yewknee

Dying to Live Now

Tue, 19 May 2026 06:35:47 -0500

Ran across an interesting film called Dying to Live Now doing some fundraising. The documentary is setting out to tell the story of RamDev Dale Borglum, an SF resident that's head of the Living/Dying Project, an organization that helps people navigate the difficulties of facing death and discussing death.

I am sure my summary here won't do it justice, so please watch the trailer. There's a moment about 2 minutes in, clipped from the Duncan Trussell Family Hour where Borglum seems to summarize his philosophy on death quite succintly; a respectable and meaningful take on it.

The fundraising project also notes that if 100 new backers join by May 22nd, they'll get a $5K matching sponsorship.. so that's double reasons to consider backing it. Great topic and a bit more assurance that it'll actually come to fruition.

A Man Called E Returns, Sort of

Tue, 19 May 2026 06:10:24 -0500

I'm a big fan of the Poprock Record blog. Author Dennis Pilon regularly posts about new music, old favorites and the occasional special essay. The latest post is in the latter category, a musing called A Man Called E returns. In it, he pontificates the work of Mark Oliver Everett, aka E, aka the guy behind the band Eels.

For a good chunk of time, I was a diehard Eels fan. I loved the pre-Eels work - aka A Man Called E and Broken Toy Shop - but really loved the early Dreamworks records. I stand by the opinion that Electro-Shock Blues is one of the most crushing and, yet, optimstic records around.

Anyway, all this is to say that Poprock Record put together a great list of songs from Eels that sound like the early works as E. But there was no actual playlist! I'm here to solve that. Enjoy A Man Called E Returns.

BandBand

Wed, 13 May 2026 11:13:55 -0500

I recently received beta access to BANDBAND.TV; a new "human-curated music video network." I am quite impressed with the undertaking! It's an immersive experience that can be enjoyed ambiently or if you wanna dive in more. I won't go as far as to say its what MTV should have evolved into it but it certainly seems like it's getting into that realm. I'm excited to see future iterations on the project.

Oh, and the curation is great! That's really the most important part! Tons of really superb videos. Go apply for your own beta access to see for yourself.

Manuel Cetina

Wed, 13 May 2026 11:00:12 -0500

Been enjoying a deep dive through the work of Manuel Cetina. It's a nice combination of glitch, 90s interfaces, Manga, and American Traditional. It's a real mish mash of influences and it works very well. The animated pieces take things up a notch but all of the glitched illustrations are perfectly up my alley. Love it!

Open Tabs, May 13, 2026

Wed, 13 May 2026 10:37:37 -0500

I have an inordinate amount of Open Tabs (not to be confused with Today in Tabs). I have every intention of spending time with these tabs but my good intentions often fall flat. So, why not let them free by sharing them with you! Maybe they'll become neglected open tabs in your browser? This is me paying it forward.

Jack Dorsey: Every Company Can Now Be a Mini-AGI - an hour long chat with ex-Twitter CEO and safety-pin earring technologist, Jack Dorsey. I do not put this man on a pedestal by any means but I am curiously intrigued to listen to this. It will now linger in my "Watch Later" queue.
Jimmy Iovine on building Interscope Records & Beats by Dre - a two hour interview with the infamous music industry figurehead. His resume is undeniable but.. is he an asshole? Is he insightful? Both? I've watch maybe 15 minutes of this and have enjoyed but just haven't made time for the rest. Maybe you will!
Scientists Discover Pee Planet - I'd love to read more about this ammonia ridden atmosphere. Also, if I ever start a band I claim Piss Planet as album title.
Touch Glass: A Declaration to Remain in Cyberspace - a very interesting manifesto that positions that the Internet isn't as bad as they're making it out to be. Would like to learn more about this movement but, for now, I'm satisfied with the phrase "Touch Glass."

Masters of Terrormonies

Wed, 06 May 2026 06:00:44 -0500

You are undoubtedly familiar with some amount of Horror Movie Hosts. Specifically, Elvira and The CryptKeeper seem like ubiquitous characters in pop culture. Joe Bob Briggs is probably the more well known contemporary host but he's not enough of a character for my taste.

Beyond those three, there are tons of these hosts! Dr. Lucifur, Sir Cecil Creape, Humphrey the Hunchback, Dr. Gangrene and many more. Most are probably not known to you but all those I just listed all hail from Nashville from the last 60 years. Dr. Gangrene himself wrote a book called Master of Terrormonies that captures the history of these ghouls from 1957 to modern times. We got our copy the other day and I'm excited to dive in.

