2005: the internet is amazing! This will transform our culture! 2025: Michael Bay is making a Skibidi Toilet movie.
Seriously proud of my year two journalism undergrads. They’ve shown both a real commitment to core journalism skills, but also finding new and relevant ways of expressing it for younger generations.
Some talent coming through there…
It almost makes marking painless. Almost.
The fact of the matter is that a lot of people want to say whatever stupid thing pops into their head or share the latest bullshit they saw on Facebook or Instagram without any challenge. Science doesn’t work that way.
Down at the Tooting campus to do some social media training.
This is a weird feeling. It’s where my wife did her postdoc…
Just spent 30 minutes in the garden with a coffee and a book, as a lunchbreak.
It doesn’t sound much, but in 13 years of self-employment, It’s been a rarity. But I’m focussing on doing it more.
Why do people still wish their friends Happy Birthday on Facebook, when the friend in question clearly haven’t used the site in nearly a decade?
Some traditional bothiers feel their world, the sacrosanct inner circle, is under threat in an age of Instagram posts and online blogs.
— From Bothy: In Search of Simple Shelter by Kat Hill 📚
The phrase “online blogs” irritates me beyond all measure. It has no place in a book published in 2024. It’s a redundancy - how many offline blogs are there? - that is surely unnecessary decades into the existence of the form.
Started reading: Fringed With Mud and Pearls by Ian Crofton 📚
One idea that I’ve been playing around with in my head is that we’re living in what I call “a fragile now”. So many of our old assumptions about the world and its direction of travel have been overturned in the last decade.
And we may be ill-equipped to truly realise it.
Y’know, it’s getting ever clearer that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t actually know what he’s doing – and when the Meta money machine starts to dry up, that will finally become apparent to everyone.
It’s breathtaking to me, how casually leadership speaks of employees being jailed. As if it’s a fact of life like taxes (though of course that’s something they try to avoid). Everyone starts calling this a “mitigation strategy”— even though the mitigation in this case is to find a “body” to be arrested.
— Careless People: A story of where I used to work by Sarah Wynn-Williams 📚
Friday night link-dump, so so I can finally escape my desk:
(Hmm. “Pre-digested” sounds worse in this context than I expected…)
After announcing a 15 percent reduction in staff last year, GoPro is continuing its cost-cutting measures into 2025 as CEO Nicholas Woodman voluntarily declined his salary for the remainder of the calendar year.
I do like my GoPros. I’d hate to see this company fail.
Apparently I have the cultural sophistication of a 9 year old, as my youngest daughter and I have just nearly wet ourselves laughing at A Minecraft Movie.
It’s a terrible movie, but it’s gloriously terrible.
🍿