Halfman @index.www.halfman.com.ap.brid.gy

Top10-June2023 1. Skate Rat Since ’88 – The Kristian Svitak Story - One of the most Cleveland dudes ever features in this documentary biopic replete with smokestacks and blue collar pride. 2. Sweating in places you didn’t know existed but not being bothered because you know what, so is everyone else 3. There are certain things you miss about a place that are tugged out of your subconscious random access like that you couldn’t ever try on purpose to pull the file for out of your brain. Remembering that London basically doesn’t really have mosquitos and how awesome that was is one of those things. 4. “Sirens” (Netflix) - Somehow there are no swords nor a single explosion and not only did I watch the whole thing but did so in one go. Positively riveting. 5. I tried to recreate the Battle of Gettysburg with Mused a bunch of times and it took forever and/or crashed. I don’t care. This thing looks amazing. Simulations, simulations, simulations. Maps and more maps. Use it and then write them and get me a job there. 6. Sure, the harkening back to the awesome days of writing on websites, already complained about that, but there are amazing things still coming out, like Three Dumb Studies for your consideration which is one of those things you read on the internet that makes you want to hang out with the author. This is especially the case because he does utterly inane things like party experiments where people put there hand in an empty bucket or one filled with ice and then compiles the data. For no apparent reason. 7. Cherries in season 8. Thousand Lives harkens back to those early, salad days of the internet when people were experimenting with story and structure and how the internet could change that. Way before all this AI thing. A choose your own adventure story about communist Poland and the choices you make. And the best bit is it only comes once a day. 9. Are LLMs overconfident? (just like humans) Duh. Yeah. 10. Igel vs. Shark - Sure, Rock me Amadeus and that, and sure again Mozart who was actually from Salzburg but lets leave that for a second, was punk as hell, but one never think ripping roots hard rock when you hear the word Vienna, but this band has somehow brought the energy of Electric Frankenstein and early Mans Ruin material out from the grave.

03.07.2025 19:53 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Presione el número dos para una fuente más pequeña It was hot. That baking hot that sears the plains of central Ohio like a fine ribeye on an early August early afternoon. Bob Johnson was sweating a lot but not convinced everyone else in the office was. Dark rings crept out from under his armpits as he seemed to be alone facing the condition. Bob didn’t like his job and he certainly didn’t like his role in what he considered to be race-based typography. “Shouldn’t machines be doing this thing already? Why do we need to?” John Sutton asked. He had been in the Ohio State Typography Regulatory Commission for about a year. His boss Bob was alright he thought. That was it. They didn’t do much, which is why he signed up. A meeting every now and again and you earn some brownie points somewhere. But now they had to do a thing and he wasn’t in the mood. “Budget cuts,” his boss Bob replied not looking up, “Budget cuts. I don’t know. I guess. I don’t know. Just, whatever,” he trailed off mumbling. This was a tactic he often used to try and end conversations he didn’t like. It wasn’t often. John looked across the 6th floor meeting room, grey as grey can be without trying and doing its best to swallow the light and life out of them that Tuesday afternoon. “Okay. Budget cuts, schmudget cuts. So, okay, how are we supposed to decide on the size of the Spanish part?” said John, “Or the new release does it for us? I can’t keep track anymore” Hi boss Bob let out a sigh as loud as a jet engine. There were signs everywhere in Ohio. Many of them had Spanish on them. There had been a decision at some point which nobody had the desire, knowledge or energy to repeal, to regulate how big the Spanish was compared to the English. They kept it and kept on throwing effort and people at it every now and again, trying to make it go away for a little while more. What appeared in Spanish though was always smaller, but sometimes varying degrees of small. It was sometimes the same weight as the English, but always smaller. Entrada. No entre. Etc. It was assumed the Spanish font sizing was based on a proprietary algorithm also assumed to be linked to US Census Data. There was also assumed to be data from various state-wide retail locations security cameras but nobody was quite sure. What was clear was that type size was a huge issue. If the Spanish font size was too small, Spanish speakers might miss it. If the font size is too big, what the Ohio State Typography Regulatory Commission designated as “non-Latino, White, Other, Etc.” would flood the office with calls about their coming annihilation, threats to their livelihood and their love of the English language and something about Shakespeare. There was one thing that was always true, which was Spanish went on the bottom. The point was to be welcoming, but not too welcoming. That was what the brochures John Sutton had put out last year justifying their existence said. They were full colour for once. Bob noticed John log in to EthnoTyper. Bob looked at the wall and hated the name and everything it stood for. John shrugged. The thing was that once you were in the system, you weren’t looking at much. It was all automatic. The Bureau of Motor Vehicles needed a sign and made a request and there they all were. He just clicked okay as he went through the cases as statute mandated that a human had to approve the typographical choices. This went through legislation for about three years. It was all automatic and he had no idea how. Relative to size of population? Relative to desired size of the population? There were rumours that the EthnoTyper was taking figures of chilli imports and then deciding based on that, but then someone reminded someone that lots of other people use chilis. There were also rumours that some sort of surveillance cameras were detecting the number of sombreros worn on city streets. Which someone also reminded someone else was pretty dumb because Spanish speakers mainly wore them only in cartoons. Bob looked at John clicking through and realised what signs were going out to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in Tuscarawas County. His Spanish wasn’t very good, but he knew enough to know that “Please line up here” did not translate to “Straighten yourself out asshole.”

