Halfman-Newsletter.049-2024Sept

September

Now on with the show…

As always, there’s your double-trouble cultural and spiritual guide in the form of September’s Top 10

I somehow got asked twice in one week about my skin care regimen. As a public service to you, dear reader, I’ll tell you my skin care secrets:

1. A huge disappointment for humanity in general. This helps to exfoliate better than anything else.
2. Consuming above-average amounts of Greek yogurt
3. Being stuck most evenings in a household of people in the grip of disappointments equal to or greater than my disappointment with humanity in general. This helps make dead skin cells even more dead to the world and get rid of them more thoroughly.

If you’re wondering where the next list in this newsletter would be, look no further because I’ve put together a short, but crucial, list of things you should enjoy doing:

1. Fun facts
2. High performance socks
3. Good cheese

This past month, Flashkit, a forum for a dead technology that I can’t unsubscribe from, sent me my annual happy birthday email, as it has every year for the past quarter century.

Naive Annual 2024 took place this year in Ljubljana. I heard it happened to me through their newsletter of course, not something local of course, because Slovenians hate promoting great things. Anyway, you have to go next year. I’ve sat in on conversations from what can only be described as the saints who keep Net Art alive, like it or not. I met a lot of great people who were largely designers like myself not creating expressive or ‘poetic’ websites. However, this may have been remedied with my own improvised performance art piece entitled “Man-tapping”, based on the iOS tap phone to exchange contacts.

I was told I was a fifth-dimensional torus. I think this might be a compliment.

I spoke to a man who started a cricket app in India with 30 million users. I almost mentioned my newsletter from almost 200 readers, but didn’t want to show it.

My former boss and overall great guy (a boss who skates, yes, that happened) told me, “Kill the copy in head Jim.” I’m still trying to figure out how to do that.

Etc

Hockey stick swinging, northern hordes coming, Molson at the ready

Canada has given us humans many things, covered in maple extract or without. But it is perhaps best known as a place that the majority of people don’t hate, which not many countries can say. I have been fortunate to work with a number of Canadians over the past two jobs, and as always, a happy and fun bunch. There are many things people don’t know about Canada. Like, they have their own jargon that’s different from the US, if you can figure that out. But did you know you can measure up like a Canadian?

As shocking as that may seem, it gets even more treacherous when you hear about the OPEC-like price-setting mafia: Canada’s maple syrup reserve.

If your day wasn’t depressing enough but you wanted a different kind of downer, like one that ran through today’s blisters and scabs, then Complicating Colonialism is for you and you’ll somehow miss Canada.

Definitely not Canada

Iran is a place that has always fascinated me, mainly because of its unconditional ability to be a country and a people in different forms for about a few thousand years longer than anywhere else. But one thing above all has always fascinated me: the ability of the people there to not let an Islamic Revolution break their spirit and take to the dance floor, as evidenced by “The Iranian Female DJs Who Shake the Dance Floor and Break Taboos ” (BBC).

Maybe the internet isn’t quite over yet

Things are terrible, as they often are, but there are glimmers of hope, disguised as big, useless pixels, shapes and words scattered across web pages, as you’ll see the next time you visit Naive Yearly. And just like this idea of ​​the poetic web, there is the idea, without any problem, the thing, the utter beauty that is simply the web-web. That place where you just do stupid things because you can, and suddenly with the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol you can create a page with the things my girlfriend and I have been fighting about.

I have no idea when this page was created, but WEBSITES, DONE CHEAP is now in more ways than one. It’s not so much hustling as it is post-hustling: desperate yet wanting to satisfy the need to self-publish without trying to sell you some bullshit self-help course. He’s a guy at a university who wants to make money and does it in an atmosphere of honesty that most of us can’t even breathe. But the care for the design, the ability to somehow inexplicably falter the type and make it look like total shit clearly took effort. It’s one page. It is a monument in itself, just like Grant’s Tomb and Wallenburg.

Crowdwave similarly harkens back to a time when you just threw stuff on the Internet because you could do it at work at your local ISP and your job was “computing.” It does a strangely compelling and quite pointlessly beautiful job of just being a place for audience voicemails about random things in descending order.

It’s rare that a message can make me cry. It has happened with deaths from within and without across oceans in places I call home. But I never thought it would be from @airplanefactswithmax, whose courage, humor and heart knows no bounds, who wrote in such honest words about personal loss that I hope I can never experience, but can still bring back to why he does, why he does that and immediately made the internet a valuable part of our lives.

On the surface, these personal stories read like strangers shouting into the void, demanding that their lives be heard and acknowledged. I have lived, these reviews say, I have fought and struggled and cried in the face of beauty. I’ve felt pain and I’ve been to Taco Bell and it was only average. Revision is marking your actuality. Not to review is to be lost in time in this strange, crowdsourced account of existence.

The Strangely Beautiful Experience of Google Reviews: A Glimpse of Humanity in an Unlikely Corner of the Internet (Will McCarthy)

Or wait, maybe the internet is a mess and none of us want to admit it

Overall I believe the AI ​​is destroying the internet, but I think it is already happening as this guy illustrates, but maybe it won’t be so drastic. Either that, or I’m completely wrong and we’re doomed. You decide.

More importantly, I can’t help but think that what I’ve been doing for a living for the past twenty years is kind of coming to an end. Sure, Vercel announces that it will let you generate user interfaces as easily as you can generate images for slides you don’t want to create. But then there’s Galileo, you type something and it designs a site. Yes, designing digital products is still hard and actually building them is even harder. But this makes it all seem like an easy, completely thoughtless activity and so enough people will start blowing out interfaces, without thinking much about it, to destroy whatever is left of the design industry I’ve called home for so long called, to waste.

So you and I started typing requests into robots because searching websites is way too hard these days. Sure, you can try to get the robot to make a baklava recipe out of increasingly dangerous materials, which is fun for about a minute, but there’s also finally some kind of fun, dumb stuff people do with the LLMs, namely things like An Adventure , if you want one that’s a text-based adventure game.

“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so I can draw and write, not AI to do my art and writing so I can do my laundry and dishes.” (Joanna Maciejewska)

Do you remember Flash? Remember when every damn site, from the local plumber to the car department, had an animated intro? Remember how long ago you had to have an intro? Because you could. Because you can interact with new media in ways that we only begin to realize decades later.

Where we are with the built environment

Cardboard Cathedrals – Life at the End of the Supply Chain takes us through the idea of ​​our outdated views of the past and the ugliness and disappointment of AI and today, wondering how it is that our greatest achievements are cardboard boxes and ugly products appear to be of towering, sublime cathedrals of the past.

However, this is somewhat wrong, especially if you are a skateboarder, like me and one of my favorite art historians Ted Barrow. This Old Ledge: Wallenberg, as always, explores similar concepts about use, reuse and monuments. A modernist school built on a cemetery becomes an icon for millions of skateboarders around the world. There are artspeak words that I probably don’t remember because I hate them for things like this, but the point is that ugly isn’t just a matter of usage, but of the cultural layers a place or structure may or may not have.

Mustard

But forget all that, because mustard. But it’s not just for summer hot dogs anymore, because as ripper Matt Webb predicts in The mustard second coming, as predicted by the C-wave theory, there will finally come the imiment collapse of hot sauce and the imminent ascension of the historical king of spices. I haven’t thought much about mustard, but now I do, and you should too. From Biblical times until now it has always been there for us. I guarantee the fridge is about 80% empty now. If it was completely empty you would actually regret it. Like reading this newsletter perhaps.

Ends

Like every month I tried, and you will too. Now go out and make a website or something.

Drive, shoot straight, speak the truth.