Halfman-Newsletter.046-2024Apr

Hello friends, this is the newsletter, by yours truly. Every damn month I bring this lovingly crafted whatever to your inbox wrapped with a bow and a whole lot of concern. Concern for your well being and any concern you may have. Bear in mind this thing won’t fix it, but the concern is there. You can subscribe here for free, and unsubscribe there which costs tens of thousands in your local currency.

April

Read These Things I Wrote Now

I managed to write the Top10-Apr2024 which is amongst the best ever.

This is partly because of the paltry pickings of other writing this month, namely this Proof of Whatever We Can, which does not compare to the Top10. It came out under nothing less than the duress of a half-baked idea which should have just died.

But the point is you can skip all of this for sure, because all’s you need to do is watch Worst Band Ever Butchers Eric Clapton at least five times right now. It’s of course featured heavily in the Top10-Apr2024 over and over again.

The Eclipse

When I was a kid I went most summers to Slovenian camp. This was a thing and actually still is a thing. And this is a thing in the rural outskirts of Northeast Ohio of course. There I was with piles of other first generation kids who inherited all the trauma, issues and self-loathing from their off the boat parents and we slept on tables and actually had a lot of fun while the camp councillors who were barely older versions of us and often siblings and cousins drank underage. One night they woke us all up and then took us outside and told us it was an eclipse. I still can’t figure out how everyone totally fell for it. Since that day, this brief five to ten minutes of the moon going in front of of the sun darkening everything in the Path of Totality (how’s that for a name?), as if it was night, has been something I’ve always wanted to see and at this rate likely never will.

This year, my hometown of Cleveland was completely within the Path of Totality and because it’s the Rustbelt, why, people had raging parties of course. The reports and just mere knowledge of these celebrations of a once a couple decades celestial event warmed my heart. People gathered with neighbours, on beaches, wherever, whatever to drink tons in the middle of the afternoon and just experience this event that is easy to understand on a physical level, but hard to grasp otherwise. The people of Cleveland, I salute your appreciation of the quiet sublime and celebrate your finding any excuse to get hammered mid-afternoon on a Monday.

I made a wall

I made a wall and it was the most accomplished I felt since forever. I can point at that wall, and trust me, if you’re around ever at this new place and you come over, I’m going to show you that wall because its one of the prouder moments of my whole damn life. Most, if not all, things I “make” are on screens, for software that over time, maybe in a year or two, will be replaced by something and never seen again by anyone. This is just how it goes. Which is sort of depressing if you think about it. But a wall, like a pile of ceramic block and mortar that I put up and levelled like I knew what I was doing by myself for a weekend, that is something else. That will be there for decades. I hope.

Top Three Queer Eye Guys

I’m losing track of how many seasons and cities I’ve watched this quintet blaze through and the innumerable lives they’ve brought joy, repose and makeovers to. There is unfortunately, because we are animals and pecking orders emerge, a hierarchy amongst them. I intend to rectify this pecking order with my own.

1. Bobby - Easily the most forgotten, downtrodden and unacceptably overlooked, he actually builds shit for these people’s lives. Not just some haircare, which don’t get me wrong, can sort you for a bit, but not like a redoing a fucking teacher’s lounge or a whole basement. Things that will last for ages and take loads of effort. See “I made a wall” below.
2. Antoni - The Canadian of the bunch teaches what you do with food, which in theory might not be that big deal at first glance, but might actually have quite a bit of impact.
3. Tan - There is something about that Midlands accent that smoothes things over with me. His bedside manner is impeccable but he already gets enough fame and glory so he’s third.

Footloose and skateboarding

The other day I woke up with yet another 80’s anthem, namely the Footloose theme song “Footloose” by Kenny Loggins. Because time is running out in general and a grid of the shrinking amount of days I have left on this earth rules my life, I actually had “skateboard” in the schedule. First thing. 08:00. There it was. And that morning looking at this grid of despair and almost exclusively not having fun, Kenny Loggins or the Universe was singing directly to me, “You’re playing so cool, Obeying every rule, Deep way down in your heart, You’re burning, yearning for some, Somebody to tell you, That life ain’t passing you by…” And the footloose I got on that 7 ply Krooked Hands On Team Model was not even that depressing.

Dyngus Day

If you were wondering what the Polish-American response to the booze holiday juggernaut that is St. Patricks Day, then look no further than Dyngus Day. That’s right, a centuries old Polish tradition is re-birthed in beer for and from the Rust Belt for you and yours.

Quote of the month and Modernism roast all in one

Mostly fuck it, and call it Monday. Fuck also Mies van der Rohe and the international style which is: no match for local weather. For six thousand years humans sloped their rooves and then along came Mies, and then later the rain, washed away with tears.

(@slavin_fpo)

Totally happening tomorrow night - BE THERE

Etc

15 Seconds of Self Care

COA “15 Seconds of Fame” from the new 7”EP TRAUMA DUMP

What started out as a shitty day, rife with panic, drowning in doubt and seeing the walls closing in on all sides and the monsters of the mind appearing on the horizon. All that. And then I saw this and turned around that fucking day into youth crew jumps, PMA, anger at the system and taking it all down. Did I mention I’m already coincidentally wearing a Champion hoodie like I’m on the cover of a Bold album cover? I think I just might throw this desk across the office. Like it says on the tin, it’s 15 seconds. Which is more than you’ve spent reading this. Everyone needs to scream at the system for 15 seconds at least. Wait, what? Puppets? Punk Hardcore? A paper progress bar. I watched this at least 12 times in a row. Actually, that’s a conservative estimate and that’s per day mind you.

