Fun with fake words
Fun with fake words
Hello there :)
Welcome to issue eighty seven of Manufacturing Serendipity, a loosely connected, somewhat rambling collection of the unexpected things I’ve recently encountered.
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Speaking of coffee, grab yourself a suitable beverage my loves, let’s do this thing…
First, a little shameless self-promotion
FREE ZOOM THINGER! On Thursday September 12th at 5pm (UK time), Britt Klontz and I will be offering feedback on a range of PR pitches, live on Zoom, plus taking any and all questions about PR pitching from the audience. Register here before 11:30pm (UK) on Monday 9th September to attend.
Britt Klontz and I are running a new cohort of our PR Pitch Writing course in October. Full course details can be found here & you can book your spot here.
Planning on heading to BrightonSEO in October this year? If so, you might like to sign up for my in-person Content Creation for Digital PR training course.
Women in Tech SEO have published their global event schedule for 2025 and tickets are available for a bunch of locations right now! This community and their events are absolutely brilliant – I highly recommend getting your mitts on tickets.
Part I: Things I’ve been thinking about…
As you likely already know, I’ve set myself the challenge to write 100 stories in 100 days. (NB if you’re bored of me talking about this, honestly, I get it – I’m kinda boring myself with it too – feel free to skip this section, I won’t be offended).
Today is day 84, (I know, right?), and perhaps it’s just fatigue, or laziness, or possibly I’ve just run out of fucks to give; but I finally feel like I’m in a place where I’m less concerned with the extent to which the stories I’m writing are “good” (whatever that means); and more concerned with having fun and experimenting with different ways of writing.
Since the beginning of this challenge I’ve kept a big old list of “ideas” for stories. Early examples of “ideas” included myths and fairytales I wanted to re-tell; a central character or conceit I had imagined; or a particular dystopian world I wanted to explore.
But recently, my ideas read more like challenges: tell a story using only a series of Likert Scale questions; tell a story using only a shopping list; and earlier this week – tell a story using a series of randomly generated fake words.
Here’s how that story turned out:
#81 Not quite tupress
One night you left your house.
You were a grancent fussople back then, forever attempating feyt, which inevitably led to schnapphors, and that night was no different.
You arrived at Bestfloor to meet your custacin, but no sast. You decided to wait for them. After several clawines you were pretty much skradicted. You were holding on to the colang for dear life by the time they arrived.
You yelled “Ete!” at them, and they senhamperkinged by way of acknowledgement.
Your custacin was a gristaline frorealm with proper voquevy style. They were successful with both miz and astrus alike. You watched on in eggmode as they ammigled, storsed, and hibbed with a gilv you could never pull off.
Eventually they made it over to you. You exchanged guisities before they handed over the furnicallment. The staff here were veytoy, there was never any ib at Bestfloor, which is why you favoured the place.
You remembered swallowing down the furnicallment with your last swig of clawine, but after that everything was kind of imperfied.
You must have left Bestfloor, because when you came to, you were lying in the kerbardefeell with an asshole Immpreator shining his eminste right into your eyes. You tried to glown, but the Immpreator was arderley.
You spent the following two days in Resica which sucked. You’d love to be able to say that was when you reached tupress, but there were a bunch more schnapphors before you hit that point.
Is this a “good” story? I have no idea.
But it was really fun to write.
And experimenting, or playing with words like this feels really good. I’m hoping I can hold on to this feeling until the 100th day :)
Serendipitous finds
The Glass Door of Wikipedia’s Notable People
Do women need to “do more” than men to get a Wikipedia page?
Lea Krivaa and Michele Coscia used network science to test this hypothesis, and have recently published their findings:
“Our interpretation is that this is a hint that the glass door exists: to be included in multiple language Wikipedias, a woman needs to have more significant ties with other notable people than a man.
This might seem a stretch or a bit abstract, but there’s a neat way to test this interpretation. On March, Wikipedia has a tradition of celebrating the month by improving its coverage of notable women. This means that, in March, it is “easier” for a woman to get added to Wikipedia than normal. And we can confirm this with our analysis! If we only look at pages created in March, the gap we observe is noticeably smaller.
Of course all of this should be taken with a grain of salt. Since we rely on Pantheon’s curation of profiles, we inherit all of their biases. Moreover, we only focus on the 1750-1950 time period, for various data quality reasons. And there are other factors affecting how much we can read in this analysis. For instance it might be that we simply do not have enough women to include in Wikipedia, because of the male bias in historiography I already mentioned.
However, we think this is an interesting question to ask, because we can do better to improve inclusivity. If the gap can shrink in March, we ask: why can’t it shrink the whole year around?”
The UK public is overconfident
“Calibration is the difference between how confident you are and how correct you are. Being well-calibrated means you’re usually right when you say you’re sure about something. Poorly calibrated people are much more likely to be ‘confidently wrong’ – they get things wrong even when they’re sure they’re right about something. Overconfidence, a key theme of the UK’s Covid inquiry, can have a negative effect on outcomes including in policy, economics and crisis response.”
“Gen Z and Millennials are less likely to be overconfident than Baby Boomers, according to the first major survey on ‘calibration’ and overconfidence in the UK.
A nationally representative survey of 2000 adults found that 81% of people are overconfident in their answers to a series of general knowledge questions – that is to say, they answer incorrectly but believe their response to be right – but there are notable differences between generations.
Baby Boomers (60-78) are the most overconfident (84%) compared with 75% of Gen Zs (18-27) and 79% of Millennials (28-43). The findings suggest many of us age into overconfidence, while younger people are more likely to ‘know what they don’t know.’”
I found this both fascinating, and scary. It’s totally fair to claim that Baby Boomers are the most overconfident; but given that 75% of the Gen Zs who took part in the study came out as overconfident too, it’s a pretty bleak picture, huh?
