Mark

developer: put it down. we don't need another one

concept artist: (clutching tighter) no. this is my emotional support sky whale

I had some theories about it a while back when they were destroying my cauliflower and broccoli plants but can’t remember all the details—something to do with planting in concentric fortifications with outer layers of calendula, borage, salvia, sage, and sacrificial brassica variants.

Hot and dry weather will beat them back

PPTA Te Wehengarua members vote to strike

No plausible argument this was in good faith: “Ten minutes before we were due to meet, the Government presented us with another offer for settlement of the Secondary Teachers’ Collective Agreement – with a condition it would lapse if strike action was notified.”
www.ppta.org.nz/news-and-med...

Marc Benioff Says Trump Should Send Guard Troops to San Francisco

Performative acceding to transient authoritarian political movements is a token gesture for the larger project of permanent corporate rule. The grotesqueries of a time of monsters.
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/u...

They don’t agree on god, or populism, individualism, globalisation, public health, etc, but they ALL agree on tax dodging.

Tax dodging is one of the few coherent unifying ideas of the right. Most of everything else is an incoherent mashup of half-understood economic propaganda, might is right/fuck you got mine tropes, and othering justified cruelty.

Mark Carney’s climate inaction is at odds with his awareness of climate change’s existential threat Climate action no longer seems to be a priority for Prime Minister Mark Carney, despite his previous activism. This is bad news for Canadians and the climate.

We have truly not yet figured out how to cope with a person or institution that is "aware" of climate change, "accepts the science", but then decides to continue actively worsening it anyway

We don't even have a word or a phrase for this!

theconversation.com/mark-carneys...

That can’t be a real quote, surely—

Can I get over my fear and loathing of setting up front derailleurs and go for an old school triple?

Shimano Alivio cranks from 1999

Another great salvage object, off a crusty old Marin that was abandoned at UC. Alivio was Shimano’s downmarket line but these 1999 cranks hold up very favourably now. They’re crying out to go on a late 90s monster cross conversion.

We need to grow up as a country and society.

*rush of breath* I also have a lot to say about the complexities of that particular hour of television.

But yes what a lovely day. If I didn’t have a huge pile of marking to do I’d be heading for the hills, climb up as high and as far away from it all as possible in a few hours. Mauri Ora.

I don’t have time or energy for reckons on this today, but will say there is a huge cultural and understanding gap in NZ around how to design and build such databases and visualise the connections to a high standard.

Shaw was attacked a day before the atrocity in ChCh, so it just wasn’t ever possible to make news cycle sausage with it, even if they’d tried.

Will never fall off.

What sort of person looks at the state of this world and goes “more weapons are needed. We could be good at making new weapons”?

This is incredible, well done

The first waves of neoliberalism made it clear to the upcoming generation of artists and musicians that the post war social contract and access to stable employment was over, even before the advanced rentier economy and housing crisis. In this essay I will…

Maybe listening in the present reinterprets the past, but then again, fucken Ruth Richardson is getting wheeled out in the media in 2024–25, so I feel like that connection has been forced anyway.

Tangent but vaguely relevant. The last 94 song I listened to (this week!) was ‘Sitting inside My Head’ and it had never occurred to me that the intro was environmental storytelling of Auckland in an economic recession.

“I walk around this town where buildings are closed and windows are boarded…”

The next one is considered a masterpiece but I think Leftism will always sit with me as the big one.

I forgot that Leftfield album was 94.

Come work with us to define the future of digital design education in Aotearoa! We’re looking for candidates with strong background in teaching, research, design practice, and experience with web platform, game engines, or mobile apps.
#AcademicJobs #AcademicSky
jobs.canterbury.ac.nz/jobdetails/a...

In my experience the “You first” dynamic is at the core of so many workplace conflicts.

Large Language Muddle | The Editors The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the ...

Source: www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...

Not all of this sits well with me and the piece does struggle to get beyond the specific literary/essay metathing it is critiquing but good to see some thinking that isn’t handwringing or abdicating from responsibility and public power.

...so we’re not exactly well prepared to deal with something equally malleable but abstract and intangible, with a much more skewed cost/benefit relationship.

We’ve never had a particularly coherent social reckoning or even much understanding and shared agreement on how plastic has terraformed the human condition and how much it is relied on for *everything*...

A blockquote from the N+1 essay ‘Large Language Muddle’ that says: “AI-made material is a waste product: flimsy, shoddy, disposable, a single-use plastic of the mind.”

The analogy I’ve been using is disposable vapes, but this is an interesting way of putting it.