Russell Davies

As disappointed as you are
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"I’ve come to realize that I function like a more curated but less efficient version of GPT. My sentences are not generated by A.I., but they are largely the synthesis of my favorite authors. I can tell you which phrases have been borrowed from Borges, which authorial intrusions are taken from Chatwin, and how much of the supposed perspective is just an approximation of what I think Orwell might think about all of this. My “voice” is drawn from the corpus of those books. Perhaps there is some spiritual self in all this text, but if there is, I cannot locate it. Inspiration in writing, instead, feels to me like what happens when you give a machine enough opportunities to spit out something interesting that can take on its own, arguably false narrative about a “moment of genius.”"


Jay Caspian Kang

 

May 24, 2024 | Permalink

Print's not dead Part 5690

This is a smart and thoughtful piece from Steve:

April 26, 2024 | Permalink

Interesting kitchens

Speaker five is the irrepressible Lucy Dearlove. 

Lucy is still nailing down the title of her talk but she reckons it'll be "something to do with the history of kitchens".

You cannot argue with that. Get yourself a ticket. Get one for all your colleagues. 

April 17, 2024 | Permalink

Interesting tea

Speaker four is the extraordinary Gianfranco Chicco.

His talk will be:

Much Ado About Tea
Tea and tea culture can be a rabbit hole, especially if you're interested in design, craft and Japan like me.

And we're planning for it to include a live demo and free matcha tea tasting for a lucky few.

It's going to be special.

You know you want a ticket.

 

April 16, 2024 | Permalink

Interesting offal

Speaker three is the incredible Katie Mulligan. 

Her talk will be "How I went from being a decade-long vegetarian to telling Jamie Oliver I was the Barbara Cartland of offal"

She has an instagram for what she describes as her offaly bits. Everyone should have one of those.

Ticket time.

April 15, 2024 | Permalink

Thought-terminating cliche

Maybe 'brand' and 'awareness' are thought-terminating cliches.

April 14, 2024 | Permalink

Interesting dust

Speaker Two is the amazing Jay Owens. 

Jay is finalising the talk title as we speak, it's currently somewhere between "Thinking with Dust" and "Why Hoovering is a Scam". Wherever it ends up it's going to be incredible.

Get yourself an Interesting ticket.

If you can't wait you should buy Jay's book.

April 14, 2024 | Permalink

On the boil

"What do you dream about at the moment?" Silvia, Observer reader, Sofia, Bulgaria

"Forgetting things. The heady possibility of travelling without mislaid passports. Breathing under the sea. I’m not particularly forgetful but there are such exertions needed for travel, especially because, when I’m at home, I do sink down into the loam a bit. I always think if you work in cities, it probably keeps you on the boil, but I’m not at all on the boil at home."

Tilda Swindon

(findings)

April 13, 2024 | Permalink

Sustainable agile

"I turn to one of the agile manifesto principles – perhaps the most surprising to people who misinterpret agile as “doing waterfall only faster.”

“Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.” This is how we expect consumer tech to work. The major operating systems and digital service providers are moving away from big, highly disruptive releases, with lots of new things to learn at once. The best digital services just work.

Updates are very frequent but come with a low burden of learning and adaptation. And that’s how we’re changing the way we deliver digital products and services in NHS England.

Away from timebound programmes with big, risky release dates at the end.

To sustainable products and services that deliver for the organisation, are sustainable for the teams that work on them, and critically, respect the capacity of frontline services to absorb change."

(Matt Edgar)(findings)

April 13, 2024 | Permalink

Interesting wardrobe

12 September, 16.07

Right, Interesting is only a month away, it's time to start talking about speakers. This is the exciting bit.

Speaker One is Sophie Sampson, responsible for my absolute favourite instagram account: Wardrobe Strategy. 

Her talk will be "A systemic approach to coolness 1974-2024"

What a fantastic start, right?

Get yourself a ticket.

April 13, 2024 | Permalink

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