Diary Edish: Meeting Gemma Styles & a gift from Lorde 🌹
📝 Your new Friday newsy with links, recs, and my innermost thoughts 📝
My angels!! This is the first edition of what is going to be the Friday newsletter from now on… a deeper look into my week/ life/ brain which should hopefully be interesting and leave you with:
A fuller picture of who you chat with every day
A better idea of who and what makes up my 🪐universe🪐
A little bit of the behind the scenes of running a biz as a couple of Gen Z’s
What’s lifting me up or dragging me down throughout the week, and
A whoooole lot of recs to keep you going over the weekend!!
But first - why am I doing this?
I’m gonna be honest - I literally NEED IT. I feel like right now life is hitting me so fast from every angle, and if I don’t stop and reflect on it all PROPERLY I’ll never be able to fully live laugh and love. I never want to take this amazing job and the experiences it (and you all) offer me for granted, so I’m taking each Friday to slow down and put it in my virtual diary. Plus, content sharing is my love language, so of COURSE I’m bringing you along for the ride.
Who’s it for?
As much as it’s for me, this newsy is a special one for our paying supporters. Let me be real with you all for a sec - for over a year and a half I’ve been writing a newsy EVERY weekday for tens of thousands of people - and when I say it is truly my life’s joy I’m being completely honest. But I also can’t pretend that it’s not a LOT! Physically, it’s hard work to get up super early every morning and make sure I’m keeping you all up to date/ not getting things wrong, and it’s emotionally hard to be doing all of this while trying to run a media company/ put out a quality product every day/ keep the SYSCA Universe employed/ pay rent (and credit to Rubes who takes on a lot of that - a hero.) But if I’m being completely honest we realised that going forward like this is just not sustainable (physically, emotionally, or monetarily!)
So, even though you’re ALL receiving this newsy today, I’ve decided that from now on Fridays are going to be a special day, for me - and for anyone who pays for the media they love - to relax and reflect on their week in prep for the weekend, and to hopefully learn a little bit more about each other!!
In summary!
Monday-Thursday is your normal newsy!! (Free to all subscribers)
Friday is gonna be my diary edish, which includes my mega link roundup (paid supporters only)
Sunday is gonna be Bel’s 💌No News Is Good News💌 newsletter (paid supporters only)
Now let’s get into it, shall we?
Let’s start from last weekend…
I had an incredibly quiet one (I needed it after spending the past two joyous weekends hosting different parts of my beloved family.) I did normal things like cleaning my house, dong my laundry, going to the pub and playing pool with some friends (and winning it on MY shot!!)
But Hayden (my flatmate who you all know and love) had a big night on Saturday night and took it upon himself to grab a whole bunch of SYSCA stickers and try and stick them in the weirdest spots he could find. Case in point:
I also found some time to walk to my local second-hand shop for a squiz & I ended up grabbing some books that I wanted to share with you (these came to a combined cost of $14 and I couldn’t be more thrilled!!!):
And on that note, I also started getting into my booktok era:
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And that was essentially my weekend! Now, before I get into the week I want to preface that what follows was an uncharacteristically insane week. Like, huuuge highlight reel vibes. It’s not always like this! Ok…
Monday
Controversh but… I love a Monday. I start the week like I start every morning - talking to all of you! But you might notice that Monday’s newsy is always a bit fresher, funnier, brighter - that’s because I’m so full of energy for the week ahead!! (It lessens as the week goes on.) BUT there was one thing that I was a bit anxious about this week and that was that it was my first day without Rubes in the office and without Liv at SYSCA!! Anxiety was eased a lil because I had a coffee with Dunc before work (we have fortnightly mentoring/ therapy/geek-out sessions which always help me stay a bit more balanced.)
Rubes and I had our usual Monday morning WIP and it was SO weird not having Liv there 😪. We realised that this week was also gonna be a big learn-how-to-manage-a-slightly-bigger-team week, as we now have the gorg Bel, Laura and Abby (our bestie/ designer) doing a few hours a week for us with their various talents. It feels cool as hell to be expanding the universe a lil more, but thank GOD for Rubes who takes the admin side of everything (tax?? invoicing??? etc???) in her stride and lets me focus on the content. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again - everyone needs a Rubes. Then I came home and watched Love Island before starting on Tuesday’s newsy because…
Tuesday was Gemma Styles day
Soooo early on Tuesday morning was my y/n moment!!!! If you would have told me when I was 15 that THE Gemma Styles would be interviewing ME I would have knocked you out for even getting my hopes up. But it happened! And before you ask YES we cleared the elephant in the room (AKA me being in love with her brother) and YES we talked about fandom and YES she was so soft spoken and a brilliant interviewer. Ugh she was so cool and had great questions, and the podcast (which is called Good Influence by Gemma Styles) will be out on March 27th I think!!! Dead over this!! Love getting to do things for my fellow stans!!!
