LET ME EXPLAIN
Expanding on a comment I made in yesterday's newsy 👀
Boy oh boy do I have some explaining to do… Yesterday I casually mentioned that Rubes and Liv were ‘leaving me’ this year, without giving any further explanation and it was honestly so nice to see how many questions/ worried messages I got about where the hell they’re off to! For those of you who don’t listen to Culture Vulture, you probably haven’t heard that Liv is leaving us to go and spread her wings in Feb! She’s heading over to Europe to do the whole Eat Pray Love thing and live her best life (the life covid took from all of us for a while.) And Rubes? She’s staying with SYSCA, but heading over the ditch to Sydney to live out her party girl/in-love girl dreams over there. As for me? I’m staying put here in Aotearoa, but I plan to have many trips to see Rubes (and maybe Liv if I can afford Euro) because a life without them?? Doesn’t seem like one I want!!!
It also just made me feel so full and warm to see how many of you were worried about how I was gonna handle the ✨loss.✨ Honestly? The three of us have been doing this thing together in some capacity for four years now (and have been living in each other’s pockets for about ten!!!) so I really don’t know how it’s gonna be. It’s super happy/sad, but it’s defs time for some wing-spreading!! And it’s exciting! And how lucky am I that I have all of you for those inevitable lonely moments?? Love u so much 💌💌💌💌💌
❤️🩹CALLING THE BROKENHEARTED 💔
The Brazillian Congress was stormed by far-right protestors
Lizzo tweeted something pretty good about Cancel Culture
Love Island contestants won’t have any social media while they’re on the show anymore
Matty Healy sucked someone’s thumb last night and I’m weak over it
❤️🩹CALLING THE BROKENHEARTED 💔
We’re working on a spesh new project with Vice & Love Better all about ✨heartbreak.✨ We wanna help young people break up in healthier, and more positive ways (bc no one ever taught us how to deal with this shit), and to do this, we need real people, going through real hurt.
Going through a break up? Got a story?
Are you 18-24 and living in New Zealand?
If the answer is yes, yes, yes, hit this link to get involved!!
The Brazillian Congress was stormed by far-right protesters
Yesterday, thousands of protesters who support far-right ex-President Jair Bolsonaro stormed Congress, the Supreme Court and surrounded the presidential palace in Brazil. Sound familiar? It was just two years and two days since the Jan 6th riots (when this happened in America) and I am once again begging you to go and watch This Place Rules by Andrew Callaghan to learn more about it.
But back to Brazil - the main reason for the ‘storming’ is that the protesters refuse to accept that Bolsonaro lost the presidential election to left-wing Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in October, and spread (and believed) false claims about ‘voting systems’ (again, sound familiar?) Since then, many of Bolsonaro’s supporters have been camping outside army buildings around the country calling for “military intervention.”
Some quotes from the BBC’s reporting for a bit more context:
“Jair Bolsonaro’s nickname was Tropical Trump and what we’re seeing in Brazil is right out of the Trump playbook.”
“There are Brazilians who plainly refuse to accept Lula's election win and who now also refuse to accept the institutions which are key to Brazil's democracy. These Brazilians were confident that Jair Bolsonaro would defeat Lula in the election, and when that did not happen, it was like taking a match to a powder keg.”
1500 people have since been detained and security forces have the sitch under control, but it was not a good day for democracy yesterday. It also shows that the world is watching the US - and when certain things or people go ✨unpunished✨ it sets a precedent that shit like that can happen elsewhere.
Lizzo is done with Cancel Culture
Yesterday I logged onto Twitter (no doubt to post something about Matty Healy) and saw this tweet from Lizzo:
and honestly I rate the sentiment. And I feel like we’ve BEEN saying this. “Cancel Culture” in the way that it stands today feels like a waste of time. It often feels like people attacking others for behaviours that they themselves may have done (just not on a public platform), or actively trying to misinterpret (or interpret in the least gracious way) everything they see online (social media sites and algos actually reward us for doing this too.) It usually ends up with the left eating the left while the people doing Actual Bad Shit continue doing Actual Bad Shit because we’re so preoccupied fighting amongst ourselves to put our energy into them!!
