Halfman-Newsletter.050-2024Oct
Hello friends, welcome to the Halfman newsletter. This is safe space of wonder, perfunctory philsophy and a lot of random reckons. If you’re going to look for some thematic throughline, don’t. This is a blog/newsletter/whatever in broad strokes about life and my hackneyed observations of it.
If you’re looking for some serious design work and thinking, you should probably go to jimkosem.com instead. If you’re in need of any product and service design or strategy, I’m your guy, very available and looking for the next opportunity so any job consideration, moral support, jokes or chat are greatly appreciated.
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Okay, let’s go.
For the love all that is still good in the world, read these things I wrote
If you were looking for answers to what you should have been concerning yourself with in October, and in which priority, look no further than the Top10-Oct2024.
Would you look at that? On the brand, spanking new jimkosem.com which you’re going to look at right now and forward to everyone you know looking for a designer, I have now have writing, such as the LinkedIn hits Verified Human-made, Endineering and hello_world.
Well, finally. What is quite likely the pinnacle of my oevre, much less the Place Imploder essay series, Britain: Kebab Shops is finally let loose on the world. Please read this opus and gorge on the feast that is this examination of Britishness, urbanism, awesome branding, temporality and being drunk on the streets of the United Kingdom.
Damn, what’s that? You want another bunch of paragraphs about music and culture that I had sitting around for over half a decade? Well, here you are: Digital Lurking.
Productivity tip of the month
Stuck on a decision? Go have a Snickers. You’ve been working hard. You’ve been starting at that computer since like 09:03 or something and having a hard time moving forward. One needs respite from the Sisyphean slog that is modern life. You know what? Fuck that pull request. Fuck that dog over there that just won’t shut up. Go get yourself some delicious chocolate, peanuts and caramel all smooshed together in a convenient rectangle of delight. You deserve it.
Fun fact of the month
Weight on a plane translates to fuel, which translates to money. That’s not a new consideration: back in the eighties, Robert Crandall, the CEO of American Airlines, mandated the removal of a single olive from each dinner salad served to fliers, saving the airline forty thousand dollars per year.
(Columbia Journalism Review: The Final Flight of the Airline Magazine)
Riffs of the month
If you were wondering if I just sat there for the remaining eleven minutes of Elder’s “Dead Roots Stirring” whilst I should be in the DIY shop being disappointed with my own lack of knowledge and general incompetence, the answer is obviously yes and also yes, the riffs are that righteous without even being on something.
Preach
“One should always be drunk…but with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose but get drunk."
(Charles Baudelaire)
Autumn in the Midwest
If there is one season that screams “The Midwest Properly Rules at least Once a Year,” it’s Autumn, or as it’s known there, Fall. I’m from there and it’s usually this time of year when my heart strings get yanked by this swath of corn, concrete and in-the-middle-ness.
Data payload shaming
But firstly, as you know, it’s election season and by the time you get this the world may yet be up in flames because of it. Who knows. But a 10MB PDF in an email Beth Knezevich, candidate for Lake County Clerk of Courts? Are you fucking kidding me?
Ohio woman goes viral over a buried rug
So, an Ohio woman goes viral. Over a fucking rug buried in her backyard. If you need any more evidence of societal decline, look no further.
How to speak Midwestern
“In the midwest you never know if you’re being complimented or insulted.”
Ted McClelland on How to Speak Midwestern
Interestingly enough, “interesting“ is sometimes used just as it is in Britain, usually meaning ”bad.”
Halloween USA
There was a place in Willoughby, Ohio, not far from where I grew up that is now called Party City. This is an amazing name and somewhere I want to go most of the time because of it. However, it used to be called Halloween USA which is quite possibly a lot better. Either name really tells you about the spirit and perhaps desperation of Northeast Ohio better than anything. The fact that an entire dead husk of a big box store can be converted to a den of escape from life via plastic costumes and tons of shit you don’t need and use for exactly four minutes once a year is as impressive as it sounds.
How, in of all places Cleveland, they turned a strip mall into a real place
There is no greater architectural metaphor for the Midwest than the strip mall. A place of too big everything, dead zones of empty parking and shops that one struggles to understand the business of, these things are good ways to kill places. Take some empty land, ideally with some trees which no one needs, pave it with five times too much parking because reasons and then populate with dead zones of the economy all the while giving tax breaks while watching the whole thing fail.
You can watch the quick explanation of the development on Instagram here
Driveway skateparks
The evolution of street skateboarding, in particular the trend of DIY skateparks where kids who have no idea what they’re doing just get a bunch of concrete and just start building is an interesting one. It’s taken an even more interesting turn for old people like me who can’t seem to quit these damn skateboards, yet are now somehow homeowners. In this instance, these aging skateboarders take driveways, the space where they originally learned to skateboard, but now own that space instead of their parents, and then just build mini skateparks. There are a number of them in Cleveland. I could go on about placemaking, ownership of liminal space, architect Iain Borden’s notion of “skateboarding is a question,” but I won’t. Because skateboarding is not a question as these things demonstrated, its a life. Oh and look at my dude Gary probably pushing 53 at this point doing a huge slob mute grab over a really nice looking hip.
