halfman-newsletter.062-2026-01
Hello friends, and apologies in advance for whatever this thing is. You can subscribe here for free, and unsubscribe there which will hasten global warming by 20 years.
I’m Jim, designer of sorts, closet hesher, inadvertent writer and this is my missive to you. You may be asking what Halfman is. I’m not really sure, but it used to be a company way back when and now, well…anyhow inside you will find delights and wonders for approximately 5 minutes and 58 seconds.
In this issue: Sandwich science, notes on diversity and post-colonialism, art school rants and an ode to VLC Player.
From the blog and now causing you unimaginable wealth and power
Style as a Service is something I put on the serious, work thing which points to other ideas of things and likely needs some sort of better followup.
That Was Something You Knew Wouldn’t Work is a thing I made for you. There is a really bad explanation.
Dispatches from the Sunny Side of Nowhere
When you come to Slovenia, you may be expecting to drink a lot of alcohol. This is a fair assumption considering wine is everywhere, that this small country has the third highest consumption of it in Europe, has the world’s oldest, productive grapevine and I believe third most vineyards per capita. All of this would lead one quite logically to believe booze is everywhere. However, there is a common belief that wine is not booze.
Top Three Songs That Appeared Out of Nowhere Often First Thing in the Morning
I’ve thought about it. I really have. There is absolutely no throughline here. The closest I came was that I thought the King Diamond song I had in my head was called “The Candle” at which point there would have been crazy cosmic things happening, you know with the Bangles and that. That and maybe the writers of Game of Thrones, considering they’re Mastodon fans, might like King Diamond. But yes, the Bangles are always on top.
- The Bangles “Eternal Flame"
- King Diamond “Welcome Home”
- The Game of Thrones theme song
VLC
When you open VLC player, there is a 97.3% change that whatever video file you’re watching for free you necessarily shouldn’t be. Using VLC player at this point is like going home. It’s like a breeze through a class album, but of one where it was an okay year and you can’t think of anything bad about anyone and oh that one teacher taught you how to draw a horse. I’m a terrible victim of nostalgia, especially for bad UIs, the days of yore and cracked warez, WinAmp visualisations. Admit it, you miss it too. It’s just slightly off, tarnished enough that what was once polish is lovingly outdated enough to be yet once again current, but not with the knowing nod, but with a shrug.
Sports Doesn’t Need to Suck
It may be the age settling in and some wisening of mind as the body falls apart, but the anti-establishment ethos I’ve held most of my life against team sports has waned. Maybe it’s because technology and the world have become so much less human and boring, and sports still remain this constant in our lives, a drama played out we know doesn’t matter yet we can’t help watching.
My dude Jonathan, bless him, is a man amongst men. Of course he’s not only working on a pilot project with the Roadburn Festival as a heritage community (Archiving Heaviness) but also behind Football Makes History. I never really thought about football or any sports until he told me about this a while ago.
I know what you’re thinking, Jim, it’s hockey season, get your priorities straight. Whilst I would otherwise wholeheartedly agree, this would be the case if there wasn’t the impending Easter season bringing us not just pancakes to those of you in the UK, but even better, the Royal Shrovetide Football. This “game” resembles more of a village-wide brawl with hundreds playing and the goals three miles apart. Though similar to “hurling” in St Columb Major (who the hell named that place) in Cornwall where two teams try to get a silver ball to goals two miles apart mainly because they’re not nearly as badass as the people of Ashbourne in Derbyshire.
Sports used to suck a lot less when the stadium was the village square down the road and there was no money to be made. People used to just make up their own rules to suit where they’re at.
By the way, I’m still considering converting to being a Tottenham supporter, so opening that up to the highest bidder.
Sandwiches are life
In the trade, the small gaps that can occur within the curves of iceberg lettuce leaves – creating air pockets – are sometimes known as “goblin caves”. The unfortunate phenomenon of a filling slumping toward the bottom of a sandwich box, known as a skillet, is “the drop”.
( How the sandwich consumed Britain)
In case you weren’t wondering
Sam Kriss can wrap sentences and esoteric thinking around your sad, little mind and without even blinking drop 5000 words on a history of dualism in Zoroastrianism compared to the origins of gnosticism and the very nature of God and then whip you back into modern Iran with gems like:
the Islamic Golden Age was the best time to rootlessly roam Asia in search of spiritual wisdom until the invention of the Volkswagen camper van.
(Sam Kriss “Good and evil in Iran”)
Not sure
Someone at the office asked if I like dogs and I somehow answered, “Oh, I have kids.”
This Crashed Home
There was the long promised dream of the automated home. Now realise why you don’t have one. That is because you have a hard enough time sorting out your router. Our fears of AI, or maybe with technology in general might be about seeing how badly it’s gone in the past. More tech often times means actually more work. Again think about that shitty little off-white box stuffed in the back of your entrance wardrobe, you know above the boots nobody wears, and think about your entire online life, thus roughly half your existence really is dependent on that box.
You might say, oh wait, I have this robot thermostat connected to my home brewing setup and the heater and it’s amazing. You are 0.0001% of the population and the rest of humanity has at this point been through enough rounds of broken tech promises that they’re just leaving it.
Ends
There was some writing about AI agents or something that was supposed to go in here, but then I realised I like you so deleted it.
Life was mentally easier when you could just lay down and listen to the radio or CDs and went to a different room to look at websites. I have no answers for you how to get back to that.
