Top10-Feb2026

This is the Halfman blog/newsletter/mistake monthly Top 10 in an email all by itself. This is where I rate all manner of things that have been reconnoitred, chanced upon, ascertained, judged willy-nilly and blundered into over the past month that you should know about at all costs.

1. The weekly work quiz - Genius. I was dubious but I joined one week just because I saw how many others were because I’m a coward like that. Sure enough, this really funny guy in sales puts it together every week and it’s a blast. Just a 30 minute chunk of competitive fun every Friday at 11:00. And all brought to you by the cartoon magic that is Kahoot, an app for good, honest fun, not optimisation or doing anything except killing time. It’s for wasting time well.
2. Philip Bailey, Phil Collins - Easy Lover - I’ve written before about this song before and am always happy to have it stuck in my head. Of course it will because ex Earth, Wind and Fire Phillip Bailey is in the game with Phil Collins. But watch this video and then reflect, I mean really reflect with intent and all that, you know breathing or whatever, and then think about videos today and how honest this is in comparison. Just look at people pressing big ass light up buttons, hamming it up backstage. Now extend this reflection to your own life. Look at your laptop and wonder where we as a species went wrong.
3. You have 10 minutes until a meeting. This is 8 of them. This is why computers and Unreal Engine exist which is what I’m guessing was used to make this. Considered, not slop. Slow and thoughtful and damnit yes, I do want to see what life around the Roman road system looked like. I have now lived now for the second time near a Roman Road damnit.
4. Things Learned While Looking Up Other Things
5. Rob Harvila, whilst meandering his way to a critique of autotune and it’s cultural implications via “Buy U a Drank” by T-Pain, describes a performance by Susan Boyle as burning the motherfucker down.
6. KoiKoi - “Enchanting female-male harmonies with a distinctive appeal will remind you either of The XX or regional folk practices.”
7. “Hardcore Architecture explores the relationship between the architecture of living spaces and the history of underground American hardcore bands in the 1980s.” Do I really need to explain more? Street view psycho-geography of addresses of bands that probably never left the basements there decades ago.
8. Mad Collabs Vol. 1 by John Robinson
9. BX Foundry - Software Experiments by Benj Edwards - I have often wished I was a gamer, and this is one of those times. People just make games because they love games. They love the mechanics and premises and rescuing princesses so much they wile away their precious spare time making them.
10. This interview with Moxie Marlinspike - What one would enjoy most when observing the tech-enabled super rich is that they can often appear normal, thus flicking that little switch in your brain that makes you think for two seconds you could be one of them. They appear like your one cousin’s cool boyfriend who would you see during summer picnics and every so often at a birthday. Just like that guy, a guy who’s name is actually Moxie, holds a candour and normal-ness of someone who doesn’t look like they would try to reverse age by injecting themselves with your children’s blood. He lost me a bit when the age extension stuff though. Sure we don’t understand aging, but we do understand dying and that is an inevitability which a shocking amount of people despite being really cool are not really prepared to deal with. He does mention though the sun burning out in 4 billion years but then doesn’t really dig into that. But this guy doesn’t just pay homage to privacy and what all this internet was supposed to be about, he went and built a thing for it.