Halfman-newsletter.059-2025Oct
Welcome to the Halfman newsletter, The blog/newsletter/saviour that gives your life meaning. Or might next month if any of us make it that long. This is a place of wonder and delight that will brighten your inbox every month. I swear, I don’t care how many have to suffer for that inbox to be brightened. I will crush and optimise and just go all founder mode working 40 hours a day, because 9–9–6 is for weaklings and cowards so I’ve in fact changed how Earth rotates for this, to make this happen. I’ll be your host Jim. I like cats, but don’t have one, pints, historical fiction, design as a broad and holistic practice, the tension between Art Nouveau and Modernism, mid-90’s San Diego hardcore, most rock music I’ve heard from Zambia in the 70’s and internet jazz radio stations. Strap right in right.
October
Numbers scare the shit out of me and fascinate me in equal measure. Randomness though, is something that brings a smile as wide as the Atlantic and a giddiness reserved for backyard fireworks. So does free booze paid for by the EU. Because you know what, I pay for that, so let them redistribute it back down here. That’s one of there reasons I ended up at a Circular Economy conference. The other is that I would describe myself as not just avid recycler, but a recycling enthusiast. My problem with consumerism is less about buying shit you don’t need as with not being able to recycle it. In any case, the Swedish lady who ran some thing that I didn’t really understand that involved living on an island and asking them to do stuff they didn’t want to because it made sense didn’t last long. Somehow the Catalan guy who had been down here a bunch for reasons that still escape me and was genuinely interested in material numbers and yeah, you’re doing pretty well here in Slovenia. Anyhow, there were majorettes. You know, high school, America, teens thrown smiling into a bright future from Topeka to Bozeman under the Friday night lights while Johnny gets the touchdown. The uncomfortable cousins with the band kids. Someone thought this was a good idea to have the policy class and my dumb ass watch young women twirl and toss batons whilst they stomp about.
I went to an hour and a half lecture about games and art in Slovenian. Didn’t think I would manage, but somehow for a second academic art game theory in non-English was bearable.
There are speed cameras all over this country, and in particular in Ljubljana. Clearly the Rakova Jelša neighbourhood is not having any of it. People here have been at war with this speed camera. Every couple of weeks, the city comes and scrapes of the paint thrown at it. So then the diligent residents up the game to concrete. And win.
Things I have written you will read right now at all costs
The October Top 10 will guide your November to unimaginable heights and levels of productivity heretofore impossible.
I have a masters in interaction design. This largely means less and less these days because software is everywhere. It’s in our brains, on our fingertips and even kids can feel their ways through software like they can through a basket of Lego. There are times, way too many times, though where I still think there are probably different, maybe more interesting ways of using technology to navigate our troubled lives. Also, why throw away perfectly good non-verbal alphabets right? I told you I was a recycling enthusiast, and it doesn’t stop with physical stuff.
So then go read about Navigating Without Looking at an App at the serious, work thing.
Oh damn, followed up the thing on Morse Code with a double trouble post on Earphone Echolocation. You’ll never want to look at another screen again.
There are loads of tags, categories and other failed attempts at categorising and making sense of things. Jason in Cairo is a story that broke that for me which hopefully will break something for you.
October is all about Halloween, which obviously means it’s also Danzig month. You might have been wondering how many round of funding I was able to secure with the Danzig T-shit App a while back. Let me tell you loads. For the holiday season and in honour of an entire day of messaging about the role of the bayou in the Danzig milieu, I decided to use Google Stitch and whilst melting a glacier and quickening global warming wasted the work of the world’s brightest mind to make this a reality.
This is all it could come up with, despite pleading with the robot to “make it spookier,” which it clearly couldn’t.
Check out this super cute Halloween Clock.
It happens twice a year to the best of us. I wrote this just as I woke up an hour too early to complete disorientation to an already disorienting world and began wondering why we need to accept this. But oh, we must go on, and we must accept the universe and remain steadfast and accepting and all horseshit. But there really isn’t that good of a reason for this changing of the clocks anymore. The original reason, dating back to the Romans if you want to be really thorough, was making better use of precious candle and oil lamp fuel. Then we have the industrial version of it where oh we can get people to work more, electric light, yada, yada. So here we are suffering with this, but of course, because the Internet teaches us to be stoic, we can use this as a lesson for something or another.
Now that I look at an actual map, just western countries participate in this madness. And even in those western countries, such as the US, it’s not even standard and we have situations like the state of Arizona which does not have daylight savings time, yet the biggest native reservation within it does.
There is much about time we inherit because reasons. I live in Slovenia where the day starts severely early compared to London where I used to live. It is not uncommon here to be on the job by 07:30. Compare that to London where you can walk the dead and empty streets at that same time while here they is already heavy traffic until stumbling into the officer for 10:00. In fact, the semi-official rule for saying “good morning” here is only until 09:00. Why an earlier day you ask? Apparently, lands of the then Austro-Hungarian empire were subject to the chronological whims of the Habsburg emperor in Vienna. Apparently, Franz Joseph just woke up really early and because he was up, all his underlings, which meant the entirety of the government, had to be awake and working as well. So reasons. To this day we have to deal with this.
I hate horror movies but ages ago due to not sure what watched “Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives” with my friends dozens and dozens of times. Sure enough there is a summer camp in rural Georgia recreating that single film of the franchise. Which is amazing.
