I’ve changed the email design from dark to light. Mainly because some email providers were stripping the style from my hyperlinks, turning them default blue and making it impossible to read on a dark background.

I think I could have fixed it with some tinkering but that looked like it would take at least an hour, so instead I’ve just changed it to white. We call that a Minimum Viable Product, or, being a lazy fuck.

Content of this week

• I’ve seen this trend of explaining kind of boring but not actually boring things through an AI-generated song. I like it. No I’m not consistent in my views because that AI is trained on stolen IP, but whatever.

• Fun little take on the ‘test how well a person knows another person’ format. I think these only really work when you already know who the hell the people are.

• Always been tempted to do this kind of content. Capital funding tends to make the public bits pretty but the money always seems to run out by the time you get back of house.

• This is literally just a video of a bell being rung. But it’s the biggest working bell in the UK. And it’s in St Paul’s. And the bellringers have to be tapped out like wrestlers when they get tired. And so many simple, fun facts overlaid on footage of a massive fuck-off bell. Love it.

The bullet point bit

• Duolingo’s social media director Zaria Parvez has quit their job, which is now being advertised for $189,600—$342,000 (remember, yOu DoN’t Do It FoR tHe MoNeY). What’s even more fun is that the role requires 7-10 years experience in social media, so Zaria wouldn’t be able to apply for her own job (she’s been doing it for about five).

• Will the AI bubble pop? As Meta pauses AI hiring, some people think so. Other people think it’s got to ‘too big to fail’ stage and even if the industry does tank, AI will still survive but focus on what actually returns money. I don’t know what that is, but it probably won’t be a freely available chat agent or a Clippy-esque pop-up in every copy of MS Word in the world.

• Instagram have changed image dimensions again, so now you can post in 1080×1440. You can still post images in any height between 566 and 1440 pixels if you can’t be arsed to update your templates. I’m pretty sure it hasn’t affected crops of images on profile pages.

• Georgina Brooke has written a very good book called Digital Content in Museums. I’ve read it, and I wish it existed when I was starting out in museums.

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

🎮📖 what I’m consuming as a consumer

I’m pretending I’m 15 again and seeing Bloc Party, this time at Reading Festival instead of a sticky Birmingham Academy. Coincidentally I was also 15 when I went to Reading Festival for the first time, and I definitely didn’t expect to end up spending 12 years and counting of my life living here.

So I’ll be spending the majority of my time pointing and shouting at teenagers that it will happen to them too. Reading is inevitable.

🐕 Keith

Here he is