As it happens from time to time, I was revisiting Supergrass and then following that down the rabbit hole to drummer Danny Goffey's underrated side tangent Vangoffey while reading Wikipedia. As you do. There's a little bit in there about a period in 2007-2008 where Goffey and singer Gaz Coomes go off on their own tour:

In 2007 and 2008, while Supergrass bandmate Mick Quinn was suffering from broken heel and vertebrae, Danny and Gaz Coombes went on a short tour of the country playing at small venues as the Diamond Hoo Ha Men. The tour was captured on film for a Rockumentary called Glange Fever, released in 2008.

I knew Diamond Hoo Ha was the name of a Supergrass album but had never heard of them touring in such a way. And I'd certainly never heard of, or seen, the Glange Fever documentary. Fortunately, someone has been kind enough to put it on YouTube.

Never seen it so I am not sure I am vouching for it but, at the very least, whenever you're reading this - use it as an opportunity to revisit Supergrass and Vangoffey.

Gary Marcus recently posted this insightful piece about the current state of "advanced" thinking within AI, entitled A knockout blow for LLMs?. He discusses a June 2025 research paper from Apple called The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity, an enormous title that basically boils down to - "reasoning" in AI is not as great as these companies want you to believe.

Marcus piece is not dense or unapproachable. If you have the slightest interest in AI and how the ongoing advancements are proceeding, it's a very thoughtful discussion. A friend of mine called it "Some good cold water on how close AGI." Meaning, we're not that close to Artificial General Intelligence despite what some of the hype may lead you to believe. The pattern matching on current LLMs is incredibly impressive but "thinking" is the wrong word for it - a 7-year old has better reasoning skills.

I do not consider myself an AI evangelist or expert in any regard. I am a fan of it and use it regularly but also agree with a great many critiques of it. Mostly I try to remind myself that it is early days. Of course OpenAI and Claude and Google and all the rest want you to believe they have the best models - they want you to pay them to use the software! It's all marketing! But that doesn't mean it's not also impressive! It just has to be taken with a grain of salt, like all marketing does.

Marcus and Apple make a great point about the state of things - they are not wrong. AGI is not impending and AI "thinking" has a long way to go (for now). That's good for us because we need to figure out how these tools fit into our landscape from an ethical standpoint and how we can regulate them.

Arlo recently clued me in to !Camera, a photography app that uses a big, chunky, fun interface to surface some premium settings. The settings are not overwhelming and it's fun to use an interface that actually feels like a childhood toy - a bit of whimsy, if you will.

I like the standard Camera app on the iPhone - it's hard to complain about. It takes nice photos and it has a lot of features if you know how to use them. But apps like !Camera and its ilk - see also, Kino for a different flavor of a similar thing - find a nice balance between giving you manual control and letting you choose what kind of post-processed filter. I'm not sure I'm ready to subscribe to such a thing but I am happy to play with it and use all the free features.

If you're unfamiliar, Mitch Hedberg was a rather unique stand-up comic. Tragically, he passed away in 2005 but his style is unmatched - one-liners and absurd scenarios that somehow manage to be funny over and over again even tho they are incredibly short.

Comedian Doug Stanhope recently shared this cut of The Mitch Hedberg Project, a 2001 MTV pilot featuring Hedberg and a cast of friends (including his wife, comedian, Lynn Shawcroft) simply touring around California. It has some rough moments - it's not confusing why it wasn't picked up - but it's nice to see a little historical relic make its way out into the world.

I've been friends with Davis for a long time. Longer than I can actually remember when we met. Over the years he has always dabbled in various music projects, some more straightforward than others. The latest, Rime, is a mixture of ambient soundscapes, a bit of noise and something entirely unique.

When it was released, Davis included this note - which I think really frames it up nicely:

Over the past few years I've been working to build my own pedals and instruments - my goal is to just make something I haven't heard before. Beyond the usual assortment of synthesizers and drum machines, on there are some tape-looped organs, found sounds, baritone guitars, thumb pianos, and even the recorded sounds of my own birth (?!), which was a SURREAL experience to discover on a hand-labeled cassette tape from home.

If you're the type to put new music in headphones and walk around, this is a great batch of songs to do it with. While there are plenty of electronic elements to the compositions, there's an atmosphere to many of them that hints toward the subtle beauty of natural things. Like tree limbs swaying or staring into the night sky, remembering you're a pale blue dot. That may sound esoteric but this is some great music to let those sorts of ideas wander into your head.

