This week has been a tough one at Storythings Towers. Amidst it, it’s been good to spend some time viewing art (the Frieze Art Fair is on in London if you are local to the city), and meeting old friends. This is your reminder to get out and experience life away from the screen as much as you can. The screen will always be there to come back to.

💻 DATA POINT: Two findings from this year’s B2BMX Insights benchmark are worth reading together. 1) AI-powered tools are now the top area for increased B2B marketing budget, cited by 60.4% of respondents and overtaking Account-Based Marketing or ABM, last year’s leader. Most of that AI is going into drafting and scaling content. 2) At the same time, 41.7% now run brand and demand as shared campaigns against shared goals. For us, the second shift matters more. Efficiency frees up time, but the real decision is what you spend that time on. The teams that put it into a consistent, long-term story, rather than simply more output, are the ones whose pipeline will hold up.

The People Holding Up The Internet (Amazing data-oriented story)

Beautiful Gallery Of Lottery Tickets From Japan (Instagram page)

When Slate Went Back To Its 1996 Homepage and Learnt Some Lessons For 2026 (3-min read)

PSA To Anyone (LinkedIn-inspired poetry)

Tiny Little Office (Browser-based website with all you need to run an office)

Magic, Made By Hand: Inside The World-First Exhibition Revealing How Jim Henson’s Puppets Came To Life (17-min read)

Pretend You’re Sitting At Elizabeth Holmes’ Desk (Website with a virtual tour)

What Are Data Centers Doing? A Mind-Boggling Amount Of Math (Data visualisation)

How A Free Puzzle Game Makes Over $100 Million In Ads (1-min watch)

📣 Wendy White Crushes On Fantasy Book Covers (23-min listen/watch) 📣

The People Holding Up The Internet (amazing data-oriented story)
If you’ve ever seen or shared this XKCD cartoon about the infrastructure of the internet, you’ll love this data story about the people looking after the code that is used to run billions of phones, from Androids to iPhones. Ever heard of Paul Eggert, Lasse Collin, Denis Pushkarev, Todd Miller, Mark Adler, Chet Ramey, Behdad Esfahbod or Daniel Stenberg? Well, you should and now you do. You’ll also learn about how some of their work is funded. I will say, women do also maintain or lead widely deployed infrastructure code (I checked), and it would be interesting to see a piece on them!

Beautiful Gallery Of Lottery Tickets From Japan (Instagram page)
Emily from our team shared this with us, and it speaks for itself. Mid-Showa era lottery tickets from Japan, but the art! We all want them at Storythings!

When Slate Went Back To Its 1996 Homepage and Learnt Some Lessons For 2026 (3-min read)
Slate Magazine revived its original 1996 homepage to celebrate its 30th anniversary recently, and they realised they liked a lot of things about the original design besides the nostalgia. This is a short bit of oral history from its editor-in-chief Hillary Frey, and Ivylise Simones, creative director, along with a look at some key design elements. Simones likes “the spareness and simplicity of earlier versions of the site”, also “pointing to Reddit and Discord as places that are “more reminiscent of old homepages than the current, very stylized, very gridded layout” found across the internet.” 

PSA To Anyone (LinkedIn-inspired poetry)
Matt shared this very neat little project: a post by Bluesky user Anne Hjortshøj, who got tired of the ‘logorrhea’ of her LinkedIn feed and wrote a poem based on the first few words of about 20 posts that she came across. As she says ‘it’s dystopian, but so is LinkedIn’.

Tiny Little Office (Browser-based website with all you need to run an office)
You can call this very cool, or ‘crazy genius’ as Matt called it, or just a brilliant creative idea. Paul Ford and Rich Ziade at Aboard built on a browser-based spreadsheet idea that Rich had years ago, and made this browser-based software that enables you to create spreadsheets, documents, presentations, images - whatever you want - without having to open a separate piece of software. Here’s an explanation of why they built it and what they want Tiny Little Office to be.

Magic, Made By Hand: Inside The World-First Exhibition Revealing How Jim Henson’s Puppets Came To Life (17-min read)
If you are a creative of any sort, or you love puppets, or indeed the Muppets, please please read this detailed and inspiring piece about a new exhibition open at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art until April 2027. It’s about the beauty of the hand-built, about the brilliance of Jim Henson, and has some great bits of trivia - did you know that the University of Connecticut has the only puppetry degree programme in the US, partly funded by the Jim Henson and Jane Henson Foundations? Bonus from Aimée at Storythings for any New Yorkers: you can now have a look at what goes on inside Jim Henson’s Creature Shop as they’re doing tours! Here’s a nice Instagram reel showing you a bit of it.

Pretend You’re Sitting At Elizabeth Holmes’ Desk (website with a virtual tour)
Should you not be satisfied with watching Nathan Fielder’s documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, ‘You Can See Everything’ (100% on Rotten Tomatoes!), releasing today, this website has you covered. Engineer Bo Lau has taken the 1000+ ‘emails, slides, texts, and documents unveiled during the United States v. Elizabeth Holmes trial’ and created a site that takes you back to 2016, looking at documents from that time that were used in the trial, and it even lets you run the Theranos Edison machine. BUT: it is also an interesting promotion for a screening of the documentary hosted by Extend, where Lau works!

What Are Data Centers Doing? A Mind-Boggling Amount Of Math (data visualisation)
A very good New York Times data visualisation about the calculations needed to train AI - ‘impossible to visualize, but we tried anyway’, as journalist Aatish Bhatia says!

How A Free Puzzle Game Makes Over $100 Million In Ads (1-min watch)
Darren from Storythings shared this TikTok video about how the mobile game Block Blast psychologically profiles players - very successfully, unfortunately - to make an enormous amount of $$$. My mind is blown.

📣 Wendy White Crushes On Fantasy Book Covers (23-min listen/watch) 📣
In the latest episode of Creative Crush, Hugh Garry talks to Wendy White, till recently Chief Marketing & Partner Officer at B2B tech company Daxko, about what makes her tick creatively: fantasy book covers. Wendy’s favourites include The Ballad of Falling Dragons, The Knight and the Moth and Alchemised. There’s so much to learn about how the cover begins the journey even before you turn a page.

Friend of Storythings, Rachel Coldicutt from Careful Industries worked with Greater Manchester Combined Authority to develop a playbook for the use of AI notetakers in business administration, frontline social care and HR. It’s worth a read.

READ RACHEL’S POST HERE>

Drop us a line if you have anything you’d like us to share in a future edition of this newsletter, or of course if you have any comments or suggestions for us!

Have a great weekend!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh, and the team