In times like these I like to refer back to one of my fave pieces of all time: Everyone wants forgiveness, but no one is being forgiven.
The state of modern outrage is a cycle: We wake up mad, we go to bed mad, and in between, the only thing that might change is what’s making us angry. The one gesture that could offer substantive change, or at least provide a way forward — forgiveness — seems perpetually beyond our reach.
Social media rewards pithy, angry takes rather than nuanced, balanced discussions, then boosts those takes so they attract more angry, non-nuanced takes. It can feel good to be part of that collective anger, especially when you feel righteous. It’s often extremely difficult to let that anger go, to forgive, adjust, and move on.
You should read the full piece here, fr!!!
Love Island UK contestants won’t have any social media while they’re on the show anymore
In a move to protect the contestants a little bit more, family members and friends will no longer be running the social media accounts on behalf of contestants on Love Island.
For the first time in the show’s history, the ninth winter season will oblige the contestants to pause all activity on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and nothing will be published on their behalf.
Ordinarily, Islanders’ accounts are overseen by friends, relatives or PR professionals during their time in the villa, in order to drum up support and build up their brand.
I actually rate this - when we’re literally watching these people’s every move for six days a week, maybe the one bit of slack we can give them (and ourselves) is not heading directly over to their Instagram accounts to scroll through every single opinion on them we can get our hands on. It also means their families can stop issuing pre-empting apologies for the behaviour of their contestants. But won’t someone think of building the brand for future brand deals tho!?!
Matty Healy sucked someone’s thumb last night and I’m weak over it
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🔔Bel Chimes In: WITH A WHOLE NEW NEWSLETTER 🔔
[Luce note: We SEE how much you all adore Bel - who ‘Chimes in’ every Thursday with her hot and witchy musings on life and all the pleasures and dangers that come with it, so we thought she’d better have her own bloody newsy!!! So, if you’re a paid subscriber to the daily newsy you’re going to be getting Bel in your inbox every Saturday!!! Now I’ll shut up and let her tell you a lil more about it.]
Besties! I'm SO excited to be taking the quill of the Saturday Subscriber newsy. Liv has done such an amazing job of writing to you for a whole year and I LOVE so much that she's following her arrow and is about to take on the world!
From me, you can expect a cute smorgasbord of things that AREN'T news as you wake up on the weekend. Poems. Cute recs. Musings on pleasures, dangers, softcore philosophy and, anything else I'm thinking that will be extremely cute/useful/insightful/hopefully funny for you.
Money is so just like - ugh - right? I totally get it. But, if you can afford it, paying to subscribe means I can keep the lights in my treehouse on when I write these for you late at night, Luce and the team can pay their rent in this dizzy, expensive city (and keep bringing you news every single damn day), and we can keep being this extremely cute heartbeat of a place on the internet that costs less than a gym membership or an osteopath appointment or a panic buy from a chic website. Food for thought...
Anyway — ugh, it's gonna be so good! Talk to you VERY soon, Bel xx
Iran protests: Crowd gathers outside prison in bid to stop executions (BBC)
The Hottest Gen Z Gadget Is a 20-Year-Old Digital Camera (NYT
From Penn student to record deal: How a 15-second TikTok video changed my life (The Philidelphia Inquirer)
Behind the Scenes at the Encyclopedia Britannica of Memes (WSJ)
Nigeria kidnappings: Dozens abducted waiting for train in Edo state (BBC)
The whole Bolsonaro sitch is CRAZY. I just watched "This Place Rules" (doco on the January 6th madness - I recommend it) and the way history is repeating itself is unsettling to say the least.
On a completely different note, I am about to be the Liv/Rubes of the SYSCA situation, leaving for uni to the other side of Europe (UK) after growing up in Greece, VERY sad times, I feel you😔💔
thanks for explaining everything so well as always!! do u have the link for the behind the scenes at the encyclopaedia of memes because i think they must have got mixed up somewhere! thanks! xx