It is, unless magic exists.

WPF presents 'Hunger' - 3pm Sunday 14 September, Underworld Tavern $20 waged, $13 unwaged also featuring sexy dangerous looking David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve, posing all vampiricly

Next up in our fundraising film series, it's camp classic 'The Hunger'. Bowie, Denevue and Sarandon bring all the sex to the screen while Underworld Tavern pours the drinks & provides the spooky atmosphere. Join us - if you dare...

3pm, Sunday 14 September, R18
www.trybooking.com/nz/events/la...

“New Zealand has long asked whether the pre-requisites for a viable and legitimate Palestinian state – in security, political, diplomatic and economic terms – exist. Fundamentally, we will need to weigh up whether sufficient progress is being made against these benchmarks in order to warrant New Zealand recognising a Palestinian state at this juncture.

“New Zealand has been giving this issue careful, methodical and deliberate attention. We will be taking heed of the facts on the ground deteriorating rapidly, our close partners being divided on the issue of recognition, and a range of Arab states making clear Hamas must disarm and must have no future role in Palestinian governance.

1. I suggest we send Winston to Gaza to personally assess whether the "pre-requisites" exist.

2. Fuck off with this Hamas shit. It is for the Palestinian people to decide who governs them. Western governments gave up the moral right to dictate terms the moment they turned a blind eye to genocide.

A calico cat inside a cardboard box decorated to look like the psychiatric help booth from Peanuts.

Can anyone recommend a good manuscript assessor, specifically for a novel that might not fit comfortably within a standard genre? There are plenty options on the NZSA site, but a personal recommendation would help me choose.

Greens look to be tail wagging the dog - should Labour be worried? Analysis: If Labour's manifesto remains light on detail for too long, the Greens could end up setting the agenda and the terms of debate by default.

But what if the tail is the only bit of the dog that's moving?

www.rnz.co.nz/news/on-the-...

Nothing I can do in terms of drawing these animals, making merch, and donating some of the profits to charity will ever make a difference if the government doesn’t stop desecrating our environment’s protections. 💔💔💔💔💔

Labour MPs gather in Christchurch to formulate election strategy The party is inching closer to announcing its tax policy, amid growing unemployment.

Unemployment & homelessness rising, health system crumbles - yet Labour seems set on a CGT as its key response - sometime. Labour friends: is there any understanding that courageous, effective income redistribution & support for public services is the only way you'll regain real respect from many?

Having several flights of beer, plus two bottles of 12% Belgian style ale, might have tipped me over the edge

7 or 8

This may be the first time I’ve ever said this, but…I think I’ve eaten enough cheese.

Chris Penk, senior government Minister, tweeting and amplifying Ani O Brien messages shouldn't be a surprise. It's really not - he's also the Minister who helped her overturn holocaust denier Candace Owen's denial into NZ

#nzpol

"PhD-level experts in your back pocket" is a completely nonsensical description of AI but a pretty good description of social media if you follow the right people

LinkedIn post from Te Papa depicting a squid-like object with ten octopus arms and no tentacles, no mantle but a pointy body, and what look like little bladders along its arms instead of suckers, either created by AI or an artist that has never even Googled a colossal squid. Also it’s wearing a party hat, which looks fine to me.

If Te Papa are so proud of their colossal squid, perhaps they could have paid an actual artist to celebrate its birthday, rather that use AI to generate a ten armed octopus with some sort of tail?

This is an example where the problem is not so much the capabilities of LLMs as it is the fact that we have independently normalized a widespread culture of acceptable lying

"Go back to where you've come from, we don't want you," shouted one woman towards the hotel. On the other side of the road, counter-protesters chanted that refugees were welcome. In a rare moment of unity, the far right began singing "fuck Keir Starmer" to the tune of Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes and the anti-fascists joined in.

Wonderful punchline to the thoroughly depressing story about the planned protests around the country yesterday and today.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

this is excellent work on the current moment of our elite's fash hysteria and only incidentally compares GPT to V2 rockets

Fat babe Joanna in a bright orange t-shirt featuring a cartoon fat cat on a pink motorcycle, flying the progressive pride flag

What’s cooler than a fat cat? A queer fat cat that raises money for @wellingtonpride.bsky.social
I wear a size 28, and this is a 5XL. It was super important to me that we offer more than just black in the larger sizes. Shirts are $50 - half goes to artis, half to WPF

wellingtonpride.digitees.co.nz

And more specifically, he had some problematic interactions with women he was working with. Not creepy, IIRC, just patronising and revealing of his underlying attitudes.

behold: a woman

I read a term recently that might describe him: “the anti-bedtime left”. They start off ranting against capitalism, which is good, but it turns out it was just based on a childish rejection of any sort of restriction, so they become “anti-woke”.

I see the issue. When we said we would replace human workers with machines you assumed the machines would work. That's on you

According to Strike 3 Holdings, Meta "willfully and intentionally" infringed "at least 2,396 movies" as part of a strategy to download terabytes of data as fast as possible by seeding popular high-quality porn. Supposedly, Meta continued seeding the content "sometimes for days, weeks, or even months" after downloading them, and these movies may also have been secretly used to train Meta's Al models, Strike 3 Holdings alleged. The porn site operator explained to the court that BitTorrent's protocol establishes a "tit-for-tat" mechanism that "rewards users who distribute the most desired content." It alleged that Meta took advantage of this system by "often" pirating adult videos that are "often within the most

This case where Meta allegedly torrented gobs of porn in order to be able to reciprocally download all the books it needed to train its AI as fast as possible is an extremely literal instance of the phrase “tit-for-tat”.

Accurate. (Alt text in replies)

What’s driving the explosive fires in the West? As of Wednesday, 38 large fires were burning across nine western states, including Colorado’s Lee Fire and California’s Gifford Fire, which ballooned into the state’s largest this year.

What’s driving the explosive fires in the West? Uh, climate change.
www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025...

Need to get back to writing after this.

Rights Aotearoa wants to salute the work that Tabby Besley has done at InsideOUT, the organisation she founded in 2012. She announced today she will be handing over the reins this year.

Quite simply her leadership and advocacy for rainbow and queer youth has saved lives, many lives.
Go well, Tabby!

Watching John Rogers and drinking soda (after a couple of late-afternoon cocktails).