yewknee
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An internet waystation.

it me - michael eades

👋 Hi, I'm Michael Eades; a long time Internet dweller, design dabbler, dangerously amateur developer, online social experimenter and frequent curator.

Currently working as a Product Manager at Mosaic. I also keep the lights on at a boutique record label called yk records, a podcast network called We Own This Town and a t-shirt shop called Nashville Galaxy. Previously, I built things for Vimeo OTT, VHX, KNI and Spongebath Records.

This site is an archive of ephemera I find entertaining; tweets, videos, random links, galleries of images.

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find me elsewhere

 

contact

Reach out via twitter or good ole email if you have anything to discuss. I do my best to reply in a timely manner.

for the record: "yewknee" is a nonsensical word with no literal meaning but a unsurprisingly nerdy etymology. It is pronounced, "yoo • knee."

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ongoing projects

yk Records →
started in 2009 as a conduit for music that friends had no plans on releasing. now it's a full fledged boutique label focused on releasing quality music from a variety of styles. you know, like a label does. Here's a sampler on Soundcloud and a different one on Spotify. Options.

We Own This Town →
Originally a Nashville area music blog, this site has grown into a full blown podcast network as of 2018. It's an attempt to bring together creative folks about a variety of interesting topics.

I host this show all about Nashville local music outside the expectations of the city. I'm biased but all the shows are good.

Nashville Galaxy →
An online t-shirt shop featuring beloved and defunct Nashville area businesses. Very niche audience on this one but I tend to think niche is good.

some noteworthy other things

Chris Gaines: The Podcast →
published along with co-host Ashley Spurgeon; a limited series podcast that takes an absurdly researched deep dive into the time that Garth Brooks took on a fictional personality named Chris Gaines.

Garth Brooks Chris Gaines Countdown →
to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of the time Garth Brooks took on the fictional personality Chris Gaines and appeared on Saturday Night Live in character, I GIF'ed the entire episode. It's a lot of GIFs; please use them.

Whiskerino →
a social network built around communal beard growing for four months. yes, it was as weird as it sounds but equally fascinating and enjoyable.

Moustache May →
an offshoot of the beard growing contest mentioned above. equal amounts of oddball fun but only a month long.

Summer Mix Series →
before all music was streaming everywhere, Internet music fans would swap zip files of music. it was truly a strange and wonderful time.

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I tweeted about this the other day but I think it bears repeating here. This article from Clive Thompson entitled Social media is keeping us stuck in the moment is not just a diatribe about the moment-to-moment distractions of our Internet landscape but a historical lesson about the power of a messages medium. The piece talks about the dangers of Reverse Chronology and how everything in our feeds is presented to us in a bite size morsel that happened a few moments ago, contextless until we scroll further or click back in time to some referential tweet. Furthermore, each platform is designed to have you refresh to see the latest, with very little emphasis on what you may have missed.

I can't do the article justice in summary form. Thompson's presentation involves insights from Marshall McLuhan, the durability and reach of clay tablets vs papyrus and then radio and TV from there. It sounds like heady stuff but it's an easy read that gives historical context to what we're seeing now. I can't emphasize that phrase enough given how our Internet and 24/7 news seems to have completely dropped the importance of history. Here's my favorite bit:
A culture that is stuck in the present is one that can’t solve big problems. If you want to plan for the future, if you want to handle big social and political challenges, you have to decouple yourself from day-to-day crises, to look back at history, to learn from it, to see trendlines. You have to be usefully detached from the moment.

What Innis feared—as his biographer Alexander John Watson puts it—is that “our culture was becoming so saturated with new instantaneous media that there was no longer a hinterland to which refugee intellectuals could retreat to develop a new paradigm that would allow us to tackle the new problems we are facing.“
I don't know how we fix this problem but I love that Thompson was able to articulate what he sees as the issue and even offer some suggestions; both in terms of our own behaviors (which seem alarmingly difficult to control) and via new features on the platforms. Looking ahead, AI and technology is going to shape our entire planet in a huge way and we're going to need to make sure it's got some insight on the past when it does so.

Image by Todd McLellan. Link via Austin Kleon.

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