that's nagging at me to work on. After all, the index page has remained relatively untouched for the past year-and-a-half to two years. Hopefully between my lectures that'll be something to work on.

Now one thing that I'm sure you're all dying to hear-- Why the URL vibracobra? To keep things brief, it's the name of a song I really love. It's from Polvo's first album Cor-Crane secret, the starting track to one of my all-time favorite alt-rock albums. Thought the name of the first song just sounded so cool and it's pretty much my favorite track from the entire album.

1.17.23

Finally got a new domain up and running! URL is vibracobra.net. No need to change your buttons to redirect to this website, since I'm putting a redirect. I think Neocities redirects already? Either way, don't worry about that.

With this new domain, I will very likely be starting a "rebranding" of my website very soon. As mentioned in my recent journal entry, this is going to be the personally anticipated website version 4.

1.15.23

Hey all. How's '23 so far?

More digital camera photos to be added soon. Haven't touched the gallery in a long time.

Oh, did Neocities update their webhosting to cut off the .html at the end of webpage URLs? Or is it just me? Either way, I like it. Makes my website URLs look cooler!

Edit -- Yes, they did.

1.8.23