Hello!

Welcome to another Friday! How has your week been? What’s the thing your most relieved to have got off your to-do list? What’s the thing that has made you go ‘wow’ this week? Ping me a reply and let me know!

I got COVID last week (yes, it’s still around!) and although the cough/cold symptoms were minor, it knocked me out for a week and I’m still only just getting my energy back. It did give me time to finish Andor though. I’m not a massive Star Wars fan, but that series is incredible, and adds a much darker political weight to the original three films’ Saturday-morning-cinema aesthetic . It’s a bit like finding out that Mr Bates vs The Post Office is a prequel to the Postman Pat universe.

Right then - on to the links!

Matt

Talia Rae Schlossberg’s awesome animations (4-min read with videos)

How To Build A Prototyping Culture (5-min read)

Vote For The 2025 Tiny Awards (11 tiny websites)

Who Is Elara Voss? (8-min read)

News Formats That Outperform Articles (7-min read)

What Happens When Your Art Gets Banned (6-min read)

Why Large Language Models Don’t Represent Many Languages (5-min read)

Suprise! It’s A Blind Box World (Data scrollytelling piece)

Can You Work Out What These Tech Billboards Are Advertising? (5 question quiz)

Perfect Sentences (newsletter subscription)

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Talia Rae Schlossberg’s awesome animations (4-min read with videos)
I’m a sucker for hand made collage style graphics and animations, so loved this profile of artist Talia Rae Schlossberg from our friends at It’s Nice That. I love the way she uses illustration to extend archive images - the ball bouncing animation is just superb!

How To Build A Prototyping Culture (5-min read)
I finished my epic series on how to build a prototyping culture for our Attention Matters newsletter this week. It took me longer than I planned to write the series, partly because I was using some of the insights and resources on actual client prototypes whilst I was doing it. So it’s been a really useful exercise to put down a lot of stuff we do in writing. If you found it useful, let me know - I’d love some feedback!

Vote For The 2025 Tiny Awards (11 tiny websites)
Every year friend of Storythings Matt Klein, Kristoffer Tjalve and Matt Muir host the Tiny Awards, a competition for “the small, poetic, creative, handmade web.” This year, some of the entries have real emotional heft as well - Fifty Thousand Names and I Feel So Much Shame in particular.

Who Is Elara Voss? (8-min read)
I loved this deep dive from Max Read’s newsletter into the strange phenomenon of what he calls ‘promptonyms’ - names that seem to emerge from LLMs with uncanny regularity. What is the driver behind these names emerging so often in different contexts? Are they some kind of ghost in the machine? Or are they traces of the texts that were ripped off to train the LLMs in the first place?

News Formats That Outperform Articles (7-min read)
We’ve shared insights from The Audiencers before, and this is another great and really practical article. It’s based on the fact that articles are no longer the main format for users of news apps - people often prefer other formats like polls, explainers, and community threads. Even if you’re not working on a news app, the insights and format descriptions here will help with your content and format strategy.

What Happens When Your Art Gets Banned (6-min read)
We’re in an era when authoritarian regimes are flexing their muscles by banning culture, either directly through their control of instituions, or indirectly through cutting funding. In this article NYT interviewed nine artists to find out what happened when their work got banned. If there’s hope to be taken, it’s in this quote from John Waters: “When people get their books banned today, I always say, “Be glad! It’ll be in the front of the bookstore by the cash register in the banned books section, not in the gay section next to true crime by the bathroom.” The censor boards were my best publicists.”

Why Large Language Models Don’t Represent Many Languages (5-min read)
We’re doing some work for a client at the moment on the cultural limitations of LLMs that are trained on mainly US/Western English content. So we loved this post from AI Strategist Tey Bannerman, looking not just at language, but the wider cultural context behind LLMs - “The challenge? Most companies are focusing on technical integration and completely missing cultural intelligence. We measure response time and cost savings, but never ask, "which human complexities are we overlooking?"

Suprise! It’s A Blind Box World (6-min read)
I thought this was going to be a piece looking at the ethics of ‘blind boxes’ in gaming, an economic innovation that puts young users on the slippery slope to gambling. But it’s actually a nuanced look at the role of surprise in an increasingly homogenised culture, and how you can use surprise to “fight complacency. Take the path of resistance. Climb out of the rut and fall out of step with convention.” Amen to all that!

Can You Work Out What These Tech Billboards Are Advertising? (5 question quiz)
When a friend shared this NYT quiz on Slack, I confidently thought I’d get them all right, even if tech companies are all so similar in their marketing these days. Reader - I got two out of five. Damn.

Perfect Sentences (newsletter subscription)
I can’t believe I’ve missed this for so long - when I shared it in the Storythings’ Slack, Anjali said she’s been a subscriber for ages, and we had Ingrid Burrington as a speaker at our The Story conference years ago. Anyway, being late to the party just means I’ve got loads of archives to enjoy. If you want to get a perfectly curated list of perfect sentences sent to your inbox, sign up now!

So there we go. Some perfect sentences, imaginary LLM characters, and unintelligible tech billboards to take you into the weekend. If you’ve got this far, and you’ve already watched Andor, I can highly recommend Mix Tape on BBC iPlayer (although it’s an Australian co-pro, so probably viewable there. Sorry Yanks, I’m not sure it’s in the US). It’s a lovely cross between One Day and Normal People, with a cracking 80s sound track to boot. Basically, it’s Gen X heaven.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh and the rest of Team Storythings