Antonym: The Scuttlebutt edition
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Dear Reader
Word of the week:
Scuttlebutt.
An American might be more familiar with this term, meaning water-cooler gossip, or just gossip. It’s one of the vast number of words and phrases in modern English related to pre-industrial ships – learn the ropes”, “room to swing a cat”, “pipe down”, “over a barrel”, “long shot”. “true colours”, etc etc.
I came across it while reading The Terror. a novel based on the tragic, true story of an Arctic expedition by the Royal Navy, in which the crew of two large ships perished in extreme conditions, which then throws in an added fictional peril: they are also being hunted by a giant supernatural polar-bear like beast.
Which leads us to my first question, this week…
Why can’t I stop reading The Terror?
Respected neuroscientist, Chantel Prat has pointed out that our idea of thought and stories can shape the way we perceive the world - a notion supported by current scientific understanding. So why, after three years of pandemic craziness, and challenges personal, familial and commercial am I reading – for pleasure – something that amounts to a trauma triathalon?
According to Dr Prat’s in The Neuroscience of You, our various instincts and thought patterns help us play a game called “What the Brain Wants the Brain Gets”. dopamine hits and neurons binding together we learn what things are more likely to bring good feelings and avoid that that don’t, and act accordingly.
I'm now three quarters of the way through the 900-odd pages of The Terror. I’ve seen the TV series. Things are not going well for the crew. I know more about the details of scurvy than anyone not on a 19th century sailing ship ever need. I know that there’s not a lot of feel-good fun to come, but I still can’t put it down.
There’s writerly advice that you have to torture your characters for the sake of the story, and the author Dan Simmons, has taken that to heart and learned the craft of literary torment to a level that I imagine would have qualified him, once upon a time, to be head of inventive interrogation techniques at the Spanish Inquisition.
When we decide to listen to music, Susan Rogers says in This Is What It Sounds Like, the choice is about what kind of “cognitive treat” our brain wants. For instance brains that like abstract music are liking its effect of taking away the burden of thinking about the real world and letting our thoughts freestyle, roam about unfettered by practicalities.
Does the same rule apply to reading? I’m not sure what my brain is getting out of returning again and again to the suffering of the crews of the good ships Terror and Erebus stuck up in the ice as scurvy, madness and mutiny threaten to end them all. But it is a very good read.
Complaining about it does remind me of one my favourite lines from Peep Show, when Mark Corrigan reflects on the struggle to read Antony Beevor’s classic, Stalingrad.
Why are names are hard to remember?
Speaking of cognitive oddities, here’s one most of us can relate to.
Because the memory of the name is stored in a limbo space between the two types of memory we are able to store: episodic memories, of actual things that happened, like meeting the person, and semantic memories, based on the meanings of words.
So the fact that someone is called Catherine, is a memory of someone who you met in a specific place, and also the meaning of the word Catherine needs to be remembered as signifying that individual. But when you need to recall that, the act of memory retrieval needs to also differentiate from all the Catherines, Kathys, Caths that you are aware of and possibly all the other people that you met in that setting.
Details gleaned from The Neuroscience of You, by Chantel Prat. Which is fantastic, as I may have mentioned a few times.
Why people hate PowerPoint
I mean they don’t, do they? We all have to say we hate PowerPoint / Keynote / Google Slides but we use it all the time. People insist on using it instead of written documents. In a recent brand refresh at my own company, we had no new document templates, but a kind of PowerPoint template for long-form written documents was created by popular demand. That made no sense to my writing-first mindset, but what do I know?
In Everything I Know About Life I Learned From PowerPoint, ad industry darling Russell Davies (not that one) wrote a very persuasive argument about why newspaper columnists, professors, lawyers and senior bureaucrats love to rail against slide decks: because they are easy to use to present ideas and arguments, and that undermines the very specific and highly developed skills that all of those people have in creating long-form, written documents.
Many people have famously 'banned PowerPoint' from their organisations: Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, Jack Dorsey, Brigadier General H. R. McMaster. Mostly billionaires and generals. Mostly men. It's a list of people who don't have to work hard to get people to pay attention. And who might be impatient with underlings talking instead of them.
There are downsides to these tools as well though. Davies’s advice on using PowerPoint is about using it to make presentations great. Even this staunch defender of the slide deck says the way to make them work better is fewer, better words on slides. He talks about his time working in UK government, where civil servants worked in:
Their meetings were discussions of papers that everyone was supposed to have read but which almost no one had. Those discussions were captured in notes, which were circulated but not read and eventually archived. Useful, difficult decisions were never made because every shade of opinion could simply be added to the paper. Memoranda are infinite. You don't need to decide anything. You can just write it all down. The civil service lived in Word, in .dọc.
We, on the other hand, wanted to move quickly and decisively so we decided to work in .ppt. We kept our words very brief and very big.
There’s a useful thought organising side-effect too, which is that chunks of ideas and arguments can be easily moved around, rearranged and reused – think switching PowerPoint, Keynote or Slides to the view where you can see all of the slides.
This week I got my hands on the beta version of iA Presenter, which uses a very new approach to creating a set of presentation slides. It focuses on creating the written version of what you want to say in notes, which you can quickly turn into slides.
It’s fantastic. I highly recommend having a look and signing up for the beta. Even the introduction video is a short primer / reminder on how to make better presentations.
