😎Have you got rizz?😎

+ WE WANT CAPTIONS NOT CRAPTIONS!!

Gooooood morning angels!!!! Today is my last day in my hometown so come tomorrow I’ll be ⚡️lazer focussed⚡️ again, but this morning I’m still taking it slow, sitting here in my PJ’s, drinking coffee out of the Family Guy mug my little brother got with an easter egg about 10 years ago - it’s a big slay.

I wanted to also show you all a new Substack feature which is (and they’re gonna hate me saying this) like Twitter, but without the Elon bullshit - it’s called Notes!! If you’ve got the Substack App you can get to it in a tab down the bottom.

Hope ur all thriving today, love you the absolute MOST!

• 🔔Bel Chimes In: Have you got Rizz?🔔

• We want captions, not craptions

• Another mass shooting to report on for you, sorry

• Some stray headlines

  • China tech giant Alibaba to roll out ChatGPT rival

  • Kim Kardashian is joining American Horror Story

  • Justice Department appeals Texas abortion pill order

• When you’re eating a meal do you combine a little bit of everything on the fork (or other eating apparatus) or do you eat all the elements individually?

🔔Bel Chimes In: Have you got Rizz?🔔

This section is written by my crush, the refreshing-as-a-house-chardonnay-on-a-steamy-day, Bel Hawkins. She also writes our Sunday newsletter ‘No News is Good News’ which all our paying supporters receive. Upgrade your plan to get her newsy here!

Crushes!

Another week, another — you guessed it — incredible word to go viral for the masses and become so successful we'll never have to work again.

This comes off the back of a summer of me at weddings trying to really get gumption off the ground, after finding myself in many corners holding many glasses of champagne being asked by many boomers why I was alone. Two drinks in, and I'd developed a gorgeous little TED Talk I could roll out about gumption being a prerequisite for any kind of thing to get off the ground these days and a disastrously lacking characteristic out there in the dating sea atm. This, in turn, would often buy me enough time for my eyes to swim around the party and find someone else to chat to (lol).

Anyway, over a wined-up Easter dinner this weekend, gumption was affectionately shortened to 'Shin', and a new characteristic came into the mix: 'Rizz' (Which Luce lets me know is in fact a huge thing on TikTok rn - life eh!). 'Have they got Rizz?' I believe is how one would use it, and for me (but not for TikTok I don’t think) it’s a shortened version of charisma, which, natch, I j'adored.

to be clear, I [luce] put this meme here

What's the balance of Rizz and Shin in a person, you ask? We then descended into unpacking. Rizz is that je ne sais quois someone brings into the room, the energy about them. And shin, well, shin seems to run deeper than that, like a spirited solid, horny enterprise-ness someone possesses that makes you feel both safe and spontaneous at the same time. A rare and precious thing!

So there you have it. Any other questions on the matter you'd like to ask? Lol. Hope you love these new words coming just as much as I do. And in return, this is my open call out to see if you have any you'd like to submit for next week's Chime.

Cool K love you, bye! xx

PS. This week, in response to popular demand, I'm delving into a guide for Loneliness over on No News Is Good News, and, well, this is your invitation to come 💘

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We want captions, not craptions‼

This section is brought to you by our besties at Spark who are encouraging us all to commit to making Aotearoa more inclusive for our Deaf or Hard of Hearing community.

The other day I read something that shook me - that right now in New Zealand there is no legal requirement to caption our videos. It shook me, not only because there are over 800,000 people in New Zealand alone who identify as Deaf or Hard of Hearing, but because New Zealand is one of the only countries in the OECD that don’t have legal requirements to do so (in Australia, Britain, and the US, closed captioning is required by law!)

I can’t believe I’d never even thought about the fact that it should be a legal requirement until today (and I know - that shows my ignorance) but after finding this out I watched this incredible speech by Hope Cotton, a 16-year-old high school student who is working to get mandatory closed captioning standards implemented in Aotearoa. 

Since Hope made this speech at Spark’s ’ALL IN’ digital equity event, Spark (New Zealand's largest telecommunications and digital services company) has committed to including closed captions on all audio-visual assets, including TV and digital advertisements, social media video content, and internal videos - and we should all look to do the same!!

One thing that Hope talked about in her speech is how the lack of legal requirements to provide closed captions doesn’t simply mean we’re getting no captions, it means we’re getting bad ones, and that in the Deaf community, some people dub these ‘craptions.’ 

Here are some examples she gave:

Auto-generated captioning can lead to some weird or even offensive situations like:

• Changing the Māori word Ngāti to Nazi

• Or me trying to understand a history documentary about the Vietnam War, when one sentence of captions included the words “helicopter fight unicorn rainbow” instead of something about Ho Chi Minh and communism?

Situations like these can also be dangerous, with captions saying things like:

• “Share masks” instead of “wear masks”

When so much of our information is online or on TV these days - it seems ridiculous for us not to have captions. Setting entertainment aside for a sec (although, imagine not being able to enjoy your fave TV shows or TikToks because they aren’t accessible to you?), it’s dangerous to think that access to things like emergency messaging, news broadcasts, or meetings could be limited to hearing people only.

Taking the lead from Spark and its guiding kaupapa of Hello Tomorrow (which nods to a future full of opportunities where the possibilities are endless), adding captions (not craptions) is one of the many things we can do to improve the well-being of the nearly one million New Zealanders who are deaf or hard of hearing - so why the hell wouldn’t we do it?

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Another mass shooting to report on for you, sorry

Content Warning: Gun Violence

The latest happened yesterday at a bank in Louisville Kentucky, when a suspect killed five people and injured eight others. The suspect was 25-year-old Connor Sturgeon, who was a current employee of the bank, and is believed to have bought the AR-15 legally on April 4.

One of the most chilling things I read while researching this for you was:

The mayor noted that, under Kentucky law, the gun used in Monday's mass shooting will one day be auctioned off and back on the street.

He pleaded, "It's time to change this law and let us destroy illegal guns and destroy the guns that have been used to kill our friends and kill our neighbors."

And just LOOK at Kentucky’s gun laws:

“Kentucky is one of 26 U.S. states that allow for permitless carry of firearms for eligible adults.

The Bluegrass State passed a law in 2019 removing the provisions that mandated state gun owners pass a background check if they were going to going to conceal carry their weapon. Under the law, most adults over the age of 21 can purchase and carry a firearm and take them to most places in Kentucky without any license.”

It’s all just fucked and I hate it.

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Some stray headlines:

• AI: China tech giant Alibaba to roll out ChatGPT rival (BBC)

  • “Chinese technology giant Alibaba has announced plans to roll out its own artificial intelligence (AI) ChatGPT-style product called Tongyi Qianwen.

    Its cloud computing unit says it will integrate the chatbot across Alibaba's businesses in the "near future" but did not give details on its timeline.”

• Justice Department appeals Texas abortion pill order (AP)

  • The Justice Department on Monday appealed a Texas court ruling that would halt approval of a drug used in the most common method of abortion in the U.S., calling the decision “extraordinary and unprecedented.”

• All the Details on Kim Kardashian Starring in ‘American Horror Story’ Season 12 (The Hollywood Reporter)

  • “Kim is among the biggest and brightest television stars in the world and we are thrilled to welcome her to the AHS family,” said AHS co-creator Murphy in a statement to THR. “Emma and I are excited about collaborating with this true force in the culture. Halley Feiffer has written a fun, stylish and ultimately terrifying role especially for Kim, and this season is ambitious and unlike anything we have ever done.”

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