🥇THE 200TH EDISH🥇
Holy shit!! How have there been 200 of these things already??? If you've enjoyed 10... or 20... or 100... or 200 of these daily newsletters, please consider becoming a SYSCA supporter 🥺 You're the reason I still love (and can afford to) wake up every damn day to do this thing and I can't thank you ENOUGH!! More soppiness (and news) lies ahead 💘
Let me get ✨sentimental✨ for a sec, because 200 editions???? Honestly, it’s wild to me that after waking up at 5am 200 times I still love it (and hope you do too 🥺🥺) I thought it would be fun to have a trip down memory lane and see what I wrote in that very first edish (I’m trying to lean into the cringe), so here was me, then:
“HEY LIL SHITS (Is this a thing? Should it be?)
I’m Luce - the voice you hear when you read / skim / completely scroll past Shit You Should Care About posts on Instagram (and now the voice of your morning newsletter!) I’m so excited to have you here - I’ve been wanting to do a newsletter for so long, and the fact that it’s finally happening is just, so cool.
A FEW THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ME
I hate acronyms
I love SYSCA
I’m a massive hypocrite (... SYSCA is literally an acronym for Shit You Should Care About)
I don’t use any words I don’t understand
I’m a big believer in being a fan or stan of stuff (and not letting people shit on us for it)
I’m not an expert in anything
AND I WRITE EXACTLY HOW I SPEAK
A FEW THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER
It’s going to be a bloody mixed bag (just like SYSCA)
I can’t promise to explain to you every world conflict (nor am I qualified to do so)
BUT, you’re gonna be kept in the loop with the internet, the world events you need to know about, celebrity antics, memes, and all the other important cultural/ historic/ wild stuff that occurs on this shit show of a planet
I really want this to become part of your morning / lunch / evening routine - it should feel comfy, punchy, and most importantly - IT SHOULDN’T FEEL LIKE A CHORE TO READ."
🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺
Now it’s 2022 Luce again, and how cute to see how we haven’t really strayed from the initial vibe!! But now I’d like to tell you a few things I’ve learnt after writing 200 editions:
I weirdly still love this thing
The email will clip almost every time and I will do nothing to fix it (you just gotta click view entire message)
Getting up at 5am every weekday WILL CATCH UP WITH YOU
BUT it will teach you to set boundaries (all my friends now know that my weekend mornings are sacred. They’re for me to sleep til at LEAST 7, read my magazines, drink coffee blah blah blah)
You all love hearing about my silly little life and I equally love using this newsy as a diary
Making low-stakes mistakes is actually really good (see, yesterday’s newsy) and I basically make them every day
My brain will never be able to catch up with my fingers (or vice versa), so what I lack in grammar I make up for in THE FACT THAT YOU GET A NEWSY EVERY MORNING
It’s really nice to have someone to jump in and help me every now and again (I’m looking at you Bel and Squish) and I hope to do more of this
None of this would be possible without our SYSCA supporters 🥺🥺
I want to expand on that last point a lil. The media industry is a funny one atm - espesh when you’re a couple of small-town girlies from rural(ish) New Zealand who have no interest in being like the big dogs. We love being small, we love being reactive, and we love being just for you, and controlled just by us. To do this, though, we gotta be able to pay our rent (and our wages.) Thanks to you, we’ve been employed for the past 200 newsletter editions, the past few hundred podcast episodes, and the past thousand Instagram posts. But we would genuinely not be able to have done that (or continue to do it) without you.
If you’re reading this and you’re in the position to spare a few dollars to help support the media you love, then please do. Me, Liv, Rubes, Squish, Bel, Harry Styles and all the other characters in the SYSCA cinematic universe truly thank you from the bottom of our hearts 🥺🥺
And obv, if you’re not in the posish to spare a few dollars, you are still a SYSCA supporter if you:
Open this newsy
Share this newsy with everyone you know
Listen to The Shit Show or Culture Vulture
Like our Instagram posts
Support me in our new endeavour on TIkTok
Are my pen pal and reply to anything I do 🥺🥺🥺
And we love you just as much!!! See you for the next 200 💘💘💘
Now, a little bit of NEWS! (Who would have thought?)