Naturally, I was running on adrenaline for most of the day after that so it’s all kind of a blur from there but I DO recall going to a media lunch with people much fancier than me (thanks to Welly on A Plate for inviting me 🥺), dropping my fork full of food all over my skirt and onto the floor (and picking it up and eating it still), drinking a mushroom and whiskey cocktail of some sort and unintentionally pulling a face because it didn’t taste how I was expecting it to (it was yum tho), and then jiggling this jello dessert non-stop because I’m a child who should not be invited nice places (still keep inviting me though, I’m fun 🥺🥺)
And this was a HUGE day to be a fangirl because when I got back to the office a SIGNED LORDE POSTER BASICALLY THE SIZE OF ME HAD ARRIVED:
I’m still figuring out what our next move with this is… a giveaway for our paying supporters maybe?? Do I start a shrine?? Do I buy a new house to fit it in?? And a new car to transport it there?? Let me know in the comments (and thanks to the angels at Universal Music for remembering how much I love it and sending it to me 💌)
We then had a catch-up with our team of girlbosses at Daylight Creative who are building our BRAND NEW WEBSITE (have I mentioned this??) which is in the works right now and holy shit - it’s looking amazing. Like… the best website I’ve ever seen. I can’t wait to show you it!!!
And then I got stuck in traffic, watched Love Island, and slept like an absolute baby (what a day!)
Wednesday
Ok so today I spent GLUED to my laptop. I had SUCH a huge day yesterday that my to-do list today was out the GATE (full of lots of really fun things like meetings and emails.) But in between those really fun things were OTHER really fun things like… having an interview with my FAVE newsletter in the world - Embedded. Dunc and I have been obsessed with Embedded for the longest time, and when Kate reached out I lost my MIND. She’s so smart and cool and I just want to be her bestie! Naturally, I’ll let you know when the piece she’s writing drops.
And then almost directly after that I met up with another dope media lady (PJ from the PJ podcast) to record for her show, and I’ll tell you what - I love doing press stuff for SYSCA - it’s one of the coolest parts of my job, but by that afternoon I was ready to crawl into a dark room and talk to/ interact with NO one.
I need soooooo much recharge time to be able to be as energetic and luce-like as I can (are you the same?), and at this point in the day I could tell that I was in desperate need of it. So - I did that. I sat in my bed, pulled the curtains (it was like 3pm at this point) and did some nice and mundane things like prep for The Shit Show, edit the copy for our website, think about what I was going to write in the newsy, answer some of my long-overdue emails, and I think I even fell asleep watching Love Island??
After my quick hibernation, I went out for dinner with some gorgeous and hilarious ladies (and Ben) from Stuff (another NZ media publication), met a fellow Louis Tomlinson stan (more so in his 1D days ) and I pitched to them what MIGHT be my favourite mundane poll ever:
You’ll have to go to our Instagram to find out the real answer 👀
Thursday
Today was my normallest (that’s defs not a word) day of the week and thank GOD!! I got up at 5:30am to record The Shit Show with Squish and write the newsy, went to the office for a couple of meetings, came home for a meeting with Rubes and our cool as fuck accountant Dyl (yes we have an accountant and YES we have to do fun things like tax), and then I started putting this diary entry together for all of you!
Tomorrow is Friday and I’m going on holiday (I’ll take lots of pics to drop in here next week) but here’s what I’ve been consuming this week/want to consume this weekend….
🕸 From the web:
How Teens Recovered From the ‘TikTok Tics’ (NY Times)
The Ohio Train Derailment Created a Perfect TikTok Storm (WIRED)
“‘Please Acknowledge the Dick’: Inside a Catfishing Factory (The Bureau of Investigative Journalism)
Gen Z slang: your one-stop, no-judgment guide (Fast Company)
Don’t Be Embarrassed to Commit to the Bit (The Atlantic)
The Girl Gang Fashion Fandoms of New York City (Harpers Bazaar)
TikTok is reportedly working on paywalled videos and a revamped creator fund (The Verge)
Podcast Companies, Once Walking on Air, Feel the Strain of Gravity (NY Times)
Philosophy: Who Needs It? (Wonderland)
BookTok is Good, Actually: On the Undersung Joys of a Vast and Multifarious Platform (Lithub)
YouTube Made Emma Chamberlain a Star. Now She’s Leaving it Behind. (The New York Times)
She Built a Following as Taylor Swift’s Doppelgänger. Then the Swifties Came After Her (Rolling Stone)
📺 On TV
Just like everyone else I’m watching The Last Of Us and I died at the Bill and Frank episode
Community is my latest comfort obsesh (Troy and Abed forever)
Love Island, duh
📖 Books
I’m reading the third book in the Thursday Murder Club series: ‘The Bullet That Missed’ and those characters never fail to make me smile
I’m bringing the book ‘What A Shame’ by Abigail Bergstrom with me on holiday and cannot WAIT to sink my teeth into that
🎵 Music
Right now I’m prepping for all my upcoming concerts - Lorde, Harry Styles, King Princess, Florence & The Machine - so I’m listening to THEM AND THEM ONLY!
👾 On my Switch:
I’ve just been playing a shitload of Dreamlight Valley while I watch Love Island
just realized this "newsy" is in "New Z(ealand)" the only pun i'll drop i promise
Almost spat my coffee out from laughing at “dropping my fork full of food all over my skirt and onto the floor (and picking it up and eating it still)” 💀