03.07.2025 19:26 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Halfman-Newsletter.057-2025May Why hello there. Just where have you found yourself? Why, it’s the Halfman newsletter where you’ll irrevocably, beautifully and happily lose 8 minutes and 36 seconds of your life. Please join me on another fun-filled installment. I’ll be your host Jim, disgruntled designer, closet hesher and otherwise nice guy who likes pints, mountains, sunsets, filling small notebooks with profusions of ideas that will never happen, not having to have meniscus surgery, all nuts except for hazel nuts which are absolute bullshit, nature documentaries, open protocols, the metric system, Eurovision and people who subscribe to this newsletter. 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. If you’re awesome, you’ll use RSS which people including myself still use but can’t make cool despite being wicked underground and with which I can’t track you. ## May Friends, rest assured, there is a May Top 10 and it is not bad. I managed to scrape two old things out of the bottom of the barrel this month and slop something together: Plumbers Might Have It Safe which you’ve probably read before on another site telling you the same thing and Learning the NATO alphabet which didn’t really happen. That doesn’t matter though because cool things happened this month somehow in between the listlessness. For one I went to free conference in Venice Archipelago of Futures where I felt for a couple of minutes like I deserved to go to the Royal College of Art. Despite being one of two people in the room who even understood the straightedge thing, this still didn't really explain anythingThere is a formula for entropy of Italian and French citiesIt's just not the Pisans who can't build a straight tower I also went to a live coding event. This was the most random thing I’ve ever seen. If you’re not familiar, live coding is pretty much what it says on the tin, some person is programming live in front of you, and making music that way. Basically you see a guy on stage, edit text, live. It was really, really cool actually. Sure free beer and snacks is a fantastic start, but seeing a piece of music put together and tweaked line by line, variable by variable, was despite sounding incredibly shit as a spectator event, was really interesting to watch. More importantly I got a story/book/whatever out… ## Cold Forest: The Troll Cold Forest: The Troll (v1) is out now. I’m not even sure if it is finished, but it is out there. People, like actual real life people that I’ve actually met in person and live in real places, say it’s funny. I was going to hire synthetic people to read it to tell me how great it is, but I’m not there quite yet. Using the Iron Swan platform you dutifully read about me making last month, I made or am still making, I have no idea, another web-book. Cold Forest is the story of a band. They are a black metal band. Black metal is a sub-genre of heavy metal known for being especially nihilistic, scary and about the supernatural. These guys however, are really bad at being scary and unwittingly summon a troll who is instead of being evil is incredibly annoying. > While the most famous of the scene had murder, blood and excitement, Cold Forest had okay jobs they just sort of stumbled into, sinus problems and body image issues. They also had what was shaping up to be an extremely mediocre name that the singer refused to part with. Everyone else, except bass player Maniacal who came up with it, thought it wasn’t actually that scary at all. Doom was beginning to be convinced that the name was failing like everything else. ## Things you can’t do in Slovenia: Be exposed to a draft If I had time and energy and weren’t staring down the Reaper coming for me yonder just on the horizon, I would make a cool map of where a draft is evil. I think it starts roughly in Bavaria or southern Germany somewhere and extends for sure through Turkey. And by draft I mean wind that comes in through somewhere to inside. If you live in a place in this zone, wind will kill you. You will also wear slippers in this zone. Where I live in Slovenia, they only recently started opening car windows whilst driving and even barely so. The wind will kill you. If you’re inside and you can feel the movement of air, you will get pneumonia in roughly half a minute and be dead by the time I finish typing this. Kids have to cover their ears at all times outside, because I think the devil gets to them through their ear canals on the currents of wind I can’t even feel. If you ever come here, be wary, draft is evil and it will subsume you and drag you in it’s clutches to eternal pain and suffering. But then it weirdly sort of stops being a thing just next door in Italy. ## Poisoning the machines Recently I listened to a podcast as to How to Poison the AI Machine which went on to highlight University of Chicago professor Ben Zhao’s SAND Lab’s efforts to build what I would term “defensive applications.” That