Harry Styles - Ha Ha Ha 🤪
I have to start this newsy off by saying a massive thank you for your support so far on our extremely special partnership with KidsCan!
Your generosity has absolutely blown us away (I knew we had the best community, but this has cemented that), and the amount of Kiwi kids you’re helping to feed is phenomenal! In saying that, so many kids still need your help - we’re going to be working with KidsCan for the next few weeks to see how many Kiwi kids we can continue to help feed, so please donate what you can!
I LOVE YOU SO MUCH! 🥺🥺
Yesterday Rubes and I attended the most amazing ceremony to kick off Matariki celebrations here in Aotearoa. It’s called an Umu Kohukohu Whetū, and it took place before sunrise (at a freezing cold 5am), but was genuinely such a special experience.
This particular ceremony was about making offerings to the Matariki star cluster through the rising steam from the umu (earth oven.) The offering was: a kūmara from the earth, a heihei (chicken) from the sky, a tuna from fresh water, and a snapper from the ocean.
I honestly want to pass on the biggest thank you to Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei for welcoming us all along to this beautiful morning, for taking the time and energy to explain the proceedings to those of us who hadn’t experienced it before, and for putting in all the mahi to make this special event happen. If you have the chance to get involved in any of the Matariki celebrations this coming week, I urge you to do so 🌟
Harry Styles launched his own Gucci collection - Ha Ha Ha
Beyoncé just released a new song
Japan upholds ban on same sex marriage
The New York Times made a ‘story portrait’ of me based on the stories I read
‘The worst person you know’: the man who unwittingly became a meme
Dalle-E-2 is catastrophic for creators
How do you put away your cutlery?
Harry Styles launched his own Gucci collection - Ha Ha Ha
That 'Ha Ha Ha' is not me laughing at the collection - it's the name of it. Harry Styles has teamed up with his mates at Gucci to release Gucci Ha Ha Ha. Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele, is a longtime mate of Harry’s, so it makes sense that they’d finally do something together - and a 70s style collection is what they’ve done. Here’s how the two met:
“When I first met Harry, he had just ventured into his solo career, and I had just started at Gucci; he had chosen an outfit for one of his appearances and asked to see me,” Michele reminisced. “I was ready to be dismissive because I thought he was some sort of upcoming singer from a boy band and I didn’t have time for that. But then he came to the meeting dressed in a fabulous fake fur coat and I just loved it. I changed my mind in an instant. That’s how our friendship started.”
Even tho I’ll never be able to afford this, it’s got lots of lil angry teddy bears which I’m obsessed with, so a girl can dream.
Beyoncé just released a new song: “Break My Soul”
On first listen: it kinda sounds like it should be played in a club 30 years ago (not that I was around then), it's also kinda a BOP!! It's a lil repetitive for me, but I love it when she does that talk/rap thing she does so well.
The New York Times made a ‘story portrait’ of me based on the stories I read
Here's one:
Here's another:
Good to know they’re putting all the data they’re collecting on me to good use! I’m kinda kidding - I’ll let them away with this because it’s actually kinda cool/ kinda bang on??
DALL-E-2 Could Be Catastrophic For Creators
Liv and I just recorded a (very heated) episode of Culture Vulture all about DALL-E-2 (you know, that text-to-art AI generator that everyone is playing with atm??), and how we don’t reckon we’re focussing enough on how catastrophic it could be for visual creators.
If you can create any art, in any style, at the click of a button, wtf is that gonna do to valuing artists? Or to imagination?? It’s not a ‘no one is talking about this’ situation, it’s a - people are talking about it for two sentences at the end of their article where they’ve spent four paragraphs absolutely hyping it up - situation.
Funnily enough, yesterday I read the latest drop of Dirt, where Elan Kiderman Ullendorff (an art director) wrote about Dalle-2, and I liked what he said here:
"Image generators are a technology of abundance. As an art director, I have already felt the strong temptation to bathe in this abundance, to reap its splendor. Why spend hundreds of dollars and several weeks commissioning artwork when I can conjure images out of thin air for free? (I can think of a few reasons; if you want to see me get worked up, ask me about the impending image producer labor crisis.)
The last cataclysmic event in the history of image multiplicity was the high-res camera in all of our pockets, any event instantly capturable by anyone. But the next one will encompass not only what we see, but whatever we can dream. Any image you can think of can exist. The question that's much harder to ask is whether it ought to.
The Dirt: Sometimes we shout democratization when what we really mean is overproduction.”
You should really listen to our episode all about this here!
Lizzo's Quick Fix, & Explaining DALL-E-2 - Culture Vulture — open.spotify.com
This week we chat about Lizzo updating her new song after realising she used ableist language (and how we can ALL learn from her), before diving into how catastrophic new AI Dalle-2 is for visual creators.
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Japan upholds ban on same sex marriage
Yep - a Japanese court has just ruled that a ban on same sex marriage is constitutional, which simply means… you guessed it! Same-sex couples still can’t get married.
Also, under current rules in Japan, members of same-sex couples “cannot inherit each other's assets - such as a house they may have shared - and also have no parental rights over each other's children.”
In completely unrelated news:
‘The worst person you know’: the man who unwittingly became a meme
Picture this. You pose for a picture. That picture is a good picture, so you upload it to Getty images. That picture then gets used in a satirical magazine with the headline: “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point.” Now, every time someone searches ‘the worst person you know’ your face pops up literally billions of times. You are now the worst person the internet knows.
This exact story happened to Josep Maria García, and The Guardian just did a write-up about how Josep handled it. You don’t really need to read it, coz I just summarised it pretty well above. But if you want to, here it is!
How does your cutlery live?
I'm not gonna lie, I had to split these across two pages of polls, and I can't be bothered working out the combines percentages, so here are the raw numbers (in order though.) I will say there is a special place in hell for anyone who jumbles all their cutlery together.
Knives, forks, spoons: 22.6k of you
Spoons, forks, knives: 22.2k of you
Forks, spoons, knives: 12.4k of you
Forks, knives, spoons: 11.7k of you
Knives, spoons, forks: 5.5k of you
All jumbled together: 4.5k of you
Spoons, knives, forks: 2.8k of you
Help to feed a Kiwi kid for a week, for only $15! (Our partnership with KidsCan)
Lizzo's Quick FIx, & Explaining DALL-E-2 (Culture Vulture)
French burkini ban upheld as Grenoble loses legal challenge (BBC)
Our Love Island Debrief (Ep 6-12) (Culture Vulture)
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