A story is never an answer. A story is always a question.
~Companion Piece, Ali Smith
Musings

Turn me on, dead man
Issue 47 of the Manufacturing Serendipity newsletter. Conspiracy theories; the allure of the Cabbage Patch; psychedelic space marbles; and more…
Read more "Turn me on, dead man"Once an unlikely occurrence is incorporated into the story of a life, or a death, it becomes almost impossible to see the alternative possibilities that once existed.
We confer meaning to control our existence. It makes life liveable. The alternative is frightening. Randomness is banal. It diminishes us. But the truth is we resist meaning almost as often as we insist upon it.
~The Premonitions Bureau, Sam Knight

Little Grey Impossibilities
Issue 46 of the Manufacturing Serendipity newsletter. Indestructible Beetles; the Disastrous Record of Celeb Crypto Endorsements; AI Generated Food Photography; & the Women who Built Grunge.
Read more "Little Grey Impossibilities"“Every time the DJ drops a new track, it feels louder than anything else that you’ve heard before, which is actually not the case! What happens is you drop a new track, and then over the course of three to five minutes, you make it ever so slightly quieter. And then the new track comes in and it’s back at the level where the original one started, and then everything feels so loud.”
Tom Holkenborg

Learning is Lossy
Issue 45 of the Manufacturing Serendipity newsletter. Thoughts about feelings and vibes; not selling out; AI; lying; & how the James Webb telescope images are data visualisations – not photos.
Read more "Learning is Lossy"“She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.”
~Pattern Recognition, William Gibson

The Shetland Pony of the Apocalypse
Issue 44 of the Manufacturing Serendipity newsletter. UK politics; quirky street names; Reddit’s compound pejoratives; mortal soul delay; and more…
Read more "The Shetland Pony of the Apocalypse"Pretty soon it would all be happening at the speed of thought, before it could actually happen, so that nothing would ever have to happen again.
You’d only think things had happened, and if anything ever did happen, you wouldn’t know the difference.
~Synners, Pat Cadigan

Benchmarking the Performance of over 2,000 Digital PR pieces
An excerpt from my 2022 MozCon talk: Myths, Misconceptions & Mistakes (lessons learned from a decade in Digital PR).
Read more "Benchmarking the Performance of over 2,000 Digital PR pieces"