Halfman-Newsletter.058-2025JuneJulyAug

Hello friends. Just where have you found yourself? Why, it’s the Halfman newsletter where you’ll irrevocably, beautifully and happily lose x minutes and y seconds of your life. Please join me on another fun-filled instalment. I’ll be your host Jim, disgruntled designer, closet hesher and otherwise nice guy who likes pints, mountains, Black Sabbath, knees that don’t require surgery, sunsets, having sketchbooks I don’t use as much as look at and people who subscribe to this newsletter. This thing is as late as can be.

Be your best you. With me. So we will be the best. Together.

You can subscribe here for free, free, free because of all that love. You could unsubscribe there, but be terribly aware this may cause unforeseen rifts in the space-time continuum. If you’re awesome, you’ll use RSS which people including myself still use but can’t make cool despite being wicked underground and being an internet technology with which I can’t track you.

June/July/August

One thing I learned this summer and you absolutely now need to is that MF Doom is Zev Love X. That’s right, the member of ancient rite NY hip hop denizens KMD, potentially and quite possibly regrettably best known for the shoutout in 3rd Bass’s “The Gasface,” became none other than MF Doom, a veritable force that reinvented hip hop time and time again. Who would have knew. Also, who would knew, despite the distinctive NY patter, he was actually born in London. This was somehow super important to me.

I lived for a number of months by probably one of the biggest hospitals in this little country. We lived there while hiking season geared up, and along with it, mountain rescue season. In the just over there a bit to the left in the Italian Alps, an average of three hikers a day are dying. I’m not sure of what it even means to see at least three helicopters a day head directly north into the mountains beyond some people just shouldn’t go in the mountains. I met some guy who lived at the foothill of one major route who told me how they rescued at 2000+m a French family wearing sandals with a newborn, no water with them and a dog that died. Apparently in the US they’re rescuing dogs in the mountains, which is sort of insane considering humans are supposed to be risking their lives to rescue people when they go up there. Either way, it’s more dangerous than people think, even for elderly Austrians getting trampled by cows.

There are tattoos that spell regret and tattoos that look as old and tired as you feel but are worn with pleasure and pride. I have one such Minor Threat tattoo on my leg. The doctor asked if I did the tattoo myself. I’m still not sure how to parse this, whether as a compliment to my artistic skills or as an insult to the tattooist. It doesn’t look that bad. It’s obviously for Out of Step.

Some other doctor put a microscopic lens into my left knee and took out a bunch of ruptured meniscus. This is amazing if you think about it from a science is magic standpoint and absolutely not if it’s two months later and you’re not recovered like how said doctor said I already would be. So there I lay on a bed being prepped and then told I would be given fentanyl to help “relax me.” The tube in my arm was already dripping it when for a couple of seconds I pictured myself a week or two later, living destitute under a bridge, tweaked out scraping the gutters for cigarette butts. This thinking went away just as quickly and the effects I enjoyed for the rest of the day and could only describe as producing a feeling of just not being worried, but not even understanding the concept of worry, much less pain. So yeah, problematic these things we invent.

Pair A Shimmering pair with Rich Harvila’s particular episode about one of 60 songs that explain the 90’s for maximum summer emo because of course you can only listen to Sunny Day Real Estate when you’ve already passed the mid point of summer and you already regret it all and don’t want to give up but feel that it’s already happened.

I went on a Secessionist architecture tour one night. It was likely the only thing I’ve done in a decade that has put years and years of art history to use. That was until I had an interview with a company founder which debated the merits of the movement’s bridge into modernism.

thedaymanlost.com is up for grabs. You’re welcome. The domain registrar emails kept on rolling in without mercy, triggering every nerve and regret in my art school addled body, “you could have totally done something with this man, so lazy, such a good name would have been, could have been….” The Day Man Lost was going to be an amazing thing. I’m just not sure what it was going to be. There were vague plans for some sort of conference, and yes, there would be rock and roll and Jägermeister. None of this obviously didn’t happen but the name is now yours.

Ozzy Osbourne died. When I heard the news, my mind raced back to that one time I almost died whilst Planet Caravan was playing. True story. Sudden and brutal case of mononucleosis and driving home through a forest thinking this is the last song I will ever hear and then waking up in a hospital the next day.

Cone. Of course you always choose the fucking cone. Never cup. Ice cream is destined for a tasty and more importantly edible shell. Also, think of the damn planet you selfish bastard, you have edible packaging, the most sustainable shit you will ever do in your life, and you even for a split second think of getting a cup. Cone. Always. Cone.

Things I wrote you will read

I wrote many things and you will read all of them. They will warm your tummy, your soul and possibly parts of your body you forgot about. There are many links. You will click each one. You can do so in any order, but you seriously need to read all of them. Or maybe not the vibe coding one.

You will start with monthly appetiser, this month’s Top10-June2025 which, well, will just cover the whole damn summer. We’ll follow with Vibe coding isn’t punk like Rick Rubin says at all.

We’ll then move on to some new, delectable Curb Your Innovation fiction with Presione el número dos para una fuente más pequeña.

Summer is for thinking, for reflecting on times of change and our relation with our climate. Enjoy

The Hammock and the Fake Interview with a Tent Designer.

You’ll then want to sample the delights of my serious, design thinking with Designing with AI Agents (part 1) and Getting local with the LLMs.

