"I just think they could've tried harder to make good art, you know?"

“PC STYLING”

“Syracuse University…announced the establishment of its new Center for the Creator Economy…including podcasters, streamers, influencers, and digital artists…The shift…follows a recent decision to pause admission for 20 undergraduate majors, including fine arts and digital humanities…”

excited to see if my 11yo thinks Bob Newhart is funny but also woah 50¢ for that Sergio mendes record!

Solid haul from annual Bookarama sale!!

why am I hearing dumb jokes about this in my head in Yakov Smirnoff’s voice

So good from @andreapitzer.bsky.social: “You don’t have to turn your back on the big issues, but you also don’t have to import the entire national crisis into your personal one.” degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/you-don-t-...

I built a meth lab out of LEGOs

you had me at “UniPwn”

12/ Meet George Vernon Hudson, an entomologist and astronomer who lived in Wellington. You can blame daylight saving on him and his shift work. No, really, DST is another Kiwi innovation. The fella wanted more sun!

seasons really seasoning oucherrrre in auckland today

Rev. Dr. Hirini Kaa thoughtful as always on the recent speech from Kuīni Nga wai hono i te po

this skeet is the tipping point

cannot believe the government’s “cameras everywhere” initiative turned out to be surveillance

They literally called it “SCREENS EVERYWHERE” why are people surprised

"your social media is just a bubble of groupthink" buddy, my mute list is three miles long and I still have to hear about every shitty person and every shitty event multiple times

I'm old enough to remember when the internet was hailed as the future archive and repository of all human knowledge and expression, universally accessible for the benefit of all. Sighhhhhhhh.

Girl, I am losing my mind

houses are our solutions to everything, except homelessness

whenever I feel bad I find a picture of this little Mayan guy

“Archaeocroton sphenodonti, or the tuatara tick, is a species of tick that parasitises only the tuatara of New Zealand…It is the only living species in the genus Archaeocroton.”

“As viewers we are tasked with reading between the lines, seeking out the kura huna, the hidden messages woven into imagery, words and gestures. Te Arikinui speaks a softer language through her wardrobe…simultaneously to tradition, modernity, authority and humility, grief and most importantly, hope”

tf is this conman’s glorified gofundme for his environment-destroying scam cruise doing on the jumbotron screen in my bougie gym

I noticed today that they’re starting to sell postcards at the magazine shop with AI art on them. You can tell which because they don’t credit an artist on the back. The irony of using a picture of a native bird to sell AI art is not lost on me.

New Zealand media’s many, many attempts to reach ‘the youth’

Hari Rā Pāpā

AI music promised freedom from hard-coded rules that were needed in pre-ML approaches to music generation. No theory, no grammar, no bias — just pure music learned directly from data. Our new @tismir.bsky.social article tears down that myth. transactions.ismir.net/articles/10....

this is still the single greatest intro ever made for an animated series, an absolute masterpiece on every level

Some outstanding album art and albums on this list thespinoff.co.nz/atea/05-09-2...

something i'm really enjoying about alumni events this year is that it's the 700th anniversary of Oriel being founded and the uhhhhhh 40th anniversary of the college admitting women. the emails are incredible

“go ahead — take it”

25,000 applications submitted for 500 jobs at NZ’s first IKEA

Gamification has its place, but it's not in scholarship. Good research takes time, writing the articles takes time, writing a book takes time. Academics are supposed to spend a good deal of their time researching (it used to be around 1/3) but for 'reasons' we no longer get that time. #AcademicSky

Metrics-based perverse incentives are corrosive to scholarship as much as education — it’s a scourge across university systems “The problem with gamification is that, over time, it can transform our values and the very nature of the activity such that we begin to lose sight of what really matters…”

In "everything is interconnected" news, US tariffs have caused a mess with the de minimus exemption which have caused many postal services to be concerned about shipping to the US which has led my NZ university to pause interlibrary loan requests It's cool I was only waiting on two books

daaang 📚 → 📦 → 🌏

“...humor development [in children] predicted socio-cognitive development six months later, but not the other way around...”

Thanks to the International Journal of Communication and Angela Xiao Wu (NYU) for this excellent review of my book. ijoc.org/index.php/ij...

We just released a *big* working paper on Voice AI and Authenticity as part of the ARC CoE for Automated Decision-Making and Society @admscentre.org.au It surveys the history of the tech, emerging issues, and what can be done Check it out at Australian Policy Online here: apo.org.au/node/331920

When Fox News’ theme music composer described their work as “Metallica rehearsing Wagner” did they know they were saying the pianissimo part fortissimo podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

Least surprising news of all time

pedantically sad the copy editors also let slip two misspellings of “carillonist”

calamitous self-own 🧪

There is a real Moneyball aspect to selection of faculty, where hiring committees over-index on institutional prestige, whether out of snobbery or laziness.

people have all kinds of takes about this but as a student one of my greatest strengths was I whip ass at Blue Book exams. I have read the material and can riff on it, on command. If life had kept offering me Blue Book exams I would own half of California

postal system disarray always feels like a bad omen to me

"...early penguin evolution...optimised for powerful underwater propulsion...New Zealand's ancient environment, characterised by a notable absence of larger terrestrial predators, likely provided a setting conducive to the evolution of flightlessness in various avian lineages, including penguins" 🧪

Good life experience to be an expert witness in the High Court... for a mock trial about a tool that I made up so there was no way anyone could challenge me for being wrong www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

shot, chaser

Hepburn romanization finally made official!