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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John Carpenter on horror classic The Thing

a rather short bit of interview with Carpenter and actor Keith David but insightful and pleasant to read... which you should do
Thanks to the HTML Review (specifically, the Garry Ing essay), I have encountered Evan Roth's All HTML. It's a bizarre looking website that makes zero sense unless you've ever made a website yourself - just View Source and you'll see all the parts laid bare. Fun.
If you see someone complaining that "the web isn't fun anymore" - steer them towards The HTML Review, an online "journal of literature made to exist on the web." Take two seconds to look at Issue 03 and you'll get the appeal - a giant spinning table of contents! It's fun, it's beautiful and it's a portal to even more engaging pieces.

This Forest Void by Hannah Jenkins is a series of small poems that reveal themselves and, if you're patient, rescramble themselves. A Cragislist cacophony from Sarah Chekfa, a video game prologue from Nicholas O'Brien. A View Source essay from Garry Ing. These things require you to spend time with them - it's not a single serving stream of swipe left / swipe right / IG stories / text feeds - but they are distinctly Of The Web. It's great to see and even better to experience.
I've been listening to Lionlimb, aka Stewart Bronaugh with Joshua Jaeger, since their initial, gorgeous, release Shoo back in 2016. The newest album, Limbo was just recently announced and is set for release in late May.

There's only one song available at this very moment but the album writeup speaks of 70's Italian movie influences, funky basslines, melodramatic strings and "making music that could easily belong on Twin Peaks just as much as a Western cowboy film." I'm in.

teable: No Code Database

a fusion of Postgres and Airtable. I dont know who needs to see this but maybe its you.
Castlevania ReVamped is a fan made overhaul of the 1986 NES classic into a sprawling Metroidvania type game. Loads of new power-ups, levels, etc etc. Kind of what you'd hope for from a fan remake of a game with 38 years to percolate on ideas. The trailer looks fantastic.

If you, like me, do not have a way to play a game like this, you can always turn to YouTube to passively partake.

Lynda! Barry!

a delightful read about creativity and getting out of your own way
It seems a little silly for me to post about an article in The Verge as I imagine anyone still reading this blog is also a fairly ardent reader of The Verge. However, there's a lot of content out there, so maybe you missed it. I did.

This piece - possibly entitled "Indie, rocked or Pitchfork Lived And Died By The Internet - is an insightful rundown on the history of Pitchfork, its influence on music and, most importantly, how the Internet was its ultimate demise.

Spoiler alert: music is much less of a valued commodity now than it was in the 80s and 90s when I was young. Turns out, having access to millions of songs makes you less invested than when you only have 12. I don't know that I see this as dire as the article makes it out to be. More music being available also means it's possible for more people to make music. A process that previously cost thousands upon thousands of dollars can be done with free software now. That's incredible.

The eulogy of Pitchfork has been spread far and wide but it's actually not quite dead yet. They're still publishing. I haven't read it regularly in over a decade so I have no idea how culturally relevant it is to anyone. I always found it intentionally obtuse or willfully antagonistic, sometimes both. From reading the article, it seems that was on purpose.

Regardless of my feelings on it, its place in Internet history and music history is undeniable. The article does a nice job of capturing that.

James Webb telescope confirms there is something seriously wrong with our understanding of the universe

I am happy to report that the little we know is actually likely incorrect. There is something satisfying about that tbh.

More Languages Won't Fix The Computing World

a compelling read with a conclusion that is somewhat ironic and unfortunate
If you're not subscribed to Ben's Bites - a daily AI newsletter - you should go subscribe now. Always a morning treat.

They recently linked up this Dan Shipper piece Can a Startup Kill ChatGPT? It's a nice read with plenty of insights worth considering. However, what I really enjoyed about it was the plain and simple reminder of the definition of disruption. These three paragraphs are a nice clip but it really works well within the larger piece. Go read it.
The word “disruption” is used colloquially to mean any instance where a startup beats an incumbent, but in its original formulation, it meant something specific.

