12 min read

Halfman-Newsletter.048-2024JuneJulyAug

Hello friends, this is the best thing to plop itself into your inbox today. I promise. It’s made by your friend Jim. I like everything you do so keep on reading. If we see each other in person I’ll probably get you a pint because I’m good like that, so keep on reading. For the love of all that is good, please keep reading.

I’ve also decided that the business plan is to now unwittingly invent some tech thing that inadvertently goes on to be wildly successful and make me millions. This, according to lore, is totally what’s supposed to happen. And then I’ll buy you two pints.

Otherwise, I need a job. If you know of one let me know.

When not dutifully writing and editing this newsletter, I’m a very experienced product and service designer for everyone from scaling startups to governments. Hands-on, full-stack design, moving digital products and services from zero to one which you can see at jimkosem.com.

JuneJulyAugust

Here is the JuneJulyAugust Top 10 which may or may not explain things.

Okay, “JuneJulyAugust.” It’s all one month. I decided. How did that all happen? I’ll tell you, it’s summer. Ice cream, grilling, all the right things going on in the world in one season all together. It’s the one time of year just about everyone looks forward to. That is unless you live somewhere where there are wildfires. But don’t worry, this newsletter will help with that. Rest assured, at the very least this newsletter is not flammable.

I become a football fan every two years exactly. It is at this particular point in space and time, for the two weeks of Euro Cup or the World Cup, that my fandom is unqualified and vapidly obsessive. I sit helpless as my brain collapses into a steaming pit of erratic emotion and quasi-nationalism. It’s something to do every two years, so why the hell not.

But we, meaning the national team of Slovenia where I live and with whom I’m probably somehow ethnically linked but I actually didn’t do anything even remotely help, made Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo cry. Again. That’s sort of all you need to know. That and watching the Austria-France match was like watching medieval battle or the last minutes of the Battle of Waterloo. Positively brutal great television. Pure carnage. See, I don’t even have the right metaphors for this stuff. That’s how rubbish of a fan I am.

If you were wondering what else got me around the TV every day, and sometimes all day and well into the evening, it was of course the Olympics. It’s every four years for f’s sake, so why not. When else exactly do I get to have a bulletproof reason to spend an entire Saturday afternoon watching Men’s Hammer Throw when I could be doing something like thanklessly cleaning the house or avoiding a hobby? I’ll tell you why, because sports, like gin, is amazing in binges with huge gaps in between them. Sports like hammer throw, where most of the contestants look like they spend about five minutes every two weeks training and then they’re off to the pub are the second reason.

This June and part of July I found myself on a number of planes where I unwittingly fell into reading two books on said planes which both have bits about plane crashes. I think maybe they should have had warnings.

There are too many pillows on North American beds. Way too many. There should be one per person full stop. Not eight. I can only imagine this is like silent home decor arms race which the US is clearly winning. I will also assume that this means the economy is totally sorted.

But if you’re in the US, the real question of the ages though, and one that had graced the US court system in numerous states is clearly is a taco a sandwich. I’m not convinced it is.

The healing powers of trees and mountains is a thing. I managed to spend a week in Colorado around ones I don’t ordinarily get to observe and not know the names of. I was moved. However, I’ve been to mountains without trees and they sort of suck. I’m not talking about being above the tree line but in a desert and in Sinai where Moses got the tablets. It was okay. No trees though, so whatever. Two stars.

Someone told me I look like a product manager. That’s right. Just standing there by the snacks at a conference as one does and some person comes up to me and we talk about why we’re there for about a minute and a half and they tell me. What does this say about me exactly, I’m not sure. Were they trying to complement or subtly insult me? No clue.

Etc.

Aggressive Ethnomusicology as or and Art

In Orientalism: Desert Level Music vs Actual Middle-Eastern Music, this dude explains not just orientalism in a Persian context, but provides the contra-examples. So yeah, just going for that Polish-Spanish sound, because you know, all you white people are sort of the same. But that’s not the best part. He positively seethes through analysis of scales and microtonality in such a pissed off way I didn’t know possible and just kept me watching and watching and watching.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is not only a really bad way of outing my age, but a significant film of my childhood. Of course I never had any idea at the time that the film is indeed an opportunity for a crash course in art history from Giacometti to Seurat.