is, apps that stop AI in various ways harvesting or benefitting from your data, identity and soulforce they would otherwise suck out of you if given half the chance. The article The Great AI Art Heist does a pretty good job of explaining more. I’ve been thinking about this stuff forever, so I finally tried out Glaze with the phasers set to “protected-intensity-LOW-render-low-V2” and you get this thing: If you want to see more or need a paragraph to read along with this “illustration,” well, you can hop on over to this page which may or may not help you in understanding anything. There were visions of finally doing it to the man. The wind was blowing with memories dank, dark and fresh from being young and running from cops, skateboard in hand. This was supposed to be that. Finger, either one or two depending which side of the pond, flung in the face of the behemoths as I hopped on a motorcycle and sped off into the distance. Instead it felt sad like using a Java app in 2003 and I had to wait 8 minutes and still kept on getting that weird patterning in the background. Anyhow, I tried. The machine might have been poisoned, that is if they were looking to consume images with blackbirds, cartoon human heels, fake sacred geometry, cartoon apples and nonsensical though bubbles. Anywho, SAND Labs also made Jammer which can jam microphones from smartphones, etc. Its awkward and huge and likely quite heavy, but it does a thing. It defends. I wished I could say we’ll see a lot more of this stuff, privacy for fun and profit, but things are still swinging for the bleachers way the other way. ## Obligatory Quote about AI by someone way smarter and eloquent than me > Maybe that’s my problem with AI-generated prose: it doesn’t mean anything because it didn’t cost the computer anything. When a human produces words, it signifies something. When a computer produces words, it only signifies the content of its training corpus and the tuning of its parameters. It has no context—or, really, it has infinite context, because the context for its outputs is every word ever written. Experimental History “28 slightly rude notes on writing” ## Design Entrepreneurship Dead on Arrival Finally, I found out the name of this thing. This history of the Monobloc chair explains firstly that these things even have names. Most parts of the world, and I’ve seen it on at least three continents, you just think it’s called a plastic chair. But no, you’re about as mistaken as can be, it has a whole history. If there is one thing I can do in this short life is take a joke way too far. One summer I had a whole plan how I was going to sell these things in rural, seaside Turkey where they were like ants, breeding in the corners and sprouting up out of every crevice. ## Malört “Have you ever heard of Malort he asked? It’s this disgusting thing they drink in Chicago. They’ve also basically reinvented advertising around it,” he said. I was intrigued. I also couldn’t believe I never heard of this stuff. He wasn’t lying. The advertising geniuses behind Jeppson’s Malort have taken tag line writing to stratospheric levels that you and I could never equal. * Malort, kick your mouth in the balls! * Malort, these pants aren’t going to shit themselves. * Malort, when you need to unfriend someone IN PERSON. * Malort, tonight’s the night you fight your dad. * Malort, the Champagne of pain. * Drink Malort, it’s easier than telling people you have nothing to live for. As a Midwesterner I laud and hail you o Chicagoans, you’ve made the malaise of the post-industrial Great Lakes not only palpable, but in liquid, consumable format. ## Etc. A Modest Proposal for Life After Death Guess that scathing review did some damage and Mozilla cancelled Pocket out of nowhere. It had to have happened, and sure enough it did and this is probably only one of many iterations of the much maligned Clippy yet running on AI so maybe being useful. More repos! I love programming challenges like this self-contained game that fits inside a QR code inspired by DOOM 1993 and The Backrooms if not for the oneupmanship, than the sheer inanity of things like this. Who doesn’t love a cute bird like the Yellow Warbler? Just be aware, they get road rage. More importantly, and I know you have been wondering htis as much as I have lately, but with this whole birds and dinosaurs things, why haven’t birds gotten as big as dinosaurs anyhow? As alluded to in the Top 10, it seems the notion of the sellout, contrary to being fixed and a matter of virtue as I had assumed, is generational, and now these crazy kids are making an art of selling out as much as possible. Famous anti-piracy campaign may have used pirated typeface. Enough said. Balkan Summer I love youSaw this on a walk in the woods, no idea but looks awesome and way too colourful for this part of the world ## Ends This month sucked. Hope it didn’t for you. But we all have to give it a go and this is an example of it. Ride. Shoot straight. Speak the truth. - Jim

