Kitty accidentally pressed the turbo button ? https://t.co/zJ9BtMgGUr

I'm not usually one for a True Crime podcast. I know they're extremely popular but, generally, they just remind me of the bad in the world and I get plenty of that from reading the Internet all day. However, I've been listening to Atlanta Monster recently and can't help but recommend it, despite it falling into that category of horrific reminders of the past. The above teaser does very little to give insight into the overall story but it does provide a listen to the production value, which is pretty stellar. The music, provided by Makeup and Vanity Set, is an absolute bonus to the experience - providing the perfectly foreboding sounds for the tale of searching for a child kidnapper and murderer.

The new season of High Maintenance started this past weekend and it did not fail to deliver. I've been a fan of the show since it started out on Vimeo and then was picked up by Vimeo OnDemand and, now, HBO. It's always managed to deliver perfect slice-of-life views into interesting characters with just the right amount of its own personality.

I try not to spend too much time learning about the personal lives of the creators of a show I enjoy but these two recent articles about Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld are too interesting to not read:

• Brooklyn's Favorite Pot Dealer Returns - a profile on Ben Sinclair (aka "The Guy") and his life between Seasons. It involves living in an RV and pushing through personal turmoil.
• How Coming Out Made Me Whole - Katja Blichfeld's personal tale of learning to embrace her homosexuality and having to dissolve the marriage with Ben Sinclair is heartbreaking and, ultimately, uplifting. Unsurprisingly, it's incredibly well written but, surprisingly, it's incredibly open.

Regardless of your interest in their personal lives, it's certainly a show that should be in your rotation.

Really happy to see this article on UT Austin digitizing its movie poster archive, approximately 10,000 of them actually. The repository is a work in progress but can already be browsed. Aside from the preservation aspect of this project, there's also an immeasurable amount of inspirational design to be had. If you're ever feeling stuck, this is a wonderful place to get ideas.

Moms of #Aspergers will likely have something similar to this. This was post-drawing maps from memory, but before being an architect by memory. Hundreds of pages. Save them all. https://t.co/LWDHySABlC

had a dream that i took an uberx to dennys like i was princess di or something what the fuck

Paddington 2 was really great! DIFFERENT.. but great. https://t.co/PZWIiRx9aE

Estimated 15,000 come out for Nashville's Women's March 2.0. https://t.co/7qv4dxfckx https://t.co/5d3IO0LMfZ

? https://t.co/piEM7OZgzY

Been a big week of announcements! We Own This Town was relaunched. Hott Minute, the first podcast series on the WOTT Network, was released. Patrick Damphier was added to the yk Records roster with a new 7" coming out on Feb 23rd. Oh, and that same day is the big A Night of: yk Records 2 show at Mercy Lounge in Nashville. Oh, and bonus thing, Little Bandit is hitting the road with Margo Price starting tomorrow (Jan 20th) playing several sold out shows. If you can find a way to see any of those, please do.

I know this site is meant to be a hub for random distractions and interesting topics but, honestly, if I can fill it with things that I'm putting out into the world, I'll do it.

That being said, here's some distractions from around the way.

• First Look: Nintendo Labo - I was skeptical but this new announcement from Nintendo seems sort of brilliant? I don't even fully get it yet but it seems that you'll be able to design and print an infinite number of cardboard chasis for your Switch that will add an extra layer of interaction to various games. I need to learn more about it all but I'm glad to see this out in the world.
• Beck - Fix Me - Adorable dogs and baby in this latest from Beck. Are the dogs friendly companions or stand-ins for parents?
• Animotion - Obsession - alright, since I already posted one music video, here's another from 80's that is perfectly bonkers. I want to see a Kyle Mooney remake of this.
• DJ Cummerbund - Jereloose - this classic from Pearly Jammins will surely top your 2018 Spotify playlist.
• Winston Churchill dancing like James Brown, played by Gary Oldman - I'm hesistant to applaud silly Oldman is doing at the moment given depressing facts about him but I did find this rather amusing.
• How TVs Work - maybe you already know all about refresh rates, LEDs, OLEDs, CRTs, etc. but you maybe haven't seen them all shot this well. It's a primer type explanation but a worthwhile one just for the fidelity of looking at how all the pieces work.

