Halfman-newsletter.063-2026-03
Halfman-newsletter.063–2026–03
Hello friends, and apologies in advance. You can subscribe here and unsubscribe there.
Please join me on another fun-filled instalment of the Halfman newsletter. 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, snacking, nature documentaries, open protocols, the metric system and people who subscribe to this newsletter.
March
As always, coming to you every month, like the moon there hanging in the sky glowing warmly and inviting you to gaze and wonder, I bring you the Top 10.
I have a thing with games. I like them in theory a lot, but then when it comes to actually playing them I have next to no patience. I would rather watch other people play games than play myself. Chess is weirdly different. I can play for a while which either means I’m smart or just okay with losing a lot. Also, it’s one of the few things I play with my kid. He more of less invented this so you need to validate my existence as having procreated well and read about how to play Extreme Chess. Don’t worry, it’s almost like watching Point Break.
If you were wondering what a post-browser web user agent was good for, how about when you take a photo of a flyer you see and automatically extracting the gig metadata?
Be careful about mentioning working in a monastery. Sure enough I was one-upped after mentioning something to the extent of, “Oh, actually this place is a 17th century monastery, there’s nuns walking around and stuff.“ Sure enough, “Oh here’s my new office in an 11th century former monastery.” I can’t win.
Oh yeah get ready, Cleveland, I will be all up in you very shortly.
Story Corner
I lost hearing for a day in my left ear. Sure there was that stabbing bit, but I swear I’m convinced it’s because of cleaning my ears. My doctor said I have to lay off of it and even the packaging says it’s for outer use only. But you know, it just feels like there’s of junk crammed in there. So it might be that. Or the stabbing, who knows.
Deleted scenes from Home Alone 2
- The Rapture takes everyone except for Macauley Culkin, followed by the rest of a film’s worth of scenes of him trying to play pranks on himself and then secretly crying himself to sleep.
- Michael Jackson comes to babysit
- Yet again, Macauley gets into hijinx while Presidents George H. W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin try to sign the Camp David Accords
Design for stress
Deliberately designing The World’s Most Stressful Objects is the sort of critical design I can get behind easily. Katerina Kamprani’s “The Uncomfortable” is the sort of ultra-approachable product design that asks questions, but not like the guy at the end of a talk during the Q&A who talks about their own ideas instead of actually asking questions. Also, they all just look nice.
Neoliberalism vs Death
In the category of “positively messed up semi-reasons to be hopeful this month,” there’s this take on what one could call a civilisational war underfoot.
Other aspects of life are no different to western cities. On one occasion I was walking back from the station, along a sort of urban A-road where people drive at crazy speeds, and saw an Uber delivery driver struggling up a hill on his moped through blankets of snow. This is why neoliberalism will win - because we love convenience more than they love death.
(Ed West)
Free Business Model of the Month: Paying for Your Kid to Lose
So let’s say you’re like me and you have an addict for a kid, glued to the screen, any screen, any spare minute he has. Fortnite, Roblox, whatever, it doesn’t matter. There is screen and thumbs and incessant movement at a size and brightness for our eyes that wasn’t meant to be. It can not be good.
But what if there was a way to buy your way out as a parent? What if there was a secret tier for parents of addicted kids where, for a fee of course, you paid for said kid to have their gameplay get so increasingly and frustratingly difficult that the kid eventually quits?
Robots All the Way Down
The Norwegian Government comes out swinging on enshittification because they always seem to do the right thing. That’s about all I can think of going well in tech recently.
Eminent and storied software developer Steve Yegge’s writing about Gastown is one of the most insane things I’ve read recently. There is a subculture of Agentic Maximalists who are layering layers upon layers of AI on to each other so much that they have to invent societies and cities of agents interacting with one another and as we all know, that isn’t actually terrifying at all.
The Intelligence Monopoly Is Over is quite insane. I really wanted to avoid writing about oh look at this crazy vibe code agent thing, but creating a real-time, data correct recreation of a war is insane and also terrifying.
Making dumb web pages for three people, which is what you’re reading at right now, is what the Internet used to be good for. It was in fact mainly comprised of that. One would imagine that with AI taking over everything people would be doing a lot more of that. Instead we must harken back to beautifully pointless bits of web like The Mountain Walrus. By the way, you know it’s not AI because it’s in PHP and was made in Microsoft FrontPage 3.0.
Sports sucking when it shouldn’t
On the note of robots and our slowly turning into them, this quote from an adopted Brazilian in the US about his cultural inheritance of football and American parents sucking the life out of it struck me as exactly what is wrong with sports.
COPA is a space where, like in so much of America, play and joy and the natural world – swimming in a lake or kicking a ball across actual grass – have been replaced by automation, surveillance, status, and award seeking. I should get a sticker for bringing him here.
Lately I’ve been watching sports. Maybe you should too, especially if you don’t really care that much and are the exact opposite of the parents in the article referenced above. That is because when watching sports when you don’t really care you can arbitrarily switch sides, get involved only when you feel like it and just let your mind do whatever. Of course there is the occasional amount of drama you are unwittingly sucked into, you appreciate the movement, the training, the immense skill these specimens splattered all over EuroSport have, but in the end it is like a meal, gone when it’s gone and forgotten leaving only a vague satisfaction.
Things you don’t really need to know
There is a hammer museum, and it is in Alaska.
There is a World Clown Convention and after looking at it, you won’t be able to sleep tonight either.
Amateur tunnelling is apparently again having a moment, and not just because I’ve written extensively about it before.
A song kicking ass, taking names and saving lives
“Stop Breaking Down” by the White Stripes is two minutes twenty seconds, all twos and zeroes because it all fits and with a brutally appropriate nod to early modernism and for sure some blues math that I will ever understand.
There are times, and those two minutes twenty seconds are one of them, when you don’t feel like you got three hours of sleep because you spent five hours the night before in a Sisyphean battle with flight booking website ripoff. Your life, beat to a pulp, and pulp may be a tad generous form-wise, because your life has been indeed obliterated at that point. You question everything because you have been made nothing. There you are, seeping into the floor, actually inside the floor and thus lower than you thought possible, and fuck airlines, fuck dynamic pricing bait and switches and most of all fuck me because man, that was awful.
But then the day after, there you sit at work, you have headphones on because one must be silent in their world amongst those doing exactly the same all the time, all of us zombies. I had lost and lost hard and my body and brain were not having modern life at all. But then those two minutes twenty seconds, holy hell. A massive finger to the world with a “Whoo” and a whoop and then the slide guitar slinks all over that fretboard with the pounding in the back picking up those atomised bits you once were. And you have the third coffee in five minutes. And sure Robert Johnson did it first, but not this loud.
Around the turn of the millennia, The White Stripes played down the road from me in Cleveland at the Beachland Ballroom every two weeks. I never saw them because someone playing down the road from me all the time of course couldn’t be that good. Instead, I became obsessed with them a year later when I was living half way across the world.
Ends
That’s it. I tried this month. You should next month, I guess so I don’t have to. All comments and witticisms and glowing reactions to game design like I’ve gotten are greatly appreciated. Have a good one. Ride. Shoot straight. Speak the truth.
- Jim
