I spent the day listening to old gorillaz youtube videos while working. Once I hopped on abelton I tried re-creating “welcome to the world of the plastic beach” by memory:

It turned out better than I thought after I compared it to the original. (You may notice the beeps from rhinestone Eyes I somehow got mixed up in my head and added to this song).

The hardest part here was the voccoder which I rarley play with and is kinda annoying to get right. So for my future self here’s the voccoder settings:

Here’s the operator that’s driving it

And here’s what’s being played:

Sounds pretty good, I think I could touch up the input noises more and if I got a better brass sound I think it would work better.

Otherwise I spent some time “vibe coding” to touch up the site. Vibe coding is just asking chatgpt to do stuff for you. I can still see why you would need an engineer to do this so I wont say its totally a replacement but damn did it take a 5 hour task and make it like 20 minutes.

(You can only see the above if you’re using a PC on the website) Both the top section and the bottom are custom shortcodes added into the site using by asking chatgpt a bunch of stuff. Here’s the PHP for the category stuff: This also requires a plugin, chatgpt suggested one but I found an older plugin that was open source and asked chatgpt to change the initial code that it gave me to that. It’s pretty crazy how simply that quick reconfiguration was.

//////
//Category Icon List
/////
function shortcode_category_icons() {
    if ( ! function_exists('get_term_icon_url') ) {
        return '<p><em>Icon Categories plugin not active or function missing.</em></p>';
    }

    $output = '<ul class="category-icons">';
    $categories = get_categories([
        'hide_empty' => false, // Show all categories, including empty ones
    ]);

    foreach ( $categories as $category ) {
        $icon_url = get_term_icon_url( $category->term_id, 'category' ); // get the icon URL

        if ( $icon_url ) {
            $output .= '<li>
                <a href="' . esc_url( get_category_link( $category->term_id ) ) . '" title="' . esc_attr( $category->name ) . '">
                    <img src="' . esc_url( $icon_url ) . '" alt="' . esc_attr( $category->name ) . '" class="category-icon-img"/>
                </a>
            </li>';
        }
    }

    $output .= '</ul>';
    return $output;
}
add_shortcode( 'category_icons', 'shortcode_category_icons' );

Also under the title page

That little line above I spent atleast 3 hours trying to get working before I started embracing AI. Chatgpt understood the problem and gave me a solution in seconds. Essentially it was adding a <div> to the “header.php”

Then some java script using another plugin that chatgpt suggested using “WP Headers And Footers” It was so easy that I imagine that it probably isn’t worth blogging too much about. But I see myself getting more into the ai dev side as I go along.