Stay safe. Be warm!

won't lie, am excited

A friendly heads up that I'm putting on a show this upcoming Feb. 23rd (2018) at Mercy Lounge for various bands on my yk Records roster. The first batch of announced bands include Patrick Damphier, New Man, Coupler, Tower Defense and Quichenight - many of which haven't even been announced as releasing anything on the label yet so it's a great first opportunity to hear what they've got to offer.

There's more on the way but I'd love it if you'd go ahead and buy tickets now so my Attendance Anxiety can be slightly quelled. I'm always nervous that no one will show up to these things but that just drives me to make it a great night out. Hope to see you there.

The first "Season" of Vox's show Earmworm just wrapped up, so now is the perfect time to binge on the eight episodes of various scientific music ephemera. They're short (never longer than 12 minutes) and cover plenty of interesting topics - like The secret rhythm behind Radiohead's "Videotape" or How a recording-studio mishap shaped 80's music.

It's not an overwhelming amount of episodes nor an overwhelming time commitment - two major pluses as far as I'm concerned.

Stumbled into these two articles recently and found them interesting enough to share. The first, a piece on the overwhelming nature of music consumption, likely needs conversation and debate to get to the heart of but is certainly a worthwhile read. The second is simply a run down of the Grunge era rush for bands and how some legitimately great bands were sucked up into the machine.

• Too Much Music: A Failed Experiment In Dedicated Listening- James Toth runs through his relationship with music and music acquisition (borderline hoarding) and his self-inflicted experiment to listen to only one album a week during 2017. Spoiler alert, he fails. Sort of. The revelations that come with the undertaking are certainly more positive than bad.
• The Grunge Gold Rush - if you've ever wondered how Nirvana spawned a million soundalikes and consumed great bands like Jawbox into their promotion machine, this is for you.

I’ve always wanted to be on the @Grimeys wall of recommendations! https://t.co/vAOa1EmVpu

tfw when my daughter explains to her class that her dad sits in his office drinking coffee and making menacing synthesizer music over bits of dialogue about serial murder for a living. ??

new song, new album forthcoming

I've recently been deep diving into the YouTube channel Techmoan. Host Mat unearths and reviews an absolutely ridiculous amount of music tech gear. From the more recent RokBlok player to Baby Driver's Tape Scratching Machine to the forgotten format of Phillips DCC. It's a massive repository but there doesn't seem to be a bad entry point. Here's a few that I've enjoyed lately:

• VHD: Movies on Vinyl - who needs lasers for video when you've got a needle?
• The Floppy Disk Boombox - MIDI for the street
• VinylDisc - an LP and a CD all in one from 2007 and died before it ever made it out of the gate.

It's nerdy but a highly entertaining indulgence.

This FloydHub post on Turning Design Mockups Into Code With Deep Learning is an oddly captivating read. Conceptually, it covers the notion that you can "train" a Neural Network to understand website mockups and re-interpret them as code. Having worked with plenty of WYSIWYG editors in my tenure as a Person of the Web, I am skeptical but the article does more than just discuss the idea conceptually. They dig in deep with actual examples of how to educate a system and start outputting real code. If you're up for it, be prepared for paragraphs of technical text like:

The vocabulary prediction could be [0.1, 0.1, 0.1, 0.7]. The softmax activation in the dense layer distributes a probability from 0 - 1, with the sum of all predictions equal to 1. In this case, it predicts that the 4th word is the next tag. Then you translate the one-hot encoding [0, 0, 0, 1] into the mapped value, say "end".

Deep Learning, Neural Networks and this actual implementation are 1000% over my head but that makes me no less intrigued.

via Adam.

I recently became aware of P5 JS - "a JavaScript library that starts with the original goal of Processing, to make coding accessible for artists, designers, educators, and beginners, and reinterprets this for today's web." In other words, it's a Javascript library that lets you draw and interact with all sorts of data - APIs, sound, cameras, HTML - in an easy way.

Their Welcome Video is downright delightful with Lauren McCarthy and Dan Schiffman introducing the basic concepts. The Getting Started Guide looks to be as straightforward as you can get and keeps the bar low for actually trying it out.

Overall, a very intriguing offering. I don't have much need for developing big, robust, interactive sites but the potential this offers for artists who code seems pretty huge.