The 80’s can be summarised by saxophone solos

I mean this is it really isn’t it. If there is one musical instrument that I would say has completely languished, despite the blip of early 2000’s third wave ska, it would be the saxophone. But man, 80’s movies all had sax solos and so did every song. And I just aged myself horribly with both of those clauses.

Cameras

Is it just me or was life a lot better in public when we had actual cameras. This makes me think, we’re likely well far too gone to necessarily go back to technologies, and cameras have for sure moved on in terms of being very pro level only, which of course has bumped up what is expected in terms of photography in line with how advanced phone cameras have become. But what are we missing from the camera experience that we could get back? Should we even bother thinking about this is maybe a better question? I don’t know, there’s just something about the single purpose device that is so entrancing. Like a toaster, it does one thing and that’s it. It’s put away and that’s it. Even if your phone captures light and colour better than a camera, I would guarantee that the camera takes better pictures still.

Orientalism of the month…or is it?

Instagram Guy in Balkans, Justus Reid AKA Amerikanac is a weird thing to stumble on to living in ex-Yugoslavia. It’s a guy from North Dakota or somewhere who goes around the region making pretty decent clips with some clever tongue in cheek very local product placement. It’s certainly nowhere near valorisation as he makes out the “Balkans” (very contested and non-specific term btw) which seems the overwhelming amount of his videos are about Serbia, but he seems at least half genuine. It’s clear he’s not trying to get rich and this seems to be one of his main schticks. He also seems to have learned a smattering of Serbo-Croatian, so good and that. But, there is way too much of the look at how cheap and shit it is here, and the classic noble savage oh they’re so genuine and present. I’m on the fence generally, but this guy does understand the true power of burek and čevape though.

File under more shit I won’t even get around to telling myself I’m actually capable of

Gorilla Sun is about generative art. Notice, not AI generated art (necessarily) but as in computer and largely code generated. This is what I oh so cleverly used to call spirograph art back in the day. This is back in the day when I was actually doing really mediocre at best copy-paste, script-kid programming with tons of help in Processing. I’m not even sure the above description qualifies as programming. In any case, I thought I was above it all, that it wasn’t digital art or something. Yet, now in the face of prompt-generated schlock, I think a new light has been shed on it. You could call it algorithmic art and this is the key. There are pattens and formulas that the programmer-artist actually needs to at least half understand in order to produce the works. A prompt-artist, which I know exists as a title because we are a horrible species, on the other hand, has no real understanding beyond some crude pattern matching of what the black box can take as commands. While being maths-challenged as myself this should be encouraging, I also think on the other hand this has enabled the schlock and ooze of shit newsletter airbrushing to take over.

Software suck

tldraw is a digital whiteboard tool. There are many of these already and I’ve used all of them. I don’t use this, because well, work pays for Figjam so there we are. However, their efforts in lots of interface thinking and just plodding along making things tiny bit, by tiny bit is somehow refreshing.

I’ve been thinking about trying out AI art generation and then realise a new thing comes out approximately every five minutes. This means a couple of things: a.) 95% of the companies building these new technologies will no longer be around in a year, b.) 98% of these new technologies will never be developed as usable tools and c.) I don’t think I care that much.

I can understand how LLMs work in that they’re a reflection of us and usually the worst bits. For instance a large amount of them are trained on Reddit. Enough said. But if you had to let’s say introduce some alien intelligence to humanity you would show something a lot nicer wouldn’t you? Like they did when they sent a record into space. You would want to show the best bits of our species, not trolling and conspiracies with the odd bit of malignant tech support comments.

The kids are alright according to an economist who has none

I have kids and this shapes a lot of my views on things now in ways I would have never thought. Let the kids use the tech I would think then. But this banger of an episode of Conversations with Tyler - “Jonathan Haidt on Adjusting to Smartphones and Social Media” makes it clear that the people funding and deciding what technology gets built and for whom is not people with kids. Answering things with flippant and dismissive “AI will do it for you.“ Oh really? So your solution is that kids will have feeds of more rubbish which an AI will create some shitty digest or summary of. An algorithm of algorithms? ”Google are a year away from doing this,” this being basically anything. Comments about the smart kids his venture capital fund has around strike me as open admission to being clueless about how life works. He knows maybe ten of America’s brightest which gives him a window into, well, fuck all really. “I know plenty of kids who are really smart and doing well with the internet.” I would say I’m a fan of the economist Tyler Cowen’s work, but his tone deafness here to what reality is like for families or the real world at large is slightly insane. Then again, he’s not just an economist, he’s an academic, and if there’s one thing academics don’t like it’s the real world. This is one of the reasons I was all set on doing a PhD myself.

Fandom and flaws

Fandom seems to be at odds with how media and the internet works today. Fandom is all about someone else. It’s anti-selfie. Yet it’s huge, and it’s interestingly huge in person, such as with conferences and in production everything from fan-fiction to video tributes.

Ends

Sorry about all of this. You know, one of those things. I hope this allowed you to avoid work for at least a couple of minutes. Thanks for sticking around.

Ride. Shoot straight. Speak the truth.

Out.