Boobie Bungalow

Mon, 04 May 2026 07:39:58 -0500

Along I-65S at the border of Tennessee and Alabama, there was a Gentleman's Club right off Exit 6. It was next to a motel and a gas station. No town nearby. No civilization. Literally a corn field across the street. I never stepped foot inside but I will never forget it. The name? "Boobie Bungalow."

Thanks to the power of Google Maps time rewinding, you can see the establishment right here. Spin that camera around, it's unbelievably desolate.

As I was trying to find out more info about the place, I stumbled on this Bandcamp song paying tribute to it. Honestly, perfect song:

Boobie Bungalow by Quest For Glory Tour

I also ran across this Heather Hopkins piece about working at the place for a short stint - "Stripping away my naiveté at the Bungalow Club. As you might have guessed, the gentleman's club off the interstate in the middle of nowhere was not always a pleasant place. Hopkins piece is quite entertaining and enjoyable tho - well worth the read.

The club is gone now. Google Maps shows barely a husk of the prior establishment. I'm sure that's for the best.

But still.. helluva name.

Bandcamp Friday - May 2026

Fri, 01 May 2026 09:29:37 -0500

It's that time again, Bandcamp Friday - a time when the music platform waives their fee, giving 100% of profits to the artists on the platform. It started during COVID and has continued through multiple ownership hands.* As the owner of a small indie label, I would be foolish not to encourage you to go buy anything today.

While I do encourage that support, I also feel compelled to share other people's work. Maybe that's bad business on my part but there's so much great music out there, I can't claim that all of it is coming from YK. Previously I have used We Own This Town for the purposes of sharing "other people's work" but I don't want to do that anymore. YK Records is not a purely capitalistic endeavor that only promotes itself, so I don't need a secondary outlet to voice that support.

Anyway, this is all a very long winded way of saying - I made a playlist for you. It's a bunch of music available on Bandcamp that I think is worth supporting. Some of it is YK, a lot of it is NOT. If you want a track-by-track breakdown of each song, here ya go! I also suggest just playing from the top and letting it ride. It's a great listen, imo.

* Worth noting that Bandcamp has been doing this less frequently. It's a slow change but disheartening to not see them do it every month. My skepticism towards their SongTradr owners has not quieted in the last few years, hence my emotional investment in Ampwall.

Zach Galifianakis, Good One

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 06:32:53 -0500

There's exactly 1 billion podcasts out there*, so you may not need another thing to listen to but I found this Good One episode with Zach Galifianakis to be quite delightful. He is funny and self-deprecating as you'd expect but also quite thoughtful and instrospective.. which you may not expect. It's an hour that flies by.

* I said this as a joke and immediately realized it's likely undercounting

Please Ask For It

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 07:24:50 -0500

Awhile back, we caught Please Ask For It, a 20-minute documentary about a record store in Holly Springs, Mississippi called "Aikei Pro’s Record Shop." It's been operating since the 1960's and served as a hangout for modern blues artists like Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside (to name just a few). It is a hole in the wall down a side street of a very small town in an area of the South that continues to be drenched in racial division. It's a great documentary and I wish I could remember how I saw it - as I'd implore you to do so as well.

As luck would have it, we were down in Holly Springs this past weekend and decided to see if Aikei Pro’s Record Shop was still around. Much to our delight, it's still operating (on a Sunday!) and the 99-year old proprietor David “Fox” Caldwell talked to us at length about the history of the store, the racial disparity of Mississippi and plenty of other topics. If we didn't have to get back on the road to get home, he'd still be talking to us. A delight.

The shop itself is not really a place you'd shop at. I tried to buy a record and he refused, choosing to give me a 45 instead. It's stacks of history wall-to-wall but I believe Caldwell knows what lies underneath all the rubble.

Go follow the film on Instagram - @pleaseaskforit - as you will not want to miss any future screenings or availability to watch it!

Soulwax Presents: Abbey Road After Hours

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 09:04:38 -0500

This one is a bit of an onslaught. It's a short documentary, a 50-minute DJ set and a brand new song, all from the band Soulwax aka 2manydjs aka DEEWEE. See? I told ya it was an onslaught.

Perfect We Are Not by Soulwax

More narratively - the band Soulwax was invited to record at Abbey Road studios. Brothers David and Stephen Dewaele used all three studio spaces and recorded their full live band to capture the new song - "Perfect We Are Not." They pressed it "direct to vinyl" and played that as part of a huge DJ set that also happened inside of Abbey Road! A total banger! And if you want to see how that all came together, there's this short doc all about it.