Artist Mattia Bioli spent three years creating this short film - Cubit. I've no idea how it was created - tho Bioli states that some innovative techniques were used (tell me more!). I also have no idea when it will be fully available anywhere to watch - such is generally the fate of a short film.

What I do know is that it has a fantastic dithered vibe and I'm excited to see more. There's a making of that I'll queue in the meantime- thank goodness for auto-translated auto-transcribed captions!

I recall a few years ago, a trailer emerged for a documentary about the band Failure. It's been a minute since I've heard anything about it but just today I noticed that there's a brand new trailer. It's a lot of similar footage but some very intriguing additions - namely from the members of the band itself.

Still no stated release date but I'm very much looking forward to it. In the meantime, I'm headed back into their full discography once again. Always a treat.

I am fortunate enough to hang out in a small Discord with a bunch of very talented people. One of them - Jazzy Chad - recently launched a new game called Letters. It's a daily wordplay game where everyone gets the same grid of letters and your task is to spell the highest scoring word - using double and triple scoring tiles similar to Scrabble.

It's addictive in juuuust the right way. It's a daily experience but it's not overly eager. It's challenging to find high scoring words but it's possible to do well without knowledge of some obscure word set. All told, a damn good game. It's in the App Store now.

Oh, and if you do not have an iPhone or do not want to install another app - it's also on the web! You can give it a whirl right now. I suggest you do.

This David Lynch Collection Auction contains no shortage of absolutely wild items. Obviously owning Lynch's coffee maker would be a real treat but an annotated copy of the unreleased Ronnie Rocket script? or his Megaphone? Bang & Olufsen Home Stereo? Dune Production Office Vintage Phone!?! His Personal 35mm print of Eraserhead?

Some of these things seem like they deserve to be in a museum. The list is long - really spend some time with this one and unearth all the gems.

Hopefully you've got Neal.fun in your bookmarks for revisiting occasionally to delight and entertain you. If not, maybe you missed the Wonders of Street View - a repository of delightful, odd and poignant captures across the planet (and across time). I've seen Alien Bugs, a Barack Obama gas station, a street view camera on a camel, a steampunk station wagon and a McDonald's airplane. And that's just from 2 minutes of enjoyment!

If you're looking for more, it's never a bad idea to revisit the archives of 9 Eyes. I wonder how much overlap there is between the two.

I stumbled across Albuquerque artist Beedallo by way of this Future Islands cover - an album I've never heard but am captivated by the art.

The Lapis Room art center has some excellent biography information about the artist, her history and her inspiration but you really just need to browse the work. I love the fusion of styles and the balance of humor, grotesque and melancholy. Riveting across the board.

The first part of 2025 was a little quiet on the yk Records front but it's starting to warm up a bit. Hopefully you've already been listening to the phiz release that was previously mentioned. Now, dive into these!

Matt & The Watt Gives - "'Til You"
If you are not familiar, Matt & The Watt Gives is the new solo project from Matt Pelham of The Features - truly one of my favorite bands from the mid-90s through the mid-2000s! This is the third (and final) single before the full album is announced and maybe my favorite of all three. This single is, intentionally, a different vibe from the previous two. It's a bit melancholy but, for me, it's also unbelievably sweet and loving.

It's on Bandcamp, Ampwall, all the streaming services and even my own YK shop. Spend some time with it! Fetching Pails - "Ruiner"
With her first album, Jill Townsend's Fetching Pails was created in a silo - written and recorded solo. In 2024, she started on new music and paired up with Dillon Smith and Andrew Core; two likeminded musicians to help collaborate on new music. "Ruiner" is the third single from the new trio setup and it's a rather epic offering! It's a slow burn but it really unfurls into a giant wall of sound.. a cathartic listen and lots of very interesting movements throughout the track.

It's also on Bandcamp, Ampwall, streaming and in the YK Shop. It's all there! Hope you enjoy.

Dream Chambers is an ambient / electronic / experimental artist that was living in Nashville for awhile but has relocated back to her home country of New Zealand. While unfortunate for me to not be able to see a Dream Chambers show up the street, this has afforded fantastic new opportunities for her - such as The Great Mystery Sound Journey that was "Made with the support of Creative New Zealand."

