I am fortunate enough to hang out in a small Discord with a bunch of very talented people. One of them - Jazzy Chad - recently launched a new game called Letters. It's a daily wordplay game where everyone gets the same grid of letters and your task is to spell the highest scoring word - using double and triple scoring tiles similar to Scrabble.

It's addictive in juuuust the right way. It's a daily experience but it's not overly eager. It's challenging to find high scoring words but it's possible to do well without knowledge of some obscure word set. All told, a damn good game. It's in the App Store now.

Oh, and if you do not have an iPhone or do not want to install another app - it's also on the web! You can give it a whirl right now. I suggest you do.

This David Lynch Collection Auction contains no shortage of absolutely wild items. Obviously owning Lynch's coffee maker would be a real treat but an annotated copy of the unreleased Ronnie Rocket script? or his Megaphone? Bang & Olufsen Home Stereo? Dune Production Office Vintage Phone!?! His Personal 35mm print of Eraserhead?

Some of these things seem like they deserve to be in a museum. The list is long - really spend some time with this one and unearth all the gems.

Hopefully you've got Neal.fun in your bookmarks for revisiting occasionally to delight and entertain you. If not, maybe you missed the Wonders of Street View - a repository of delightful, odd and poignant captures across the planet (and across time). I've seen Alien Bugs, a Barack Obama gas station, a street view camera on a camel, a steampunk station wagon and a McDonald's airplane. And that's just from 2 minutes of enjoyment!

If you're looking for more, it's never a bad idea to revisit the archives of 9 Eyes. I wonder how much overlap there is between the two.

I stumbled across Albuquerque artist Beedallo by way of this Future Islands cover - an album I've never heard but am captivated by the art.

The Lapis Room art center has some excellent biography information about the artist, her history and her inspiration but you really just need to browse the work. I love the fusion of styles and the balance of humor, grotesque and melancholy. Riveting across the board.

The first part of 2025 was a little quiet on the yk Records front but it's starting to warm up a bit. Hopefully you've already been listening to the phiz release that was previously mentioned. Now, dive into these!

Matt & The Watt Gives - "'Til You"
If you are not familiar, Matt & The Watt Gives is the new solo project from Matt Pelham of The Features - truly one of my favorite bands from the mid-90s through the mid-2000s! This is the third (and final) single before the full album is announced and maybe my favorite of all three. This single is, intentionally, a different vibe from the previous two. It's a bit melancholy but, for me, it's also unbelievably sweet and loving.

It's on Bandcamp, Ampwall, all the streaming services and even my own YK shop. Spend some time with it! Fetching Pails - "Ruiner"
With her first album, Jill Townsend's Fetching Pails was created in a silo - written and recorded solo. In 2024, she started on new music and paired up with Dillon Smith and Andrew Core; two likeminded musicians to help collaborate on new music. "Ruiner" is the third single from the new trio setup and it's a rather epic offering! It's a slow burn but it really unfurls into a giant wall of sound.. a cathartic listen and lots of very interesting movements throughout the track.

It's also on Bandcamp, Ampwall, streaming and in the YK Shop. It's all there! Hope you enjoy.

Dream Chambers is an ambient / electronic / experimental artist that was living in Nashville for awhile but has relocated back to her home country of New Zealand. While unfortunate for me to not be able to see a Dream Chambers show up the street, this has afforded fantastic new opportunities for her - such as The Great Mystery Sound Journey that was "Made with the support of Creative New Zealand."

This live, improvised, performance is ethereal and engaging on its own but when paired with Helen Gilley's analogue video visualizations, it's just a whole new immersive experience. This visual aesthetic is the sort of thing I'd love to have playing on screens nearby at all times.. there's just something so incredibly captivating about it.

It's very unfortunate but you can not embed the video outside of this site, so I highly highly recommend you go watch it there.

Some musically related things for you.

