Tag: Newsletter

  • But what about *second* day of rest? (Challenge Day 10 of 30)

    But what about *second* day of rest? (Challenge Day 10 of 30)

    It may not surprise you to find out that after 24 hours of feverish gastro I am still not 100 percent; I did in fact spend a chunk of today asleep. The rest of the day was mostly doing miscellaneous chores, those I felt well enough to do. Looking after the kids, doing the dishes, cooking dinner. Things of the carrying water, chopping wood variety, if not those things exactly. Oh, and once night fell and the kids (mostly) fell asleep I played D&D with my wife and friends. Good times.

    Merry and Pippin look expectantly at Aragorn, son of Arathorn, for a second breakfast
    We’ve had one, yes.

    It seems to me that self-improvement stuff is often unnecessarily compartmentalised, into individualistic, dare I say capitalistic systems, which means — to bring in a little Marx — they are often alienating. If your image of self-improvement and those that practice it is a single male gymbro who takes cold showers and meditates, perhaps this is why. And perhaps that’s why those that pursue self-improvement as marketed often ultimately find it lonely or unfulfilling. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with being single, going to the gym, cold showers (I still do them!) or meditation; just that when these often solo pursuits become what is understood to be “self improvement” then the common things in life that it actually makes a lot more sense to be good at (cooking, cleaning, fixing things, and such) are denigrated. Or, as often seems to be the case these days, they are gendered; the lionised warrior-monkish self-improvement stuff is male-coded whereas cooking and cleaning and child-rearing gets flowy sundresses and Instagram filters and becomes tradwife-chic.

    I say nuts to that. Sometimes the most improving thing you can do is be present with the kids, or make sure the dishes are done, and I’m going to assert that this is independent of gender; you can be sheila or bloke or anywhere in between and find the ordinary things that don’t require a membership the most self-improving activities around.

    Thanks as always for reading. All going well, something like normal service will resume tomorrow.

  • Challenge Day 10 (of 30): Unforced Error, Enforced Rest

    Challenge Day 10 (of 30): Unforced Error, Enforced Rest

    Apparently it was Sir Francis Bacon who coined the phrase “if the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the mountain.” The funny thing is, I’ve always thought the proverb ran the other way around; perhaps in my head it got mixed up with the Christian wisdom about faith being enough to move mountains. But I take the meaning to be roughly the same: if one thing won’t budge, something else will have to give.

    The gastro I have is as bad as any I can remember; the fewer details the better, and it’s kept me in bed and mostly half-asleep with a temperature all day. (A friend made a joke about Jackson Pollock paintings and, well, yes.) But the gastro is clearly made worse by burnout; I have been going too hard and if I keep missing out on sleep to get stuff done I will get sick. Physics! It is what it is.

    So this is as short as these emails get; I’m now going to turn in and try to coax some rest out of the resurgent nausea, and come the morning I will start prioritising bedtimes. It will be tricky to get all the Business Stuff done while also getting enough sleep, but burnout would be trickier still.

    Thanks as always for reading.

  • Challenge Day 8 (of 30)

    Challenge Day 8 (of 30)

    Sawing the Z’s

    Every day I teeter on the edge of not sending one of these out; every day (or night) I manage to do it anyway.

    A lot of the pain I experience, mental or physical, has to do with overthinking. I overthink my art, my work, my videos, my newsletters, my health, my relationships; and while I’m sure this is a human universal — no special snowflake stuff here, we’re a species of overthinkers or we’d probably have stayed happy in the trees — I find I could often do with a bit less of it. That’s what this do-shit-everyday project has accomplished, for this newsletter and much else, and for that alone it has been worth it. Instead of agonising over a given decision the short time-frames involved mean I just get stuck in and do the thing. Finally. At last. Took me long enough.

    The side effect is that I am very tired and spent this morning sleeping in. Don’t worry, it’s not all the newsletter. A lot of it’s my infant child’s emerging teeth causing her to yell in pain throughout the night as nature apparently intended. But I am pooped, almost as much as she is, and I need to turn in early tonight.

    I’m still on the wagon. I went for a run today. I did pullups. And I noticed that after struggling to make 5 pullups at the start of this thirty day thing I am now quietly putting away a couple more per set. I spent a bit of quality time fiddling with my Dungeons & Dragons character sheet; that warlock/bard gunslinger multiclass in a alt-history Wild West setting isn’t going to roll itself, is it?

    Oh and a bunch of folks on TikTok really liked that stamp video, and several people actually subscribed to my print club! Exciting stuff (here it is again, if you want to use it to write actual letters to your actual friends.)