Disruption, as theorized by Clayton Christensen in the early 1990s, is a process by which a startup offers a lower-cost product that performs worse along standard dimensions of performance for a small subset of customers outside of the mainstream. The product gets adoption, though, because it performs better on a new dimension of performance that is important to its niche customer set. Over time, the disruptor improves on standard performance metrics so that it can move up-market to higher-value customers, while maintaining its other advantages.

The startup is able to displace a larger, well-managed incumbent because the latter sees that the startup’s original product is lower cost and lower margin, and generally performs worse. So it looks like a bad business. Therefore, the incumbent fails to react until it’s too late.
The boys over at The Horror Fried Podcast recently covered the 1981 film debut of Eric Weston, Evilspeak. It's brand new to me but take 2 minutes to watch the trailer and I think you'll be as intrigued as I am... Clint Howard conjures a demon from his Tandy TRS-80 to seek revenge on his bullying classmates. If you wanna spoil a bit of it for yourself (like I did), you can watch the conjuring scene. It's like a prophetic, satanic, ChatGPT run through a terminal emulator.. and it's good.

The Wikipedia entry for it reveals that it was banned in the UK (TIL "video nasty") and praised by Anton LaVey. Amusing facts all around.
I was recently introduced to Venjent, a DJ / musician / drum-n-bass enthusiast. I suggest an Instagram deep dive but anywhere you start is a good place.

Picotron by Lexaloffle

an entire operating system made with PICO-8. helluva aesthetic.

Drams: Framer components inspired by Dieter Rams' principles

somehow I feel both incredibly impressed and entirely turned off. worth a gander tho!
Take 9 minutes and watch the Aidy Bryant Opening Monologue from the 2024 Film Independent Spirit Awards. It is delightfully funny.

I've nothing particularly interesting to add here, sometimes you just need a nice, amusing, break.

Sable on Steam

saw this back in 2018 and was impressed by the Moebius vibes. Here again in 2024, still impressed.

Midjourney debuts consistent characters

the headline is more intriguing than the results but it is a helluva big step in the right direction.
Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman recently sponsored and officially introduced the Living Wage for Musicians Act, aka Artist Compensation Royalty Fund (fka H.Con.Res.102). The legalese of the resolution may be hard to parse through but accompany announcement summarizes it fairly well:
The Living Wage for Musicians Act would create a new streaming royalty, with the aim to compensate artists and musicians more fairly at a penny per stream when their music plays on streaming services. Currently, musicians make tiny fractions of a penny per stream, while streaming has grown to represent 84% of recorded music industry revenue in the U.S. Spotify, the world’s largest streaming service, pays rights-holders an average per-stream royalty of $0.003, which means it takes artists more than 800,000 monthly streams to equal a full-time $15/hour job.
A bit more discretely put, it collects money from music platforms and then has a third party service pay out those funds, bypassing labels. The intent is to ensure that streaming services are paying musicians a fair wage, which public sentiment all agrees they are not. The resolution does include a payout cap per artist per month to ensure the funds are spread out more equally and the payouts are based on actual streams played, not just having music available on a DSP.

There's lots of lively discourse on Reddit of course - which I recommend reading. For the most part, they feel the bill is misguided at best and total trash at worst. They don't propose alternatives but, hey, Reddit gonna Reddit.

Of course, if this passes and the tax is applied to DSPs, they will simply pass that cost along to consumers, increasing the cost of subscriptions. Personally, I don't think $15/mo (or more!) is too expensive for access to the wealth of music that is available but I can understand how others would disagree.

