Climate Change Isn't ❄️Chill❄️
➕ An update to the 'Bali Bonking Ban,' & a love letter to gifs 💘
Omg!!!!! Every fucking day you all remind me how much of an amazing community we’ve got!!! The NZ Podcast Awards were announced yesterday, with The Shit Show taking home bronze for Best Current Affairs pod, and Culture Vulture winning listeners’ choice!!! Ugh, hate to get soppy, but just extremely cool for this thing we started as 20-year-olds at uni, and still often record on our bedroom floors, is up there with all the other NZ media companies… and sometimes winning???? Very cool, very proud, very much thanks to all of you!!!!
And in other news: the finale of The White Lotus was last night and… holy shit, that show just KEEPS GETTING BETTER. I’m not going to spoil it in here (as if I would do that to you) but I’m so sad that it’s over. Everything from the setting to the scripting to the acting???? And as much as I have such a crush on Aubrey Plaza I also love so much to see Sutton from The Bold Type getting the hype she deserves.
Now. on with the day!!
Bali sex ban: Indonesia tourists won't be charged under law
Iran says it has publicly hanged a 23-year-old
Winter Olympics host decision postponed due to climate change
A Love Letter To Gifs
Nasa's Orion capsule makes safe return to Earth
Tell me your celebrity encounters!!
How do you pronounce turmeric?
Bali sex ban: Indonesia tourists won't be charged under law
I know a lot of you were worried about this, so let me clear it up real quick: officials have confirmed that “tourists visiting Indonesia will not be charged under a new law which will criminalise sex outside marriage.”
For businesses who need tourism to survive - especially after they were hit so hard by cov** - and for couples people who would like to have sex during their visits, this is good news!
More on what’s been dubbed the ‘bali bonking ban’ here.
Iran says it has publicly hanged a 23-year-old
Content warning: death, hanging
A very bleak story coming out of Iran today - they just have committed their second execution (that we know of) over the ongoing protests - 23-year-old Majidreza Rahnavard, who was hanged in the city of Mashhad. He was convicted of “enmity against god” after they found he had stabbed to death two members of the paramilitary Basij Resistance Force.
Human rights groups have spoken out about these trials, calling them ‘shams’ and that this sentencing in particular was based on "coerced confessions, after a grossly unfair process and a show trial."
Winter Olympics host decision postponed due to climate change
Today in consequences-of-climate-change-that-I-hadn’t-considered: the decision as to who is going to host the Winter Olympics has been postponed so that the IOC (International Olympic Committee) can “investigate how climate change will affect venues for snow sports.”
Here’s what TheFutureParty reported on it:
Although the International Olympic Committee was expected to choose a host city for the 2030 games next fall, the committee is postponing that decision until it has studied more about how climate change will affect the venues. With “climate reliable” venues dwindling, the Winter Olympics may only be hosted in a handful of locations over the coming decades.
To put it simply - the IOC now needs to make sure that wherever they choose to host the games isn’t too warm by the time they roll around. Obviously, they need a shit tonne of snow to make the games ⛷work⛷ and the IOC says the host cities need to have an average minimum temperature of “below 32° F at snow sports venues over a 10-year period.” Right now the three top contenders - Salt Lake City, Vancouver, and Sapporo, Japan - all say they meet those standards, so we’ll wait and see I guess.
Seems ❄️chill❄️
💗A Love Letter To Gifs💗
This section is brought to you by Sacha Judd - a huge SYSCA bestie, an even HUGER Harry Styles stan, and the person who made me see fangirls (AKA me) for what we are: smart, capable, great at community/ website building, and nothing to be embarrassed by!! She’s super techy and super into online communities (she’s also a rly good fanfiction writer.) Enjoy her words!
