🎁It's My Birthday!! 🎂
🚙Tomorrow is day one of our roadie!!🚙
We'll be hosting a cute coffee catch-up at the Auckland Allpress Roastery from 10-12, and everyone is welcome!! No pressure to stay for the whole time, just come, have a filter coffee on us, and say hey!! 💘
Hi my besties!!!! It's my birthday today, officially making me 25!!! Feels huge. As I said previously, if you'd like to get me a gift, anything to do with Harry Styles will do, or you could simply become a ✨SYSCA supporter✨ (that would be really cute.) I'm doing what any 25-year-old would do on their birthday... going for brunch, going out for drinks, and then hand chopping 500 posters in preparation for a two-week SYSCA roadie. Bliss!
Speaking of the roadie, tomorrow is our Auckland coffee catch-up, from 10-12 at the Allpress roastery!! It's gonna be super chill, you can drop in for as long or as short as you like, and we'll give you a filter coffee on us! Come thru!!!
Love you the absolute most xxxxx
New Episode of Culture Vulture
The Try Guys Try Explaining
🌞London Laura: On having a 'Chosen Family'🌞
YouTuber Dream Revealed His Face!!
Morning missile update: North Korea shoots one over Japan
How do you pronounce garage?
The episode of Culture Vulture you've all been waiting for...
Why Do 'Wife Guys' Cheat? — open.spotify.com
Lucky we didn't talk about it last week because guess what? We have another cheating wife guy on our hands!! We dive deep into the psychology of cheating, but not before we hear more of your iconic period mishaps!!!!
Thanks to Hello Period for making this episode of Culture Vulture possible!! You can use our code SHITYEAH for 15% off any pair of Hello Undies or Hello Discs!!! Just visit helloperiod.com!!
The Try Guys Try Explaining
And succeed. And look at how PISSED Eugene is!
🌞London Laura: On having a 'Chosen Family'🌞
Laura is our resident ray of sunshine. She’s a new London dweller, chief of romanticising literally everything, and will definitely ask you all what your love language is at some stage. We love her to death and can’t wait to have her therapeutic wisdom in here whenever we can!
Hello gorgeous SYSCA whānau!!!! I am currently wizzing home to London on the Eurostar after a lovelyyyy weekend away in Belgium, feeling a little emotional about returning to London but armed with a mini-bottle of Sav and packet of salt & vinegar crisps - so thank you for being here to keep me company! Let’s start w a quick moving update❣️
Gas: 61 days and COUNTING WITHOUT IT. If anyone is well versed in UK tenancy rights let me know because things are getting cold!!!
Community: befriended the baker next door & the owner of our local chippy + have made some lovely work pals 💫
Head/heartspace: despite the gas, wayyy better!! Still wobbly for sure but feeling slightly more…stable? It’s been 2 months today so I’m calling it a milestone!
Now, let me talk to you about Chosen Family 💖
My best friends and I had two glorious weeks before I moved here where in the best ever turn of events we were renting flats next door to each other, and as people who regularly fantasize about starting a beach-side commune, I can’t tell you how happy this made us. We dropped groceries off on each other’s doorstep, drank overpriced margaritas at our favourably dubbed “local” and spent every night lying on our lounge floors eating baked kumara (sweet potato for those outside of Aotearoa!) together. Even though we knew that realistically we couldn’t continue drinking entire bottles of wine every single weeknight, the sense of community was so delicious we will honestly talk about it until the day we die as “the time we were neighbours for 14 days”.
Which brings me to the book I won’t shut up about - Still Life (the ones who get it get it!!!).[Luce note: you’ll remember I recommended this to you all a few months back - BEST BOOK EVER!] We went on a trip to Tuscany (!!!) before arriving in London and amongst losing my mind over the local produce, getting taught how to make pasta by our gorgeous nonna neighbour 🥺 and walking through as many olive groves as I could encounter I DEVOURED Still Life. I don’t know if the experience was amplified by the under-the-tuscan-sun setting or if I was very conscious that we had just left our own wonderful community, but that book absolutely destroyed me! I won’t spoil it, but it gives such a stunning depiction of real, deep friendships that span a lifetime and reflect a life actively chosen to be shared, together. It described so beautifully something I have spent most of my life both pursuing and cultivating - community, chosen family, whatever you want to call it, those relationships that have crossed the threshold of friendship and woven themselves into the fabric of your story, and you in theirs.
