What do you do when you meet the Try Guys?

You take a selfie and print them for your journal

I’m handed a Redbull vodka as soon as I step out of the lift and into a rooftop filled with creators, producers, and sponsors. I scan the room for a face that looks familiar and immediately spot some I recognize from YouTube, plus BTS operators I know from LinkedIn and Instagram.

I’m swept into one conversation almost instantly. I bump into Dan Sleeman, a Write of Passage Airtable legend who’s flown down from Toronto, and I have to crane my neck up to talk to him. Then I see Vicky Zhao, who I thought was in Tokyo but is somehow here. I’m giving her a tl;dr of my life since we last chatted in 2023 when a producer friend cuts in from across the room: “YOU’RE BECKY WHO LIKES NOTION”.

I’ve never been to a speed-dating event but this feels like the closest proxy. Conversations rotate so fast that my instinct is to pull out my phone and take a selfie with everyone within the first 30 seconds, because who knows when they’ll get pulled away next. I don’t normally take selfies. I also don’t normally attend events full of people who work in the same industry as me.

In my pocket I’ve got a Field Note ready to jot things down the second I wrap up a conversation, but there’s no time between shouting over the music and running to the bar to down glasses of water because I’m talking so much. A selfie will have to do. The rest I’ll have to trust my memory for.

The next 48 hours whizzed by. I’d have no recollection of who I spoke to if not for the scores of selfies in my photos library: producers, people who work at Circle and Kit, newsletter writers like Evan Armstrong of The Leverage, podcast hosts, and even some folks I watched as a teenager: Keith and Zach from the Try Guys.

Somehow, at the end of each day, I managed to print the selfies on a thermal printer and paste them haphazardly into my Field Notes for future Becky to fill in later. I scrawled the notes the next morning, waking up with coffee. If I squint hard enough I can just barely read them. But they’re there. Ink on paper, curated in a notebook I can flip through. Which is more than I can say for the rest, just sitting there in Apple’s servers.

Selected journaling spreads below. I don’t know why I bother blurring stuff when my handwriting is already illegible.

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Update log:

• 🖥️ I’ve been really loving the Espresso second monitor I got to work with

• 🤖 Shipped a bunch of updates to my carousel tool because Chrome cracked down on its extension permissions and my tool stopped working

• ✂️ Blurred the pictures on this page with Cleanshot X. The best tool is the one right on the toolbar

• 🎤 Figured out how to work an AV system with no prior knowledge. Only took 45 mins of twiddling with DJ-esque buttons

• 🌆 Had a sunset picnic at the Griffith Observatory. Trader Joe’s ready meals make for great picnic food

• 📺 Published my June creative updates here

Work with me: https://go.beckyisj.com/workwithme

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