I have long been a fan of Adam Lisagor and his video production company, Sandwich. Their work is always fun, informative and distinctly Sandwich. They recently overhauled their website, rebranded themselves and started selling merch. All good things.

But mostly they just have a massive portfolio of work, all well worth watching. Watch this and this or this, just as a start.

Some folks still releasing music on Tuesdays and I love it.

New interview up today: Extensive chat with @haxan_cloak about his extraordinary score for Midsommar. https://t.co/hvQlhYmR4d

Nicolas Cage / 63 posters https://t.co/jWcEaKqnHo

DM Stith rehearsing his exquisite show at Antwerp’s miXmass ⁦ @dmstith⁩ will blow your mind in 2020 https://t.co/1VXasiSCHy

I wonder what this man did to compel a witch to turn him into a dog https://t.co/y8M10Jbyxu

When I need a pick-me-up, I turn to jjjjjohn. That repository of GIFs never fails to perk a day up.

Happy 2020, hope you aren't back at work yet but, if so, enjoy some mild distraction..

• Pat Sajak: Master Impersonator - it's really uncanny.
• John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch - I've posted about this before but if you haven't watched the new Netflix special from John Mulaney, please do so. It's the perfect blend of snarky, sweet, absurd and heartwarming. Not an easy balance to pull off but it's really stellar.
• Zoomies - I don't care if this is too Basic for you, it's fantastic.
• Turkey Slurpy - hot new trend for 2020.
• Modified Furby - a horrifying dystopian vision OR the best use of Furby? Maybe both.

the Trapper Keeper vision is the most accurate, bizarrely

Jim clued me in to the passing of Vaughan Oliver, the graphic designer responsible for an unbelievably impressive body of work for a number of artists that were, visually, influential for myself. The Pixies Doolittle, The Breeders Last Splash, Gus Gus's Polydistortion and Lush's Split all quickly come to mind.

I won't claim that as a youth I was aware that each of those albums were all created by the same person (much less an individual at all) but it's impossible to look at a gallery of his work and not feel moved by it.

I've yet to encounter a full, exhaustive, repository of his work but poking around looking for various collections is part of the fun. Check out Oliver's favorite 4AD work, read this interview with him, peruse this Guardian retrospective and then poke around Pinterest and Tumblr for even more treats.

Nashville electronic musician Sugar Sk*-*lls is generally known for creating a bit of dance-y 8-bit inspired music. His work has grown and expanded over time but, in general, his public output has been somewhere in that realm. Recently he released explicit ethical agent, a new full-length album that not only explores new sonic territory but also an entirely new way of making music. With the help of Google's Magento AI, he poses the question - is this music even mine? While I am sure he is not the first to do this, I am rather intrigued by the entire process. His liner notes for the album explain the process in great detail but here's the gist. Google AI powers Magenta, a tool for making music and art via Machine Learning. The free web version of the tool is seeded with 10,000 classical songs and allows you to input some notes or chords to start the process of creating a song. Some small musical input creates a full-length song.

Sugar Sk*-*lls went through this process to input a single chord for each song, got back the MIDI output and ran it through his standard batch of synthesizers. The output is explicit ethical agent. The music is fine - neither offensive nor overtly compelling but the question of "Is this Sugar Sk*-*lls music?" is a fascinating one to ponder. If a musician isn't making the choices of how song is created, can they even claim it as their own?

Even more interesting to ponder is the idea of this AI being seeded with his own back catalog of music. The output would, surely, be more sonically aligned with his previous work but the question would still stand on who the actual "creator" was. It doesn't take much to extract that even further and wonder about an AI seeded with Bowie or Prince or Aphex Twin or anyone for that matter and contemplating what you get back.

None of these curiosities are particularly new - Spotify has been playing with AI music for years and some of it ain't bad. It's not a leap to imagine a world where Spotify's Radio option is seeded based on your actual music interests and entirely new compositions are made; specifically for you.

