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December, 2020

Hi. I’m Jim, your host for what is to be the brightest gem in your inbox today and every other day you get it, which you will remember in the pantheon of days in your life alongside the birth of your children, getting drunk for the first time or graduating. I’m a designer, writer, etc. and I’m here to entertain and inform you.

You’ve found yourself already ankle deep in the Halfman newsletter, the only place on the Internet where you can read about design, rock ’n roll, remedial economics, toast, the state of the world and obscure references all in one place.

If a friend or colleague forwarded this to you, thank them from the bottom of your heart, hand them that little brown envelope I just passed to you and go and...

Of course if you hate that person, despite them possibly saving your life, you can always unsubscribe here. You can also check out all the back issues, if you don’t have access to printed and framed version on your wall right now.

Updates

The Gates of Vienna, the number one siege comedy of the year, is now completely and freely available on The Web! You read that right, by un-popular demand, I’ve freed the funniest story about a 17th century siege from the desolate and autocratic shackles of the iOS App Store, delivering them into your soft, supple and deserving hands. So there you have, to read and enjoy online at your leisure, a whole fun novel without all the tech hoohaw.

You may be wondering? Siege comedy? Who? What the…? Well, brace yourselves. A couple of years ago I wrote a lot of words, over 50,000 of them, about an event in 1683 that involved two large groups sitting around most of the time and then shooting cannons at one another every so often. This, I thought, lent itself to not only gut-busting laughs and out-loud chortling for readers far and wide, but also to poignant thoughts about belief structures in the early modern period, kinetic response architecture, baked goods and life when things around you suck quite a bit.

If you want to read a bit more about the project, go here.

* * *

I’ve also been thinking a lot about just where and why we’re putting all this mess of digital stuff and wrote about it here in “This Old File.”

Having waded back into the sordid and bellicose world of web development with rebuilding The Gates of Vienna, I took things one painful step further and rebuilt my design and strategy site jimkosem.com. Wait, Jim, it has an FAQ?!? It’s a thing. Designers can and should have FAQs I think. I had a lot of questions about my work, so now this FAQ page should answer some of them about what I do and why.

Oh yeah, and the entire site was built in the Jekyll static site generator on Ruby which means: a.) It is on Github Pages which means it’s Open Source and you can take the code and go make your own thing like this now, and b.) I’ve discovered that building things yourself the hard way is sometimes the best way of really making it yours and takes your mind off of things.

Top 10 - December, 2020

Because reasons, I’m giving you, free of charge, one time only, or not, the Top 10 also in the newsletter, meaning you don’t even have to click a link. This will save approximately 32,435 tons of carbon I’m pretty sure.

1. Ügür Şahin and Özlem Türeci, the couple behind the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine - Dear Alternative für Deutschland and various other European anti-immigrant parties, especially the British type, you would have kept these sorts of people out and then what? Instead, you have immigration and a couple of Turks to thank for potentially saving millions of lives.

2. Toast - I know toast appeared in last month’s newsletter in the self care section, but damn is it good. Remember kids, bread is just a vehicle for butter.

3. Midnight Prey - Solid, rocking 70’s style power rock, proto-metal, also from Germany and also potentially saving humanity. They look super cool and how I should have in high school.

4. Dave Hill - He ranks above Rory Scovel mainly because he’s from Cleveland and also in loads of bands. He also has the classic Great Lakes stoner-without-really-being-stoner, shrugging fun quips about everything from hanging out in Canada to making black metal even funnier.

5. Rory Scovel - He's funny. I don't know what else to type.

6. Simon Rich “Hits and misses” - Hilarious, short and easy to read short stories

7. Evan Wright “Generation Kill” - An intense, first-hand and brutally honest look at the lives of the kids, yes, actual kids, most of them aren’t holder than 22, that were sent into Iraq Part II not knowing or even seeming to care why.

8. Every Little Thing - The new (?) podcast from Gimlet where they just sort of explain things like how potatoes got to be so damn popular

9. Friday At the Hideout: Boss Detroit Garage 1964–67 (various artists) - Hip-shaking, head swinging, ripping surf and garage tunes from way back when it was

10. The faint, so ever faint, glimmer of hope that 1–3 grades will go back to school in January

January Self-care Tips

As we descend into the not-so-cold-and-worrying-warm winters of what needs to be a contentedness, we need to all remember to every now again, between the sobs, the booze and the TV, take some time, even more time really, for ourselves.

Point Break

It’s bad out there. The world is alternately burning, the seas rising to meet the piles of dead from a global plague while an elite few profit tremendously. What narrative salve could possibly be applied to a situation as dire as that? Why the only early 90’s epic Keanu-Swayze vehicle that was clearly ahead of it’s time. What better time do we have besides this pained point in history to reexamine our relationship to materiality, capitalism and extreme sports?

Going for a walk in the wood

There is a lot of stuff out there about “forest bathing” which besides being just a shitty name, doesn’t do it justice. A walk in the woods can just be a damn pleasant thing and not some amount of requisite hygiene to check off your trend list. Who doesn’t need a break from all the damn screens in our lives? There’s just so many things to look at, hear and smell that it can, forgive my plunge into strained literariness, lead the mind on a journey of natural rediscovery. Or something like that.

What I’ve been thinking about that is not related to dumb fun: Time-focus and the weather

“Your time-focus is environmental. People who grow up in unstable places are more present-focused because imagining the future is hard. People who grow up in cold climates are more future-focused because they have to prepare for the winter.”

https://sive.rs/time

This is a truly fascinating if not a bit simplistic of an idea. Imagine if how you viewed time was a function of where you grew up? As a child of a the Midwest Rustbelt, which is when not the butt of jokes, is either buried under snow or hotter than the Gates of Hell, I think this might be partially true. Seasons mean something when so much of your home life revolves around pulling out the lawnmower or the snowblower, or in times past, putting stuff in jars or something. It always struck me living in a place without seasons, like California for instance is hyper-focused on the now, and dictates that mind-frame not only to the rest of the country but to the planet to it’s detriment.

The Jim Kosem Short Story Explosion

Here’s a short (539 words, 2 minutes 41 seconds reading time) little fiction ditty for you to enjoy with your toast today:

“Little Bobby Caruso”

Here’s a bit of it:

Little Bobby Caruso was probably the biggest jerk an eight year old kid could ever possibly be. He just wouldn’t listen. Well at least during that particular school year in Lumombolla County. He had the Devil in him according to Mrs. Farnsworth.That is if she saw fit to tactfully circumnavigate the school board’s dictates on mentioning or directly referencing Christianity, or in this case its antithesis, on what was still officially an institution that was a publicly funded ward of the Great State of Ohiowana. A lot of the teachers, well, the ones that were human, shared the view of Bob MacCaul. They could be summed up by noting his comments on the morning of 5 November which were, "I'll tell you Mike, the kid really is a jerk, but man can he play."

Super Serious Forwards

You Suck at Photoshop

This is not only comedy gold but more interesting is that its internet-only, comedy gold. It could not really exist in any other shape. If you were wondering why you need to watch a tutorial of software that is at least five versions old, it’s because it’s the most passive-aggressive, hilarious utter genius you will see today. Cheers to Hugh from Formats Unpacked.

Colophon

Halfman endorses: Mastodon, IAwriter, CSS as a medieval guild-worthy craft, really wanting to play guitar again but knowing it’s a bad idea, Refused, the reexamination of third way political structures, not going outside for days so screw it I’m going for the record, Sacher Torte, long hard looks out the window and the notion that most issues in ones life can be sorted out with a beer and a notebook.