Being forced to watch West Brom as a teenager turned me off football for life but I do tune in for the World Cup when it gets to the Semis, and despite not caring about football I was way more annoyed than I expected by the Argentina match. I don’t know how football supporters willingly do this to themselves.

Content of this week

• Interpreting your weird little guys as criminal geeblers is something every archaeology collection can learn from.

• Speaking of archaeology, I’ve been suggesting to people for a while that you don’t necessarily always need to do short-form video - a well-written carousel can do the job just as well with half the effort.

• This hasn’t got a ton of Likes, but I’m always on the lookout for how we communicate the more neglected parts of our work (i.e. education). This post about an Art & Photography trip has a really simple invitation: “How we do it, in 18 photos”.

• I absolutely love Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, and this is a really rich profile of its creator Becky Sloan from the Young V&A - showing the power of basically handing the creative reins over to, you know, the creative.

• [narrator voice] it was not, in fact, coming home.

• If you’ve got old fans in your museum then nick this post from Will Jennings.

The bullet point bit

• You might’ve heard about Trump recalling a conversation with the long-dead Teddy Roosevelt, which turned out to be because he chatted with an AI avatar of the hirsute president. This article from the FT (not paywalled, for me at least) asks about the increasing use of this technology in museums amid falling visitor numbers, slashed funding and an archaic offer. Lots of ‘we can’t trust AI slop’ vs ‘visitors don’t give a shit and actually spend more time with the AI avatar than the real painting’ vs ‘AI companies are taking advantage of public trust in museums to make people like AI’.

• I’m going to be in conversation with content creator, broadcaster and writer Alice Loxton at the GEM conference this year, mainly digging into whether social media can be a tool for learning or is it all watered-down fun facts.

• The season launch for music venues doesn’t get a good rap - it takes a lot of work, doesn’t reach new audiences and nobody really innovates. Well, Beki Smith at CBSO decided to experiment by making it feel “less like a press release and more like an album drop”. It was great, made a lot of noise and reached a lot of new people…who then didn’t go on to book any tickets. This article explores what they learned about who a season launch is really for.

• Tim Woodall’s written a very useful article for Cultural Content on how Google search is changing and what we can do about it (a fair bit it turns out).

• If you’re going to read any article this week make it this one from The Atlantic: The End of Reading Is Here. People are reading less and losing basic comprehension and parsing skills, mainly due to the new mode of consumption: bite-size social media. The way the internet is changing our brains isn’t just an issue for how we create content, it’s going to affect gallery interpretation and education too.

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

🎮📖 what I’m consuming as a consumer

I’ve finally finished tiling our bathroom on a diet of Geese, The Chats, QOTSA and The Rest Is History. I basically haven’t done anything else.

🐕 Keith

Here he is