Jason Lives in Rutledge, Georgia: A horror-themed weekend at Camp Crystal Lake
If I had to paint the general vibe with an unfairly broad brush, it was somewhere between System of a Down concert and team-building picnic.
Just look at this. This is how stoked this particular person is on this particular type of owl to dedicate a significant part of the back of their car to it. Now, imagine you were that stoked on something.
As much as I find Stoicism attractive as a world view, I have a hard time accepting advice to be stoic from rich people who tell me what to do, or otherwise magically create their luck and context, through the internet. Marcus Aurelius included in the litany of self styled Substack martyrs. Your cold plunge hair shirts are bullshit.
Now that we got that out of the way, on with the show
Designers Corner: Reflections on Google Cardboard
VR has been the next big thing just about to take over everything from how you walk your dog to how you experience the universe itself for years now. It keeps on not happening. But when it was, there was a brief moment when it was interesting in how Google Cardboard was trying to actually make it accessible for people. It looks to maybe still be on life support, but don’t count on it. It’s coma or undead status maybe showed where things were going, which was more and more expensive hardware and eventually a dead market. It also showed that maybe this whole democratisation thing didn’t stand a chance in hell in general.
Threats, Minor and Not
I’ve heard “Is that a Minor Threat tattoo?” multiple times in weird situations (comic/coffee shop in London, holiday camp in Croatia, etc.) and that is not a bad thing. You should listen to Fugazi not just because I told you to, and because they rock in insane ways, but because of what they stood for. For instance, Ahmet Ertegun, the guy who made Led Zeppelin who they were, wanted to sign them. They refused because it didn’t align with their anti-corporatist music stance. Anyhow, Rich Harvila does it again with his dissection of this ethos, an amazing story about working in a grocery store all through the lens of the Fugazi song “Merchandise.”
Life vs. AI
The models must read because they cannot live.
No they can’t. At this point in our existence, reading about AI is about as fulfilling as having AI write for you. At some point AI is going to do both for us. But it’s a damn good quote. They don’t live, they consume and have to keep on consuming, similar to the concept of growth for growth’s sake being the ideology of cancer. Not terribly far off. But reading instead of living is a bit like this though.
Leaves
We are different from all other humans in history for sure. No doubt. None whatsoever. We live in a too fast, sad blip of our collective short time on this planet where we don’t know the names of the shit that since the inception of our species grew around us, sheltered us and provided warmth and oxygen. Because we suck, we know the names of people in other counties who are good at video games instead.
When you read older books, there are often references to types of trees. She passed the birch tree by the lane and pondered this and that. Or, he made the cudgel out of larch and the mage did some awesome. People could identity particular species and know their particularities. Now we have this technological distancing combined with our being inside all the time now, where there is so much unnatural bullshit in between and us and the outside, natural world.
Autumn, of which October is the most awesome part as we all know, is fantastic for trees though. There is a blessed breed of people who travel the northeast of the US, let’s say around the northwest New York town of Ellicottville for instance, who are known as Leaf Chasers. They check and trace weather and forest varieties, booking and travelling for the best display. You can imagine the pleasant walks and the gentle rustle beneath their appropriate footwear. Loads of holding hands then to holding steaming mugs of delightful hot drinks. Now tell me why I need to know the name of a guy who started a company again instead?
Preach
The prophets of the 1950s promised robot maids by 1990. The prophets of the 1990s promised virtual reality workplaces by 2010. The prophets of 2010 promised self-driving cars on every street by 2020. The prophets of 2020 promised On-Chain Everything. None of it happened as advertised.
DIYs and what this guy regrettably called a liminal space
Skateboarding is wonderful for a multitude of reasons. One of them in terms of the built environment, is the practice of DIYs. Basically building your own damn skateparks. Often under bridges and in other discarded urban spaces, skateboarders just figure out through tons of trial and error how to carve the transitions and obstacles that make modern skateboarding what it is.
@jonjon.jpeg is a quasi-academic, self-styled urbanist who dissects the urban environment pretty well. Regrettably, he had to describe these places as “liminal”.
This is one about a 40 minute drive north of me called Zgoša which literal kids built themselves which if you have working knees is super fun.
Swearing in other languages
Because I’m not that bright, I had the not great idea when asked on a big work call to introduce myself with one fun fact. If you’ve read this thing ever, you know how much I love fun facts. But I seem to love subconsciously embarrassing myself even more. So I said how I can yell at my kids in four different languages. This is true. At one point in my life I could swear in more. Bear in mind, swearing in a language doesn’t equate to shit linguistically. Turkish is one of those languages, and I’m half sure I can even conjugate it properly sometimes. But to see this done on a podcast warms my heart more than any amount of swearing at kids who break things can.
Sona Movsesian, bless her, teaches her boss, Conan O’brien how to swear in Turkish.
She translates the phrase as “I shit on your father’s soul.”
Whilst this is in terms of swearing and curses, pretty damn good on many levels (scatological, philosophical, ecumenical), there is some consternation by some Turkish speakers as to whether it actually contextually meant soul, spirit or life. Regardless, it’s so good of a thing to tell someone.
Ends
Today is Halloween. Somehow the pumpkins didn’t get carved, but it is that day of the year when I do get to eat my weight in imitation Snickers without a second thought.
I tried. So should you. It’s all we got. That and each other. I think. See you next month.