Trump’s house was raided by the FBI
Ukraine calls on other countries to ban Russian visitors
A day in my life
A low-stakes error irl
Are these (these things hugging my words) brackets or parentheses?
Trump’s house was raided by the FBI
This was written by Squish (well kinda… it needed a lot of Luce editing so I’m taking some cred here too 👀)
So, old mate Donald Trump said on Monday that the F.B.I. had searched his Palm Beach home and had broken open a safe, which looks like a major escalation in the various investigations that are going on rn into the final stages of his presidency.
The search, according to multiple people familiar with the investigation, appeared to be focused on material that Trump had brought with him to Florida when he left the White House. Those boxes contained many pages of classified documents, according to a person familiar with their contents - the same sort of documents that according to new reports out this week, Trump used to regularly flush down the toilet (yes, really.)
Laughing at his misfortune aside, this is a big fucking deal. The FBI and judges are extremely aware of the optics of raiding a politician, especially if the person they are raiding turns out to be not guilty of a crime. To do that to a former president (and let's be honest, presumptive candidate) means they had some serious evidence to back up the search warrant.
And before you all go saying this is a democratic hit job like our friends over at Fox News, the Director of the FBI—which is currently raiding Donald Trump’s home—was appointed by Donald Trump himself!!!
Ukraine calls on other countries to ban Russian visitors
In case you missed it: Russia is still pushing on with their invasion of Ukraine, and this week Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called for western countries to ‘ban all Russian visitors’ until they ‘change their philosophy.’ Estonia, Latvia, and Finland seem to be kinda down for this, with the Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin telling their national broadcaster YLE "it's not right that at the same time as Russia is waging an aggressive, brutal war of aggression in Europe, Russians can live a normal life, travel in Europe, be tourists".
Here’s what the Estonian PM said too:
Putin's spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, has condemned this idea though (unsurprisingly) saying: “The irrationality of thinking, in this case, is off the charts” (um if we’re gonna talk about irrational thinking, we may want to take a good hard look at our own actions Dmitry…) and "this can only be viewed extremely negatively” and "any attempt to isolate Russians or Russia is a process that has no prospects.”
A day in my life
My flatmates have been telling me that I should be using our TikTok to give you all a lil more insight into what running SYSCA looks like, so for anyone who’s curious (or who just wants to see my vlogging skills) here’s a day in my life running SYSCA on holiday!!! You’ll see me writing the newsy, replying to all of you, recording a podcast with Squish, and doing a LOT of walking!! (PS, not every day looks like this - I’m still on holiday 💘💘)
a day in the life running sh*t you should care about ✨holiday edition✨ — www.tiktok.com
Are these (these) brackets or parentheses?
56% said brackets
44% said parentheses
I had SO many people in the comments on this one!!! I just thought they were synonyms of each other, but according to differencebetween.net (great name), they're not:
"Parentheses are used to enclose numbers, words, phrases, sentences, letters, symbols, and other items while brackets are used to enclose information that is inserted into a quote as well as parenthetical materials within the parentheses."
And, apparently in American usage, brackets refer to [these boxy bois] and parentheses are ( these round bois.)
Will I be changing my ways based on this new information? Probably not.
And finally, a low-stakes error irl
Yesterday, after reading about my low-stakes errors and remembering that I love crosswords (you are all so cute and know me so well) El sent me this excellent combination of my interests:
Funnily enough, I used to try to do the crossword in the Wellington student magazine Salient, but I’d very rarely get very far because there were ALWAYS MISTAKES! Good to know mistakes happen at all unis, and in all publications (not just the SYSCA daily newsy.)
THAT'S ALL THIS MORNING, BUT HAPPY 200 AND PLEASE COME AND SUPPORT US 🥺🥺
Rec!! You HAVE to go and watch Thirteen Lives - the incredible story of the boys who were rescued from the Tham Luang caves in Thailand! (Our partnership with Prime Video)
Kim, Pete, Bridgerton, & Beyoncé (Culture Vulture)
Taylor’s Swift Jets & F1’s Silly Season (The Shit Show)
Our Love Island Debrief (Culture Vulture)
SYSCA playlist (✨Supporters only✨)
Our HUGE SYSCA reading list! (✨Supporters only✨)
