Hi friends,

Ratik here — for once — starting to write CC early. There’s still eight days till my end-of-month deadline. Good job, me! I can’t take all the credit though: It’s a Saturday after a busy work week. I watched a great film last night, which I am still thinking about. I’ve been basking in the winter sun for the last two hours. I just brewed myself a delicious cup of coffee. So, of course, I felt like writing. Multiple factors have come together to formulate the perfect vibe for me to write.

I finally watched Haider (2014) last night. Yes, I know, I’m very late. I usually am though so it's okay. Haider has been on my watchlist for many years. The decision to watch it last night was pretty sudden. My girlfriend and I were looking for something cozy to watch and then she suggested we watch Haider (which she loves) instead. Haider is the polar opposite of what one would call cozy. It’s dark and gruesome. It smacks you in the gut. But, it had been on my list for years and I’m always down for a Good™ movie. We put the movie on and let it consume us for the next three hours.

C'mon C'mon-ers —

Hello hello! It is I, Ratik, writing to you using a teeny tiny keyboard (pictured below!). I built this keyboard last week during Diwali week aka time off from work week. I'd originally planned on writing and sending this month's issue of CC during my time off. I had also planned on spending time on some top secret side projects. Did I do any of that?

Noooooope.

Helloooooo friend,

How are you doing? What do you have going on these days? What's new? I'm Ratik, founder and CEO of C'mon C'mon, broadcasting to you LIVE from my bedroom. I'm listening to a Tiny Desk Concert as I type this email. The vibes are immaculate and I feel GOOD.

My workplace Kagi has a monthly meeting for the whole company. It's called the monthly Townhall. In this month's Townhall, we had a mini session by our AI Lead Matt about mental health and burnout. During the session, Matt told us about an important study on human psychology called Pavlovian counterconditioning. In the study, researchers performed an experiment on rats using food and electric shocks. Two scenarios were devised based on 'stimuli ordering'. In the first scenario, rats received a shock followed by food. In the second, food came first and then the shock.

Over time, something fascinating emerged. The rats receiving an electric shock first got comfortable with it. They started to willingly get the shock in order to get food. In contrast, the cohort of rats — which was getting food first — became averse to food and stopped eating. This study highlighted an important trait of mammal brains: the back-propagation of rewards. The rats started to enjoy electric shocks because they understood food would be given to them as a reward. Wild.

Hi buds —

Welcome back to C’mon C’mon! I’m Ratik and BOY has it been a busy month.

A few readers replied to the previous issue of the newsletter. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your kind words. I hear you, I see you. I just couldn’t get back to you. In the rush of getting the first issue out, I forgot to toggle a particular setting in my newslettering software. This made the newsletter go out from an email alias rather than my actual email. As a result, I did see each of your messages but had no way to actually reply back. I’ve patched this up now and things should work as expected. Hit reply and let’s find out!

Hi —

I'm Ratik, an engineer, designer, writer, podcaster, and photographer. Welcome to C'Mon C'Mon, the start of my adventure in newslettering.

I love email and by extension email newsletters. There is a certain intimacy to delivering email directly into a living, breathing person's inbox. Social media has allowed to us to connect with each other in an unprecedented manner over the last fifteen years. My introduction to social media was through Facebook in middle school. I have so many fond memories of (instant) messaging my buds from school the moment I got back home.