01.06.2025 09:43 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Top10-2025May 1. I have a Github repo with two stars - If you are reading this and you are a programmer, this is very sad. If you are me, this is amazing. I made a very mediocre thing that actually does a thing that I couldn’t find and then told the tumultuous and heartbreakingly humorous tale of trying to navigate the world of AI development and being a designer through README and ohlin and clausjuhl, bless them, starred. These two heroes, giants among the living saw through the miasma of tech bullshit and read the tender tale of a dude trying to make books for the internet and also quite possibly could be awesome rockers. 2. Arthroscopic surgery - In a couple of weeks some guy in a clinic will insert a tiny camera and instrument of sorts into my knee and sort of the torn meniscus somehow. This will instantly, or rather after the recommended six weeks of recovery, make me have the body of a fearless 20 year old and I’ll turn pro as a skateboarder finally. 3. Cinnamon rolls 4. David Foster Wallis “A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again” - I’ve heard and read about this guy forever, but assumed in my aged, Cleveland mind that because most literary types laud this guy, he must be painful to read and of course a total sellout. I have no problem publicly admitting my small mindedness, and this is no exception. I can’t possibly even imagine how someone can write about the weather and geography of central Illinois in such captivating prose that as every sentence drips off the page you go and lick the edge to get it back. 5. Deadguy - The post-hardcore/metal/graphic design dreadnought that is Deadguy is back 6. Carts of Darkness - It’s a documentary about the homeless bombing the hills of Vancouver with stolen shopping carts by a former snowboarder in a wheelchair. It is good. It is made in a very 90’s honesty which take apart people’s and systems lives somehow. 7. Your kid making pancakes 8. TV 9. That first coffee in the morning - There might be a second, but it won’t be nearly as good or sumptuous as the first. That’s for damn sure. The first coffee is there for you in the haze, a lighthouse in the distance pulling you from the terrors of the night and into what could be one of two things that awaits you in the day to come: generally sort of okay-ish, or not great great-ish. But there is a chance as you sip, deep in its embrace, that you will start a day that is not total shit. There is a chance that as you artificially stimulate your brain into stasis that you have a shot at normalcy and rest. That for a couple of fleeting minutes, you can sit betwixt the world of sleep and possibility and watch the sky. 10. Long walks in the morning

