Halfman-Newsletter.057-2025May

Why hello there. Just where have you found yourself? Why, it’s the Halfman newsletter where you’ll irrevocably, beautifully and happily lose 8 minutes and 36 seconds of your life. Please join me on another fun-filled installment. I’ll be your host Jim, disgruntled designer, closet hesher and otherwise nice guy who likes pints, mountains, sunsets, filling small notebooks with profusions of ideas that will never happen, not having to have meniscus surgery, all nuts except for hazel nuts which are absolute bullshit, nature documentaries, open protocols, the metric system, Eurovision and people who subscribe to this newsletter.

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May

Friends, rest assured, there is a May Top 10 and it is not bad.

I managed to scrape two old things out of the bottom of the barrel this month and slop something together: Plumbers Might Have It Safe which you’ve probably read before on another site telling you the same thing and Learning the NATO alphabet which didn’t really happen.

That doesn’t matter though because cool things happened this month somehow in between the listlessness. For one I went to free conference in Venice Archipelago of Futures where I felt for a couple of minutes like I deserved to go to the Royal College of Art.

I also went to a live coding event. This was the most random thing I’ve ever seen. If you’re not familiar, live coding is pretty much what it says on the tin, some person is programming live in front of you, and making music that way. Basically you see a guy on stage, edit text, live. It was really, really cool actually. Sure free beer and snacks is a fantastic start, but seeing a piece of music put together and tweaked line by line, variable by variable, was despite sounding incredibly shit as a spectator event, was really interesting to watch.

More importantly I got a story/book/whatever out…

Cold Forest: The Troll

Cold Forest: The Troll (v1) is out now. I’m not even sure if it is finished, but it is out there. People, like actual real life people that I’ve actually met in person and live in real places, say it’s funny. I was going to hire synthetic people to read it to tell me how great it is, but I’m not there quite yet. Using the Iron Swan platform you dutifully read about me making last month, I made or am still making, I have no idea, another web-book.

Cold Forest is the story of a band. They are a black metal band. Black metal is a sub-genre of heavy metal known for being especially nihilistic, scary and about the supernatural. These guys however, are really bad at being scary and unwittingly summon a troll who is instead of being evil is incredibly annoying.

While the most famous of the scene had murder, blood and excitement, Cold Forest had okay jobs they just sort of stumbled into, sinus problems and body image issues. They also had what was shaping up to be an extremely mediocre name that the singer refused to part with. Everyone else, except bass player Maniacal who came up with it, thought it wasn’t actually that scary at all. Doom was beginning to be convinced that the name was failing like everything else.

Things you can’t do in Slovenia: Be exposed to a draft

If I had time and energy and weren’t staring down the Reaper coming for me yonder just on the horizon, I would make a cool map of where a draft is evil. I think it starts roughly in Bavaria or southern Germany somewhere and extends for sure through Turkey. And by draft I mean wind that comes in through somewhere to inside. If you live in a place in this zone, wind will kill you. You will also wear slippers in this zone. Where I live in Slovenia, they only recently started opening car windows whilst driving and even barely so. The wind will kill you. If you’re inside and you can feel the movement of air, you will get pneumonia in roughly half a minute and be dead by the time I finish typing this. Kids have to cover their ears at all times outside, because I think the devil gets to them through their ear canals on the currents of wind I can’t even feel. If you ever come here, be wary, draft is evil and it will subsume you and drag you in it’s clutches to eternal pain and suffering. But then it weirdly sort of stops being a thing just next door in Italy.

Poisoning the machines

Recently I listened to a podcast as to How to Poison the AI Machine which went on to highlight University of Chicago professor Ben Zhao’s SAND Lab’s efforts to build what I would term “defensive applications.” That is, apps that stop AI in various ways harvesting or benefitting from your data, identity and soulforce they would otherwise suck out of you if given half the chance. The article The Great AI Art Heist does a pretty good job of explaining more. I’ve been thinking about this stuff forever, so I finally tried out Glaze with the phasers set to “protected-intensity-LOW-render-low-V2” and you get this thing:

If you want to see more or need a paragraph to read along with this “illustration,” well, you can hop on over to this page which may or may not help you in understanding anything.