    Print Club

    I also made a much-requested shirt:

    Cats are Comrades – Unisex classic tee

    Also I just realised that it’s been more than a week since I did the proper Cynic’s Guide email to all subscribers. Irony! You guys have had more emails than I’ve sent in the rest of the year, and I still haven’t quite managed a weekly cadence for the rest of the email list. Tomorrow! It’ll give them something fun to do with their Sunday.

    After this email goes out I’ll head to bed. I can’t wait to sleep blissfully for thirty minutes before the baby wakes up.

    Thanks for sticking with me as I stick to whatever this is.

    A skeptical dive into the weird, sketchy, occasionally life-changing world
    of self-improvement.

    Social hellsites:

    The Gram:
    https://www.instagram.com/tworuru/

    The Tube:
    https://www.youtube.com/tworuru

    The Tok:
    https://www.tiktok.com/@tworuru

    And of course, my website, where art can be bought and all these newsletters are archived (and can even be commented on!) is

    Home
  • Challenge Day 7 (of 30) – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Reanimate

    Challenge Day 7 (of 30) – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Reanimate

    Hey everyone! I have already sent out two big ol’ emails today — a lot of you are paying subscribers, and I sent you something special earlier today — and I also put out my first customer newsletter in a while. To save my sanity and some semblance of an early bedtime, you 30 Day Challengers are getting the email I sent out to my customers. I think it’s relevant, as there’s a fair bit of art and stuff you may not have seen yet.

    And apparently rest days are important when you’re doing an absurd endeavour like this newsletter+video posting marathon. That’s probably true, I wouldn’t know, but today is the seventh day so maybe some kind of kip is called for. I believe it’s traditional.

    Oh also I finished the painting part of my secret project today. Y A Y

    Gidday, Two Ruru art enthusiast,

    It’s been a while, but I wanted to show some of what I’ve been working on. This is just some, by the way; I’ve never done more art (or writing in my life.) There’s a good reason for that:

    I’m now a full-time artist/writer/marketing contractor/consultant/dilettante

    So there really has never been a better time (for me) to purchase my work. And I’ve just made the best possible way (for you) to do just that:

    Print Club

    Introducing the Two Ruru Print Club: where you can subscribe to my work (digitally or in-real-lifey, your call!) for a very attractive price ($2 less than the cost of one PDF download from my shop)

    AND the prints come with a postcard printed on the back, so you can send a message to your friends in the snail mail like in the olden days!

    AND there’s an option to get a stamp with your print and the stamp has art on it that I made myself, as seen in the following educational film:

    https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lEiR1nJskVU

    I like all this very much, and I hope you do too. I especially like the idea of getting folks sending actual letters (well, postcards) to each other — it’s something I miss from the pre-internet days and I think it’d be good to get going again.

    Oh and subscribing to any of the tiers will also get you a letter from me each month. If that’s something you’d like.

    Check out the Two Ruru Print Club

    And I’m still making prints, shirts and other things. The aim is to get a print, a sticker, and a shirt made for each piece of art I make each month, so if you want to buy something as a one-off, you definitely have that option too.

    Moby Duck: How to Buy

    That duck picture you’ve seen a lot of is part of the new project I hinted at last time: I am attempting to paint along with every single episode of Bob Ross’ show The Joy of Painting and make… creative adjustments to the art that comes out. I’ve done a few of these now and will be putting out prints and stickers for each, as well as making them available for digital downloads.

    And on a completely unrelated note, people seemed to like this:

    Cats are Comrades – Classic Matte Paper Poster

    There’s now a shirt that says “Yeah, Nah” to complement The Shirt That Says “No.”

    T-Shirt that says “Yeah, Nah” – Men’s AS Colour staple tee

    And custom commissions are extremely open:

    Custom Commission

    If you’re more in the scrolling mood, I’m making an antidote to doom at all of the usual social media hellsites. I challenged myself to post something new every day and I very nearly have — I’m now up to day 22. Feel free to check it via the digital addiction platform of your choice:

    Social Medias

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tworuru/

    YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/tworuru

    The Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tworuru

    New bird coming sooooon

    “Kakabro” (a kakapo wearing a trucker cap) was the standout winner in the poll I sent asking you what bird I should paint next, and work is now underway! The reveal should be my October Surprise (a good one, I hope.) I’m looking forward to showing you.

    Thank You

    Now, more than ever, I appreciate you supporting my work. Go have a hoon on https://www.tworuru.com/shop/ and I’ll have more for you soon.

