Rosie’s Newsletter #1 - Rosie Campbell

December 29, 2020

Hi friends,

I’m Rosie, you’re receiving this because you signed up to my newsletter - welcome to the first issue! I’d love to hear how you came across me - was it my Roam videos? My Obsidian Publish? Something else? Feel free to hit reply - since this is the first issue I promise to read and reply to all messages 🤓

This newsletter is a bit of an experiment; I’m not sure yet what the structure will be or how often I’ll send it, but you can expect it to cover topics like productivity, systems, tools for thought, and anything else I find interesting.

What I’ve Been up To

After spending an embarrassing amount of my spare time tinkering with different blogging platforms, I appear to have (at least temporarily) settled on Ghost. Here’s my new website!

I’d actually been holding out for Obsidian Publish to support custom domains, with the intention of using it to power my whole site. But while it would be a breeze to maintain, I realized it would lack a lot of the features and flexibility you can get from a platform like Ghost. Let me know if it would be helpful for me to write up my thinking about this?

I plan to use my site for microblogging (sharing quick thoughts, quotes, and anything that resonates with me) as well as longer-form essays. I guess Twitter would be a more obvious place for some of this, but a) its good to control your own content, b) Twitter has problems, and c) I’ve felt weirdly anxious about posting on Twitter recently. I think it’s because I have such a random mix of followers that I feel obliged to include a ton of context in my tweets which is obviously not practical. Anyone else have this issue?

Writing

Anyway, I’m trying to start publishing more regularly, and due to being off work for the holidays I’ve managed to kick start this with a few items:

Some quick reflections on a thread by Paul Millerd about the state of work in 2020
I try to be less confused about the difference between ‘win-win’ and ‘positive sum’
How I capture everything with Drafts

Question of the Week

How come firms in a market economy are centrally planned internally?

See the link for more context, and send me your thoughts!

What I’ve Been Watching/Reading/Listening To

TV: Killing Eve (available on Hulu in the US). I’ve already seen the whole thing, but it’s so good I’m watching it for a second time. It’s such a compelling drama, the writing is masterfully witty, and it has fantastic female characters. I want to be Carolyn Martens when I grow up. I found out recently it was written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge (of Fleabag; which is also awesome), because of course it was.
Podcast: Chameleon: Hollywood Con Queen. I’ve been fascinated by scams recently, and have been using investigative podcasts about them to bribe myself into going on walks so I can listen to them. Today I binged this one, and it’s really quite something.
Book: The Girl on the Train. My GoodReads is full of aspirational literary books I like to think I’ll someday read, but sometimes you just need a good psychological thriller. This one was certainly a page-turner, and I enjoyed the ‘unreliable narrator’ aspect.
TV: Death to 2020. When people ask me what I miss most about the UK now that I live in California, my answer is always: crumpets and gallows humor. If you feel like you need to laugh at the horrorshow that was 2020, Charlie Brooker’s Death to 2020 really hits the spot.

What’s Next?

All the cool kids seem to be writing ‘100 tips to live better’ pieces (see here and here). I’ve been thinking about doing something like this for a while - stay tuned for mine, which will likely focus on becoming a competent and agenty human.

Thanks for reading - please feel free to reply with any reactions or feedback on the content, length, frequency, what you would like more of, etc - and if you know of anyone else who might like this, please forward it!

Until next time,

Rosie 🌈