• AN ORAL HISTORY OF SPOON’S GIMME FICTION by Sean O'Neal - I don't know what my favorite Spoon record is but Gimme Fiction is an undeniably enjoyable one... and who doesn't love an oral history? I'd love one for every record they've ever done.
• - speaking of oral histories, here's a long interview with Chad Clark on Beauty Pill's Describes Things as They Are; a fantastic record that might get overlooked because the prior Unsustainable Lifestyle is so good. I haven't cracked into this one yet but am excited to do so.
• All The Young Droids: Junkshop Synth Pop 1978-1985 - a compilation of early synth pop that is right up my alley. 24 tracks and so many great ideas in here.
• Abandoned Albums with Matt Mahaffey (Self) - an interview podcast that has an impressive number of Spongebath Records artists being interviewed: Seth Timbs, Jason Moore and even Bingham Barnes. The Mahaffey episode is insightful but they're all worth a listen.

When Bandcamp was sold to Epic, people were worried. A year later when Bandcamp was sold to Songtradr, people were downright nervous. Rightfully so, I would add. Since that second acquisition in 2023, Bandcamp has been stable and even continues to embrace Bandcamp Friday, albeit a little less frequently. But what of the other features? As a tech company, there is a constant need to be announcing new stuff and in Bandcamp's case, a dash of good news would go a long way to quell the concerns around the ownership.

They very recently announced Bandcamp Playlists - a native way to showcase your favorite songs from a variety of artists. The staff powered sample playlists are great. The feature is smart about how it places limits on the user if you don't own the music - you can't add a song to a playlist unless you own it and you can't listen to a song you don't own more than 3 times. This encourages purchasing music, not an easy task in 2025! All and all, great to see them adding some functionality that encourages discovery and some (potential) social presence through playlist sharing.

The thing about the new feature that sorta bugs me is that they already announced it in 2023 - slightly after the Epic purchase but before the Songtradr acquisition. When it launched, you couldn't add songs to a playlist from the web, only the mobile app. This is still true. The only thing that seems to have changed since the initial launch is that there is a web component for listening to playlists. That's great but still a bit underwhelming given the progress of the feature over the last few years.

To be fair, Bandcamp was acquired by Songtradr after the initial feature was announced and many people were laid off. Progress is going to be slower.

This is a lot of text just to say "Hey, Bandcamp moved this feature from the app to the web - sort of" but I'm a big fan of Bandcamp. I want them to survive. I'm critical because I'm rooting for them. I am also rooting for others in the same space because I think it's one of the only paths for an artist to be financial supported in this modern era. Let's hope it all works out!

It's okay to be tired. Just have some bottomless coffee and stare off into the distance. It helps. Here's some entertainment.

• Conner O'Malley - "Slugs" - Over the years, O'Malley has gone more and more subversive with his videos. This is a fantastic piece of work containing plenty of the absurd and true social commentary. The very end made me extremely uncomfortable, which I think is the point? Hopefully it is taken for the satire and commentary that it is.
• Kiwi Nutrition Reform - a campaign to help get Japan eating healthier.. with Kiwi. Of course the commercial is incredible start to finish. There's another one worth watching too.
• Woman & Octopus Are Best Friends - I don't care that this is The Dodo and it's something your aunt would send you on Facebook. It's delightful.
• SNL's Chloe Fineman on Letterman - in 2004, Chloe Fineman appeared on Letterman to show off her own stupid human trick of bird calling. It's legimately impressive and truly stupid at the same time.
• Criterion Closet: Ben Affleck Picks - these are always entertaining but Affleck is much more of a cinephile than I think he gets credit for. Also, his comments on Dazed & Confused and Armageddon are a delight.
• The Making of Charli XCX Joke - really enjoying everything I see from the John Mulaney Netflix show. This stupid joke with behind-the-scenes sendup is just more affirmation that it's a treat! Another good one here.
• Lindy Hop Moments - I personally have no interest in being a competitive dancer but I'd be lying if I said this isn't impressive. It's wild and seems like they're having a blast.
• Dschinghis Khan / Starparade 1979 - In 2025, this isn't particularly outlandish to see anymore but that doesn't make it any less refreshing. A 46-year old musical performance of some heavily themed pop music from Germany that looks like the precursor to the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers should not go unappreciated.

I've been singing the praises of Total Wife for many years now. They recently went on tour with Baby Wave and released a collaborative EP together - still life. This video for "leftovers" is riddled with VHS style kaleidoscope effects and pairs perfectly with the song. Turn it up loud.