You can do the test yourself to see how your fare here.
Here are my results:
71% average confidence level
85% of questions answered correctly
This means I came out as underconfident (i.e. my confidence is at least 5 percentage points below my “correctness”).
Ouch! Still, I guess it’s good to know these things, huh?
Public Work is a visual search engine for public domain content. Explore 100,000+ copyright-free images from The MET, New York Public Library, and other sources. Love this.
Dungeons and Dragons taught me how to write alt text
tl;dr - describe the most important thing first.
This is so, so, so, good:
“Because I cannot half-ass anything, I went hard on immersing myself in the culture surrounding Dungeons and Dragons. This included subscribing to Dragon magazine.
I don’t remember the issue number, or the original author. However, I do remember it was from an advice column. The problem was the person who was running the game wanting to enliven his descriptions, as they felt like their narration was both boring and confusing.
The advice for that problem was spectacular, and it boiled down to describing the most important thing first.
Consider:
A large room with rough stone walls. Brownish moss clings to the walls, and trickles of brackish water also flow down parts of it. Broken furniture is scattered across on the floor. The ceiling is so high that you cannot see it. Also, there is a large red dragon attacking you.
I don’t know about you, but I’d want to know about the red dragon’s presence and activity a lot more than the quality of the masonry. There’s also another odd bit of putting too much detail on the wrong thing.
Let’s rephrase it:
A huge dragon the color of a smoldering coal is attacking you! It is rearing its snake-like neck up to strike, head poised underneath a ceiling that is so high you cannot see it. Its dull black, iron-like claws dig into the floor of the rough stone room as it prepares to lunge at you. Broken furniture is scattered about, no doubt victims of previous altercations.
We’ve put the most important thing first. We then supply detail in an order that aids in understanding the main point, and discard information that is irrelevant to the overall concept we’re trying to communicate and mood we’re trying to evoke.
[…]
This is explicit prioritization of information. It also demonstrates that informative information can also be entertaining.”
The Secret Inside One Million Check Boxes
This is so wholesome!
On June 26th 2024, Nolen Royalty launched a website called One Million Checkboxes (OMCB). It had one million global checkboxes on it - checking (or unchecking) a box changed it for everyone on the site, instantly.
“My expectations for the site were very low and very wrong. I thought hundreds of players would check thousands of boxes - instead, 500,000 players checked over 650,000,000 boxes in the two weeks that I kept the site online.
[…]
A few days into making One Million Checkboxes I thought I’d been hacked. What was that doing in my database?
A few hours later I was tearing up, proud of some brilliant teens.”
Sometimes a Wild God by Tom Hirons
This is beautiful.
Part II: Books I’m Reading Right Now
I’ve been mostly writing, but I stole a couple of hours to read Lauren Redniss’ graphic biography, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout. It’s brilliant, beautiful, and sad – buy a copy for everyone you love.
You can see some imagery from the book below, ©Lauren Redniss:
In an NPR interview, Redniss talks about the process she undertook to create the artwork for the book:
“It was also clear to Redniss that the Curies' story was a highly visual one, albeit one that proved challenging for the illustrator.
"It is largely about invisible forces," she says. "Love and radioactivity, these things that we can't see. To make a visual book about that was an intriguing challenge."
The book's look and feel -- it is luminous and vibrating with color -- comes from a process Redniss used called "cyanotype printing." In the process, one takes paper, coats it with a light-sensitive chemical solution, and then exposes it to sunlight to reveal a negative image. The sunlight often turns the paper blue.
"That blue has sort of a twilight quality," says Redniss. "And because you are getting a negative of the drawings, you often get a white line. That to me had this sort of glow that reflected what Marie Curie called radium's spontaneous luminosity."
Part III: Things I’ve Been Watching
Wicked Little Letters (Netflix) – I think this is the only thing I’ve watched that I’ve managed to stay awake through because Long Covid’s been kicking my ass again. Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about it. The film revolves around the true story of the Littlehampton poison-pen scandal of 1923. It boasts a stellar cast, (Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Anjana Vasan, Gemma Jones), it’s feel-good, fun, frothy, entertaining, and maybe that’s ok.
But I can’t help but feel like a much more interesting and challenging film could and should have been made, rather than this cute little trifle. It’s about a middle-aged woman who is so deeply repressed and unhappy that her only joy in life is to pen obscene letters; and that’s both tragic and awful, no?
Part IV: What I’ve been up to…
I have written a bunch of stories, talked about common PR pitching mistakes and how to avoid them on the Digital PR Explained podcast, worked on a bunch of gloriously lovely WTS things (there’s going to be a Workshop Day as part of WTSFest in London next year - YAY!), and kicked off some new client projects.
I also got to catch up with Steve, have a lovely birthday dinner with my Mum, meet up with Laura in-person in Brighton, and fall asleep in front of almost every TV programme or film I tried to watch.
What’s next?
I am excited about:
Running this Live PR Pitch Feedback Workshop on September 12th.
Emceeing WTSFest USA in Philadelphia on September 19th.
Completing the frankly absurd “write 100 stories in 100 days” challenge I set myself – the final day is September 22nd.
Watching some wonderful talks at Marlborough LitFest with my friend Diana.
Prepping for the in-person Content Creation for Digital PR training course I’m running at BrightonSEO on 2nd October.
Prepping for the new cohort of the PR Pitch Writing course Britt Klontz and I are running throughout October.
That’s all from me for now :)
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider sharing it, and if you would like to support me you can buy me a coffee.
Please note, various life happenings are continuing to mess with my publishing schedule over the next month or so. The next issue of this newsletter will land in your inboxes towards the end of September.
Big love,
Hannah x
PS Wanna find out more about me and my work? Head over to Worderist.com
