Halfman-Newsletter.053–2025Jan

“Just got back from a terrific holiday.” “Been really busy crushing it.” Etc. Etc. Etc. You will never read these things here Dear Reader, not just because I love you, and they are patently false, but because I realise with every fibre of my being that nobody in their right mind wants to read this shit in the morning when they open their email.

Oh yeah, I’m Jim, and I’ll be your host for the next 11 minutes 34 seconds or so. There may be a throughline or something holding all of what you’re about to enjoy and forward to each and every single person you know together, but I’m not sure what it is yet. I’m pretty sure the table of contents this was going to have would have helped much.

You can subscribe here for free, free, free because of the aforementioned love. You could unsubscribe there, but be terribly aware this may cause unforeseen rifts in the space-time continuum.

January

Things You Will Read Forthwith

You are so very welcome there is the Top 10 for January to soothe your soul and guide your life’s journey.

Over on the professional web sides of things, I wrote about how Fun Should be Enough. If you’re judging by the “engagement” it got, most people on LinkedIn are totally against fun. But I suppose we all knew that already.

Etc.

Let’s start healing this country. Mine, yours, whichever one wherever is fine really.

So I’ve been using kebab-case this whole damn time?

I know what you’ve been thinking all month, “Jim, what is Cleveland like?” Well look, actually never look no further. Cleveland’s own, Dave Hill, dropped yet another tale of wonder and amazement with The Mystery of the Church Vandal: A deeply disturbing tale from my misspent youth on the diamond-paved streets of Cleveland

Search history

• “Planets aligning 2025”
• “Alder tree”
• “Human echolocation”

Sometimes the algorithm is awesome

There are times, and January has been resplendent with this, when you just let the algorithms pull and prod you in weird and wonderful ways. You get shoved ever so slightly down a hallway and there you are in various rabbit holes, which you find intriguing. The etymology influencers (which I hope isn’t a thing, but have no idea what you call them) sure enough starts the dumping of tons of Irish Gaelic language rapping into the feed. And then because IP addresses or something, it’s all Serbs vs Albanians.

Word of the month

“Heimscheißer” - Modern German: “Home shitter”

We’ve all been there before and we’ve all done it. Leave it up to the German language to codify it lingually and succinctly, slathering the language with such unashamed bluntness.

Software of the month

Leaflet is just a nice and simple doc editor with fun backgrounds, no logins or accounts (I think). I wish I made this.

The trials of stovetop coffee nerdery

You, me, we just can’t ever get it right can we? Oh that dude with the leather apron spending more time on his frothing wrist positioning than I have caring for my children? He gets it right. We can not. There are probably more threads online dedicated to how to make coffee better in your own home than there are for cancer research for sure. If you were wondering what you call the actual coffee in a stovetop Bialetti Moka, it’s called a “charge.”

Top three reasons I support Arsenal (I think)

Friend of the podcast, the county Rwanda, is now partners with Arsenal FC, who is also a friend of the podcast that I don’t have. Many have asked throughout the ages how it was that I came to “support” Arsenal. Note, “supporting” includes just talking about it and going to exactly one match ever and leaving early. Here is why:

1. The logo has a cannon. I really shouldn’t need numbers 2 and 3 after this.
2. Where I lived mainly in London is sort of by there and the pubs next to my house were all Arsenal pubs, and because I like beer, and I like pubs a two minute walk from my house, well, I’m not good at math but there you have it.
3. They have easily one of the most skate-able London club stadiums with innumerable ledges that were while I was around, not skate stopped

Corner of Unintended Consequences

Apparently, leash laws enacted in the suburbs of the US for safety concerns have gone slightly haywire over the past decade or two. The thing about dogs on the loose is that they scare deer away. Now the suburbs are overrun with deer, and where you have deer, especially lots and lots of them, you have deer ticks and all the diseases they bring with them like Lyme disease. Whoops.

In other butterfly to storm sorts of wtf’s, Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, was created by a heckle. That’s right, you know heckles, a guy in a crowd, well that happened to 1956 president of Brazil, Juscelino Kubitschek, and sure enough “okay fine I’ll make a new capital in the middle of the jungle in four years, you’ll see.” So much for linear dynamics.

I keep on telling people how countries are invented and many times not terribly well or on purpose but nobody seems to believe me.

Music saves

So Bodø (Norway) has become Norway’s Capital of Culture, yet there is no mention of the early 2000’s hardcore-punk, Situationist(!) band The Spectacle, not the fact that there was during that same period an actual arctic hardcore scene according to a leading Oslo based academic from the Arctic?

Most realise in most of their waking hours the universal power of the Bee Gees and their role in the course of human civilisation. Many however don’t know that that very power is so crucial to saving lives as exemplified by the 1977 hit “Staying Alive" has perfectly timed beat for CPR.

The Goldberg Variations are an infamous set of 30 variations by Baroque Badass Johannes Sebastian Bach. However, it isn’t named after the count who commissioned the work to help with his insomnia but the poor kid who had to play them for him every frikkin’ night.

Waiting on Red

DHH, already bored with super freedom cultural war victory, slid into an interesting screed on Waiting on Red. This is something I do a lot and think about potentially just as much.

Here in Central Europe and Slovenia we also, generally, wait on red. I view it as a mark of civilisation and couldn’t agree with the establishment of norms. However, I can’t wholeheartedly agree with going on and on about “freedom” and how amazing the death of woke will make things and then bandy about strictly enforced cultural norms. Woke was a cultural norm with enforcement, sure, but it was just on the wrong side of the political spectrum for this guy.

