Halfman-Newsletter.055-2025Mar
Hello friends, welcome to the Halfman newsletter. This is safe space of wonder, perfunctory philosophy 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, available in mid-May. Any job consideration, moral support, jokes or chat are greatly appreciated.
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Okay, let’s go. Let’s hope we don’t regret this.
March on the Internet
Whoo-eee. Look at that blog blast. Making up for lost time with six, count ’em, six posts. They are all available free to you on the Internet. Go to them and live like you never have before.
Here is this month’s: Top10-Mar2025 and here are the things actually put on the blog you need to read in exactly this order. Maybe.
Scratching the Good Itch with Turntable was on the proper work ting.
Mozilla Pocket Review 16 Years Too Late you need to read now before it’s too late.
Decibels are not linear because Covid nostalgia.
Halving Belief is about crypto religiosity and What If Money Expired is mainly quotes, but worth a gander.
March search history
- “Are there robots in Pokemon?”
- “What are some popular visual themes in black metal that I can put on a background?”
- “What is this plastic thing the plumber left on our table?”
Best song I woke up to this month
“Panama” is one of my favourite songs. Ever. I could go on and on about it, I really can, but I’ll spare you the rock critic wannabe-ism and instead dither on about the socio-geo-political implications of the song. It of course starts in the Netherlands. There is much that the Netherlands has done for the world. Sure, water engineering, especially important moving forward as the seas rise. They also invented the stock market as a thing. The jury is still out on that one though. One thing for sure though is that the Netherlands invented the Van Halen brothers who, as you know, rock.
The hit single “Panama” is the third track on Van Halen’s release “1984” of the same year. It was both a paean to the seemingly blind hedonistic optimism of the 80’s vs the reality of Reagan constant threat of thermonuclear annihilation. It was a fuck it over the top nod to fast cars, loose everything all soaked in that trademark guitar sound. Oh and just like the Dutch invented the microscope, wifi and bluetooth, Eddie brought the infamous finger tapping technique to the world and made guitar solos that much more awesome. Don’t get me started on “Hot for Teacher.” I had down something about AI agents which sort of doesn’t make sense, so instead you have this sentence.
This song was in my dream and where a certain unnamed friend of the site and product hot shot at massive tech company and closet drummer was swinging on the cable like Diamond Dave was in the music video. Also, the day after I had the Fame theme song stuck in my head from the second I woke up. It was an alright week sort of.
Other famed Dutch artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” may describe the month the best. There it is, life happening. There is the carrack plodding by, people tilling, everything going like it always has, but you know, the subtle crash from the heavens into the sea and not a wince about it from the world.
Even better Bruegel has a work who’s title translates to, "I am rebellious and sullen so I run with my head against the wall.”
Oh and speaking of awesome Lowlanders, let’s Make New York Dutch Again.
The Outside World
I went to a meetup with the best catered food spread ever. There was a bar where you could just get loads of pints all night for free because some sports betting company can’t directly pay for speakers or something and because you actually don’t belong there. But then again, there was a thing on the programming language Ruby making you happy. This I couldn’t resist. Of course the guy with the leather jacket with studs only one side is doing the Ruby talk. Slicked back hair. Badges. This guy just loved this programming language so much he straight up told someone that it’s so awesome you should’t worry about the shit job market for it because.
Notes I would find the next day on my phone I don’t necessarily remember writing
NB: These might have something to do with being in situations like the above
- “I really have no reason to try to learn a bit of jazz guitar”
- “I think I want to hunt boar”
- “Peasant.js”
Supporter-ship up for grabs
In mystical response to outing myself as an erstwhile Arsenal support in January’s newsletter, a lifer Hotspurs fan just informed me that in fact there is no red (Arsenal’s colour) allowed in the Tottenham football grounds. That’s right. Out of 60,000 attendees, you won’t find a spec of red. In fact, they even needed to apply for special permission to not have red fire extinguishers. Anyhow, I’m starting the bidding war for who I support. And I’m fully aware this is not how it’s supposed to work in English football.
Regional Roundup
There are times when I sit back and think to myself, “Well, Jim, you’ve seen it all.” And then you see bits of regional Alpine weirdness that just makes your jaw drop in discomfort and hilarity. The national hunter’s association of Slovnia’s 2024 Državno prvenstvo v oponašanju jelenjega rukanja 2024 ("national final of stag calling) is one of them. There aren’t many times when I’m at a loss for words, but this is one of them.
Friends of friends have attended for the sole reason which is a running bet who can stay in the room without laughing first.
Sports Corner
As if professional slapfighting as a thing wasn’t good enough, the guy beyond it has a whole slew of other Bullshit Sports:
Tilley is a self-described inventor of “bullshit sports,” as he told me with a laugh, like carjitsu, “jujitsu but inside of a car,” a new sport for which he signed a deal with ESPN; ultimate tire wrestling, “a big stack of tractor tires, and your objective is to stuff the other guy inside the hole,” also ESPN bound; beast ball, “one-on-one football in a shipping-container unit”; sumo boxing, which I couldn’t entirely figure out; and a new one he was developing where two guys get roped together as in the “Beat It” video and have to fight.
Quote
…symmetry, he explains, “is often a signal in the natural world, that of something we should take notice of, because symmetry very often is an indication of an animal.”
The hidden mathematics behind why you find things beautiful - Big Think
Robot Review
The last thing you might want to read, especially from me, is about AI. Well, here we are. You might be wondering why I’m not doing this on the oh, so serious work blog. Well, because maybe there is too much of it everywhere you look without a non-work slant to it.
Whatever you might think of The Church and the Vatican, personally I think the current pope is pretty solid and the first actual Christian in a while, at least they’re thinking in public about our humanity with AI.
Perhaps more importantly, someone Used ChatGPT to Finish the Game of Thrones Book Series and it’s of course already taken down. Then again, whoever was responsible for the email that the solitary dev having a bit of a go at making a point for GRR to hurry the hell up already, was doing us a favour. After all, knowing that it’s generated, how many of us would read it or at least try to just to see what happens and how bad it could be?
Recommendations, random, etc. and more
My dude from way back when James Wheare lives in Scotland, 1/3 of the Awesome Dudes Group I shared a table with about a hundred years ago, I imagine busying himself wearing delightful cable knits and flat caps whilst building interesting things, one of which is seeing marine activity around Fife.
A weekend at the ventriloquist convention
Love Arabic tattoo fails almost more than Chinese ones.
You can waste at least five minutes of your life you will never recover, yet not care about on the UK Data Explorer European word translator.
End
I never wanted this to be a link fest and that’s pretty much what it’s become. Sorry. I tried. So should you.
Ride. Shoot straight. Speak the truth.
- Jim