Love the song and if 2manydj's is not a wormhole you've ever pursued before.. dive in.

A Mad Undertaking: The Aadam Jacobs Collection

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 09:45:58 -0500

The Aadam Jacobs Collection is an ongoing effort to digitize 10,000 bootlegs captured from the late 80s onward in the Chicago area thanks to the titular Aadam Jacobs. You should absolutely read the origin story before you dive into the collection.

Even if you don't consider yourself much of a "bootleg person," I think this collection is worth poking around in. The sound quality varies per show of course but everything I've heard has been quite enjoyable. Here are just a few that I've run into that you may want to listen:

That is barely the tip of the iceberg. There's plenty in there you may not recognize but it's a lifelong project form Jacobs that will continue to have new offerings for the foreseeable future. Definitely worth being aware of and keeping up with.

The Goose Controversy

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 09:04:53 -0500

If you are even marginally online, you have seen the recent discourse about promotions company Chaotic Good Projects and their podcast episode where they own up to their tactics of manipulating TikTok and other social networks to make their campaigns look like real organic growth. This sums up their tactics nicely:

Songs are dropped into the backgrounds of videos. Live clips are shared. Sometimes, burner accounts, comments, and whole ecosystems of interactions can be fabricated out of digital cloth, stoking—and in some cases, completely manufacturing—discourse around an artist. These ginned-up interactions push the songs and the discussion about them higher up a platform’s algorithmic rankings

That's from a WIRED article called "The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop." Meaning, they aren't really popular, the Internet was just manipulated in a way to make you think they were popular.

There has been much discourse about this. A lot if worth reading. This Maximum Exposure Inc piece has some nice insights into what Chaotic Good is doing:

What’s being shaped is not the audience directly, but the atmosphere in which the audience encounters something, the environment that determines whether it appears meaningful, relevant, or real.

The rest of the post goes into "Angry Music Fan Yells at Cloud" territory, which I find personally tiresome, but it does make some excellent insights earlier.

Of course, Garbage Day spoke on this as well and, turns out, Chaotic Good is probably not as good at all that manipulation that they claim to be so great at, especially when it comes to the band Geese.

There is a link between music streaming platforms and social content, yes, but it goes in the opposite direction. A big artist releases an album on Spotify, Spotify puts it in playlists, and that artist grows on Instagram and TikTok. It’s almost never the other way around. And this is actually true for almost every form of digital media right now.

...we know that Geese didn’t get big from TikTok. Major outlets like Rolling Stone and The New York Times were writing about them all the way back in 2021! They’ve had an extremely traditional career actually.

So, what is real? Are comments and posts and "online discourse" actually being effectively manipulated by a promotions company? Is that manipulation trickling out of social media and into real world opinion? I'd say yes to both but probably not to the degree that anyone wants you to believe.

Coincidentally, back in early March there was an episode of Darknet Diaries called "Melody Fraud" in which the guest talks at length about how his promotions company manipulated the Internet for musicians back in the late 90s & early aughts. Maybe there's some solace in the idea that whatever manipulation tactics are happening in 2026 aren't some new aggressive behavior, it's the same ole game that's been happening for a long time.

Major Label Debut: Sound Team

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 08:38:22 -0500

Great episode of Major Label Debut here talking to Bill Baird of Sound Team about their experiences signing to Capital Records in the early aughts. Spoiler alert: it did not go well and Baird is not afraid to talk about it.

You can hear it on Apple, YouTube, Spreaker, anywhere you get a podcast.

If you're unfamiliar with Sound Team, you are in for a treat. I suggest starting with the major label debut in question, “Movie Monster”. I think it sounds great and I bet you'll be hooked by the time the second track ends. From there, you can go exploring their other albums and short run cassettes. You can explore Baird's vast catalog of solo work. You can find Matt Oliver's fantastic post-major label project TV Torso (named after a Sound Team song). All of it good.

The podcast episode discussion is fascinating because of Baird's honesty - he pulls no punches about bad experiences with the label, the producer and management. He also seems to recognize that a good bit of it was being an obstinate 20-something making contrarian decisions. Lots of blame to go around that makes for a very compelling chat.

Pixelfaxing

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 07:38:57 -0500

Been enjoying the work of Pixelfaxing, a Javascript pixel artist making moody images from code and composition. I'm particularly a fan of the animated pieces or those playing with light but they're all worth a gander. They're on Instagram, Threads and Gumroad.