    Feel free to reply to this email with any suggestions or requests, and I’ll make sure to reply right back – I read every email you send, and I appreciate ‘em, too.

  • Challenge Day 5 (of 30)

    Challenge Day 5 (of 30)

    I have, true to my word, been absolutely smashing the website. As always when I make Website Stuff I feel like Homer when he’s been up all night eating cheese, or like Billy Joel Armstrong in Brain Stew.

    There, some comforting references for Elder Millenials. The rest of you will have to be confused. Let me assuage that by showing you the things I made today. Behold, my stuff!

    Some of the stuff I made today

    First up is a print of old mate Moby Duck, as requested by what seems like a billion but is more likely about ten TikTok commenters:

    Moby Duck on Classic Matte Paper Poster

    And next is a digital download, because DRM is silly and digital products are cheap and convenient for customers and all margin for me, baby! It’s a win-win!

    Moby Duck – Digital Download

    And lastly, the thing that took me most of the day and that I am — justly, I think — absurdly proud of. Welcome… to the Two Ruru Print Club!

    Print Club

    You folks who’ve signed up for this 30 day challenge malarkey are the first ever to see this. And if we’re all extremely lucky, all the subscription links and options on that page should actually work. Feel free to test it out! 1

    A bit more about the print club in the last few minutes before midnight. Essentially, it’s a way to subscribe to my art. I’d been wanting to set up a subscription print club for ages, but I thought the concept was a bit… done. Then I thought: why not postcards? So you can choose to keep them or send them to your mates?

    So that’s what I did.

    And then I thought: but why not stamps too? Because it turns out New Zealand Post offers a custom stamp option, and so now you can bathe in this glory:

    Minutes left until deadline! Oh, I almost forgot. Paid subscribers to the Cynic’s Guide are going to get opted into the Two Ruru Digital Archive automatically. I’ll send an email about it tomorrow. It’s the least I can do for you guys. With that in mind, here is the big red button.

    Thanks all! And feel free to reply to this email and let me know what you reckon.

    (Don’t worry, I’ll sort you if anything goes wrong.)

  • Challenge Day 4 (of 30)

    Challenge Day 4 (of 30)

    Today is a shorter update. I worked on my Secret Project — it’s a painting, but that’s not the secret bit — and I did House Chores.1 This episode isn’t likely to be riveting for anyone playing along at home, but I think there’s a metaphor to be mined out of the boring detritus of domesticity.

    We have a set of curtains in the master bedroom that is Not Doing Well, and hasn’t been for oh, let’s say, a year. The lining, I suppose you’d call it, the stuff that blocks out light and attracts mould, is getting sun-damaged and fragile and has ripped accordingly. When the rip started it was about four centimetres long.

    “We should fix that,” Louise, or I, said.

    Of course, since then, the rip has grown up and had little baby rips of its own. It’s now a good metre long. Or I should say was over a metre long, because today I finally took the curtains down and fixed them.

    Of course, I’d figured out how to fix them many months ago. About midway through what I am, entirely without justification, going to call the Rip Saga, I’d bought some iron-on patches and tape from Spotlight and done nothing with them. As is so often the case with ADHD stuff, there were what seemed like dozens of reasons not to fix the curtains. The stuff I’d bought might not work. The ironing board wasn’t big enough. The curtains might rip even more. All these excuses, half-thought, felt as a kind of almost tangible barrier in the mind.

    So while the kiddos were out and after I’d done enough work on my secret painting I popped into our bedroom, took the curtains down — five minutes, tops — laid them out on a set of drawers, no ironing board needed, grabbed the iron-on patches and scissors, and the curtains were fixed. It took maybe 45 minutes.

    45 minutes, for a job I’ve been avoiding for a year.

    I don’t want to pin all this sort of thing on ADHD. Every person in with a house has housework they don’t get to. But that odd little barrier in the mind, the terminal indecision followed by a reflexive urge to do something else — that, I believe, is an ADHD thing. So many of the things I struggle with come down to indecision. I can’t decide, so I avoid, so I fall in to some kind of default behaviour.

    Since finishing my old job and attempting my own thing, this sort of stuff happens far less. I’m noticing I get more done, more often. Some of this is the inevitable result of having more time and more mental bandwidth; there’s a reason newly unemployed people are so often portrayed in media as taking a sudden interest in housework or arcane hobbies.