As I mentioned previously, yk Records released a new two song single from phiz, a collaborative project between Tristen and Cortney Tidwell. Now there's an official video for the first track, "i lost my fkn mind." There's a lot of themes of romance, love and sex in here - so maybe don't watch it while at Starbucks. Or do! Could be a refreshing zing for yourself and those around you.

I can't stop listening to these two songs and am particularly proud of the Flexi we made for them. If you're not into plastic 7"'s, you can stream the songs or snatch them on Bandcamp or Ampwall.

A smattering of semi-shortish reads for you!

• Stack Overflow is almost dead - this seems.. impossible? The article details the timeline of big events that led to this decline - including GenAI (obviously) and being sold to private investors (less obvious but possibly more impactful, imo). Wild.
• What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT? - a bit of good news for you. The reports of energy usage in this one regard are somewhat overblown it seems.
• Nocturne - remember Spotify's Car Thing? The hardware they made that was clearly doomed from the beginning? Well, they discontinued it and now folks are hacking it back into an open-source, usable, device. Ya love to see it!
• Anime.js - a javascript library for powering animations. The website and the documentation are bonkers. One bullet in a list is doing it a disservice but please click through on this.

When I was a youth, I was a bit of a troublemaker. I don't think that's out of the ordinary. My particular flavor of trouble happened online - specifically on AOL. It was the mid-90s, I was a young teenager and, frankly, the stakes were pretty low. I ran around with a group of folks that considered themselves hackers - which is a laughable label in contrast to an actual black hat engineer but, again, it was the mid-90s and I was a young teenager.

In that same era was a piece of software called AOHell - a kind of sidekick tool that assisted in exploiting bugs in the AOL software, harassing chat rooms and phishing other customers for account credentials. Apparently it's also the first recorded use of the word phishing. The creator - another teenager - claims his motivation behind the software was driven by AOL policies that would shutdown warez chat rooms but would not shutdown pedophilia rooms.

Despite that altruistic motivation, it was a tool that enabled a lot of kids to exploit a lot of users news to the AOL version of the Internet. It also made those kids have power trips of their own, bringing plenty of chaos to a service that, by and large, was for chatting with people with similar interests.

Inspired by AOHell and the power trip it brought, myself and two very close friends - TheMeth and SAiNT - set forth on our own piece of software called AOTurkey. To be released on Thanksgiving day, it would provide ways to ridiculously troll chat rooms with a giant ASCII turkey drawing and, we claimed, do a lot of incredibly powerful exploits to the AOL software. If the name "AOTurkey" didn't give it away, it was really just a big joke. It could do very little. But it could scroll a giant ASCII turkey whenever you wanted. Still an entertaining visual to me, to this day.

There was a second version of the software that had even more jokes but, over time, the project got away from us, we moved on, we got offline, etc. AOTurkey 3.0 was made by other people and it was legitimate malware - a true exploitative virus. Unfortunately, that's all the Internet seems to remember about it. If you search for AOTurkey the only thing that comes back is that it's a virus.. that's a shame.

Added to that, TheMeth, one of the founders of the program recently passed away. I haven't talked to Vic in decades but our time as teens making such a silly joke was unforgettable. He was my same age and, clearly, a similar person in many regards. It's tragic he is gone.

So, in tribute to Vic and in an attempt to unsully the good name of AOTurkey, I've registered the AOTurkey.com domain and provided the history of the software - courtesy of The Full Wiki (another resource lost to Internet Time). There's a button to copy a giant ASCII turkey to your clipboard there too. I don't know when you'd need it but you never know when it might come in handy.

This is the kind of feel good nonsense you can't help but love learning from The Internet. The J. W. Westcott II is a mail delivery boat operating out of Detroit, MI that brings supplies, letters and packages to people residing on boats. In other words, it's a mail delivery boat bringing mail to other boats. It's also the only floating zipcode! 48222 is reserved for destinations on boats - wherever they may be.

Nothing life changing to learn here - unless you have been considering being a mail carrier on a boat and didn't think there was an opportunity to do such a thing. Now you know, there is!

While I don't actually get enough time to play a lot of games, I sure do appreciate checking out new releases and trailers. Case in point, Zwaard, a Zelda-esque action-adventure game with an aesthetic that feels extremely close to Sword & Sorcery and Hyper Light Drifter. So much so that I just assumed it was made by the same studios (tho, both of those games are made by different studios - shows what I know!)

