Halfman-Newsletter.049-2024Sept
September
Now on with the show…
As always, there is your double trouble cultural and spiritual guide in the form of the September Top 10
I was asked twice in one week somehow about my skin care regime. As a public service to you Dear Reader, I’m letting you in on my skincare secrets:
- Immense disappointment in humanity in general. This helps to exfoliate better than just about anything.
- Consuming above average amounts of greek yoghurt
- Being stuck most evenings in a household of people gripped by disappointment equal to or greater than my disappointment with humanity in general. This helps dead skin cells be even more dead to the world and come off you more thoroughly.
If you were wondering where the next list would be in this newsletter, you need look no further, because I’ve compiled a short, yet crucial list of things I like that you should too:
- Fun facts
- High performance socks
- Good cheese
This past month, Flashkit, a forum for a dead technology which I can’t unsubscribe from, sent me my yearly happy birthday email like it has every year for the past quarter century.
Naive Yearly 2024 happened in Ljubljana this year. I found out about it happening down the road from me of course from their newsletter not anything local of course because Slovenians hate promoting awesome things. Regardless, you need to go next year. I watched talks by what could only be described as the saints keeping Net Art alive whether it likes it or not. I met a ton of awesome people who were largely designers like myself decidedly not doing expressive or “poetic” websites. This however may have been rectified with my own impromptu performance art piece entitled “Man-tapping” based on the iOS tap phone to exchange contacts feature.
I was told I was a five dimensional torus. I think this may be a compliment.
I talked to a guy who started a cricket app in India that has 30 million users. I almost mentioned my newsletter of almost 200 readers, but didn’t want to be show him up.
My former boss and overall awesome dude (a boss that skates, yes, that happened) told me, “Kill the copy in head Jim.” Still trying to figure out how to do that.
Etc
The hockey stick wielding, northern hordes cometh, Molson at the ready
Canada has given we humans many things, covered in maple tree extract or without. But it is perhaps best known as a place that the majority of humans don’t hate which not many countries can say. I’ve had the fortune of having the past two jobs working with a number of Canadians, and as always, a happy and pleasant bunch. There are many things that people don’t know about Canada. For instance, they have their own slang actually that is different from the US if you can fathom that. But did you know that you can measure like a Canadian?
As shocking as that may seem, it becomes yet more insidious, namely when you learn about the OPEC-like price fixing mafia that is the Canada maple syrup reserve.
If your day wasn’t depressing enough, but you wanted a different type of downer, like one that trod through the blisters and scabs of today, then Complicating Colonialism is for you and is missing Canada somehow.
Definitely not Canada
Iran is a place that has alwasy fascinated me, especially it’s inante ability to be a country and people in various shapes for about a couple thousand years longer than anywhere else. But one thing especially has always fascinated me is the ability for people there to not let an Islamic Revolution break their spirit and get down on the dancefloor as evidenced by “The Iranian female DJs shaking the dance floor and breaking taboos” (BBC)
Maybe the Internet isn’t totally over
Things are dire, as they often are, but there are glimmers of hope, disguised as largeless profitless pixels, shapes and words splayed on webpages as you will see when you go to Naive Yearly next time around. And like this idea of the poetic web, there is the idea, no scratch that, the thing, the utter beauty which is just the web-web. That place of just doing dumb shit because you can and all of the sudden Hyper Text Transfer Protocol allows you to make a page cataloguing Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About.
I have no idea when this page was made, but WEBSITES, DONE CHEAP is so now in more ways than one. It is not hustling so much as post-hustling: desperate yet wanting to fulfill a need to self-publish without the trying to sell you some bullshit self-help course. It’s a guy at a university looking to make a buck and doing so in a level of the honesty atmosphere most of us can’t even breathe in. Yet, the care to the design, the ability to somehow inexplicably dither the type and make it look like total shit clearly took effort. It is one page. It, itself, is a monument much as Grant’s Tomb and Wallenburg are.
Crowdwave similarly harkens back as well to a time when you just chucked shit on the internet because you could do that at work at your local ISP and your job was “computers.” It’s does an oddly compelling and pretty pointlessly beautiful job of just being a place for voicemails from the public about random things in descending order.
It is rare that a post can make me cry. It’s happened with deaths from within and without across oceans in places I call home. But I never thought it would be from @airplanefactswithmax who’s bravery, wit and heart knows no bounds who wrote in such honest words about personal loss I hope to never be able to experience, yet can bring it back to why he does why he does and at once made the Internet worthy being a thing in our lives.
On the surface, these personal stories read like strangers shouting into the void, demanding for their lives to be heard and recognized. I have lived, these reviews say, I have fought and struggled and cried in the face of beauty. I have felt pain, and I have been to Taco Bell and it was only average. To review is to mark your actuality. To not review is to be lost to time in this strange, crowdsourced record of existence.
The Strangely Beautiful Experience of Google Reviews: Glimpses of humanity in an unlikely corner of the internet (Will McCarthy)
Or wait, maybe the Internet totally is a dumpsterfire and none of us want to admit it
I generally do believe the AI is destroying the internet, but think it is already happening as this guy illustrates, but maybe it won’t be this drastic. Either that, or I’m totally wrong and we’re doomed. You decide.
More importantly, I just can’t help thinking what I’ve done for the past two decades for a living is coming to a close a bit. Sure, Vercel announces that they will allow you to generate UIs just as easily as you can pictures for slides you don’t want to make. But then there’s Galileo which you type a thing and it designs a site. Yes, designing digital products is still hard and actually building them even harder. But this makes all of it look to be an easy, completely thoughtless activity and thus enough people will start just blasting out interfaces without much thought to lay waste to whatever is left of the design industry I’ve called home for so long.
So you and I have begun typing requests at robots because searching for websites is just way too hard these days. Sure, you can try to coax the robot to create a baklava recipe of increasingly dangerous materials which is fun for about a minute, but there are also, finally, sort of fun dumb things people are doing with the LLM’s, namely stuff like An adventure, if you want one which is a text based adventure game.
“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so I can do my laundry and dishes." (Joanna Maciejewska)
Remember Flash? Remember every damn site, from the local plumber to the motor vehicle department had an animated intro? Remember way back when you sort of had to have an intro? Because you could. Because you could counts with new media in ways we only begin to realise decades later.
Where we’re at with the built environment
Cardboard Cathedrals - Life at the end of the supply chain takes us through the idea of our dated visions of the past and the ugliness and disappointment of AI and today, asking how is it that our greatest achievements seem to be cardboard boxes and ugly products instead of soaring, sublime cathedrals of the past.
This however is slightly wrong, especially if you’re a skateboarder, like I am and like one of my favourite art historians Ted Barrow is. This Old Ledge: Wallenberg, as always examines similar notions though of use, repurpose and monuments. A modernist school built on a graveyard becomes an icon to millions of skateboarders throughout the world. There are artspeak words which I do not remember probably because I hate them for this sort of thing, but the point is that ugly is not just a matter use, but of the cultural layers a place or structure may or may not have.
Mustard
But forget all that, because mustard. But it ain’t just for summer hot dogs anymore because as ripper Matt Webb predicts in The mustard second coming as predicted by C-wave theory there will finally come the imiment collapse of hot sauce and the pending ascension of the historical king of condiments. I’ve not thought about mustard much, but I do now, and so should you. From biblical times till now, it’s been always there for us. I guarantee it’s in your fridge right now roughly 80% empty. If it was totally empty you would actually kind of regret it. Like reading this newsletter maybe.
Ends
As every month, I tried, so should you. Now go out there and make a website or something.
Ride, shoot straight, speak the truth.
