Deconstructing Tone of Voice, Not-Cool Britannia and Jon Ronson Chats to Adam Curtis

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10 stories we've enjoyed this week

Illustration of a black boy with the peace symbol shaved into the side of his hair. There are three images of the boy side by side. Each image gets progressively lighter.

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Hi All,
Newer subscribers may not know that for four years we ran a publication about the future called How We Get To Next. When we launched in 2014 it felt like a good idea to make Medium its home. Over time Medium changed, some of our articles were no longer accessible and navigating the publication was almost impossible. So we decided to take everything and move it to a Wordpress site. Everything is now in one place. Safe from the tinkering of Medium. We're really proud of all the work we did on Next and delighted that it's going to be preserved.

At Storythings we believe that building editorial publications like this is much better than 'content marketing'. If you'd like to know more about how we use editorial publications to get attention for brands get in touch.

On the subject of writing about the future, I just wanted to give you a heads up that there will be two newsletters next week. The Friday newsletter will be as usual. There will also be a mid-week newsletter sharing all the stories and formats we produced for our tenth birthday celebration.

That's it from me this week. Enjoy the stories and have a great weekend.
Hugh

The Short Story

How the End Credits of Movies Have Become World-building Formats
(5 min read)

Tone Knob: Deconstructing Tone of Voice
(5 min read)

The Secret History of Monopoly
(5 min read)

The Oral History of Cool Britannia
(20 min read)

Jon Ronson and Adam Curtis Discuss Storytelling, Culture Wars and Journalism vs Activism
(10 min read)

A Wonderfully Weird Flickr Account of Old Postcard Collections
(Flickr account)

Why Are We Obsessed With Dubious Personality Tests
(5 min read)

One of the Oldest Arcades in the US Still Has a Banned For Life List
(3 min watch)

How NASA Found Inspiration For the First Space Suit at the Tower of London
(3 min read)

Daylight Saving - The Movie Trailer
(2 min watch)

How can we help you?

Storythings is a strategy and content company based in Brighton and London. We'd love to help you with some creative and bold ideas.

Here's 3 reasons to get in touch.

1. You want to talk to us about content production: podcasts, videos, animations, illustrations, editorial.

2. You want to talk to us about content strategy or format development.

3. You want to create a brand or an identity that makes it easier to communicate your message.

We do other things too. We're very friendly and always enjoy meeting people, so get in touch.

The Full Story

How the End Credits of Movies Have Become World-building Formats
During our team call this week Matt was talking about how end credits for movies are sometimes used for world-building, particularly in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This became a discussion about when end credits became more than just end credits, how they became more entertaining and which were our favourites. So I asked Matt to unpack post-credit movie sequences. It's a great read.
(5 min read)

Tone Knob: Deconstructing Tone of Voice
I've been looking forward to the first drop of this newsletter since I signed up a few weeks ago. In each newsletter Nick Parker will mull over one brand’s tone of voice, and what makes it tick. It kicks off with Lemon.io whose voice is a "glorious mash-up of fire-and-brimstone religious cult, fantasy lore, with a dash of old skool ‘choose your own adventure’ gaming." Looking forward to the next one already. Have a read and subscribe.
(5 min read)

The Secret History of Monopoly
It's great to see Steven Johnson writing regularly via his Adjacent Possible newsletter. He's one of my favorite writers. Here he looks at how the inventor of Monopoly, Lizzie Magie, was written out of its history, as was as an important part of the gameplay. In Magie's version, there were two variations of gameplay, one in which players competed to capture as much real estate and cash as possible, as in the Monopoly that we play today. In another variation, the point of the game was to share the wealth as equitably as possible. You can hear Steven talking more about innovation and games in Wonderland, a podcast series we made with him in 2016.
(5 min read)

The Oral History of Cool Britannia
During our team Show and Tell session yesterday we got into a conversation about which scene we all go back to if we had a time machine. Thankfully none of the team chose Cool Britannia. This is a hugely entertaining yet depressing reminder of how terrible that era was: "It started out as quite an arty scene, but devolved the more popular it became. Like any party, it started out with people talking about books and films, and ended with shouty men balancing beer glasses on their heads, puking in the kitchen sink."
(20 min read)

Jon Ronson and Adam Curtis Discuss Storytelling, Culture Wars and Journalism vs Activism
I've just started listening to Jon Ronson's new podcast Things Fell Apart. I was reluctant, but it's Jon, so I took the plunge. So far so good. Here Jon chats to his old friends Adam Curtis about how you tell stories about culture wars without your story becoming a part of it: "Every show that’s about the culture ends up a part of the culture wars, and I didn’t want to do that. So I thought the way to do it was by focusing on a moment and a human story and tell that story in as unexpected a way as possible. In the end we found eight stories about the complexity of human life and they all happen to be origin stories. These are the pebbles being thrown in the pond and creating these ripples."
(10 min read)

A Wonderfully Weird Flickr Account of Old Postcard Collections
I was watching this video about why lots of postcards have the same sky and came across this account. If you like old and slightly weird stuff, this really is a goldmine. Collections include Fire and Destruction, Tunnel Entrances and Mock Violence. There's no better way to say 'wish you were here' than a postcard depicting fire, destruction, tunnels and violence.
(flicker account)

Why Are We Obsessed With Dubious Personality Tests
This week I found myself deep into three different stories about identity. As mentioned above, Jon Ronson's podcast Things Fell Apart, Will Storr's new book, The Status Game and the new (to me) Substack called The Power of Us. This piece looks at how easy it is to fall for these tests and how problematic they are: "The ease with which people form group identities can be traced back to one of the most important studies in social psychology. In the minimal group experiments, people were randomly assigned to groups after completing a test of dubious merit, such as their ability to estimate the number of dots in an image. Within minutes, they had created a new sense of identity and were treating their new in-group members very differently from out-group members."
(5 min read)

One of the Oldest Arcades in the US Still Has a Banned For Life List
There's so much to love in this news report about an arcade maintaining its ban on kids that are now in their middle age. The list on the wall. Sneaky ways of getting around the ban. The strictness of the owner. The (very few) redemption stories.
(3 min watch)

How NASA Found Inspiration For the First Space Suit at the Tower of London
The excellent Neil Perkin on the relevance paradox and why it's important to look beyond best practice in your own field to solve big problems.
(3 min read)

Daylight Saving - The Movie Trailer
We've all been there, right? "This November, they call it Daylight Saving but the thing that needs saving...is us! WHAT TIME IS IT?!"
(2 min watch)

We hope you've enjoyed this week's newsletter. I'm sure some of your friends would love to read it. Sharing it would be really appreciated. If you've received this from a friend you can subscribe here and get it direct to your inbox every Friday.

Thanks for reading and see you all next week,

Hugh, Matt, Anjali and the team at Storythings