They can be circumstantial, a shared life spent in dressing gowns with morning coffees and walks home at 3am with a bag of gas station crisps and your heels in your hands. Or painful, when they have scooped you off their doorstep in the middle of the night and fed you sips of tea when your world fell apart, or how you know exactly where their heart is broken and when it happened. And they can be gritty! Letting them down when you lose yourself in a ❣️man-woven-out-of-red-flags❣️ or feeling adrift when they get a perfect new partner and your shared normal suddenly looks very different.
Dolly Alderton paints such a wonderful picture of this across her book & TV series Everything I Know About Love that struck a chord with many twenty-something’s who particularly in this age/chapter, find solace, security and chosen family in the people they start to share their space and time with. She describes slowly feeling less adrift as realized that with her chosen family around her she could start to build a home in herself, realizing she was like a snail with all she needed, her shell on her back. My bestie Kim has walked with me over the years through many growth periods, and when I would start to feel the ground dissolving beneath my feet she would always remind of that line - that I was slowly building a home, and she was right there with me 💘
Currently feeling rather adrift myself, with our community all the way back home and our lives looking more different each day, I keep reminding myself that the blessing of chosen family is exactly that, you have chosen each other and just like in a relationship, you choose to continue to love that person day after day, no matter where you’re at. So keep investing in life-giving relationships no matter where you are, and tell your soul-friends you love em!!!! Lots of love - LR xxxx
Also - a PSA for the UK SYSCA contingent, where do I buy winter-appropriate shoes??? My sneakers are getting soaked lol.
YouTuber Dream Revealed His Face
And the reaction was... not that chill. Dream, for the uninitiated, is one of the world's biggest gaming YouTubers and up until now, he's been completely anonymous. All we knew about him was that his first name was Clay, and that he'd amassed millions of fans despite no one knowing what he looked like. Me? I love this, and I hope he didn't feel he 'owed' anyone a face reveal. Keeping yourself private online somewhat equates to keeping yourself safe online, and it also stops us from feeling like we have to commodify (package up and sell) every little bit of who we are (something Liv and I spoke about at length on today's episode of Culture Vulture.) Privacy in 2022 is a blessing! Here's how Ryan Broderick explained Gen Z's anonymity bias:
"The best way I’ve come to describe Gen Z fame is, I’m aware, extremely cringe and very millennial, but I think it’s useful: Every Gen Z celebrity is some combination of Kim Kardashian, Blink-182, and Banksy. Gen Z creators are avatars in a reality show about their own careers, but also extremely “authentic” in a heightened way, and tend to release their work in drops that not only don’t fit within traditional media cycles but hijack or break them."
Anyway, Dream made the decision to reveal his face, and he first did it by facetiming other stars/collaborators (like KSI & Addison Rae) and then by making his own video about it, and all the reactions I saw were pretty nice, but apparently (since this all took place online, and the internet is mean) some people haven't been so nice about it. Anyway, here's wonderwa- DREAM!
Morning missile update: North Korea shoots one over Japan
Yesterday, North Korea fired a ballistic missile over Japan, in what seems to be an attempt to get the attention of Tokyo and Washington (can someone tell North Korea that there are other ways to get them to text back??) The US and South Korea sorta 'responded' by carrying out their own bombing drills, to demonstrate to North Korea that if it came to, they would respond 'sternly.'
And a lil reminder:
"The UN prohibits North Korea from testing ballistic and nuclear weapons. Flying missiles towards or over other countries without any pre-warning or consultation also contravenes international norms."
How do you pronounce garage?
40% say gA-RAA-ge
60% say garage
Hope this makes sense to you
PS, some words to live by:
Why do 'Wife Guys' cheat? (Culture Vulture)
Canada Stabbings and New Prime Ministers (The Shit Show)
The new American Dream is buying a house with friends (Insider)
Iran schoolgirls remove hijabs in protests against the government (BBC)
SYSCA playlists (✨Supporters only✨)
Our HUGE SYSCA reading list! (✨Supporters only✨)