There were visions of finally doing it to the man. The wind was blowing with memories dank, dark and fresh from being young and running from cops, skateboard in hand. This was supposed to be that. Finger, either one or two depending which side of the pond, flung in the face of the behemoths as I hopped on a motorcycle and sped off into the distance. Instead it felt sad like using a Java app in 2003 and I had to wait 8 minutes and still kept on getting that weird patterning in the background. Anyhow, I tried. The machine might have been poisoned, that is if they were looking to consume images with blackbirds, cartoon human heels, fake sacred geometry, cartoon apples and nonsensical though bubbles.

Anywho, SAND Labs also made Jammer which can jam microphones from smartphones, etc. Its awkward and huge and likely quite heavy, but it does a thing. It defends. I wished I could say we’ll see a lot more of this stuff, privacy for fun and profit, but things are still swinging for the bleachers way the other way.

Obligatory Quote about AI by someone way smarter and eloquent than me

Maybe that’s my problem with AI-generated prose: it doesn’t mean anything because it didn’t cost the computer anything. When a human produces words, it signifies something. When a computer produces words, it only signifies the content of its training corpus and the tuning of its parameters. It has no context—or, really, it has infinite context, because the context for its outputs is every word ever written.

Experimental History “28 slightly rude notes on writing”

Design Entrepreneurship Dead on Arrival

Finally, I found out the name of this thing. This history of the Monobloc chair explains firstly that these things even have names. Most parts of the world, and I’ve seen it on at least three continents, you just think it’s called a plastic chair. But no, you’re about as mistaken as can be, it has a whole history. If there is one thing I can do in this short life is take a joke way too far. One summer I had a whole plan how I was going to sell these things in rural, seaside Turkey where they were like ants, breeding in the corners and sprouting up out of every crevice.

Malört

“Have you ever heard of Malort he asked? It’s this disgusting thing they drink in Chicago. They’ve also basically reinvented advertising around it,” he said. I was intrigued. I also couldn’t believe I never heard of this stuff. He wasn’t lying. The advertising geniuses behind Jeppson’s Malort have taken tag line writing to stratospheric levels that you and I could never equal.

• Malort, kick your mouth in the balls!
• Malort, these pants aren’t going to shit themselves.
• Malort, when you need to unfriend someone IN PERSON.
• Malort, tonight’s the night you fight your dad.
• Malort, the Champagne of pain.
• Drink Malort, it’s easier than telling people you have nothing to live for.

As a Midwesterner I laud and hail you o Chicagoans, you’ve made the malaise of the post-industrial Great Lakes not only palpable, but in liquid, consumable format.

Etc.

A Modest Proposal for Life After Death

Guess that scathing review did some damage and Mozilla cancelled Pocket out of nowhere.

It had to have happened, and sure enough it did and this is probably only one of many iterations of the much maligned Clippy yet running on AI so maybe being useful.

More repos! I love programming challenges like this self-contained game that fits inside a QR code inspired by DOOM 1993 and The Backrooms if not for the oneupmanship, than the sheer inanity of things like this.

Who doesn’t love a cute bird like the Yellow Warbler? Just be aware, they get road rage.

More importantly, and I know you have been wondering htis as much as I have lately, but with this whole birds and dinosaurs things, why haven’t birds gotten as big as dinosaurs anyhow?

As alluded to in the Top 10, it seems the notion of the sellout, contrary to being fixed and a matter of virtue as I had assumed, is generational, and now these crazy kids are making an art of selling out as much as possible.

Famous anti-piracy campaign may have used pirated typeface. Enough said.

Ends

This month sucked. Hope it didn’t for you. But we all have to give it a go and this is an example of it.

Ride. Shoot straight. Speak the truth.

- Jim