This live, improvised, performance is ethereal and engaging on its own but when paired with Helen Gilley's analogue video visualizations, it's just a whole new immersive experience. This visual aesthetic is the sort of thing I'd love to have playing on screens nearby at all times.. there's just something so incredibly captivating about it.

It's very unfortunate but you can not embed the video outside of this site, so I highly highly recommend you go watch it there.

Some musically related things for you.

• AN ORAL HISTORY OF SPOON’S GIMME FICTION by Sean O'Neal - I don't know what my favorite Spoon record is but Gimme Fiction is an undeniably enjoyable one... and who doesn't love an oral history? I'd love one for every record they've ever done.
• - speaking of oral histories, here's a long interview with Chad Clark on Beauty Pill's Describes Things as They Are; a fantastic record that might get overlooked because the prior Unsustainable Lifestyle is so good. I haven't cracked into this one yet but am excited to do so.
• All The Young Droids: Junkshop Synth Pop 1978-1985 - a compilation of early synth pop that is right up my alley. 24 tracks and so many great ideas in here.
• Abandoned Albums with Matt Mahaffey (Self) - an interview podcast that has an impressive number of Spongebath Records artists being interviewed: Seth Timbs, Jason Moore and even Bingham Barnes. The Mahaffey episode is insightful but they're all worth a listen.

When Bandcamp was sold to Epic, people were worried. A year later when Bandcamp was sold to Songtradr, people were downright nervous. Rightfully so, I would add. Since that second acquisition in 2023, Bandcamp has been stable and even continues to embrace Bandcamp Friday, albeit a little less frequently. But what of the other features? As a tech company, there is a constant need to be announcing new stuff and in Bandcamp's case, a dash of good news would go a long way to quell the concerns around the ownership.

They very recently announced Bandcamp Playlists - a native way to showcase your favorite songs from a variety of artists. The staff powered sample playlists are great. The feature is smart about how it places limits on the user if you don't own the music - you can't add a song to a playlist unless you own it and you can't listen to a song you don't own more than 3 times. This encourages purchasing music, not an easy task in 2025! All and all, great to see them adding some functionality that encourages discovery and some (potential) social presence through playlist sharing.

The thing about the new feature that sorta bugs me is that they already announced it in 2023 - slightly after the Epic purchase but before the Songtradr acquisition. When it launched, you couldn't add songs to a playlist from the web, only the mobile app. This is still true. The only thing that seems to have changed since the initial launch is that there is a web component for listening to playlists. That's great but still a bit underwhelming given the progress of the feature over the last few years.

To be fair, Bandcamp was acquired by Songtradr after the initial feature was announced and many people were laid off. Progress is going to be slower.

This is a lot of text just to say "Hey, Bandcamp moved this feature from the app to the web - sort of" but I'm a big fan of Bandcamp. I want them to survive. I'm critical because I'm rooting for them. I am also rooting for others in the same space because I think it's one of the only paths for an artist to be financial supported in this modern era. Let's hope it all works out!

It's okay to be tired. Just have some bottomless coffee and stare off into the distance. It helps. Here's some entertainment.

• Conner O'Malley - "Slugs" - Over the years, O'Malley has gone more and more subversive with his videos. This is a fantastic piece of work containing plenty of the absurd and true social commentary. The very end made me extremely uncomfortable, which I think is the point? Hopefully it is taken for the satire and commentary that it is.
• Kiwi Nutrition Reform - a campaign to help get Japan eating healthier.. with Kiwi. Of course the commercial is incredible start to finish. There's another one worth watching too.
• Woman & Octopus Are Best Friends - I don't care that this is The Dodo and it's something your aunt would send you on Facebook. It's delightful.
• SNL's Chloe Fineman on Letterman - in 2004, Chloe Fineman appeared on Letterman to show off her own stupid human trick of bird calling. It's legimately impressive and truly stupid at the same time.
• Criterion Closet: Ben Affleck Picks - these are always entertaining but Affleck is much more of a cinephile than I think he gets credit for. Also, his comments on Dazed & Confused and Armageddon are a delight.
• The Making of Charli XCX Joke - really enjoying everything I see from the John Mulaney Netflix show. This stupid joke with behind-the-scenes sendup is just more affirmation that it's a treat! Another good one here.
• Lindy Hop Moments - I personally have no interest in being a competitive dancer but I'd be lying if I said this isn't impressive. It's wild and seems like they're having a blast.
• Dschinghis Khan / Starparade 1979 - In 2025, this isn't particularly outlandish to see anymore but that doesn't make it any less refreshing. A 46-year old musical performance of some heavily themed pop music from Germany that looks like the precursor to the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers should not go unappreciated.