01.06.2025 08:17 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

PlumbersMightHaveItSafe It’s come up a weird amount of times in conversations. Plumbers. Someone you don’t really think a whole lot about unless you’re trying to finish a house to make it liveable like I unfortunately am, or if you’re in a bad spot with an existing house. Trades now are a funny thing that come up in tech circles, because this is looking like a way safer place to have a job than whatever it is we’re doing with all this software and typing and that. I even heard this in a talk where the speaker said yeah, you should be telling your kids to be plumbers because look I’ve just eliminated junior developers wholesale with this multiple coding agent comborama thingamabob I whipped up. Plumbers might have it kind of safe for a while. Tilers too. The architecture of our lives, and specifically of our houses, will not likely change all that much for a couple of decades. There will still be pipes all over in the floors and walls and there will not be the infrastructure too easily, meaning mechanically or automatically, install it or change it without humans. So far. Anyone working with words and images, is, well, sort of fucked. Words and images can and already are being solved as engineering problems. The ultimate irony though is that engineers have also, unwittingly or not, engineered themselves out of the equation as well. Well at least they have a white van in their future as well.

29.05.2025 16:25 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Learning the NATO alphabet “Lima, Oscar, November, Delta, Oscar, November. You know, the capital of England and the UK,” said my flatmate at the time from the next room. He was on the phone with a bank, a phone company, Parliament, it doesn’t matter. You have to know the alphabet. Alphabets are something you never think about, unless of course you are illiterate or are three years old. When I moved to the UK I had to learn a new alphabet, a spoken one, that you only ever heard in films with lots of explosions and camouflage. That’s right, the NATO alphabet. In at least two flats I lived in in London, I had a printout of the NATO alphabet taped to the wall in front of the excuse for a desk in my little hovel. This is because in the UK, at least at the time, you had to know it, and it was assumed you knew it. I thought this was cool because it’s like secret code that you would only otherwise learn as someone from the US when you were doing missions or hanging out with SEAL teams. But if you get on the phone in the UK and if you need to fix anything, you’re calling somewhere where they talk a lot different than you do. And this alphabet is the only way to get by. But that isn’t the best bit, which is the pub challenge which is when you challenge other fellow drinkers to spell things.

29.05.2025 16:02 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Iron Swan I actually made a thing. Well, I argued with three different Large Language Models to try and make a thing for another thing. Friends, I present to you, the bestest Markdown-based, web book platform this week, or maybe ever: Iron Swan. So let’s say you want to write a book and put it on the Internet, and you don’t want to put it on Wattpad or some other app thing and you sure as hell aren’t going to spin up Ruby and configure a server thing so you can run Writebook. And what if you were so inspired by the number one siege comedy of 2017 The Gates of Vienna that you just had to make your own? If you’re like me and like to make internet books for no one in particular and are working on a comedy about a black metal band who inadvertently summon a troll, and just so happen to be a designer in software, and are inundated with all this hype about AI, you go and make your own way to make internet books. You can get it and learn more at the Github repo. You can also read the sordid development history. You might think that with an amazing graphic like the above (requirement for v1) it would be enough, but I spent hours and hours arguing with robots so you don’t have to and made a thing you should be able to download/fork/copy, chuck some Markdown files, tweak the names of some stuff and should just work and you go put it on the Internet somewhere. Because I’m a designer, I’m clearly also into making my life harder than it needs to be due to a combination of DIY subculture youth, overthinking, perfectionism and way too many years of art-school over-education. So I need to do things myself. Like you, I saw all the videos of all the bros making their cool AI things at the press of a button and thought to myself, well, you can guess. I hate calling it “vibe coding,” not just because it is an utter shit name, but in reality should be prompt coding but it’s probably too late. Anyhow, easily the best part is getting to make the cover or whatever you want to call it where I used AI to help with the swan mesh and the space background. Names I was originally considering: * Steel Dominion * Celestial Warlord But obviously its named after The Sword’s opus “Iron Swan” off of their 2006 debut studio album “Age of Winters.” Now imagine the acoustic, dare I say troubador-esque intro, lulling you into a place where you can’t handle the pummeling riff that melts your face off seconds later. Its going to totally be like that.

