200 - 4️⃣ years
Hey !
It's been four years writing this newsletter, and a lot of things have happened over that time. It's pretty insane to think I've written 200 posts and still have y'all following me here reading this stuff.
I'm still loving it, but time and energy are getting away from me. Potential changes later on, but let's do the classic roundup!
Quick stats
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49 posts written (not including this one)
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No net new subscribers last year I think - I believe I actually lost a subscriber somewhere? I currently have 82 active subscribers, broken down in the following way:
- Deloitte: 43
- Uni: 12
- School: 20
- Family: 3
- Boardgames: 3
- Untagged: 1
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~50k words written, at an average of ~1k words per post. This is a decrease by a third in terms of post length - dayum there are a lot less essays I've written!
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3955 sentences
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1790 paragraphs
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An approx. read time (all posts) of 4 hours, 23 minutes, 40 seconds
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An equivalent of 105 A4 pages in total!
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An average open rate of 60% (ranging between 45% to 75%), which equates to nearly 50 people reading this per week!
Not shabby at ALL. Last year I had a goal to write less essays, and focus more on the key things that I wanted to do. Looks like it succeeded, if at least a bit?
Post highlights
Top 5 posts:
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175 - A detour into mental health - I was scared of posting this. Truly, it was confronting to uncover and look at these incidents all together at once by myself - let alone open up to you, my audience of varied backgrounds. I remember telling the Paramedics story in person a lot, and making it a fun comedy bit; I use humour as a defense mechanism, did you know? But re-reading that I realise how intense it was, and how far I've come. Thank you for all the kind comments, emails, in person catch-ups etc. following this; it meant a lot to me.
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165 - Roll for Stealth - I'm...not sure why this one did so well in terms of open rates. Maybe 'Roll for Stealth' people thought was about D&D? Or it was intriguing enough to open? Who knows - regardless, now y'all know more about how I think about breaking into places :D
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183 - A Melbourne Chicken Itinerary - not unexpected. Since this post I have been to El Jannah (excellent place!), Marrybrown (not as great), Leonard's House of Love (fantastic!) and some other Korean fried chicken places. I would add El Jannah and Leonard's in a heartbeat!
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166 - Survey for One - I still love this idea, but it's a bit dumb. It's a shorter one, which is probably why it got the opens it did - you gotta get rid of the dumb ideas so you can get to the great ones.
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173 - Lessons from a Renovation - I mean, it was the only thing I could talk about for like...a year. It wasn't exactly my whole identity, but it also wasn't not my identity. I'm in my interior decorating era right now (and by that I mean I bought like...a few pieces of art to fill these blank walls with, but I still need more!)
Personal favourites in addition to the above:
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160 - I'm also writing...fiction? - I liked this one because I'm a selfish mf who likes reading his own writing. I still love writing and writing and writing, and these fiction pieces helped scratch an itch I have. Writing in general is just...a thing that I do, and I love. It's one of those things that you just make time for - I might not necessarily be a literary genius, or be able to write beautiful poetry, but I really like writing. Enough that I would sacrifice sleep and other activities for it. Is this what they call passion?
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162 - Bed - honestly thought this would do better than it did! IT'S BED. All the stuff you'd want to know about bed sizes - specifically, how big they could get. What's not to love.
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192 - Omakase: Reloaded - it's still my dream menu - a chicken omakase. I thought there would be more replies about what types of omakase's others would want to have - because I'm thinking of like...a cake omakase, or a bread omakase, or a butter omakase. Imagine all the different iterations of omakase you could make!! Why isn't this a thing 😭
Survey
- will update this in the future as I didn't give lots of time for it - keep it coming here :D
Goals
From last year, we had a bunch of goals, which I think I've done most of!:
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More personal posts!: Every 4th post is now a Life Update, and I think that works well in terms of frequency. There's a lot more personal stuff that I've put into the newsletter, but also still some stuff I can keep to myself. Maybe more will come out in the next year of posts? :D
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Playing with form: I think I've changed a few things here and there - more multimedia, more experiments in writing - but they weren't really things I kept doing persistently. I did like doing the chatGPT thing, the poetry posts, the DALL-E Vince was a personal highlight - they've been fun! I just need the time to put into them.
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More OC: Somewhat successful. There were things that I did in terms of VinceAI and chatGPT that are kinda OC, but not really. I feel like there are bigger and better projects that I could tackle - there are so many projects to start, and never enough time to do them (especially with work and life things).
For the next year, some thoughts:
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I'm contemplating a new schedule. I haven't thought about exactly what I would do yet, but I'm thinking of pushing it out to a fortnightly or monthly thing, and provide a Life Update, New Post, and the same Recommendations and Links in each one. This is helpful because I have more time between writing, and/or I can use that time to write other things. Content has been harder to get to as I calcify the routines of my life, and I'm trying to push myself as hard as possible to go out and try new things to report back on (which was the reason I had this newsletter in the first place!).
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More projects, more AI, more interesting things: Doing the AI stuff - DALL-E and ChatGPT - were really fun. They were new, novel, different - and though I saw a lot of other terminally online people race past in terms of capability, I realised that most of my friends aren't terminally online and don't give a shit about learning this stuff. So I'll do it! The other thing is that it'll be small steps, continuously, so I don't get burnt out and sad that I can't achieve really big things - I just want to have small little wins that snowball.
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Something new: I love writing for y'all, but I think I want to find something that breaks out of the personal newsletter form. It would be something completely different - a fiction blog, or something that is specifically about explanations of complex things. I really like that genre of post, and I want to get better at writing those formats...which would require a lot of reading, researching, and then distilling into simple forms, and more time. Time is always the limiting factor, the ways I waste it D: but we'll see how it goes. No guarantees.
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Better marketing: Time to pump those numbers up. Once I go past 100 I'll have to pay for the provider I use, which will probably spur me on to spend more time on this and actually slightly monetise it (somehow). If that's the case, I may as well push harder on how I market this (or whatever other blog I might start). I say I'll start something new every year, but I don't, so take that prediction however you'd like.
In conclusion
No recs this week, just love <3
Thank you for your continued support in reading this little corner of the internet! It's not something that's on feeds, and it requires you to wade through your inbox to actually read this. I know it's not always gonna be up your alley, but I'm thankful for those of you that do read my words. Young little Vince who wanted to be a writer when he grew up feels fulfilled that this gets read by a bunch of you, consistently, every week.
I don't always look at the analytics, but I read every single email that comes through, all the feedback that's sent through - little pops of joy in my life.
I'm very appreciative of you, - and I hope that this newsletter is, as always, Potentially Interesting for you.
Chat soon :)