The Numbers: It Just Never Gets Old
Goodness gracious. The upward trend that’s been going since September of last year continued in February, with 14,968 page views. I was holding my breath last night to see if we’d get over 15,000, but since 14,000 was my goal for the month — and it seemed an unrealistic one at that, since it was a shorter month — I was thrilled to see the numbers land where they did. 14,968. Wow.
There were a lot of small changes put in effect over the last month, from the advertising thing to the line spacing and other tiny tweaks, but if anyone’s objected, I haven’t heard about it. Overall, I look at The Obelisk today and think of where it was a year ago and can’t believe how it’s evolved and level of interest that it’s been given. Unreal. Just imagine where we’ll be a year from now.
A couple quick notes to run down:
Merch: The shirt design that I thought was coming hadn’t begun yet, so it’s going to be a while more. Typical stoner rock miscommunication. For me, that’s the stuff of life at this point. But anyway, we should be back on track now and getting things moving. Yes, the shirt will feature a wizard fighting a grizzly bear. No, I have no idea what that will look like yet.
Podcasting: The February podcast (“An Ode to Fuzz”) did considerably worse than its predecessor in terms of downloads and all that. I don’t have a way to track streaming activity, so I can only get a sense through comments and download numbers (which is why I’m always asking for comments on the podcasts). I’ll be keeping an eye on the March one — in my opinion, the best of the bunch — and deciding whether it’s worth my time to continue podcasting based on that and probably next month’s.
Roadburn: After much back and forth with The Patient Mrs., she finally got drunk enough to buy me a plane ticket to The Netherlands, which means I’ll once again be covering the Roadburn Festival in Tilburg. Goatsnake, Los Natas, Garcia Plays Kyuss, YOB (twice), House of Broken Promises, Samsara Blues Experiment and about a million more. I am stoked beyond belief, and all the more so, because the kind folks behind the festival have asked me to do my reporting for their very own blog in addition to The Obelisk. Tickets are sold out, but if you’re going, I’d love to meet you there. I’ll be the fat American dude with the beard. Oh yeah, and I’ll have a black t-shirt on.
Review and interview-wise, there’s a lot of great stuff coming up. Later today I’ll be knee-deep in some surprisingly killer space rock from Virginia, but hopefully in the next week or so albums from Johnny Cash, Demontage and Lair of the Minotaur will also be tackled. Maybe I’ll even get to that High on Fire record one of these days. I’ll be introducing you to my favorite unsigned band in the country, and (again, hopefully) nailing down interviews with The Wounded Kings, Sasquatch, The Brought Low, Phased, Asteroid (just waiting on them to return the email questions), Cathedral and maybe even a certain legendary Maryland doomer known as much for his lifestyle off-stage as for his James Brown impression on it. All tentative (well, the reviews are pretty much a lock), but that’s just a sampling of why it’s worth sticking around for March.
In fact, why doesn’t everyone just stay here and click refresh every seven seconds or so? You’re bound to run into something awesome sooner or later.
I’ll cut it here and just say thanks again for helping make this site what it is. I’m looking forward to seeing where we go next.
Covered in fuzz,
JJ Koczan
Hock Ptooey Taskmaster
