So I’m doing a 6-month gig at London Museum as Digital Content Campaign Lead, picking up Helen Maher’s legacy and working with Trish Thomas’s lovely team (of hat fame).

I feel like freelancing has been one long Rocky montage preparing for (temporarily) going back in-house. I definitely used to suffer from a lot of paralysis in past jobs - am I allowed to talk to this person? Should I wait to be told what to do? Am I doing the right thing?

After working with so many places and people I’ve come to the simple truth: just get shit done. Work backwards from what you want to achieve (launch a really cool museum and make people like it), write down how you want to do that with creative people, and then do it.

So this is going to be fun.

Content of this period of time

• “The price of a slave is one Birmingham gun”. The press went apeshit over the National Trust putting up a few labels saying ‘the man who owned this big house made a bit of money from the slave trade’ so I’d love to see how they’d react to museums making videos like this.

• Love kicking Tate when they’re down, but honestly what is happening with these lockers. Including because I truly respect someone going to the effort of making a whole carousel to (rightfully) complain about something.

• The traditional ‘People like seeing something being cleaned’ post.

• Bristol Aquarium is absolutely killing it.

• My favourite thing about the Bayeux Tapestry is the dicks and I’m very glad someone’s made an entire account to talk about them. Also a reminder that people love your account to have a niche, even if this one has a short shelf life.

• James Blunt is a case study of how you can do good at social by: leaning into your personality and weaving your messages into (good) skits.

The bullet point bit

• Ash Mann has made a very snazzy website for his work on hidden digital labour. It’s an illuminating if a little depressing read. You also have to sign up to his newsletter to read it, but that’s an easy trade because his newsletter is very good.

• They’ve used AI to recreate Adobe apps and they’re letting people download them for free. I am a supporter of AI in this specific instance, but the implications for all software is going to be a shitshow.

• Meta are starting to charge people for using more than two links per month, which will kill Facebook’s status as the only channel where people click links. I’ve already seen my local What’s On account despairing about it.

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

🎮📖 what I’m consuming as a consumer

Resident Evil is one of the best horrors I’ve seen in ages. Beautifully shot, a bit of humour (maybe a bit too much though), actually scary, and enough nods to the videogame without putting off normal people (my wife).

🐕 Keith

Here he is