07.05.2025 15:00 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Halfman-Newsletter.056-2025Apr Hello friends, welcome to the Halfman newsletter. This is safe space of wonder, perfunctory philosophy and a lot of random reckons. This is a blog/newsletter/whatever in broad strokes about life and our collective stumbling through it as a species. If you’re looking for some serious design work and thinking, you should probably go to jimkosem.com . If you’re in need of any product and service design or strategy, I’m your guy. Any job consideration, moral support, jokes or random chats are greatly appreciated and will earn you a place in heaven. You can subscribe here for free, and unsubscribe there which cause irreparable damage to something, like democracy or the welfare of these kittens I have here on my desk for instance. This somehow now federated and works on the open social web and can be followed on @index@www.halfman.com and if you want on Bluesky here. Yay internet. ## April Here are some things you need to read immediately. Drop whatever you’re doing. Seriously, whatever it is, CPR, discovering that cure for cancer. Doesn’t matter. They are not long. It till take minutes, and probably save more lives. This month’s Top10-Apr2025 will change things forever. Imagine a top 10 list that stabilises the world economy instantly. It’s that. Finally got back writing some fiction and the Story Explosion with The Hot Dentist which is sort of okay. Will AI just look budget? Maybe. Hopefully? I managed to end up in another place that brought such terrible, deeply inexplicable anger frothing forth from every orifice. Yes, it’s true, I have an unrequited hatred for caricatures on walls in restaurants. ## Search history * How exactly are birds dinosaurs again? * Building a music aggregator app * Origin of the word “bre” in serbian and the greek “vre” ## Iron Swan I actually made a thing. Well, I argued with three different Large Language Models to try and make a thing for another thing. Friends, I present to you, the bestest Markdown-based, web book platform this week, or maybe ever: Iron Swan. So let’s say you want to write a book and put it on the Internet, and you don’t want to put it on Wattpad or some other app thing and you sure as hell aren’t going to spin up Ruby and configure a server thing so you can run Writebook. And what if you were so inspired by the number one siege comedy of 2017 The Gates of Vienna that you just had to make your own? If you’re like me and like to make internet books for no one in particular and are working on a comedy about a black metal band who inadvertently summon a troll, and just so happen to be a designer in software, and are inundated with all this hype about AI, you go and make your own way to make internet books. You can get it and learn more at the Github repo. You might think that with an amazing graphic like the above (requirement for v1) it would be enough, but I spent hours and hours arguing with robots so you don’t have to and made a thing you should be able to download/fork/copy, chuck some Markdown files, tweak the names of some stuff and should just work and you go put it on the Internet somewhere. Because I’m a designer, I’m clearly also into making my life harder than it needs to be due to a combination of DIY subculture youth, overthinking, perfectionism and way too many years of art-school over-education. So I need to do things myself. Like you, I saw all the videos of all the bros making their cool AI things at the press of a button and thought to myself, well, you can guess. I hate calling it “vibe coding,” not just because it is an utter shit name, but in reality should be prompt coding but it’s probably too late. Anyhow, easily the best part is getting to make the cover or whatever you want to call it where I used AI to help with the swan mesh and the space background. Names I was originally considering: * Steel Dominion * Celestial Warlord But obviously its named after The Sword’s opus “Iron Swan” off of their 2006 debut studio album “Age of Winters.” Now imagine the acoustic, dare I say troubador-esque intro, lulling you into a place where you can’t handle the pummelling riff that melts your face off seconds later. Its going to totally be like that. ## Things not to do in Slovenia: Never ask how you are doing Don’t do it. Just don’t. This isn’t Milwaukee. This isn’t Bristol or wherever. This is central Europe and not only does nobody care, but they will answer the question with something just about all Brits and Americans can’t handle which is brutal honesty. In the US or UK you would get some gloss-over bullshit like “fine” or “busy.” Here you will get, “Oh you know my son, he has such problems,” or “I don’t know, not great, my mother has cancer, so it’s hard,” or “Well, not good, my wife left me and just realised that Schoppenhauer was right that there is largely no point to anything.” People will tell you how they are actually doing, which you don’t actually want to know. I’m here to give the low down on how you can avoid the trials and tribulations of not being from here. I qualify as a half-insider or half being from here or half something like the name of this newsletter, so take it from me. You’re welcome. ## I knew I couldn’t have thought of this myself > Any business related to optimisation is a race to the bottom. I thought of that myself, so went looking. "Dear AI who else said that so I know I’m not that original? (Claude) _This quote, “Any business related to optimisation is a race to the bottom,” is often attributed to Thorsten Heins, the former CEO of BlackBerry (formerly Research In Motion)._ ## Blendering Amongst the big-wow videos clogging your screens these days, there are now loads and loads of MCP demos. The biggest wow of these is of course the Blender-MCP, which lets you do 3d wizardry through the magic of asking the robot to do it for you. This is frigging fantastic as you can see by me being able to have the robot put the “ornate war hammer” in “dramatic lighting” with “fire.” Granted, fire, as always, AI never wants to make cool, if at all for me, but that’s a different issue. MCPs are good for doing complicated things you don’t want to learn or can never remember, especially in this case. It does settings but exactly what we need really because there is no way to know all of this. However, Blender MCP does not do modelling, and modelling is the main thing of 3d. Affinity MCP? Why not? The thing that is cool about MCPs is the level of abstraction and the ability to be out of the app and not tied to whatever they’re chucking into it, like you they’re doing with Figma for instance. ## Shook Ever since I heard Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones, Pt II” for the first time I can’t forget it. It’s a beat you can not un-hear. Like a DJ or something, I’ve been digging and digging for background on the song, how it came to be, what the effect of the East Coast 90’s AKA the best hip hop ever and Queensbridge and all that had. Where did that sound come from, etc. Fortunately there is not just a Song Exploder episode about it, but also in the Netflix series Rapture, Just Blaze breaks it down (14:59). ## Lingua before the Franca Many people think that I’m good at languages. Maybe a smidgen above average on a good day, but I am more interested in languages than good at them. This most likely has something to do with growing up in a bilingual household where I could hold a conversation with my mom and each of us would be speaking a different language at the same time which would do people’s heads in. Funnily enough this is how my own family’s lives work. Anyhow, there is of course sabir which was the original lingua franca, but apparently there were others. > The new era also saw the emergence of a Turco-Persianate Islamic ‘high culture’ as Persian became the lingua franca of Turkic dynasties across the vast expanse that Shahab Ahmed termed the ‘Balkans-to-Bengal complex’, equivalent to the use of French in early modern Europe. The use of Persian as a lingua franca would not be superseded by any other language until English became the global lingua franca in the 19th century. ## The Pigeonhole Principle > It’s easy to sum up in one short sentence: If six pigeons nestle into five pigeonholes, at least two of them must share a hole. That’s it — that’s the whole thing. How a Problem About Pigeons Powers Complexity Theory ## Truth > Or, as my friend Alison Fensterstock, who lives down the road, texted me: “‘You’re so resilient’ is just code for ‘You’re on your own, sorry.’” ## Links, etc. This deodorant is based on The Iliad. Americans are likely to have favorable views of castles and chivalry, but not the Crusades or the Inquisition ## Ends I tried, so should you. Ride. Shoot straight. Speak the truth.