    But I feel like mine runs a bit deeper; I’m finding myself more apt to do tasks I’d typically avoid. That little mental hiccup of indecision, the stab of resistance, is somehow more noticeable and therefore more avoidable. And some of this is quite definitely because of my do-something-every-day project; instead of just letting the roadblocks get in the way I’m just smashing through them, and realising (to continue the road transport metaphor) they were more cones than concrete barriers.

    Or maybe I just give fewer ducks these days.

    Speaking of ducks! For inexplicable reasons, that duck I painted has gone almost legitimately viral on TikTok. Last I looked it had 123,000 views, which is still small beer in the scheme of things but is by far the most looks anything I’ve ever made has had. My almost-daily posting and gruelling video-making has, at last, paid off. Not in money, of course. That would be too easy. But there are a lot of folks asking for prints, and so I’m going to have to get some of those ready to sell tomorrow.

    Oh here is that large red button again I suppose. Thanks to those who have taken out paid subscriptions! You can pay what you want, so long as it’s more than $3 dollarydoos

    https://buttondown.com/cynicsguide?as_embed=true
    1. Then I played D&D with friends, which is why this one is late (there will be a new reason every night, I’m sure.)
  • Challenge Day 3 (of 30)

    Challenge Day 3 (of 30)

    I know, I know, I said I’d get this out bright and early, but apparently bright and early is (at the time of writing) 10:30 PM. However, this fundamental inability to get a newsletter out before sunset has given me an incredible idea, based on the shittiest, griftiest, shiftiest, outright dumbest self-help tome I ever read: The Morning Miracle. This book, with fellow travellers like The 5 AM Club, claim that your inability to rise before 4 AM is what’s holding you back in life. Well, here’s my contra-thesis, in the form of an obnoxious self-help book blurb:

    The Midnight Method

    Author, artist, entrepreneur, male model and playboy dilettante’s Joshua Drummond’s otherwise perfect life was marred by just one flaw: his urgent need to rise at 5 AM. He felt like he was cursed to be an early riser – until he discovered this one weird secret trick: The Midnight Method. In this 864 page book and accompanying webinar series, Drummond outlines the ultimate lifehack that changed it all – staying up late every single night. His rediscovery of the secret known by midnight luminaries from Benjamin Franklin to Imhotep is exactly what your sad life has been missing. The Midnight Method will teach you the seven highly effective habits that lead to being a regular night-owl, and will at last unlock your health, productivity, riches, love life, and happiness.

    There you go. Wasn’t that horrible? It’s accurate, though; The Morning Miracle and my Midnight Method have the exact same thesis at their core: go without a bit of sleep to get more stuff done, or go for a jog, or something. It’s just that one is surrounded by weird biblical hang-ups about wise men rising early, and the other is culturally frowned upon.

    I promised you a list. I also did a spreadsheet, but it’s not ready for public consumption. That will have to be tomorrow.

    I reserve the right to change the order of the following items without notice, but this is pretty much the order in which I want to get stuff done. In between these specific jobs, I will of course be working on commissions and making videos and cooking food and changing nappies: ideally not all at the same time.

    28 Days Later

    1. Ideas, part 1
    2. Ideas, part 2
    3. A 28-day todo list (you are here).
    4. Secret project
    5. Daddy Capitalism: add a whole bunch of products to the store and send out an email to customers. Work on secret project.
    6. Rejection therapy: Ring around 20 art/gallery/souvenir-ish shops and see if they’ll stock my stuff. Finish secret project.
    7. Very Specific Parody Video: I’ve been wanting to do this for ages. I figure it’ll take about a day to film.
    8. Rejection therapy, part 2: Ask customers for testimonials. Ask local cafe/venues about drink&draws.
    9. Plug me pls Ask influencers for plugs. Prepare materials for Print Club.
    10. Print Club 7: Launch preorders for print club – digital and physical.
    11. Level Up Louise: This is my awful code name for my adult drawing course. I’d like to get a few people learning from this weekend.
    12. Day of Rest: I will probably spend Sunday resting with family, by which I mean “doing chores”
    13. Again, capitalism daddy: Adding more products to the shop
    14. Business time: Business plans and investment pitches. As much fun as it sounds.
    15. Those that can’t: Developing course materials for professional development course
    16. Brand me: hitting up corporations – greeting card companies, apparel companies, whoever it is who makes jigsaws, etc – to see if they want birds or other paintings/designs on their shit
    17. Artwork for corridors: put up a website page advertising the suitability of my stuff for doctor’s surgeries or hospital waiting rooms or other depressing places that need something cheerful in them
    18. Crowd Fund: Investigate some kind of crowdfunding for Season 1 of Everybob or something.
    19. The First Rule of Print Club: Actually launch print club
    20. Look for investors: I’m pretty sure you find them under rocks, right?
    21. Send out prints for print club
    22. Moar products on the store, another email to customers. The aim is to have a print, a shirt, and a sticker available for pretty much everything I make.
    23. Stage a drink & draw
    24. Stage an art class
    25. Stage a professional development presentation / lesson
    26. Launch crowdfunding
    27. Pitch to investors
    28. Apply for a real job. I kid! If I see real jobs that look awesome I will apply for them anyway.