Writing challenge

A writing challenge from a devoted and dear reader:

Challenge you to write a story about a bored viking, with twice as many full stops as commas

Harald the Bored had nowhere near the fame, fortune or consternation his more famous and older cousin Erik the Red had. His father, Ragnar Plainbeard, wanted to name him Erik first, but of course his own damn brother Thorvald had to steal all his thunder and name him Erik. Red hair, all covered in blood. Whatever.

Verbosorama

I tried to make a clever AI thing. What I got was Verbosorama.

There is justice if you want to call it that somewhere out there for the humanities

Data Defense Initiative

I’ve written extensively, well once or twice at any rate, about what one might call “Data Defence” and have planted in this very blog poisoned images, but sure enough, some smarty pants makes a tool strips away anti-AI protections from digital art just when you thought it was safe to peek your head above the covers.

But there are now HTML bombs like this one.

Finally, someone has come up with a typographic way to have Proof of Human

Un-coaching

It seems that there is now a coach for everything and everyone and that everyone can also a coach. But I want you to stop and consider the opposite. What if you have too much coaching going in your life already? You might need less of it. Thus, for absolutely free today only, I present to you Dear Reader, my three step Un-coaching programme.

Day 1: Briefly but completely consider the idea that in times past you would have talked to a friend or someone in your community.

Day 2: Start listening to your grandparents if they’re still alive instead of podcasts

Day 3: Do not ever pay for a fucking PDF

Tattoos

I have no shortage of tattoos I regret. They may not be many, but they scattered about like children that should stay lost. I regret the images, but I supposed I don’t regret the experience. There is something about the fading and the bleeding, wavy line that is human and then some bit about linking us with this nonsense we’ve been doing to ourselves for millenia. But a robot giving you your next tattoo? That I’m not so sure about.

We have loads of things with zero safety features

There is something completely refreshing about this sandwich maker. It has zero safety features beyond yelling at the underage, non-adult user it to unplug it. That is because it doesn’t even have a switch by the way, so the plug is the on/off switch. It also doesn’t beep or ding or exude any hint of a notification that your toastie is indeed finished. You have to open it and check. There could be another paragraph about the economy of design and some even more construed bit about the good old days when users had a notion of agency equal to their notion of responsibility. But I’m not going to do that to you because you already aren’t living dangerously enough like I am.

Non-sequitor Redux

Notes. They are here, there, everywhere. I have them in my dreams, embossed into the inside of my eyelids. Now that we can take notes essentially anywhere and at any time they will not leave us alone. Here is where I attempt to make sense of notes I had written down, as in actually took part of my dwindling life and wrote what at that time was important enough to stop other things like breathing or trying to figure out how to support my family. Help me figure out the following:

“Bringing back the word snatch”

“Chafing as an art”

“Zach from Saved by the Bell”

Things you can’t do in Slovenia

Expect any level of self-promotion from anyone or anything

The European Design Awards on and there is precisely one poster in front of the venue. Some old lady makes the best burek ever. You have to know her phone number and hope that it’s not sold out when you call. Brant Bjork is playing, but it’s tomorrow and the only way you would know is if you went to the website of the squat complex that is actually across the street from you. You don’t see a single flyer, Instead someone you went to primary school with texts you about the gig. Someone is giving out free money because of something and you just have to know about it. Jimmy Carr does two nights in a huge national venue. There are three posters for that nationwide, all in front of that venue, and nowhere else, and it sells out in seconds.

This is how shit works here. There is plenty of internets, but don’t count on it for any information, because if one were to put information on their product or service online then the person would have to manage that and who needs all that bother. It’s something that as a half foreigner, half whatever supposed to be here person, has always baffled me. I blame communism a bit, but I feel it’s older than that. The tall poppy syndrome is all to real here and there is a lot of comfort to be had in just keeping your head down and keeping out of the way.

Quest for fire

I’ve been trying to make cool fire things with AI since it came out. This is my latest effort. It’s that disappointing.

Cleveland

I miss Cleveland most in summer. The mangy smell of some tree I can’t identify. Lake Erie looking so inviting yet you know it’s not.

“It’s like announcing that, ‘I’m going to Mars’ and then, you know, going to Cleveland.” —Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor, pokes fun at Elon Musk’s autonomous ride-hailing ambitions, Reuters reports.

Top three verbal reactions upon telling people I’m from Cleveland

• “Damn.”
• “Sorry.”
• “Huh.”

Linguistics corner

Arabizi - As far as alphabets go, Arabic looks cool. The sweeps and swishes the dots and mainly the abstraction of it just having a form that isn’t actually for a non-Arabic sort of guy like myself nowhere near typographic despite being typography, but visual and compositional forms, that mean a thing, but I have no idea what that thing is and probably couldn’t pronounce it anyhow. I worked with this Egyptian dude one time who showed me arabic in Word and my mind was blown. The letters keep on changing as you make the words. It seriously looked like a spellbook. But one thing I’ve always been curious about was Arabizi which is essentially the Arabic alphabet transliterated.

My favourite design things

This month’s best design is Russell Davies’s Homesense Bikemap. I have a masters in interaction design and think up anything this immediate, this useful, this charming if I had a gun to my head. Paper. Lights. It tells you the closest bike without you having to reach into your pocket and look at the goddamn phone again.

EuroFocus

France are doing a good thing

Planned obsolescence is the conscious reduction of product life in order to accelerate product renewal. France was the first country in the world to ban this practice in 2015. It can be punished with 2 year imprisonment and €300,000 fine and up to 5% of the annual average turnover.

https://www.stopobsolescence.org/

Ends

That’s it. I tried. So should you. This should be the summer issue, but life as late as our dreams and that number 9 bus.

- Jim