Updated Blog Visuals!

Hello everyone!

It's been a while. More than two years after the last entry, I am back at writing for this blog. But that isn't all: I have updated the blogs' visuals, so they better match the aesthetic and vision I had for this platform. This is a generalist music review blog, but I am also very fond of heavy and underground music, so I decided to match the theme to those preferences.

 

Chat Pile's Who Loves the Sun, the album I am currently listening to.

First, let's start with some life updates: For the last four years or so, my online presence diminished a bit. I have been rather busy, completing a Masters Degree on Geology with the Universidade de Lisboa, and writing up a Thesis on sauropod limb musculature (and rather successfully so, if I might add). This has been a wonderful few years, filled with victories: I managed to have the highest grade average on my Masters year, and my Thesis was unanimously evaluated with maximum grade by the evaluation committee. But, despite these successes, academia is bumpy road: at the beginning of the year, I applied for a PhD grand to continue studying the locomotor apparatus of giant sauropods, but the funding proposal was rejected. Therefore, I am now an unemployed bum! 

 

In all seriousness, my life is very unstable right now. I am doing research work (without getting paid), although I might get some funding from upcoming projects. I have also been supplementing my research job with my paleoart and private tutoring gigs. While these are not excellent occupations, they do provide me with some income. I will try to apply for funding again next year, both in Portugal and Spain, and see if I get lucky. Meanwhile, let's see I have a bit of free time to write for Sound Logs!
 

About the new look: in the updated blog you will find some neat new features. First and foremost, the visuals have been updated. The blog has a new aesthetic, inspired by Victorian and gothic visuals wrapped in a dark-mode newspaper skin. The heading has some cool references to my occupation as a vertebrate paleontologist, and clicking on the blog title takes you to the main page now. The posts also look fancier, with aesthetic fonts and contrating accent colors to really make the blog stand out.

Additionally, there is an updated display of the qualitative ratings attributed to the albums. small rating boxes appear on the bottom of each post on the Main Page, and clicking on those boxes takes you to the full post. At the bottom of the full post, there is a full-sized rating box, that includes a neat justification of the attributed rating.

There is also, on the right sidebar, new menus to better navigate the blog, including a "Blog Archive" (a collapsing menu to search posts by publishing date), a "Labels" cloud (that displays labels in larger fonts the more they are used) and a "Given Scores" list (with absolute counts of each score).

 

That's it for this update. I hope y'all enjoy the new look of the blog. Stay groovy!