It's not a simple topic and I'm sure the resolution has its flaws. However, it's more than anyone else has done recently and I'm glad to see the conversation moving forward. You can help by signing the petition of support and then contacting your representative to tell them you support it. The UMAW site makes both extremely simple, please go for it.
Excellent read on the history of Kickstarter and, more specifically, the pivot to crypto that came with an investment from a16z. The article gives plenty of reasons to wince at their growth pains but, quite frankly, running a successful business is very hard. I've known a handful of folks that have worked there and I've always respected it as an outsider looking in, even when it was disappointing to see them not keep up with competitors.

No shade from my end being thrown towards them, it's just a fascinating read.
Riddler is a fun daily word game that tasks you with substituting a single letter in a word to answer a riddle. There are helpful clues and quick little cheats to help if you get stuck but you should have no problem. You're smart. You'll get it.

via pmo.
I have been absolutely cranking out the episodes of my local Nashville music podcast We Own This Town: Music. By and large, I'm trying to catch up on a huge backlog of releases from 2023 that I just missed because of work obligations. However, this episode is a little different, as it's 100% cover songs.

Tune in to hear covers of: The Breeders, Joy Division, The Cure, Nilsson, The Replacements, Sheryl Crow, ABBA, Capt Beefheart, Flaming Lips, Wet Leg, Devo, Sad Baxter, Hall & Oates, Iggy Pop, The Ventures, Brenda Lee, Tim McGraw, Arthur Russell, The Smiths, Townes van Zandt and Sondheim. All the details are here and the show is streaming on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, et al.

I always enjoy a cover song and this episode is really brimming with them.

Future Sounds Of Kraut Vol. 1

gave this a recent listen and rather enjoyed. There is a Vol 2 that looks v worthwhile as well

Introducing the Claude AI 3 family

the benchmark battles are really heating up!
I can't recall if I have ever heard this Failure on KCRW performance before (from 1996!) but, either way, it feels new to me. I still stand by Fantastic Planet as one of the finest albums of the entirety of the 90's.
You know Eurovision, right? Well, Windows95man is Finland's representation in the 2024 song contest and it is... something else! Eurovision generally brings some absurdity but this one ticks all the boxes. Make sure you stay for at least 2 minutes. Please.

via Chris

Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age

the headline says it all but the full read is a v good one.
In recent years I've become a hat guy. Previously in life I couldn't imagine such a thing but the rise of the Dad Hat just clicked with me. There's also no shortage of creative designs to indulge in.

Case in point, a buddy of mine launched Abandonware, a hat collection inspired by shareware and abandonware of the 80s and 90s. This Rodent's Revenge hat was an instant buy and I've got the DOS prompt waiting in the shopping cart. If those don't do it for ya, there's plenty more that probably will.
YouTube decided that I needed to see this music video for "Summon the Fire" by The Comet Is Coming, a London based band that incorporates synth, drums and sax. YouTube was quite correct in the recommendation.

Beyond the music tho, the video is spectacular. An absolutely overwhelming onslaught of textures, illustrations and painterly vibes. It was released in 2019 but it looks like the sort of thing AI would try to generate now - only with a loose precision that is impossible to capture. The director is RUFFMERCY, an animator and fine artist that I assume everyone has already heard of a million times over except for me but I'm overjoyed to have found it. The official portfolio has works for Nirvana, Thom Yorke, Run the Jewels, Lakeith Stanfield, Basquiat, the Sydney Opera House and a smattering of unofficial works & doodles that are incredibly impressive each on their own.

That's all to say, I'm late to the party but there's so much to enjoy.
As an Internet user, you have inevitably viewed The Windows 95 Launch video - an unbelievably awkward gathering of Microsoft C Suite employees working to get the crowd hype about the latest version of the operating system. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer in particular define the stilted nerd and aggro tech bro perfectly.

Write and Director KK Apple was inspired by this clip and created The Launch, a short film depicting the backstage prep for that exact event. The cast does an impeccable job of portraying the nervous, awkward developers - particularly Katie Sisk as Ballmer and Alyssa Limperis as Gates.

You can watch it on YouTube or Vimeo right now. It's just under 10 minutes, so you've no excuse.