I've been singing the praises of Total Wife for many years now. They recently went on tour with Baby Wave and released a collaborative EP together - still life. This video for "leftovers" is riddled with VHS style kaleidoscope effects and pairs perfectly with the song. Turn it up loud.

As I mentioned previously, yk Records released a new two song single from phiz, a collaborative project between Tristen and Cortney Tidwell. Now there's an official video for the first track, "i lost my fkn mind." There's a lot of themes of romance, love and sex in here - so maybe don't watch it while at Starbucks. Or do! Could be a refreshing zing for yourself and those around you.

I can't stop listening to these two songs and am particularly proud of the Flexi we made for them. If you're not into plastic 7"'s, you can stream the songs or snatch them on Bandcamp or Ampwall.

A smattering of semi-shortish reads for you!

• Stack Overflow is almost dead - this seems.. impossible? The article details the timeline of big events that led to this decline - including GenAI (obviously) and being sold to private investors (less obvious but possibly more impactful, imo). Wild.
• What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT? - a bit of good news for you. The reports of energy usage in this one regard are somewhat overblown it seems.
• Nocturne - remember Spotify's Car Thing? The hardware they made that was clearly doomed from the beginning? Well, they discontinued it and now folks are hacking it back into an open-source, usable, device. Ya love to see it!
• Anime.js - a javascript library for powering animations. The website and the documentation are bonkers. One bullet in a list is doing it a disservice but please click through on this.

When I was a youth, I was a bit of a troublemaker. I don't think that's out of the ordinary. My particular flavor of trouble happened online - specifically on AOL. It was the mid-90s, I was a young teenager and, frankly, the stakes were pretty low. I ran around with a group of folks that considered themselves hackers - which is a laughable label in contrast to an actual black hat engineer but, again, it was the mid-90s and I was a young teenager.

In that same era was a piece of software called AOHell - a kind of sidekick tool that assisted in exploiting bugs in the AOL software, harassing chat rooms and phishing other customers for account credentials. Apparently it's also the first recorded use of the word phishing. The creator - another teenager - claims his motivation behind the software was driven by AOL policies that would shutdown warez chat rooms but would not shutdown pedophilia rooms.

Despite that altruistic motivation, it was a tool that enabled a lot of kids to exploit a lot of users news to the AOL version of the Internet. It also made those kids have power trips of their own, bringing plenty of chaos to a service that, by and large, was for chatting with people with similar interests.

Inspired by AOHell and the power trip it brought, myself and two very close friends - TheMeth and SAiNT - set forth on our own piece of software called AOTurkey. To be released on Thanksgiving day, it would provide ways to ridiculously troll chat rooms with a giant ASCII turkey drawing and, we claimed, do a lot of incredibly powerful exploits to the AOL software. If the name "AOTurkey" didn't give it away, it was really just a big joke. It could do very little. But it could scroll a giant ASCII turkey whenever you wanted. Still an entertaining visual to me, to this day.

There was a second version of the software that had even more jokes but, over time, the project got away from us, we moved on, we got offline, etc. AOTurkey 3.0 was made by other people and it was legitimate malware - a true exploitative virus. Unfortunately, that's all the Internet seems to remember about it. If you search for AOTurkey the only thing that comes back is that it's a virus.. that's a shame.

Added to that, TheMeth, one of the founders of the program recently passed away. I haven't talked to Vic in decades but our time as teens making such a silly joke was unforgettable. He was my same age and, clearly, a similar person in many regards. It's tragic he is gone.

So, in tribute to Vic and in an attempt to unsully the good name of AOTurkey, I've registered the AOTurkey.com domain and provided the history of the software - courtesy of The Full Wiki (another resource lost to Internet Time). There's a button to copy a giant ASCII turkey to your clipboard there too. I don't know when you'd need it but you never know when it might come in handy.