    That is a lot and obviously jobs will blend into each other or stretch out across days, it is all subject to change, but getting all the shit I need to do written out is cathartic.

    Today’s video

    I made a video about ruining one of my Everybob paintings with a duck. It did OK on Instagram, terrible on YouTube, and for some reason – I genuinely have no idea why – it is going gangbusters on TikTok. Last I looked it was getting about hundred views every other minute. This doesn’t mean much, especially in the TikTok scheme of things where 1 million views barely rates as viral, but it’s still easily the most successful video I’ve done even if the algorithm arbitrarily cuts off the view firehose in the next five minutes. Check it out here:

    @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

    Self-improvement

    I did a bunch of pullups as part of a houseworkout. Remember my New Year’s resolution? I’m still on it. I really want to get that muscle-up before December ends.

    Like and subscribe

    Here as always is the big red button that helps me out. You know what to do.



  • Challenge Day 2 (of 30)

    Challenge Day 2 (of 30)

    It’s late; I need to figure out a way to get these emails out before stupid o’clock. You know what doesn’t help? GODDAMN DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME THAT’S WHAT. Despite evidence clearly showing that daylight saving kills or maims or just really pisses off a huge number of people every year, we persist in the monumental folly of meddling with time. And it’s even worse with kids, because they don’t understand why they have to get up and go to bed an hour earlier and it is apparently bad form to give them coffee. “Oh, but it’s so nice to have that extra sunlight in the evening!” Yeah, it is, and that would have happened anyway, thanks to the axial inclination of the earth and the sun’s gravitational pull. I hate daylight saving and I will spend the next few months furious about it until time returns to its rightful course.

    Did you miss yesterday’s email?

    Some of you didn’t sign up to this until the email was already out. Luckily, I am archiving them all on tworuru dot com. Go read, comment, share, and enjoy.

    Challenge Day 1 (of 30)

    Ahem

    Here are the remaining revenue plans/ideas I have.

    1. Art classes/drink&draw sessions etc
      I am good enough at art to know I’m not and never will be top-tier, but I’m also well aware that I have more draughtmanship than the average schmo. If those that can’t, teach, then surely those that can (a bit) would be better at it? Also, I enjoy the science of drawing, and I like teaching people. Some drawing classes or maybe putting on a few of those drink-and-draw sessions could help keep the wolf from the door. I was thinking of starting up an online cohort of folks who’d like to pick up some drawing skill; email me if you’re keen – josh@tworuru.com
    2. Teaching teachers how to draw
      You know who mostly can’t draw, at all? Teachers! To me, this is mind-blowing; it’s like if someone dropped a casual “Oh, I can’t add” or “Hah, yeah, I never learned to read!” in conversation. It’s not just arty-farty; the ability to sketch or diagram is a vital skill for any number of STEM-ish careers and a lot of kids aren’t being taught how to do it, because their parents or teachers didn’t know how. So I’m putting together a little professional development course for primary and intermediate teachers in NZ. The idea is just to teach the basics, to get teachers to the point where they’re “better” than the kids (children have a pointedly unsophisticated view of drawing; if you can do realism, you’re amazing) and they can take it or leave it from there. I’ve been at it for a while now and have a pilot school signed up ready to go. If you’re a teacher or principal or aligned such, ping me on josh@tworuru.com
    3. Investment/crowdfunding
      I think a few of my business plans – those I’ve detailed here and others – have legs, shapely business legs that might actually provide a return on investment. To that end, I am interested in hearing from anyone who might be interested in investing, or can simply tell me how to talk to potential investors without falling flat on my face. I also think there’s some crowdfunding potential for painting series – for example painting along with every Bob Ross episode – that might be worth looking into. If any of that is something you know about, josh@tworuru.com will find me.
    4. A day job. I am not proud. I’m aware that the spool-up-your-own business biz may not work out, despite my best efforts — and you’d best believe I am giving it my best effort — and I’m more than happy to take on another normal-er job. On the bright side, the deeply stupid AI bubble should be bursting soon, so people might start hiring humans with a comms and marketing skillset again. On the dark side, the bursting may reap pure economic chaos, so who knows, maybe I’m better off trying to convince people to buy my stickers.