Japanese web design is indeed weird to those of outside of that particular place, or even Eastern Asia as a whole, but I would have never have thought of the real reasons.

Squatting desk

At a conference in Brussels, I drank a lot of free beer with a bunch of other people who also spend way too much time sitting with really bad posture in front of computers. Given the zeitgeist around standing and because beer, we decided we needed to be one step ahead and go beyond a standing desk and invent a squatting desk. I was going to generate some AI image, but of course, there are actual pictures of them and we’re probably decades too late. There go the aforementioned millions.

If you were wondering what you can do with Processing since you haven’t touched it in twenty years for that brief year or so during your masters where you thought you could program

Well, you can make letters move around in all sorts of ways with P5 Design Tools.

Look how fun these are! Imagine, making letters on the internet that just move around for no other reason than to make some letters move around on the internet. Absolutely no hustling, on the side or otherwise, or even bustling for that matter. Sliders for everyone and everything damnit.

Lettering vs. Typography in the Ultimate Battle

If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering about various typographic choices you’ve made throughout your life. You might even think way back when to a video introduction you had to a sort of colleague, who’s, bless him, first words to you were: “Garamond eh?” in response to the shirt you were wearing. But all that aside, type really can save us, and the Sans Bullshit Sans: Leveraging the synergy of ligatures™ is a shining example of that.

If you were wondering if kids should still be learning handwriting, the answer is yes. If you were wondering if this has anything to do with a tried and true method of thinking about what you’re writing while you’re doing it and slowing the brain down, all the while increasing retention, the answer is also a resounding yes. The interesting thing though is that there are country to country styles, whereas I thought it was just supra-regional, as in this little place I live in just does whatever Germany does. This is clearly not necessarily the case, and one learns while perusing the Primarium Handwriting Models. Here’s the style that’s beaten into my kids’s heads:

We just can’t escape this AI stuff so this past month I just gave in

I did. I really did. I held out as long as I could. Those creepy little robot hands came right out of the screen and held that phase blaster right to my head and made me do it. Also, I just reckoned it was about time.

What I was most stoked on was trying to get SerendipityLM running, which didn’t happen at all. But the stoke was there in making psychedelic patterns, which sort of looks like this is one of the biggest use cases. Considering the amount of Kyuss I’ve listened to in my life, I thought this would be a breeze.

Oh wait, also there’s this Rebind, which is an AI thing I think I can get behind. Really. Read the classics, but then machines make it less painful. That I can get behind. For real, Kant is somewhere there on the list. Robots can help this happen I’m convinced.

Some awesome tools, like artistic ones even, are going full on against AI, for instance, Procreate is decidedly and publicly against AI. Well that keeps in line with the fact that apparently the majority of US adults are more concerned than excited about AI, so looks like I might be somewhere near the right side of history.

Just read I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again.

But guess who/what doesn’t understand sarcasm? LLMs apparently don’t, which doesn’t surprise me. AIs are psychopathic, just like some humans, and can’t read subtext, inflection, mood or sarcasm no matter how obvious it seems. So far that is. But this is the problem, “we” are not creating human replacements that can be reasoned with or swayed, or even made to empathise with other humans, we’re creating psychopaths to replace us.

The Riddle of Mythic Steel upon Lands Laid Waste by the Thunder Wyvern

Rather than the desk bound, AI-addled life of today, sometimes I would rather live amongst heroes of yore and have ballads sung about my brave feats, which include one time I saved a lady on crutches from being run over by a slow moving van and she offered to buy my sandwich. But we need to start asking some hard questions, as they do in this astute examination of The Moral Economy of the Shire. Not to be Middle Earth speciesist, but hobbits look lazy as shit.

“Are there taxes in the Shire? If not, how does the government function? Are there worries? Does the lack of taxes relate to the lack of worries? How do people think a whole economic system built around drinking and pipe-smoking even works?”