Space Missions and Home Satellite Dishes

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 07:16:47 -0500

I have mentioned before that I am subscribed to HAM Radio Weekly - a newsletter of insights from the world of HAM radio. I've never touched a HAM radio in my life but this newsletter always has something interesting to read.

For example, a recent issue linked the Save it for Parts channel video that asked the question: "Can I Overhear The Artemis II Moon Mission With Software Defined Radio?" It's 24 minutes of experimentation, DIY thinking and healthy curiosity.

If nothing else, just scrub through it and enjoy the various attempts at listening in. I can't say I understand much of the science behind the signal tracing but I was still entertained.

Panic World: Boomer Brain Rot Started Long Before Facebook

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 07:08:10 -0500

If you are not subscribed to Garbage Day and its companion podcast Panic World, you are missing out on the best* insights about the Internet. This tagline says it all: "how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality." Subscribed.

The "Boomer Brain Rot Started Long Before Facebook" episode is a great discussion between host Ryan Broderick and Sam Seder (of The Majority Report) about the historical influences of Conservative media (Rush Limbaugh), the Conspiracy Theory Internet (Alex Jones) and how it resulted in our current cultural chaos (Donald Trump). You'd think that would be a suffocating and brutal conversation to listen in on but it's actually quite enlightening and entertaining.

jeb's Legend Of Zelda

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 09:47:34 -0500

YouTube decided I needed to watch a multi-hour playthrough of Jeb's Legend of Zelda, a free to download fan remake of the original game with many improvements and additions (some being incredibly absurd).

I don't know why these sorts of projects are so interesting and soothing to my brain but I can't help but respect the craftsmanship! If you find yourself tempted by an extra-long playthrough..go ahead and treat yourself.

Misc Reads Regarding AI

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 09:03:09 -0500

There is no shortage of hot takes and outlandish claims about the future of AI. It can be exhausting but it's also a topic that really can't be ignored. Here's a few reads in the AI orbit that I've encountered recently that I found worthwhile.

OpenAI’s oddly socialist, wildly hypocritical new economic agenda - TLDR: OpenAI says one thing but actively does the opposite. IMO, cancel your ChatGPT account stat.
Ben Wolfe, What AI Needs - it's a Threads post (which is generally incendiary) but it's a nice rundown on how AI could work better for us all. Articulated well, particularly the part about pattern machine vs thinking; def not the same.
Tips for Designers on Making it Through 2026 to the Other Side -from Mike Davidson, Microsoft Design Executive. A blog post that posits we're all "Assemblers" now - a sentiment I have heard a number of different places with different verbage (I've heard "We're all Engineers now"). It gets into how to be a good Design candidate in an AI world but there's plenty of gems sprinkled in there even if that does not apply to you in any way.
husk.irl abusing AI - this is from the latest Garbage Day so I assume you've seen it but at this moment in time, AI can not spell or perform simple tasks. At this moment.
Introducing Solarium - Mark Wunsch walks through making his own eReader. This supports an idea that I've been hearing more often recently - software will be personal in the future. Given the pace and expertise of AI-assisted development, why couldn't you have apps that do exactly what you want without having to put up with annoying UI/UX? Yes, there will be API restrictions and boundaries that halt some projects but I really enjoy this idea of making exactly what you want.

Sky Blue Super Mario Bros

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:16:22 -0500

This ROM hack of Super Mario Bros - officially called Play It By Trust (Sky Blue Super Mario Bros.) - is impossible to play unless you are intimately familiar with the game. Every single pixel has been changed to the same shade of sky blue - meaning you can't see anything. I've seen YouTubers play blindfolded, so maybe there is someone out that that could play this and actually make good progress? Even if it's a fools errand, it's fun to try.

The best part of this hack is the thought behind it..

The game is specifically an homage/reference/exploration of Yoko Ono’s classic work “Play It By Trust (White Chess Set) (1966)” which is a chess set in which all the pieces are white, with the core idea being that if you play with someone you will inevitably lose track of which pieces are yours and which are theirs, and then “there’s a moment when you feel like it really doesn’t matter which pieces are yours or the opponent’s.” There’s a really great discussion from Ono herself (I think) on the page linked above.

What parallels are there between this project and Ono's? Any? I'm not really sure there are but I like that a silly hack about Mario Bros led me to a thoughtful art piece from a controversial figure about a topic that is as timely now as it was then.