    Your ideas. Give them to me.

    I have more ideas, but that’ll do for now. Is there anything you reckon I’ve missed? Hit the reply button or snap an email off to josh@tworuru.com and let me know.

    Also your money

    The big red button lies below. Do you click it, helping me hit my $1k a month newsletter goal, or do you let it languish, curious to see if I can keep up daily emails for more than two days running?



    A bit of transparency is in order here. I currently bring in about (it varies, for various reasons) $400 a month from this newsletter. That may surprise you; perhaps it sounds like a lot, perhaps it sounds like very little. Either way, I’d love to get it up to $1000, a hefty 10 percent of my revenue goal.

    Tomorrow — bright and early tomorrow, not at what is apparently 10:45 PM but is actually 9:45 PM and you cannot convince me otherwise — I will send out a calendar of all the biz stuff I’m going to do or try to do for the next 28 days. There may, and this is fair warning, also be a spreadsheet. I hope you are ready.

  • Challenge Day 1 (of 30)

    Challenge Day 1 (of 30)

    For those who signed up for the Cynic’s Guide way back when, this new series may be what you were expecting (compared to whatever it is you got) it’s just me, trying on every damn self-improvement business hustle malarkey under the sun in an effort to make something stick, or at least make money, in 30 days. Let’s go.

    It’s business time

    I am wearing my business socks, mm. Because I am addicted to eating food and having a house, I am attempting to spool up a business in 30 days. This isn’t quite as follycious[1] as it might sound; people sometimes manage this stuff in a weekend. The target I’ve set myself is $10k revenue a month, which is a curious combination of lofty and about what a supermarket middle manager earns, but I’d rather shoot for the moon and miss and… end up asphyxiating during a decaying eccentric orbit? Damn my inability to let trite metaphors go unexamined. I’m giving it a damn good go, put it that way.

    The model I am using – because I like easily divisible numbers – is 10 revenue streams of $1000 each. Of course it may not shake out that way, chances are some will be more and some substantially less, but here’s the 10 that I think I can spin up from scratch or develop out over the next 30 days.

    1. Corporate comms and marketing stuff. I would be silly not to do this; it’s been my bread and butter for a decade now. To that end I have set up a website for a freelance case study business, specialising in being a tech whisperer for industries that absolutely suck at selling themselves. If you’re an accountant, systems integrator, infosec consultant, or your business has anything to do with Linux, you’d better make that call to the Content King.[2]
    2. Art shop. https://tworuru.com has been ticking over for ages now, but I’ve never really souped it up. I’ve been absolutely smashing out art lately and the plan is to make – at minimum – three kinds of product for each new piece I make: a print, a sticker, and a t-shirt.
    3. Commissions. A bunch of people have bought a commissioned artwork since I opened them up again and I am very grateful; you are keeping the (two) wolves from the door. You can get one of your own here if you’re so inclined: https://www.tworuru.com/product/custom-commission/
    4. Two Ruru Snail-Mail Print Club[3]. You subscribe and you get a print and a letter in the mail, each month! Like the olden days! I am actually absurdly excited about his one as I think I have come up with a really unusual twist on the fairly well-done concept of a snail mail club. I’ll introduce in an upcoming email. I’ll let you guys know first, because you’re cool. Oh and everyone who joins the Snail Mail Print Club also gets access to:
    5. Two Ruru Email Print Club. Exactly the same idea as the above, but users will subscribe just like you do to this newsletter and I’ll send you the letter and prints via electronic mail. Oh and I almost forgot; everyone who subs to either Print Club will get access to a downloadable archive of every artwork I’ve ever made.
    6. The newsletters. Yup, you’re here too! If I can get around ~200 paid subscribers a month, that’s 10 percent of my revenue requirement taken care of. And – as I hope this email proves – I will be writing a lot more. If I’ve made my case well enough, scroll down to the big red button

    That’s just the first six for now – I realise, now that I’m on a roll, that I have lots more of these in various stages of feasibility and completion, and these emails are meant to be short. So I’ll talk about the next five ideas/revenue streams in the next one of these thirty day challenge emails. And in the following email I’ll put in what I plan to be doing on each of the subsequent 29 days – there will be a new, business-time focus for each day. Today was “Explain the plan”.

    “Artwork” of the day

    I’m tired. Here’s a duck.