If you know me, you know that I like dragons a lot and always have. Back in my vainglorious career in midwestern American restaurant teenage indenture I worked with these two metalheads. After we did our time drenched in slop, sweat and knee deep in the grease of the kitchen dungeon, we would stay after work to play cards, joke around and draw fantasy art often with a dragon or two. It was awesome.

How people thought up dragons is fascinating, especially when you consider how it should be way more likely to create a monster from stuff people could see and were scared of in premodern times. Meaning instead of a big ass lizard, there should have been a massive two story wolf. So of course there is an episode of The Rest is History, where they also talk about how dragons are actually symbols about power and the fear of power.

I have as an appropriately tortured relationship with heavy metal as I do with fantasy art, which of course overlaps as often as a hobbit sits on his ass. It is sort of everywhere in my life somehow even if I might not listen to it all the time like I used to.

But a hilarious thing happened one day listening to local student radio when they started playing death metal. The kids were in the back hitting each other or something and then they start laughing their heads off. They go on to ask what the hell they were listening to and why it was so ridiculous. Despite telling them I was in a band that sounded like that trying to be “brutal,” it was not easy convincing them it wasn’t sort of silly. They didn’t have a chance, or maybe the reading comprehension level to read these two academic papers that may have shed some light on the whole thing, namely Who enjoys listening to violent music and why? and this banger, The memory remains: How heavy metal fans buffer against the fear of death.

Trading Spaces and Places

I have no idea if I wrote this or not but it fits here so there you are:

“A place where we can all be exceedingly mediocre. Where you’re not limited only by your limitless imagination and the infinite opportunities of the world. A place where the folly of comparing our normality to huge and unattainable success and prosperity is as clear as day.”

The #1 Rule for where to sit in a restaurant: On the human need for enclosure is a beautifully obsessive piece about something we generally do, or at least I think we all do.

If you’ve ever tried to go to the part of the US that you’re supposed to just fly over, there is a good chance you flew into Chicago. I was told from a person from there that Chicago was determined to be the “most rectilinear city in the world.” Which is an awesome title, but I couldn’t find any sources.

We’ve already deteremined you love fantasy art which means we all might as well love “the metaverse,” whatever that may be. Well thank heavens Walmartrealm has come up with a way for us to shop in virtual reality for discount retail.

Preach

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

We Need To Rewild The Internet (Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon)

Blocked

If you were in Tasmania at Australia’s Museum of Old and New Art, 15–24 June, then you got to hear the fabled Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin which you may remember for having the once single copy of it being bought by one not exactly exemplary human.

Created in secret over the course of six years in the 2000s, only one pressing of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin exists in CD form (and it’s unavailable digitally or to stream). The CD was auctioned off in 2015, selling to pharmaceutical tycoon Martin Shkreli for $2 million. But when he was sent to prison for fraud, and his assets were taken by the federal government, the CD was purchased by PleasrDAO with crypto. Phew.

Hark, The End is Nigh: Cold plunges are totally in Revelations

I think it’s sort of safe to say that at this point in history, we as a species have come to a point of inescapable comfort. We have turned into such lazy slobs whose material notion of misery seems to revolve around being able to get an iced coffee in milliseconds or not. We are likely the first and the last species to try and create entire industries of artificially created misery. That’s right, I’m talking about cold showers, cold plunges. The whole bit. First it was about replacing not doing physical labour with fake physical labour, AKA exercise. Now it seems that we need to replace suffering like people did back in the day with controlled, artificial experiences. Oh we have hot water and comfortable room temperatures whenever we want, I guess we should try to make ourselves freeze our asses off now. We’ve done and ended history. Reversed all of it. Yes, the end truly is close. Just read the bit at the end of the bible about Wim Hof.

Ends

Okay that settles it. I’m taking this damn thing on Broadway.

Here’s another newsletter. I tried. So should you. Ride. Shoot straight. Speak the truth. Thanks for sticking around and see you next month.