Oh fun US English fact about cultural and legal norms with streets. What’s known as “jaywalking” in the US comes apparently (heard this from an older, quite sophisticated older British gentleman who just so happened to be a transportation and urban mobility specialist) the word “jay” meaning an unsophisticated country peasant sort of person. This was in fact a way popularised by early car interests to make the streets more car-oriented, thus relegating pedestrians to predefined crossings.

“Overall, you’re not that ugly”

Instagram as we all know is the Devil, but so are a lot of things we enjoy. However, there are rare and redeemable bits of non-fallen angel in there, namely Bells Explores, where places are explored entirely through Street View. Best exemplified by my home state and the virtually exploring Toledo, Ohio and the verdict after much shittalking, that “overall, you’re not that ugly.”

Man caves

There are great portmanteaus, but none as good as “mantuary” and fortunately we have the internet to show us how good man caves can be to justify the word’s existence.

This sort of place was a very real thing for me for the first part of my life because for the proud or not so proud denizens of the Midwestern Rust Belt it was endemic. Back in the day, many, if not most, suburban homes had a basement bar, a place of leisure and escape from the sleet and sheets of blue collar disappointment. Since living in Europe now for well over two decades, I can say I miss these places where you are not to be messed with in your own home dearly.

An asssize and A4

Sometimes I miss you Britain, sometimes so dearly. Pubs as a thing are such a rare and unmatched combination of community and place of respite, and yet in some places imbue another level of awesome. There is a unit of measurement of beer known as an “assize.” I think that’s all you need to know. Thank you Britain.

And if you know me, which you surely do intimately by now, you’ll know how much I love paper size standardisation. Here Hannah Fry drops the science on how amazing A4 is which you should already adamantly agree with.

Big Potato Must Be Stopped

Our world, capitalist and much, much before capitalism, has always been victim to cabals of large power players and their machinations. But Big Potato? Yup, it’s a thing.

For the frozen potato companies, the smoke-filled room is called PotatoTrac, an analytics service sold by a third-party company called Circana. The four major frozen potato companies all agree to feed data into PotatoTrac, which the service then distributes to the market, giving executives an in-depth look at supply, labor costs, and pricing.

So there is a potato-centric analytics company. Somehow I’ve not worked there, regardless of how much I love fries. I love fries so much I’ll gladly call them chips, frites, whatever you want.

Also, let’s stop desertification whilst we’re at it

If there’s another thing you might know about me it’s how much I hate desertification, so seeing things like this warms my cockles more than the Sahara ever could

Wind is back

One thing that always disappointed me about modern Britain is the lack of fanfare and celebration of the Age of Sail. I mean, what country has a song about ruling the waves and that? Nobody cares anymore. But the Age of Sail is something that fascinated me to no end, if for no other reason than how this thing that Nature just does, can power so much, historical and physical.

A little while back I thought for two seconds that I reinvented sailing for the modern age, but it seems there’s actually been a lot of work going on by people and companies that count to bring back the age of wind powered ships and actively trying to decarbonise shipping. The idea was if ships are powered by propeller, all you need to do is get rotation happening, lets say from a rotor that wind would cause to rotate, or just power a generator like a windmill.

Wind can be great, but as hinted above, it also created the conditions and abilities to do a lot of bad things. For instance, the tradewinds and currents of the Atlantic played a role with the slave trade with the Spanish Empire. So the transatlantic slave trade happened because the wind took them to Africa first and then the Caribbean.

Somehow the East India Company is in the news still

…At an early stage, the company began trading slaves. It continued doing so for the next two hundred years.

But opium was especially profitable. Like today’s web platforms, the East India Company learned that it could exploit addiction—if the client was hooked, you could squeeze even more cash out of them.

I note that there are only two businesses that call their clients users—drug dealers and Internet businesses. The East India Company is a role mode for both.

Damn. Ted Gioia brings it again.

But it gets better for the former most powerful company on earth for a couple of centuries, a company with it’s own armies who essentially owned India and told he king of the United Kingdow what to do. But now, the company that once owned India is now owned by an Indian.

More wind

In 2021, a gust of wind hit a container ship nearly twice as long as the _Titanic_. The ship twisted sideways, both its ends wedged awkwardly into the banks of the Suez Canal. The _Ever Given_ was stuck—and, in an instant, the shipping pipeline for 12 percent of global trade was blocked. 

For six days, supply chains broke down, products were spoiled, and delays piled up, sending shockwaves across the global economy. One analysis suggested that the total economic damage from that one boat twisting sideways was $73 billion.

More from Brian Klaas

Productivity is for all intensive purposes a death cult

In that never-ending battle, which we always lose, the checklist itself becomes the achievement, an utterly bizarre, tragicomic approach to living—and yet one that, like most of us, I struggle to resist. We are, too often, chained to our checklists, inmates held inside our own inboxes.

Few humans on their deathbed have celebrated their achievement of “Inbox Zero.”

Last Brian Klass I promise.

Generative art corner

I will forever regret not trying to do all the generative spirograph sort of things way back when I could do a bit of Processing and that, and HYPER-KINETIC’s work for sure reminds me how nice it could be and how naive I was.

Ends

There is one and only one big problem with curry which is it’s hard to drink beer after eating a ton of it. Oh wait, is that a feature?

Anyhow, this was a doozey, but I tried and so should you. Hopefully see you next month. Ride. Shoot straight. Speak the truth.

- Jim