    It's an image of a duck on a lake, I painted both. People thought this was AI. It's not!

    Today’s video

    I made a video of me painting the black hole scene from Interstellar, one of my favourite sequences and visuals in any film. I love the painting. I’m less sure about the video, but I never know about those.

    And here’s the one from the day before, in which I painted those weird lights you see when you shut your eyes. People seemed to like it.

    What did you do today self-improvement-wise?

    I went for a run. Pre-kids I could whip out a casual 10k and now… I can’t. So I am taking it easy, because nothing will stymie me like a swollen knee. I am doing Couch to 5K. Should you be struck by the urge to join me, feel free. Because I am more bougie than I am comfortable with, I am using an app. You don’t have to use the app; there are plenty of training programs available online and you can get pretty accurate distance estimates via Google Maps or your neighbourhood.

    Lifehacks

    When I come across anything I’m doing that helps me on this mad caper, I’m putting it here.

    Making the most of your spare minutes

    I’m writing this particular snippet in the nine minutes the air fryer has to finish doing the burger patties we got in the 3 for $20 deal. If I have a useful lifehack to offer, it’s that productive activities – or, less toxically, “things I genuinely want or need to do but end up doomscrolling instead” – can be done in the same time blocks, on the same device, that you’d typically use to have a hoon on the Tok pipe. The more I do this the more I find that the phone in my pocket is a boon instead of a curse, and it’s one of the very few self-improvement plans that survives contact with kids. Things that have built-in timers work well for this method. It’ll go beep in a minute or few, and I’ll leave the laptop and go assemble burgers for me and (Borat voice) My Wife.

    Markdown

    Writer? Get yourself a Markdown editor and learn Markdown. It’s the fastest, most distraction-free, and ultimately foolproof (and I am very foolish) way to format as you write. I use Obsidian for the moment – it’s what I used to write this – but there are lots of others. Many, including Obsidian, are free. Get amongst!

    Yeah/Nah

    A few minutes before sending this out I realised that some of the people who signed up to my “Yeah” list also clicked “Nah” to receiving an email every day for the next 30 days. I am sorry about this but you must admit that it is a very funny, very Kiwi problem to have, given how we tend to use this expression. Of course it’s my fault; I simply shouldn’t have included a “Nah” option. If you’re getting this email and you’d rather not, simply reply to this one and let me know I messed up, and I’ll take you off the list.

    For everyone who did want to get these, welcome! I hope you enjoyed Day 1.

    1. This, a portmanteau of “folly” and "fallacious’ is not a word, but it should be. ↩︎

    2. Old Simpsons fans: this is exactly the joke you think it is. Also I apologise for the AI generated image; it’s a placeholder. I need to create a new File Photo as none of mine were even verging on professional. ↩︎

    3. I am thinking of setting some ground rules, and the first and second rule will probably be “Talk about Print Club”. ↩︎

    Here’s the big red button, click it to help me on my follacious journey



  • Pivot to video

    Pivot to video

    Thanks so much for the incredible response to my previous newsletter. People wrote a lot of very kind and thoughtful emails and comments; I think I’ve managed to respond to most of them, and some of them are so insightful that I’ll be spotlighting them in an upcoming edition. So here we are, a week later — using the most flexible possible definition of a week1 — and, as promised, I have a new newsletter, and an update on what I think the Cynic’s Guide to Self-Improvement will become.

    The short version is: I’ve started making video essays.

    Here’s a bit more “why.”

    I started this project in the hope that cracking the self-improvement code would give me the power to get more stuff made. I wanted to make several kinds of things: fiction; and non-fiction columns, essays and features — the kind of thing I used to write for media. I also wanted to make art, and videos of me making the art. And while it’s true that all that is a redonkulous workload, and probably impossible, it’s also very true that I spent a lot of time avoiding doing any of it, mainly by reading and scrolling life away on my phone.

    I have managed to write a lot of self-improvement articles! But that isn’t all I wanted to make. And, on another selfish note, the move away from Substack that I made for personal morality reasons has completely munted my subscriber growth. My subscriber numbers have been static or diminishing slightly for months now. Substack has a semi-decent recommendation engine that was my main source of subs, and while it is flawed — a lot of subs are spammy, and they recommended a Nazi newsletter the other day! — it was something.

    I’ve been mentally wrassling with all this for months now. Some time ago whilst scrolling, I came across a timely YouTube video essay which was about why you should make YouTube videos and was set entirely to gameplay footage of Sonic the Hedgehog 1.2

    This fascinated me, because the essay was very well written and the visuals — while compelling — were completely tangential to the video.