A quick aside, as you may have noticed, you write in iA Presenter using a format called “Markdown”, which sounds technical, but really isn’t. Simply, when you write with Markdown you use symbols to indicate different styles, like a # to mark a set of words as a headline, an asterisk and a space to make bullet points and > to make an indented quote. This way of writing means you don’t get tempted into adjusting fonts or all of the other distracting things you can do in a writing app (what we used to call word processors) and can instead get on with getting things written.
The app is beautiful. Some of the articles the company writes about PowerPoint etc are a bit snobbish though. For instance, this one which starts off with a picture of the PowerPoint team to have a laugh at what they are wearing.
I think it would have been fairer to also make available a photo of of iA Presenter development team, so we could compare and contrast, but I imagine that as a design-led company coming out of Tokyo they may be very stylish indeed.
Judging software by design teams’ dress sense, where would it end? I mean – we all love the web, but the first W3C consortium wasn’t exactly catwalk-ready:
And its early fans have looks that have come back into fashion, or may do soon.
Have to say, Tim Berrners-Lee’s white shirts are timeless classics though. The man can do no wrong.
Switch of tone and pace - sort of an ad
I'm one of the judges for this year's BIMA100. It's a lovely way of celebrating people doing interesting things in our industry. If there's someone you know who you think should be acknowledged get a nomination in, or nudge them to put it in for themselves. I have a big soft spot for BIMA (the British Interactive Media Association), a force for good in an industry that needs forces for good.
Send your nomination for the BIMA100 2023 via this link.
And an actual ad
I do like a straightforward ad. This on the back of a delivery truck for a firm that delivers potatoes to chip shops. I’ll even forgive the Union Jack, as fish-and-chips is a legitimate part of British identity (and I may be just a little tired of culture wars), although I appreciate it’s not the only country that likes chips A LOT.
Measure your subconscious biases
This is not a gimmick. Bookmark it. It’s really useful for reminding yourself that you’re nowhere near as unbiased as you think you are.
Harvard University’s Project Implicit Tests: Social Attitudes
We all exist within cultures and variants of that culture. Have a look at some of your biases by taking these tests. You don’t have to shout about the results, but just looking allows you to see evidence of the things we often project onto others – for instance, we don’t often think of ourselves as prejudiced, because that word carries an implicit value judgement, but we all are.
Explain what your company does to a five-year-old…
Then ask an AI to have a go.
Was the challenge a researcher put to me this week. My first attempt was garbled. My second, taking the five year old bit seriously and being determined not to just fob them off:
We help people play nicely and use their toys nicely so that they can make better things to share on the internet.
I recall explaining what we did to my children when they were much younger:
We sell ideas to companies.
That seemed to work.
This is the best an AI did re-writing our website for a five-year-old:
We have an idea that can help you with your brand's biggest trouble quickly. We'll work with your teams to try it out and see what happens. Save lots of money and time. Talk to us now.
I quite like that, actually.
Speaking of bizniz…
We received this lovely plaque to mark Brilliant Noise’s accreditation as a B Corp toward the end of 2022, one of the first 1,000 companies in the UK to do so. Naturally the plaque is made from recovered timber and lasered into being. Very lovely.
Watching…
Babylon Berlin
So good I want to applaud at times. I think a couple of times I actually have*. The Rest Is History* podcast mentioned Babylon Berlin was a very accurate portrayal of Weimar Berlin, the period of extreme poverty, artistic expression and political violence during which the Nazi party edged toward taking power in Germany. There are multiple plot-lines and intrigue, characters pin-balling between historical forces and personal crises, art direction and sets that are beguilingly beautiful and then grim as hell. Best of all, I’m a few episodes in to season one, and there are four currently available. Schön.
The Last of Us: Episode three
The Last of Us episode three – a.k.a. When Armand met Ron — was a triumph.
I’d been enjoying The Last Of Us and knew there Nick Offerman would be making an appearance at some point. Like many viewers I wasn’t expecting the plot trajetory or for the show to become cultural moment quite like this has, judging by the reactions, tributes and remixes in social media.
It was great in so many ways BUT… I pray to the gods that some silent cabal of Hollywood controlling shadowy figures could limit the use of “Fratres” by Arvo Part. In a slightly Amish way, I’d like to propose that every use of it after There Will Be Blood (2007) is struck from the record, soundtracks re-recorded. If you’re not sure what Fratres is – here’s a good version:
Three-Body (Rakuten Viki)
Last week, I mentioned the new Chinese adaptation of Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem and the deluge of ads on YouTube that made it almost unwatchable. Thanks to a suggestion from Danae Shell in the comments I got the Viki app, which streams a huge amount of Chinese, Japanese and South Korean dramas with English subtitles ad-free (seven day free trial then £3.99 a month).
Without the ads, the quality of the production shone through. It has obviously been a well-funded labour of love, very close to the books’ slow reveals of mind-warping concepts and full of dazzling effects.
There are some jarring elements for a Western viewer: many the English-speaking actors seem stilted, and the English-language songs – which feature in long sequences and kind of have a Scandi-Noir vibe – don’t always make sense.
One last joyful oddity about the show. The Viki app has a “live chat” feature which let’s you see viewers commenting along about the show. I turned it on accidentally and it really doesn’t add anything, but is hilarious as a kind of standalone snapshot of a hive-mind missing the point.
The plot at this point centres on the mystery of why a large number of top physicists around the world are committing suicide. Featuring gems like “it may be boring because physics isn’t fun for ebveryone” and “crazy scientist y kill yourself over it 🤣”…
Auf Weidersehen!
Das ist all for this week. Thank you for reading and leave us a like or a comment if you enjoyed it.
Tschüss,
Antony