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January, 2021

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 watching your second attempted coup, finally winning at Scrabble against Bobby Pinkowicz and that one time you went an entire day without spilling something on yourself.

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, snacking, the state of the world and obscure references all in one place.

If a friend, colleague or loved one forwarded this to you, you should be aware you owe them your life. Anyhow, the least you could do is honour them and their efforts to bring joy to our little lives and…

Of course if you hate that person, despite them 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 holidays are thankfully over and I can go back to eating chocolate and dried salami till I bust only twice a day. Also, we don’t have anywhere to put the empties anymore. The holidays are also the time of year when you get shitty emails from software signups as described in the poor excuse I have for a year wrap-up.

“I don't believe you actually care about my Christmas”

Other than that, a lot of bloating, headaches and not being allowed to leave my goddamn statistical region even though the goddamn skiing starts just outside of it happened in January.

Top 10 - January, 2021

Because you dear reader are worth it, I’m giving you, free of charge, again out of the goodness of my heart, the Top 10 also in the newsletter, meaning you don’t even have to click a link.

1. Modern Family - It was out for over a decade. Somehow I missed this. Like I missed most of my life. It is never too late, it never is. You can take that pilot’s course, learn to fly fish, ask that girl in your chemistry class to the big dance. There is no time for regret in our blips of life in the span of this immense universe of time. Within that expanse was a beautiful, hilarious blip that you can binge without guilt as your laugh your ass off.

2. Blender - I’ve plunged into this free open source 3d software and something has changed. My dreams in the back of the class scribbling explosions can now be realised with a mere 3000 hours of pounding my head into some software. I don’t care, because you can do amazing things for fun and nothing else on your very own computer like film studios do. Did I mention explosions?

3. Andrew “Blender Guru” Price - His moniker is sort of regrettable but I couldn’t ask for any other guy besides this smiling Aussie trying to crack jokes as he does the best job I’ve seen breaking down how to get into ludicrously complex 3d software. This guy is a prince.

4. Kurt Vonnegut “Deadeye Dick” - This Vonnegut barnstormer takes place in 1960 but could just as easily be about about America today. There’s amphetamine addiction, death, the gun problem, conspiracy theorists, nobody giving a shit about the people of the Midwest, paranoia, the gutting of the American city, race and sexuality. More importantly were the pleas to not be an artist or try and love the creative life which I wholeheartedly endorse interspersed with recipes. “You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages the Dark Ages - they haven’t ended yet.”

5. Soledad Brothers - Dirty, jump blues from The Great State of Ohio that you might not be able to handle. Consider that a challenge to your ideas of self worth and what soul you thought you might have had.

6. Danny Kroha - Distressed, soulful Detroit blues from the founder of the garage rock legends the Gories

7. Oathbreaker - Tortured, female-led blackened hardcore with a dynamic shift from quiet to blast I’ve never heard before and can’t get enough of.

8. The Arctic Monkeys - There is no shortage in the ways I likely disappointed my father. If you lined them up, you could cross the Atlantic on them. I swore I would never be that sort of dad, but then my son started talking about boy band One Direction and some guy named Zayn. I never felt a shame like that in my life. I didn’t think it was possible my brood would go there. He of course doesn’t know what’s right and is terribly confused. Or maybe not my kid. Then one day an algorithm saved our family and our lives by spitting up the Arctic Monkeys which took him into its rock bosom. Now I have to listen to this on repeat every day. I can get behind a lot of their early stuff and more recent slightly stoner meanderings, but it’s more that it’s actual rock and roll my kid was asking to listen to.

9. The Quietus - Online magazine like the magazines you could buy way back when that had super obscure combinations of art, music, film and random political commentary.

10. Open Movies - Open source movies are a thing that I can’t even handle philosophically and one of you out there should be doing something with.

February Self-care Tips

Beer

Man oh man, delicious, pernicious beer. It’s there for you when you’re high and when you’re low, but maybe just what you need for February. That is assuming you plan on casting away the yoke of Dry January.

Reading at night

I like TV, I do. Don’t get me wrong. Sitcoms have likely had as big of an impact on my life growing up as has Catholicism and Skateboarding (not in that order obviously). That said, there is little that I can tell you works in life, maybe you can sort of count on gravity and only ever trust the first four Black Sabbath albums for instance, but reading at night works. Get your brain to slow down the right way. But, for the love of the gods don’t read some self help malarkey. You know what you have to do already, stop giving these clowns any more money.

Decentral Low-down

I’ve been working in and around the world of DLT/blockchain/dweb/web3 space for a couple of years now. One thing that has gotten me all up in a tizzy as of late is the financier world infecting it like a global pandemic in April 2020. Or maybe now.

