halfman-newsletter.062-2026-02
Hello friends, and apologies in advance for whatever ensues forthwith. You can subscribe here for free, and unsubscribe there which will cost you millions and potentially your life.
I’m Jim, designer of sorts, closet hesher, inadvertent writer and this is my missive of compassion, vulnerability and whatever else these things are supposed to be to you Dear Reader. Whatever you want. One thing I can promise is you will be veritably hugged by this newsletter in seven minutes.
Can you survive on just bananas you ask? Apparently, but not for long as you would need to eat 26 bananas a day to reach 2,340 calories and then your muscles will atrophy as your body starves for protein. Dear Reader, this is how much I care about you and your survival, bringing you fun facts like this just in case.
Don’t worry, there will not be any impassioned pleas to join a community, like, subscribe or join some hackneyed members whatever.
In this issue: in the grips of Olympic fever, grind as hustle hair-shirt vs. musical destruction, notes apps and more.
This is all I want to be really:
It was carnival time again in Slovenia, AKA “Pust” where we have Kurenti, drunk, sheepskin monsters with bells, ribbons and feathers, and the rest of us in half assed costumes fill out town squares. This pre-Christian practice is all about scaring winter away. Of course global warming means we don’t really have winter anymore so not sure what the Kurenti are going to do then. Sure enough “we” also do it in Cleveland.
This month the robots are as disappointing as always. That goes as well for the cute, disc-shaped one that are supposed to be cleaning our floors. I’m pretty sure our Roomba has been gaslighting me. I come home, the wife complains it didn’t do shit at the designated time that we check each and every damn time. But there is a log complete with a map of green all over the place sitting there on my phone laughing at us. I don’t know who to trust anymore.
You’ve already received the Top10-Feb2026 which I’m sure you’ve printed out and hammered into the wall so you know how to understand the world for the next little while.
Apparently the term “grindcore” is being coopted by tech workers in Silicon Valley. This is ironic as the real grindcore, an offshoot of punk hardcore, was against capitalist exploitation, not self-inducing it. If you want to work a ton, fine, that is your prerogative, keep it to yourself, but life and work conjoined as performative suffering is not doing anything for anybody.
This hustle cultural appropriation drove me to write an essay. Essays are things that sound shit when you think about having to write one and then you can’t figure out any other way of spewing it all out so you do it anyhow.
This I did with an essay about Napalm Death vs. a ceramics installation that is about a decade too late.It might be entertaining and exactly what you need in your life today to balance it all out.
Olympic fever
The Olympics are a strange form of acceptable nationalism. It’s an event all about nations and their symbols and pitting the people tied to these nations and symbols against one another. Yet those countries also don’t matter in many ways. I would like to say that sport transcends the borders of our minds and melts the ones that demarcate the lands of the Earth, but the fact is, countries are the basis of it all and yet total bullshit at the same time.
Take ice dancing and it’s intense brand of transnationalism. Sure, newly French citizen-ed duo Laurence Fournier Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron fiercely rinsed it under a new flag, but Allison Reed, of Kalamazoo, Michigan has like 3 or 4 passports including Israel, Georgia and Lithuania each of which she competed in the Olympics for. She clearly has spent a lot of time on Ice Partner Search which couldn’t find me a partner in Europe at all despite my wide net of body type inclusion. She and many others clearly also don’t give a shit about countries, flags and symbols.
Speaking of symbols, Germans waving inflatable pretzels. Because of course pretzels. How else to better reconcile symbols with a troubled past with an impending concern for propriety whilst valorising millennia of perfecting drinking beer? Of course you inflate massive cartoon versions of what you pair that beer with the lovingly curled and twisted strains of dough lightly rock salted. Duh.
Speaking of amazing German Olympic stereotypes proven right, if you were wondering how good Germans are at math, consider the following: there are about 16 bobsled tracks in the entire world total. Three of them are in Germany. 19 medals in hurtling Germans down a tube of ice. Math innit.
Fun fact: Skeleton the kamikaze sport which most resembles suicide by sled is, believe it or not, safer than both bobsled and luge. You would imagine hurtling yourself on ice at 120km an hour would at least earn a decent scratch, but many make less than minimum wage. Nevertheless, they swathe themselves in their flags and weep. I would too probably, but would rather with a pretzel.
The only thing I’ll mention about the hockey is somehow, despite all the ADD going around in our world today, the blinding speed of action where you can barely track where the puck is that is modern hockey isn’t more popular. It’s made for our latest generations of attention addled people.
Quote of the month
“Wait, are you talking about a bidet or a lawnmower?”
This was written down for a number of as yet to be realised monuments to culture and civilisation, but I can’t decide if this is the impetus for a space opera or ten part documentary series. It also wasn’t written down to be the impetus for the following…
Drunk Notes app
You’ve been there. I know you have. Pints. In a situation where quantification is a losing proposition and numbers go out the window. Values and volume abstract propositions that do not matter in that time-space. It might be less than the fingers on your left hand or not, but that is not the issue. You’re not sure but feel you should care a bit. You asked the bartender, thinking this last chance at responsibility and good citizenship will help. You are chatting loads of shit. I mean heaps. As high as the table and there you are above the clouds and real life, floating. There are amazing ideas to be had in such situations and because nobody uses napkins, envelopes or any other paper detritus anymore, you have this rectangle of evil in your pocket and you whip it out, “Hold on, I totally have to write that down.” And so you do.
The Drunk Notes app takes that one step further and takes your drunk ideas and then releases an innumerable cohort of AI agents to make it a reality just after the kebab while you slip into sweet slumber. You awake to not just a massive hangover, but the respite of robots making that idea imbued on that note a reality. It matches the coffee and Ibuprofen with a clever summary, contrived intent based on your feedback from past Drunk Notes, a business canvas, signed bank loan and a bunch of Facebook advertising launched overnight in your stead.
Lovely
This level of anti-hustle, and just, well sadly I need to specify it, honesty, with Unmonetisable me, is nothing short of exquisite and what the internet needs more of.
I didn’t write this
There are (currently) zero material benefits to receiving this newsletter. There is no cash prize. There will be no vouchers. It is also completely unclear whether reading this will bequeath any spiritual or psychological benefits. I’m just trying to be honest with you. I am a very poor man with a storied history of making morally grey decisions. Hopefully you can do slightly better than me.
Word of the month: crapulence
noun: Sickness caused by excessive eating or drinking.
noun: Excessive indulgence; intemperance.
From crapulent, sick from gluttony, from Late Latin crāpulentus, very drunk, from Latin crāpula, intoxication, from Greek kraipalē.]
From The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
Ends
“No drama with money.” This is what some guy recently told me. That is what he had and nonchalantly plopped into the conversation. He didn’t talk about material things or accomplishments and yet summarised it in such a lackadaisical, southern European way. I guess I’ll have to invent something that is wildly successful to sort that out in March maybe. Maybe I can have some robots make the Drunk Notes app.
This is all I got this month. I tried, so should you.
- Jim