    This last part was the most important. I’d made quite a few art videos in the past, but they were always mostly about the art I was making. I’d found this restrictive as well as time-consuming. Now I realised: I could make art videos that were not actually or only tangentially about the art; where the visuals of painting just served as an interesting backdrop for the content I wanted to make anyway.

    Essays like this one.

    There’s another factor at play. The event I hinted at in my last newsletter is this: My day job, in the tech industry, is finished. And while I’m actively looking for another job, either in or out of the tech industry3, I would very very very very very much like for a decent proportion of my income — ideally all of it — to come from the art I make, or things related to that art. Yes, this is another lofty goal. But people achieve it all the time! I know a number of full-time, non-starving artists, as well as quite a few who make a living from their newsletters. Why don’t we have both?

    Summed up:

    • I need income from art/writing stuff
    • I can’t have that without a following
    • One of the best ways to get a following is to play the content game.

    Which brings me to this video that I’ve spent quite a lot of time making. The other half of the project is explained there. I’m calling it “Everybob.” That should make sense once you watch the video.

    Astute readers will realise that you have not actually seen this so-far mythical video, or a link to it. Well, if you’ve read this far, chances are you have the attention span for what I’m about to ask. Sneakily, all the text above — in addition to being fascinating — is serving as a gatekeeper for skimmers. And I can’t have readers watching the video for thirty seconds and then clicking away. Can’t embed it here either. The Algorithm will punish me for that. It is a cruel master, but we all serve at its whim. If you want to watch the video — and it’s fine if you don’t, but significantly finer if you do — it would help me enormously if you did the following. Click on the upcoming thumbnail image, which will take you to my channel page, and click/tap on the video to start playing it, then, in diminishing order of importance:

    • Watch it all the way through
    • Leave a Like
    • Leave a comment
    • Subscribe to the YouTube channel
    • Share the video with at least one friend who you think will like it enough to watch it through to the end, or one enemy who will hate it so much they watch it through to the end.

    For all the reverential talk about the Algorithm, it isn’t black magic; fundamentally, it rewards videos that get watched all the way through to the end and that get engaged with. That’s it. The only place luck comes in to it is with the initial crop of people the video gets shown to. If you wonderful people, my real subscribers, can signal to YouTube that people will watch my video, there’s actually a very good chance that the Algorithm picks it up and shows it to many many more.

    Whew. Nervous. Here’s the link to my channel page. If you’re keen to help out, watch the video through to the end (important!) and let me know what you reckon in the YouTube comments.

    For the avoidance of doubt, here is a ginormous red link that will take you to my YouTube video page

    Don’t worry! This isn’t going to become a newsletter where all I do is urge you to watch my videos. If anything, it’s the opposite; the videos exist so hopefully more people will find my writing. Instead of asking viewers to Like and Subscribe in the traditional way to you my video content, I’ll be asking them to Subscribe (For Real) to my newsletter. Think of the videos as another medium, as way of watching or listening to the newsletter content, at your leisure. And subscribers will get early access to the vids, behind-the-scenes content, and they’ll often get to read the actual essays before they become video essays.

    Oh, and if you want to support my work by becoming a paid subscriber, that would be absolutely mint — not just because paid support is going to be extremely personally helpful, but because I’m finally going to start offering some proper benefits to paid subscribers.

    If you’re a paid sub, look for something special in your inbox soon.

    Subscribe now – pay whatever amount you want!

    There’s a lot more I’ve got planned and ready to go, but that can wait for next time. Thanks, as always, for reading.

    And as of now, thanks for watching as well.

    Another shout-out: If you have any jobs that need doing, or know of jobs going, just hit reply and let me know. Likewise, if you’d like to commission a or buy a painting (examples of the sort of stuff I can do are in the video!) now would be a really good time to do that — just hit reply. And feel free to get in touch if for no other reason that you feel like it; I like reading your replies.

    Also, comments are back! And they’re on a website I own and control so they’re never going away again. You can make a comment right here, just below the footnotes 🙂

    1. It’s 11 days later, but we’re still technically in the week following the week where I wrote the last newsletter. Unless you believe that the next week starts on a Sunday, which it absolutely does not. Blame ISO8601 if you don’t like it; I don’t make the rules.
    2. It’s well worth a watch!
    3. Hit me up if you know of anything going! I’m going to do an online CV kind of thing soon but for now know my skill-set is comms, marketing, and most things relating to those areas.