A few months ago, the Guardian made the sweeping claim that gifs are cringe. Giphy’s valuation had dropped rapidly and the consensus seemed to be that only boomers and your boss are dated enough to still enjoy a reaction gif. Somehow that felt inevitable. The days of having a strong gif game are long gone. Nothing’s more tired than typing “shocked face” into a shuffling search and posting whatever bug-eyed dog pops up. Or worse, trying to convince your aunt not to engage in digital blackface in the group chat. But I kept thinking about the one place that gifs still flourish as a gorgeous, intricate artform: tumblr.
Now that twitter’s a slow-motion trainwreck and social media users are on the hunt for a new home, you see people tweeting ironically “maybe we should just head back to tumblr”. For those of us who never left that broken little hellsite (affectionate), there are mixed emotions. It’s like people discovering your favourite dive bar: you’re sort of proud they’re recognising it has a great vibe, but you’re not looking forward to it becoming crowded with newcomers. But if there’s something I am delighted to share it’s the thing tumblr has that no one else does: gif sets. Transformative fandom is usually associated with fanfic, fancams and fan art, but gif makers are the unsung heroes – immortalising tiny ephemeral moments into endless looping perfection.
Perfectly timed, perfectly lit, perfectly captioned. If you’ve ever tried to make a gif you know how hard it is and how much talent is involved. Gif sets capture your fave’s expression as they sing your most beloved lyric, your OTP glancing at one another over and over, the players on your team celebrating after a goal. Gifs tell a whole epic saga in just a few frames. We reblog gifs to preserve those moments for ourselves and to share them with others. Gif sets have dragged me into more fandoms than I can count. Gifs have made me watch hot firefighters and vampires and kpop and superheroes and ice hockey. I may not know who your blorbos are, but I’ve seen the gifs and they’re pretty and now I want to know more. So, sure, no one needs another stupid clip from The Office in the work slack. But if you want to visit the place where gifs are a love letter to all the many, many things we care about, tumblr might be just the place.
Nasa's Orion capsule makes safe return to Earth
Look Squish! I’m writing about space stuff! After talking about for a LONG time on The Shit Show, the Orion capsule was launched, and has now safely made it back to earth. The capsule was out on a 26-day mish to the moon (or to orbit it at least), and although there were no people on this flight, there will be on the next one.
The next flights will take place in late 2024 “and include, in 2025 or 2026, an attempt to put humans back on the lunar surface.”
This was last achieved exactly 50 years ago to the day by the crew of Apollo 17. The agency's new project is called Artemis, who in Greek mythology was the sister of Apollo.
"[During Apollo] we did the impossible by making it possible," observed Nasa Administrator Bill Nelson.
"Now, we are doing that again, but for a different purpose, because this time we go back to the Moon to learn to live, to work, to invent, to create, in order to go on out into the cosmos to further explore. The plan is to get ready to go with humans to Mars late in the decade of the 2030s, and then even further beyond," he told reporters.
No doubt Squish will talk about this a bit more on The Shit Show this week, so tune in for that on Friday!
Tell me your celebrity encounters!!
After getting the gorg Isabella to tell us her story of going on stage and kissing Matty Healy, one of u lovely newsy readers suggested that we make that somewhat of a regular occasion because sometimes it’s fun to read fanfiction in amongst the news. AND if there are two things about me they’re:
Imma listen to you
Imma crowdsource content
SO I’ve made this lil Google form for you to please drop your celebrity stories!! They can be mundane but also the juicier the better!!!
TELL ME YOUR STORIES HERE!
Today’s mundane poll:
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Do they really need snow to make the Games work? The Jamaican bobsled team manager to practice just fine without it
We love a good gif <3 also, this is more unrelated, but I feel like I've commented on the newsies a lot this year about how I bring you up probably at least once a week in my Contemporary Rhetoric class. I just finished writing my final paper for it, and in my little imagined relationship with all of you, where we've been on this journey together, I thought maybe you'd like to see it :,) it's about polarization, post-truth (which is like lying from a politician, but worse), and how we can combat it!! I've got a link to a Google Doc with it here if it sounds like something that interests you!! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1slT_JssenpvPLVJkCUACzmyiKjUwIbP_AdoeYyTgklY/edit?usp=sharing