01.05.2025 09:29 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Will AI just look budget I watch a lot of documentaries. So much so that the various advert themes of BBC Earth and the Nature Channel are my bedtime lullabies. Many are history documentaries. In times past, I did consulting work with everyone from universities to the Council of Europe on how to bring design and technology to history education. This turned into knowing a weirdly large amount of archeologists. All because I have always been fascinated with historical recreations. What did it look like? What was life like then? All that. History documentaries don’t have the hugest budgets in the world. They recreate a Viking assault with 12 people, a lot of closeups and if they’re really feeling saucy, some off the shelf visual effects. Knowing people at the cutting edge of this new AI filmmaking thing and what they’re working on, I was thinking: Well here’s how history documentaries can do anything they want now for half the price. Well sort of, not really, but that’s a different article. But if the low budget documentaries become overrun with AI generated footage, will AI generated footage then become the budget look? A perhaps better question is has it already?

01.05.2025 07:55 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The Hot Dentist He’d had roughly three semi-major dental procedures including a root canal or two he could have gone without and was ready to destroy his dental health to see her. He wasn’t scared at all for the root canal, because she was kind and she would be staring down into his mouth intently but with deep care, ripping a tiny bundle of nerves going from up his jaw through the hole she would drill through his tooth. He would be staring right into her eyes and it would not really be considered creepy at all probably. She was very attractive, which he though defied the way the world was supposed to be. Dentists were not supposed to do that. She was slightly, but not overly, short which meant something to him. He wasn’t sure what, but it was there, lingering, implanted in his skull since high school really. He reasoned this was good for a cuddle without much prodding. He was convinced. He would do what it takes. He already went to her quarterly which he realised was pushing it. Most people went once a year and he had an inkling it might seem suspicious. He was thinking of every other month, but for now, sticking to the seasons made some sort of sense. He didn’t like sweets even. Not that much since he was a kid. But to self inflict cavities seemed about as wrong as possible. It went against every childhood dental hygiene prime directive. It seemed like the only way. It started small, a bag of Oreos, the big Snickers after work every day. But then he just felt bloated all the time and anxious about gaining weight. Then realising that aside from just not brushing his teeth if he mixed half a cup of sugar with half a cup of water and held it in his mouth without swallowing, he wouldn’t actually ingest the huge calorie doses. He decided to make the trek to the dentist’s to make another appointment. “Hi, I would like to make an appointment with ” “You mean the cleaner?” “What are you talking about? She’s not the dentist?” “No, I’m just messing with you. I actually have no idea who this person is and think we have to call the police or something.”