Placemaking Schmacemaking
There has to be some super long German word for the feeling: that weird spot in between inspiration and desparation driven by a mix between realising your life on earth is getting shorter by the second and just wanting to do something sort of pointless and destructive. So I started waxing curbs for the first time in decades. If you’re not familiar, to get curbs, ledges and the like to grind and slide to do tricks on them, skateboarders rub wax all over them to help that happen.
There is a lot of art and theory types that go on about placemaking and “interrogating the city” and all that. They should stop writing and start skating like Local Curb Service who shows how to reform urban spaces the cool way.
Typography as cultural praxis
Are there still hipsters? Aren’t we all? Am I? Are you? It was always a term foisted on other people, and I’m guilty of it as well, and I can guarantee someone at some point in some place saw me walking down the street and chucked the term my way in derision. However, as a former graphic designer (believe it or not) this notion of the early 2000’s hipster stands out in history as probably the only subcultural sort of thing which had a distinct typographic feel.
The hipster moment did not produce artists, but tattoo artists. It did not yield a great literature, but it made good use of fonts.
(What Was the Hipster? - New York Magazine)
Romans
There was some Internet thing about half a year ago about men thinking about the Roman Empire all the time, and oh silly them. I actually do spend some time now and again thinking about the Roman Empire. It’s hard not to when roughly once a week you walk past a wall that empire built about two thousand years ago.
It’s hard to not think about what stuff looked like then though, which I always thought would be the dream job, historical recreations. Of course we now have AI things to do this for us, and this is one good case where the airbrush slightly off occasional glitch look is okay, which is showing us what it might have looked like. Which is awesome.
Serendipity that really counts
So sure everyone and their mother talks about Vienna and how Hitler, Einstein and whoever all lived there at the same time. But no one talks about how Dave Lombardo (Slayer) and Sen Dog (Cypress Hill) went to high school with each other and are still friends to this day.
Cantastoria
Cantastoria was easily one of the weirder forms of storytelling I’ve come across recently. There are examples of it from ancient Tibet up to early modern times in Europe, thus the Italian name. It was essentially a person singing, telling or performing a story while pointing at an image or series of images. A super crude PowerPoint essentially, but it seems to have been really cool for people then. Imagine though if watching someone presenting a deck was entertaining or political even. And had nothing to do with work.
Punk rock John Stewart
Punk rock was formative not just to me and even this newsletter but to many other clearly more awesome people, amongst them the comedian and social commentator John Stewart. He was a bouncer at an infamous punk club in New Jersey (here is the documentary about it) which he goes on to recall was awesome, but also a disaster and the thing that made him drop it all and move to New York to pursue comedy. In this episode of Conan Obrien Needs a Friend he even name drops Cleveland punk legend Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys and others. Beyond the trailer showing a place and scene that could as easily be the one I grew up in, it brought to mind the following: Is John Stewart awesome because he was into punk rock, or do I just think he’s cooler now because he was?
We are doomed, part 378
Apparently there is a “smart” bassinet that sells for 1700 USD. You know a bassinet, otherwise known as a baby rocker, that thing you put a kid in and nudge back and forth trying to get them to sleep so you can have your coffee and a minutes rest. Well, someone made an app for that and to get the app to rock the bassinet you all of the sudden have to pay 20 USD a month.
I contend that both the existence of something like Snoo and the outrage of those who now feel betrayed by the company reveal something else that is more alarming about our society: we have lost any sort of basic comfort with the manual labor of caring for other people.
(On Not Losing Our Minds to Technology)
Couldn’t say it better myself really.
Bands named after places I used to work at
The last thing I thought I would ever see is a band named after somewhere I worked, least of all a black metal band from Italy. By the way, I’m talking about the first logo. But maybe this is the problem really, that I never worked for a company called Incantation or Cannibal Corpse. Brutart’s typographical choice is obviously winning in the legibility category, but whatever the last band name is called I can’t figure out, but maybe I should work there.
Data corner
Of course people in San Francisco go about making data analysis and visualisation of text messages with their ex-boyfriend because. Of course I can appreciate using data visualisation for fun, let’s say with the masterpiece The Pizza Complex, but was expecting it to be funnier somehow.
As a South Slav, I take issue with potato centricity
Venkatesh Rao in a recent critique of another internet thinker type Nassim Nicholas Taleb stated he was, based on the phrase “life is pain, only potato,” a slavophile. As a Slav, but the southern and awesome kind, I take issue with his reverse orientalism in going on about Slavs, potatoes and wars. First of all there are many types of Slav. Second of all, down here potatoes are for eating, fruit is for jam and schnapps like it should be. Down here you are Mediterranean/Mediterranean-ish and Slavic which he thinks are mutually exclusive. Nor do we squat. So there.
How to feel bad about everything you’ve ever done in your life till now
This 15 year old kid is trying to reinvent computers and you know what? It’s not bad thinking, taking things back to first principles and that. When I was 15 I was primarily thinking about not getting beat up at school, skateboarding and Metallica.
Ends
Sorry, I tried. Thanks for sticking around. You win somehow. Maybe I do as well. Not sure.
Ride. Shoot straight. Speak the truth. Out.
