I’m Josh Drummond. I’m a writer, an artist, and I work as freelance contractor and consultant. Want to work together? Email josh@tworuru.com
The description above is a bit meaningless, as is so much work-speak, so this page is here to explain in a bit more detail.
I live in a small town in New Zealand with my wife and children. I like cooking, hiking, mountain biking, and playing board games and tabletop RPGs with my friends.
The best cookbooks are Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, and anything by Recipe Tin Eats.
The best hike I’ve done is the Tongariro Crossing. The best MTB track was a double-diamond monster I did at Rotorua completely by accident and I’m lucky I survived.
My TTRPG of choice is Nimble (GMs, convert your D&D 5e adventure to Nimble today!)
Everything on this page was made with my own brain and hands and computer without the “aid” of AI.
Contracting and consulting work
My latest contracting work is the website, videos, and case study for Beyond Expectations. I also consulted on their social media and marketing strategy.
Here’s a rather lovely testimonial they did for me.
We’ve been delighted with our Marketing support from Two Ruru.
Josh hit the ground running. He understood our business, the terminology we use, the customers we serve. We’re able to provide rough inputs to Josh and he turns them into well crafted and relevant outputs, suited to the various modes of communication we use.
Our transition to HubSpot CRM has also been assisted by Josh as a by-product of his engagement. He created our new website using HubSpot as the underlying platform, got us up & running with direct email messaging from HubSpot, which also required us to get our data in order and segment customers. We’re streets ahead of where we were with our HubSpot evolution.
There’s also a bit of icing on the cake. Josh is the Master of Case Studies. We’ve done our first one with him, and it will be used for many any different purposes and shared with several key stakeholders.
And a cherry on top – Josh is great to work with!
Writing
I’ve written for Stuff, The Spinoff, 7 Days, Webworm, The Waikato Times, Metro (RIP) and many more publications. Here are a couple of recent stories I’m proud of:
Tech stuff
I am an editor/writer and do tech and moral support for Emily Writes Weekly, one of NZ’s most-read newsletters.
I’ve moved several publications from Substack to Ghost, including Emily Writes Weekly and Alice’s Soapbox.
I maintain this website, tworuru.com, which acts as my newsletter, art e-commerce site, and blog. It’s made in WordPress, hosted on Dreamhost.
Voiceovers, voice acting, and podcasting
I made this audio documentary podcast for Webworm:
I’ve also done freelance voiceover and voice acting work.
I’ve just started making a weekly podcast with Emily Writes:
Video editing
I edit videos for both myself and clients. These are good examples of the sort of stuff I make.
@tworuru This absolute unit of a duck has blessed your timeline to pass on a very important message: you’re wonderful. Pass the duck on to someone who needs to hear it. #motivation #painting #rubberducky #bobross #positivity ♬ Wes Anderson-esque Cute Acoustic – Kenji Ueda
A few of my many projects
I wrote and edited the Pacesetters books for Xero. To my knowledge they are the first piece of marketing that accountants formed an orderly queue to pay $30 for.
I was a researcher for the documentary film Tickled, directed by David Farrier and Dylan Reeve.
I created the Bird Hat Grift Club, an actually-working parody of NFT schemes that were at the time incredibly hyped and are now deservedly mocked.
I’d do one for AI too but I’m worried it might get taken seriously.
I wrote the copy and co-created an AI disclosure project with Walter Lim, called Responsible AI Disclosure. It was one of the first of its kind; today, there are many such projects.
Art projects
I have a lot of art projects and I am a bit behind with my portfolio, but you can see a reasonable selection at my Portfolio page.
Tech Knowledgey
The list of stuff I know how to use (or usefully kludge) is embarrassingly long. I’m really good with Photoshop and decently good at Premiere Pro and InDesign. I also work in the relatively non-toxic, less-enshittified alternatives to the Creative Suite, like Da Vinci Resolve, Affinity, and various OSS equivalents. I have worked with what seems like every CMS under the sun and some that have been blessedly sunset. I can cope with the Office suite, if I really must, but I’d rather use software that works, like the Libre Office or whatever Google is calling their suite these days.
One day I will move my entire workflow to an open-source stack, but today is not that day.
My current computer is a MacBook Pro M2.
My next computer is something made by Framework.
LinkedIn is a bad website.
Microsoft Teams is the worst software that exists.
I just had to get those last two off my chest.
Want to work together? Email josh@tworuru.com