Gaslight💡, Gatekeep❌, Goblin Mode 👹
➕ Indonesia just banned sex outside of marriage for locals and foreigners, & Bel Chimes In LIVE ON CULTURE VULTURE! 💘
Hi angels!!!! What is there to fill you in on this morning? Well…
I’ve not had wifi at home for three days now, so I’m spending an obscene amount of money on data at the moment
I had band practice last night which is probably one of the things that fills my cup up most in the goddamn world
Speaking of the band, our bandmate and your girl crush BEL (who chimes in each week) joins us on Culture Vulture today!!
I’m obsessed with you all in our weekly subscriber chat (WHICH IS NOW AVAIL FOR APPLE AND ANDROID)
THERE ARE NOW OVER 60,000 DAILY NEWSY READERS WHICH IS THE COOLEST THING EVER
AND If you’re a paying supporter you’re going to get our updated SYSCA book list/ library today to set you up for the holidays/ Christmas presents!!
Hope good things are happening in your life my angles, let me know how you’re doing in an email reply/ comment/ chat xxx
Indonesia just banned sex outside of marriage
New episode of Culture Vulture with a VERY SPESH GUEST
‘Goblin Mode’ is Oxford’s word (or phrase?) of the year
Matty Healy deleted his Twitter, but Halsey brought back their Tumblr
Would you like planes to be a productive place (you could work, take meetings, talk on the phone??)
Indonesia just banned sex outside of marriage for locals and foreigners
Indonesia’s parliament has just passed a sweeping new criminal code that “bans anyone in the country from having extramarital sex” - a rule that applies both to locals and to foreigners living in Indonesia, or visiting holiday destinations such as Bali. This law will also seriously target the LGBTQ+ community, as gay marriage is illegal in Indonesia.
As well as banning sex outside of marriage (and unmarried couples will face up to a year jail term if you caught doing so), here are some of the other new rules:
Unmarried couples are banned from living together
Insulting the president becomes a criminal offence
Expressing views counter to national ideology is banned
When Rubes and I were in Indonesia earlier in the year, we actually spoke to someone we met there about this at length. He said he envied us here in New Zealand because of our relaxed view on relationships, and that a lot of people in Indonesia have to get ‘married by accident’ because they fall pregnant (and that would prove that there was sex before marriage.) We chatted for about half an hour, but I naively wasn’t aware that this huge change in laws was coming for them (I also should note that sex before marriage was already banned prior to the approval of this new criminal code, but the law was often not enforced.)
Another thing to note is that for prosecutions to start, a complaint must be filed by the children, parents or spouse of the accused couple.
Ajeng, a 28-year-old Muslim woman living in the West Java city of Depok, said she was now at risk for living with her partner for the past five years.
"With the new law, both of us can go to jail if one of the family decides to make a police report," she told the BBC.
"What if there's one family member who has a problem with me and decides to send me to jail?
These new laws come as we’re seeing a rise in religious conservatism in the Muslim-majority country, and are seen by critics as a disaster for human rights. The laws have also constituted protests from (mainly) young people, and are expected to be challenged in court.
There’s so much more that I could go into on this one, but I think I’ll do an extended segment on The Shit Show about it this week, so we can all get a bit more context xx
New episode of Culture Vulture with a VERY SPESH GUEST
An INCREDIBLY exciting episode of Culture Vulture for you today… we have a spesh guest by the name of BEL! WHO CHIMES IN EVERY THURSDAY! You know her, you love her and now you get to MEET HER!
You’re going to hear about Liv’s latest car trouble (and then mine), Ye’s latest bullshit, and how Bel writes her glorious chimes every week!! You’ll be seeing a lot more of Bel if this goes well, so let us know how much you adore her 💘💘💘
‘Goblin Mode’ is Oxford’s word (or phrase?) of the year
And it shows how extremely online we all are in 2022. Honestly, between ‘Gaslighting’ being Merriam-Webster’s word of the year, and now ‘Goblin Mode’ being Oxford’s, I’m starting to think that they’re basing these decisions off words/ topics that SYSCA has done podcasts on.
For the record, Goblin Mode is basically when you’re just acting like a little goblin. You’re lying in bed, you’re eating chippies, your shit is incredibly NOT together, and you’re just leaning into being a lil goblin.
The way Goblin Mode entered our collective vocab is actually pretty interesting. It had been used on Twitter a few times in passing, before being brought back up in this doctored headline about Julia Fox and Ye:
Then the internet went mad with goblin mode discourse. It was taken so far that Julia Fox had to confirm that she’d never actually used the term:
And to be fair, we at SYSCA leaned into the discourse heavily. We felt more seen by ‘goblin mode’ than we did by ‘that girl’ and that was cool for us.
But as cool as it is to see buzzy words that made me lmao for a hot minute being celebrated like this, I do wanna express just how bizarre it feels to see these big old institutions adopting internet speak and how influential social media is as a breeding ground for new vocab (is it bad that I kinda want some things to stay serious??? Am I a bore??) Whether this is a good thing or not, I can’t say, but I do hope that all the goblins out there are being compensated appropriately for the way we are capitalising on their way of life.
Matty Healy deleted his Twitter, but Halsey brought back their Tumblr
Matty Healy deleted his Twitter yesterday (he tends to do this from time to time because the man loves attention) but he seems to have snuck back through a very cool media publication…
But in other 1975ish news, Halsey re-entered their Tumblr era AND addressed the poems she wrote for Matty Healy when she was younger, which are now re-circulating (in large part thanks to us I think - SORRY HALSEY.) Here’s what they said:
So happy we’re reentering 2014.
A mundane poll based on yesterday’s mundane poll
Protests in China, & Gaslighting, Explained (The Shit Show Podcast)
A Ye Update, and Bel Chimes In (Culture Vulture Podcast)
In Sweeping Legal Overhaul, Indonesia Outlaws Sex Outside Marriage (The New York Times)
So You Want to Be a TikTok Star (The New Yorker)
Harry and Meghan's Netflix trailers criticised over 'misleading' clips (BBC)
Lady Gaga dog walker shot: Gunman gets 21-year prison sentence (BBC)
Dolly Parton Joins TikTok (Variety)
Taylor Swift fans are suing Ticketmaster over presale disaster (The Verge)
feels very appropriate to read this while being in bed and snacking on corn chips xxx
very much in my goblin mode era
I swear that half of my contributions to my Contemporary Rhetoric grad class come from you lovely folks at SYSCA--today we were talking about the concepts of demagogues (leaders who gain power by stoking division and thrive in overexaggerating and scapegoating--Donald Trump is a great example), and you pulled through with discussion information on Indonesia AND on Dwight Schrute. You are so so lovely, and hopefully bringing you up in class once a week gets you some subscribers!! Hehehe