Yet more of the evils of the “regular” finance world have now descended onto the once self-assigned, virtuous “decentralised” world of finance. This time it’s with CDO’s. Oh what are those? Collateralised Debt Obligations, otherwise you know, just one of the main causes of the 2008 global economic crash. Great. For an added bonus they’re layered on to the most exceptionally unstable currencies we currently have for the win. God help us.

I find it really hard to be that idealistic at this point about a whole field of technology and what could have been new interactions and potentially much fairer and efficient systems for us to live in. It all feels a bit like Metallica’s Black Album coming out, all the bated breath after “…And Justice for All,” then the sudden, sad realisation of the end of innocence with a heaping pile of grey mud.

Modern Life is War

Recently I made a 3d donut. It actually even sort of looks like a donut in real life. I made it in Blender which if you don’t know is free and open source software that can do amazing things. I spent a couple days doing nothing but going through this really good tutorial series and making a thing just to make a thing and to learn something that I’ve been thinking about for the past twenty years.

I first learned this 3d stuff way back in the mid 90’s right after Jurassic Park came out and made the word CGI known to the world. I learned Alias Wavefront on SGI Iris machines. This is a bit like saying you learned to cook over an open fire. Despite a couple dalliances with Maya at the Royal College of Art, I never really got back into this world and missed it for a long time. I just couldn’t justify it to myself because it wasn’t my job. And I always sort of wished it was.

It was wonderful. Just learning a thing to hopefully use on a couple of projects just to make things. It became craft, not work and worry, and was somehow despite the frustration, oddly relaxing. The wife even said something about how much different and relaxed I was. And all from a fake donut.

Oh yeah, and if you think I’m alone out there in thinking this blasphemy, check out these people’s comments on giving up pursuing their 'dream' to settle for a job and hobbies instead.

So Jim, Tell Me About the Future

I’m getting to that, just hold your darned horses for a gosh darned second.

Audio AR

Right. First up is Audio Augmented Reality (AR). It’s a thing sort of, or mainly not yet. But it should and could (easily) be. Imagine this, you have headphones on, you turn your head, your phone tells you what you’re looking at or where to go. This instead of you having to hoist that shiny lens up in front of you risking theft, social exclusion and just looking dorky. Funnily enough nobody is coming out with headsets with compasses them which would allow you to do this. The smartphone has your location, the headphones it’s connected to has your gaze or direction. Bam. The future, right there on a plate for you. You’re welcome.

Design Automation

Oh, and other thing, design automation is already happening. AI is now starting to look like an actual tool for designers these days, but AI’s are finicky and they need to be taught, or rather shown, what to learn. The designer needs to be a teacher to the thing that will make things and that requires quite a different set of skills. Just like schoolchildren, AI’s can and will have quirks and be temperamental. Where and when will designers start learning to do this teaching of creating to creating tools?

Super Serious Forwards

Irony and Sarcasm Marks

You know how you’re on some chat thing with someone and you say something like, “oh man, Bob in accounting is so cool,” but you know eye roll emojis just won’t cut it like the verbal mocking tone would? Why isn’t there punctuation that can indicate things we can generally only do with tone and pitch? Well, guess what, typographers and writers have been thinking about this for roughly 353 years.

Irony & Sarcasm marks, part 1 of 3

It’s Not Always Sunny in the Real World

That’s right, our Californian software overlords have figured out after 30 years that some places don’t have year round sunshine. I love more than a lot of things when reality smacks this Silicon Valley techno determinism right on its ass and it has to slum it with the rest of us.

Not All Sunshine and Rainbows: Waymo’s Self-Driving Cars Take on Inclement Weather

5G Covid implants or Metal Distortion Pedal? You decide!

As a former Boss pedal player I can attest, the shredding that didn’t happen out of my since long dormant Epiphone did probably contribute to my mind control and Gates somewhere. Probably Soros too. But seriously the social-media-forwarding-without-even-looking awards winner is right here. Somehow nobody seemed to notice it saying “treble” and “bass?”

Brought to you by Superstar Jon Laguardia

Conspiracy theorists share schematic for “5G chip” they claim is implanted in COVID-19 vaccines – only it's actually for the Boss Metal Zone

Making a straight line of cities across 170km of the Arabian desert is a thing

If there is one things feudal despots are super good at is actually being able to pull off stuff like this. It also helps that there is actually nothing in the way of someone doing this it being inhabited. I have no idea how they’re going to do this through those pesky mountain ranges in between, but hey ho what do I know.

Saudi Arabia's Neom Project

Colophon

This newsletter is brought to you by Oathbreaker, spreadsheets, home schooling, the long overdue valorisation of treating interests as hobbies over jobs, pâté, bread with seeds, weekend mountain hikes, wine on Mondays instead of Saturdays, Wu Tang Clan and blast beats.

Just remember, I ain’t dead yet, and neither are you, so hang in there.

Thanks, all of you out there. See you next month hopefully.

Ride.

Shoot straight.

Speak the truth.

- Jim