Regardless of who made it, it's an aesthetic that I really love and a game formula that is right up my alley. Stick around in the trailer for the real teaser about 49seconds in.. very enticing!

A few months ago, Tristen reached out to me and asked if I'd be interested in releasing some collaborative recordings she'd done with Cortney Tidwell years and years ago. Obviously, I jumped at the opportunity. Both Tristen and Cortney have stayed in my regular rotation for the last.. decade plus! So learning that they had performed together was a surprise and a delight. Today yk records released two songs from phiz, the aforementioned collaboration. "i lost my fkn mind" and "If I Had Known" are very distinctly different songs but they both equally compelling in their presentation and simplicity. And of course the vocal play between the two is wonderful.

For the unique collab, I thought it might be interesting to make a unique physical manifestation of the songs. So, we put together a package for a Flexi 7". If you're not familiar, the Flexi is much like a traditional vinyl 7" but it's etched into thin plastic. Historically, a Flexi might not sound that great but technology has come a long way since the 1980s and I can honestly say this sounds great.

The photos were shot by Miles Price. The sleeves were printed by Risology Club. I'm always overjoyed to get to collaborate with people I enjoy so much and this was a great example of that.

The songs are on Bandcamp and Ampwall. They're streaming everywhere – Apple Music, Spotify, etc. The Flexi is in the YK Shop. Wherever you like to get your music, it’s there. Please enjoy.

This portrait, created in 1967 by Charles Csuri, has been sitting on my desktop for months. I tend to keep a tidy digital space but something about this image keeps calling me back. The original piece, printed on a plotter, belongs to the Whitney Museum. A blue silkscreen variant was available at Sotheby's.

The current accolades are nice but my interest is, pure and simple, the aesthetic of it. On that front, I don't really care to dissect the specifics of what I like about an art piece as it's subjective and unnecessary to explain why something is personally appealing. I'll just say, I absolutely love it.

There's plenty more to see from Csuri, as he experimented in digital art for his entire life (he lived to 99!). These early works are my favorites of his. Here's another plotter man, also conveniently entitled "Sine Curve Man."

Fiona Apple dropped a new song - Pretrial (Let Her Go Home). The song, as it explains itself in text, is an ode to the thousands of women sent to jail for simply not being able to pay a fine during the pretrial process. Despite being innocent, their lack of payment for bail takes them from their family and community. The statistic are harrowing - "On any given day, 60,000 women and girls are caged in jails.", "Over 66% are mothers to minor children."

It's harrowing and heavy to say the least (tho the song is quite catchy). While I appreciate Fiona using her visibility to spread awareness about a terrible issue, what I really love is that she provides a direct call to action to actually help. Too many times we hear how bad things are and the takeaway is simply "sucks, right?"

Not in this case, Fiona ends the video with a call to action to visit Let Her Go Home, a site that provides a central source of information and ways to donate both to Local Bail Funds and national organizations working to help people in this situation. I immediately sent some funds to Free Hearts, a TN local bail fund. I hope you do similar.

My frequency of posting WOTT Music episodes has really dropped off a cliff.. this year I've only managed to post 3 episodes! Ugh.

For this one, I decided to put together a playlist that contains some of my all-time favorites. I've been curating this show for approximately 18 years, so I have a long list of fantastic songs. This is two hours of a handful of those selections going as far back as 1995 and as recently as 2025. It's a primer to the Nashville indie music scene - not exhaustive but a helluva good listen.

It is available in podcast format - Apple Podcasts, Overcast, etc (tho often banned on Spotify). Or just keep watching it on YouTube!

Hope you enjoy, it's one of my favorites. Continue Reading...

In Catholic belief, Mary Magdalene is considered a saint and was present at the tomb of Jesus, after his crucifixion. I am not, in any way, here to talk about the validity of such "history" but I am here to tell ya that this relic of her supposed skull is metal as hell. It's incredible! A group of angels holding a disembodied gold sculpture containing a red cloth with an aged skull contained with a glass enclosure - just incredible. What an image!

There's plenty of back story to it, doubts of its authenticity or additional pictures where a face cover is placed over the skull. There are Mary Magdalene sculptures worth having a peek at too. Lots to discover on this particular rabbit hole but nothing tops that Golden Skull.