I had a chat with a couple of friends today about dealing with awful comments on LGBTQ+ posts on social media, and the sad reality that banning comments and hoping it blows over is the primary tactic of most organisations.

If some of the comments we see on social media were said aloud to our staff I think they’d be escorted out the building. It’s a phrase I don’t see around too much any more but museums are not neutral. We don’t treat racism as a ‘We’Re A pUbLiC fOrUm’ issue, and LGBTQ+ discrimination shouldn’t be any different. What prevents that is often when leadership doesn’t make values a bedrock of how an organisation is run.

Anyway that’s a heavy start to my second newsletter. It’s also hot.

Content of this week

I want Milwuakee Public Library to be my friend. They are - to date - the only cultural institution who’ve posted a video of a manga-loving 78 year old flipping the bird, and for that they must be protected and cherished.

But it’s their most recent Wes Anderson-inspired video that caught my attention this week. Libraries often struggle for content and how to communicate what they do, but the same rules apply: entertain first.

You can read me stretch that single point over five paragraphs, like butter scraped over too much bread, on my website:

@milwaukeepubliclibrary

Let the library help with all your genealogical endeavors. Come see a librarian in our Frank P. Zeidler Humanities Room at Central Library... See more

The bullet point bit

• Trump is stalling the TikTok ban yet again in a classic TACO move.

• Instagram are looking at allowing you to rerrange your grid, and even post things to your grid without it showing up in people’s feeds. Personally, I don’t think many people give a flying fuck how synchronised your grid looks but it might be useful.

• If you ever need some YouTube inspiration, Louise from OneFurther has shared a deck of good museum examples. (Hint: get tanks)

• I know a lot of social media/content people who struggle with imposter syndrome and creative paralysis. I was talking to my friend (& MERL marketing manager) Joe Vaughan about it and he shared this video with improv legend Keith Jonstone. The advice is good: say yes, when you fail stay happy, do your best rather than be perfect.

• This is just a very good anti-joke from the Crab Museum.

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

🎮 what I’m playing

I redownloaded Chivalry 2, which is basically Counterstrike except with medieval armies and I love it. The one downside is that I forgot what online chat was like, and in hindsight the alt-right and incel movements were truly incubated in video game chatrooms. I just want to tell them to touch grass.

I’m getting old.

📖 what I’m reading

I’m on Margaret Atwood’s second Oryx & Crake book, The Year of the Flood. It’s about a dystopian future where corporations manipulate genes to keep people sick for profit, grow chicken meat from plants and generally make poor choices. A scientist decides humanity can never escape its genome and will inevitably destroy everything, so he creates a virus that kills everyone while creating a new type of docile human that photosynthesises. This second book is much more about a group of hippies pre-apocalypse and it’s a thumbs up from this twat (me).

🐕 Keith

Here he is