Sugar Sk*-*lls writeup on the undertaking (which, apparently, only took about 2 hours) is a great read but I particularly enjoy his closing remarks, so I'll leave you with those:

As the technology matures and improves, it will invariably alter the nature of musical creativity. The introduction of photography and the technology’s ability to render an image of an individual didn’t make portrait drawing and painting redundant. Photography changed and opened up the possibilities, meaning, and purpose of human rendered forms. In the case of music, AI driven compositional technology could have a democratizing effect on the creation of music. The creation of music is not just bound to the musician’s ability to perform an idea on an instrument or knowledge of music theory, but also the distillation of a musician’s stylistic influences. A tool that can manipulate content via styles like swatches on a palate already exists for image creation. However, just as deceased musicians can be made into holograms that tour previous material and generate revenue without the musician’s explicit consent, the stylistic essence of a musician can potentially be quantified and made to output new works without the musician present. The technology will present new methods to exploit musicians and create new modes of expression. Ultimately it will further blur the lines of listening to and creating music, which is a kind of subversion I fully support.

an eloquent and insightful postmortem on the mix sharing service

They don’t get much snow in Southern California. Wait for it... https://t.co/cPJWLpdTD4

Ring out the Old, Ring in the New. Never seen this video... fun stuff.

finally got around to watching this. not a huge fan of the song tbh but the video is both fascinating and terrifying. technology sees so much.

"bizarro electronic, freak folk, and ambient smoothness" suggested by Frank Chimero

anyone that says Tumblr is dead isn't looking in the right places

you will not find a cooler looking Kindergarten

... i was proud of a lot this year. but never prouder than when we clicked publish on this. please enjoy & share. happy new year! https://t.co/t4jAWTdsVK

This one sure took a turn I wasn’t expecting... https://t.co/X4agwn3SIl

Over the course of 2019 I slowly picked away at redesigning yewknee.com. Twenty minutes here and there plucking away at markup, styles and backend configuration. If you're reading via RSS, come check it out. I'm happy with the results but wanted to give a little insight on why the change in format.

I've been running this site since 2001 and a lot has changed in terms of the "blog" landscape in that time. Once upon time, you had a slew of bookmarks or a robust group of RSS feeds to help facilitate finding something interesting to look at. This site has always served as a repository of my findings along the way, hoping that others had shared interest. With the rise of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, podcasts, apps, games, etc - the traditional blog has become less necessary. I'm not implying they are obsolete, I'm just saying they require a little more effort to keep up with in 2019 than they did two decades ago.

I've always admired the likes of Waxy, Kottke, Anil Dash, Daring Fireball, Austin Kleon and Frank Chimero for their ability to document parts of the web, then frame it, augment it and eloquently contextualize it into something bigger yet still keep it personal. My site has never been that. That's not pessimism or self-deprecation talking, that's just not what I do here. Unsurprisingly, I get a lot of my updates from all of them via Twitter now.

Furthermore, I love peeking in on the works of (version) industries, Mark Weaver, Will Bryant and Caroline Bowman - they're consistently providing inspiring design styles and execution techniques. Here again, I get my fill from all of them via Instagram these days.

In addition to all that, I really don't find myself with near as much time these days as I used to. I have a full-time job at Vimeo and I try to consistently post updates for my little indie label, yk records, and my podcast network project We Own This Town. Striving to write 2-3 blog posts a day on top of all that has proven to be difficult at best.

So, taking all that into account, here we are with Version 11 of this site. It's a single feed of distractions culled from my day-to-day experiences around the web. It largely consists of three post "types" - a regular blog entry like this one, a Quicklink that points to some website / YouTube video or a Favorited Tweet from @yewknee. Hopefully the tweets don't get overbearing but that's where I see the most of the web, so I suspect there will be plenty.

I'm certainly not quitting this site, I'm just attempting to evolve it a bit. The Internet is a different place now than it was in 2001 and this site should be too. I've got plans to write some longer form content (even if it's not up to the bar of those aforementioned) and I'll continue to post about inspiring projects, designs and images I encounter. As we head into 2020 it was time for something different. I hope you like it.