01.05.2025 07:50 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Top10-Apr2025 1. “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3” (Netflix) - I’ve always had a strained relationship with postmodernism. Having been through the academic wringer of not just recursive what-if thinking and endless relativism, I’m not sure where I stand in terms of the whole everything is chaos and maybe nothing means anything (annoying, potentially obvious and exhausting) vs things can be controlled and ordered (desirable, potentially childish and altogether also exhausting). This is something that is quite possibly a non-binary choice between the Boolean of our ages. If you’re familiar with the premise of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” fine, but it’s clearly arbitrary, as are the characters and what could or should pass as a script if you can call it that. I keep on watching this and then I’ll stop. And then again weeks later. Can it be that bad on accident? Can something that is clearly setup to be funny just fizzle out in a very non-funny way that horribly? Does anything mean anything in our universe? Are we past meaning or was this made so fast and so bad that it can’t even contain itself? I wholeheartedly recommend this film not just because on the surface it requires zero brain synapses. It in fact requires loads to understand just what anything in our reality really is. 2. Blender - It’s free. Somehow. It can do amazing 3d stuff. It is now about a million times easier to learn than it used to be as they finally after a decade when they redid the UI. I can pick it up about every four months or so and render a thing without a license, all open source. The community reminds me of a proper dedicated underground scene. Blender, you are just another notch in the bedpost of The Netherlands bed of historical achievement. 3. Ghost on the fediverse - So the thing that makes this blog and newsletter is part of this federated wonderland where you own your data and can have it lots of other apps and communities and whatever magically whilst you still control it. 4. “Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds” (Werner Herzog) 5. Affinity - So all of them really. I got the whole damn suite and so should you. Been using it in anger and have to say warms my cockles this even exists as one time actually buy it software sort of thing all from a bunch of people in Nottingham owned by some Viennese thing. 6. Bitter Branches “This May Hurt a Bit” EP - Members of Calvary, Deadguy, Lifetime, Lighten Up, Kiss It Goodbye, No Escape, Paint It Black and Walleye rip it apart with a melodic plodding that would make the Jesus Lizard proud. 7. The Ganges with Sue Perkins - Croydon’s own takes on a goddess and a river at the same time in the usual aplomb and snark 8. Weed whackers - Apparently known as a “strimmer” or something to that extent in the UK. I have a lawn now in a house I can’t live in. Long story. I grew up hating lawns because I had to mow them with a push mower. I’m over the bit how my parents got a riding mower as soon as I moved out. Or maybe not. Either way, grass is abominable. It is the worlds largest crop and yet is inedible and requires tons of work. You do the fucking math on that one. But there is a machine, a mechanise scythe really which allow you to decimate it. Take that lawn. And fuck off while you’re at it. 9. Studio Famous - Tim Singer’s (Deadguy, No Escape, Kiss It Goodbye) graphic design work reminds me of that beautiful time of late 90’s early 2000’s hardcore when music packaging (remember that) was almost as involving and hard hitting as the music. 10. Obsidian Copilot - It’s not bad, mainly free and with Ollama generally does the job really. You got your little chat thing on the side and it’s just about, but not quite Claude. Of course, generally model dependent, but hey, no subscription, etc.

30.04.2025 14:49 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

test test

04.04.2025 07:22 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

hello_world

04.04.2025 07:21 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Latest posts by index.www.halfman.com.ap.brid.gy on Bluesky