Hello gorgeous friends, welcome to 💥BLAST! #72, and with a new year comes a new look.
🏺 Horrible vase for sale (cat not included): “That cat isn’t for sale. But maybe the vase would look lovely in your home? Perhaps you’re putting on an amateur dramatics production of Abigail’s Party and need some suitably ghastly props? I don’t want it, that’s for sure.”
📲 How the Custom Ringtone Industry Paved the Way for the App Store, Then Vanished: Remember the crazy frog? A billion-dollar industry silenced seemingly overnight, ringtones laid the foundations of modern mobile consumer technology and set the stage for the app store and mobile commerce as we know it today.
📉 The story of U.K. lockdown through Google Trends: Predicting which behaviours are transient, and which will endure long into the future, is the subject of much analysis and debate. Search activity can give us clues about evolving behaviour.
🔍 Google’s Top Search Result? Surprise! It’s Google: The search engine dedicated almost half of the first page of results to its own products, which dominated the coveted top of the page.
↩️ The boys who were almost in One Direction: Today, they write music, perform solo or own restaurants. But these three men narrowly missed out on becoming a part of the biggest boyband of all time.
🕰 The Art of Running Late: A Love Letter: This lovely piece pitches the anxiety of running late as a drug. “I love the running of running late, but I don’t love the being of being late. I do not want to enter a meeting with a wet brow and a profuse apology as I try to revive a dormant laptop to project a 50-slide PowerPoint.”
💿 Defining the ’90s Music Canon: The Pudding asked thousands of people whether they recognised hit songs from the ’90s, such as Wannabe and No Scrubs, ordering the results by birth year. Which song is more likely to be recognised by future generations?
🔪 First ‘Non-Cuttable’ Material in the World: Researchers have manufactured a non-cuttable material with a density only 15% of steel that could be used in bike locks.
🥳 Inside the UK’s rave renaissance: An illegal party scene returns: As clubs close at an alarming rate and lockdown further sucks the life out of nightlife, the UK’s illegal rave scene has risen from the ashes, 30 years after acid and love conquered Britain for the second time.
It’s not all work, work, work
Look past the protagonist’s ears and ill-fitting clothing in this 1991 NatWest TV advert with its memorable Jan Hammer soundtrack, and you’ll notice the effort that went into dramatising a bustling high-street bank. People on the phone, shifting paperwork, serving customers, photocopying, handling cash (whatever that was) and so on.
Three decades later, banks don’t look anything like that. That very branch used in the advert has stood empty for two years. This fills me with optimism that the contemporary workplace will soon go extinct.
Long-time readers may remember that a hot-desk in an open-plan office might be the worst place to try and get anything done. Fortunately, walls are finally coming back in style, and all it took was a global pandemic. Other changes are coming: video-calling is ripe for an experience make-over, and those who’ve had their employment disrupted have turned not to gigging, but hustling.
Employers have learned remote working works and remaining employees have found the need for all kinds of new signalling to demonstrate their busyness. Post-pandemic, a full return to the office is unlikely. The Centre for Economics and Business Research estimates 30% of London employees will work at home on any given day. In the not to distant future, the talent will not be thinking inside the glass-and-steel box.
