Hey all,

We were very lucky to add the brilliant podcast producer and all-round audio (and wrestling) expert Chris Mitchell to the Storythings team earlier this year. He’s just released Redemption Man, a podcast about a mysterious man who has been seen carrying a large white cross throughout West London for almost 35 years. Then he disappeared. So, who was Redemption Man?

If you love stories about hidden histories and local characters, you’ll love this podcast. And if you want to work with Chris and the Storythings team on a podcast project, hit the button below.

[checks calendar] It’s Friday! It’s nearly the weekend! Here’s 10 interesting and creative links to make you smarter and more gorgeous.

Matt

A Starter Pack for Researching any Topic (lots of resources)

The Art of Scaling Taste (5-min read)

A Father-Daughter Swearing Lesson (6.5-min video)

What’s an Audience-Orientated Business? (4-min read)

Rating AIs Like Fine Wines (new publication)

The Missing History of the Emoji (10-min read)

Incredible Robot Costumes Built From Trash (3-min Video)

What the Internet Was Like in 2004 (4-min read)

Infinite Lego Candy Factory (18-min watch)

Tom Cruise made a 6-hour film school video (sadly, not a 6-hour watch)

How We Got Here: A podcast series for UK Parliament
With a General Election coming, its good to remember that voting isn’t the only way we can get our voices heard. We made this six part series for UK Parliament, telling the stories of historical pioneers who used their voices to change laws and shape the society we live in today.

How we can help you

Storythings is the content marketing agency of choice for some of the world’s most forward-thinking B2B brands and organisations. Here are 2 reasons to get in touch. 

1. “I don’t know what to do” – You’ve been creating content but it’s not having the impact you need. Talk to us about our Content Audit Workshop. 2. “I need something making” – You know what you want to make but need an agency to make it. We can help make your podcast, video, publication, animation and newsletter.We do other things too. Get in touch for a FREE 30 minute consultation. 

A Starter Pack for Researching any Topic (lots of resources)
This is a wonderful resource from friend of Storythings Steve Bryant. It’s full of excellent advice and links to tools you can use to help you begin your research. It includes strategies, workflows and AI tools. Steve is an incredibly smart strategist and consultant who also runs Rental Car Rally - the world’s first, only, and silliest 500-mile, midnight-to-midnight, costumed driving challenge.

The Art of Scaling Taste (5-min read)
I’ve read plenty of profiles of the art/culture pranksters MSCHF, but this one brilliantly frames their work as part of a ‘narrative network’ of projects based around a shared concept of taste: “Everyone bifurcates the world into content and distribution. From the beginning, we viewed those as the same thing. Each object gets better with more participation, and so does MSCHF. Scale is not the goal. Scale is a tool to make the concepts better and more powerful.”

A Father-Daughter Swearing Lesson (6.5-min video)
There comes a time in every parent’s life when they need an answer to the question “Dad. What does f**k mean?” In this comedy short from The New Yorker, Chris Gethard plays a dad struggling to give an age-appropriate explanation of the expletive.

What is an Audience-orientated Business? (4-min read)
This Marketing Week article feels related to the MSCHF article above. It argues that creator-led businesses are introducing a third model for growing a business - instead of being market-orientated or product-orientated, they are audience-orientated.

Rating AIs Like Fine Wines (new publication)
Noah Brier is the most interesting person working in AI and Brands right now, with his excellent Brxnd.ai conference. He’s launching a new publication in autumn 2024 with Tim Hwang called AI Spectator, that will review LLMs and AIs as cultural products based on tastes, like fine wines, food or art: “We aim to be a home for a new kind of AI criticism, one that embraces the subjective and the aesthetic, that treats LLMs as cultural creations to be interpreted and debated rather than just technical objects to be benchmarked.”

The Missing History of the Emoji (10-min read)
I love a bit of deep history into the forgotten corners of tech history. Like this from Matt Sephton, tracing the missing history of the emoji through a collection of early personal digital assistants from the 1990s.

Incredible Robot Costumes Built From Trash (3-min Video)
My daughter is studying costume design, and her designs show how the most surprising and seemingly useless objects can be transformed into awe-inspiring costumes. This great video shows how one man’s hobby took over first his office, then his apartment, then his life.

What the Internet Was Like in 2004 (4-min read)
This is not a nostalgic eulogy for the web we lost, but a clear-eyed reminder that the web as we use it now really started in 2004. There’s a good argument that the 20th century really started in that year. In just five months between January and May 2004, Trump re-launched himself on The Apprentice, Kanye released College Dropout, Musk took over Tesla, and Zuck launched The Facebook. I wonder what happened to those guys?

Infinite Lego Candy Factory (18-min watch)
I love two things about Brick Machines videos - the ASMR rhythmic sound design, and the fact that the builds start simple, get complex, and then go way, way beyond complex to completely amazing. If you’re the kind of person who sorts their candy before eating it (shout out to the WITI slack), then this video is for you.

Tom Cruise made a 6-hour film school video (sadly, not a 6-hour watch)
Ok, so this is a nice enough GQ long read with actor du jour Glen Powell. But what got me was the casually dropped nugget that when he worked with Tom Cruise on Top Gun: Maverick, Cruise invited him, alone, into a private cinema to show him a 6-hour video sharing everything he knows about movie making: “[Cruise] is like: ‘Do we all agree that this is what a camera is? This is the difference between a film camera and a digital camera…’ The funniest part is on flying. It was like he put together this entire flight school. So he would literally go ‘OK, this is what a plane is. Here’s how things fly. Here’s how air pressure works.’” Please, Tom, we’re begging you, release the video!

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Thanks for reading. We’ll see you all next week.

Hugh, Matt, Anjali and the whole team at Storythings.