I had a nice time this week lifting the cultural rock of Reading and discovering all of the little arts and culture bugs scurrying around beneath at the What’s On Reading awards.

As someone from the Black Country, I hate it when people dismiss a place out-of-hand because they think it's a cultural desert - whether it's Luton, Dudley, Carlisle or, yes, Reading.

Go to any corner of this country and you will find people creating art, dancing, writing and celebrating their corner - often without enough recognition or reward. Our awards are put on by two council employees who aren’t paid any extra to do it, and it feels like the world runs on people like that.

Content of this week

These are pretty much all Instagram because I haven’t had time to look at anything else 🙃

• If you’re depressed then the Charles Dickens Museum has the cure.

• Coffee shops are weirdly good at social content (maybe because half of arts graduates have to become baristas), and I think we can all relate to this.

• hahaha

• The MERL have made little costumes for their little rats and it’s very cute.

• Another classic camera roll bit (Historian edition).

• This Maxim Gun has been in use since 1886 and was last used in Ukraine to shoot down a literal cruise missile. I’m including it because it’s also a fun way (format-wise, not celebrating war) to do an object biography.

The bullet point bit

• The New York Times homepage is 49MB, bigger than the original disk size for Windows 95. The FixMyStreet front page is 0.45MB.

• Also web-related, National Rail recently included a pre-checked box that automatically opens a Booking.com webpage for hotels at your destination. I don’t know about you, but I consider NR to be a service that exists to tell me when trains leave and what they cost, not to give me unsolicited ads. Don’t give your users something they didn’t ask for. I even sent them an email complaint.

• Pleasantly surprised that Meta and YouTube were found liable in their social media addiction trial. Expect them to tighten age restrictions, hastening the trend already started by various governments banning social media for under-16s.

• I’ve been enjoying David Reece’s posts on LinkedIn recently. I always hear people want insights and I never know what that means, but when I read David’s stuff I think ‘oh, that’s an insight’. This is one on how important it is to make your venue a place that’s nice to visit and a day out, not just a collection on display.

• Callum Walker reflects on his social media growth for Buckinghamshire Archives. Not enough archives realise their potential for content but you usually need a Callum to do it.

Personal stuff I do for me and you can just skip this if you like

🎮📖 what I’m consuming as a consumer

I caved in the Steam Spring Sale and bought Dispatch, a narrative-driven game where you play a person working in an office dispatching a team of villains-turned-superheros to fight crime and save cats up trees. That makes it sound shit, but the journey is one of the best stories I’ve played in a long time.

I’ve also started reading Demon Copperhead, and while usually I get a bit bored of ‘person just talking about their life’ books this one is Good. I don’t have enough of a head for literary criticism to say anything more than that.

🐕 Keith

Here he is, king of the chair