On my internet bullshit 👩💻
So many new faces!!!!! Today we’re starting with a BIG shout out to the 47 new ✨SYSCA SUPPORTERS✨ who’ve joined us in the last week!
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How lovely to have you all here nice and early on this Monday morning (and yes I know it’s Sunday for a bunch of you… LUCKYYYYY!) This weekend was incredibly chill and I really don’t have a lot to report to you. On Friday night Rubes, Liv and I went to the Arts Foundation Laureate Awards which were incredible!! The calibre of Māori and Pasifika artists in Aotearoa is fucking outstanding, and we all felt so lucky to have been invited to such a spesh night!!
The rest of my weekend was sorta taken up by ✨moving admin✨ (we have to leave our gorgy whare soon - whare means ‘house’ in te reo Māori) so we’re currently on the hunt for somewhere new!! Also… why is moving house just the most stressful thing in the world??? Anyway, I won’t blab on about it for too long in here, but that’s happening. I also started watching The Rehearsal by Nathan Fielder, nearly finished I May Destroy You, AND continued watching the O.C (did I even tell you I was watching that?) I adore Seth Cohen and I feel like you should all know that.
Songs I’m loving right now (more on my playlist if you’re a supporter)
Complex (demo), Kaite Gregson-MacLeod
Rockstar, Hannah Montana
Mushroom Punch, Zella Day
Parentheses, The Blow
Paparazzi, Lady Gaga
I feel like we need to properly catch up??? Tomorrow I’ll give you a lil life update about me going to San Francisco/ Austin TX and then some more info on our SYSCA ROADIE (EEEEK.) For now I'm off to watch the highlights from last nights F1 race xxx
PS, today’s edish is kinda unintentionally about the internet so…. be prepared for me to be on my internet bullshit!!
🩸LET’S TALK ABOUT PERIODS AGAIN🩸
Whattaboutism is killing the internet
A link to show you what the internet was like 10 years ago today
Twitter is getting an edit button
An A.I.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize. Artists Aren’t Happy
Does it make you irrationally angry when someone enters the kitchen while you’re cooking?
🩸LET’S TALK ABOUT PERIODS AGAIN🩸
This section is brought to you by our favourite sustainable period care company, Hello Period!
Ok so it’s not news to ANYONE that I get extremely intimate with you in this newsy - you’ve already heard about Liv and I’s journey with period cups, and you’ve shared with me SO many of your own period stories too, so it only makes sense that we continue this big old oversharing fest eh???
First I wanted to share with you a few of my FAVE responses from you about your period mishaps:
“So my mate is a big dog in a big multinational company. She was on a video conference call with her (male!) team in Canada and had a few minutes before it began. She was googling “why do you poo more when on your period” when one of the Canadian team politely advised her that she was in fact sharing her screen…”
“I got mine a little early (I think I was 10?) before we had any education about it. My parents also hadn't talked to me about it, so I had no clue what it was and obviously assumed I was dying. Instead of telling my parents or literally anyone, I WROTE A WILL. Divided up all my precious belongings (including every last Jonas Brothers poster) to the important people in my life.”
Funny stories aside, I know that a BUNCH of you really want to cut back on your single-use period products, but for whatever reason, period cups/ discs just aren’t for you - and that’s totally fine! It’s especially fine because in the BEST NEWS YOU’LL HEAR ALL WEEK, our favourite period company Hello Period have just released period undies - AND THEY’RE SEXY AS HELL (I legit love mine - they’re pink and red and lacy 😚) Their new undies hold the equivalent of five tampons or pads, they’re machine washer/ tumble dryable, they’re SUPER absorbent, and they look SO GOOD.
Honestly, by wearing these undies you’re gonna feel really good about yourself (not just because you look hot as hell) but because think of all the single-use products you’re avoiding!! We love it see it!!
If you want a pair you can use our code SHITYEAH for 15% off any pair of Hello Undies!!! Just visit helloperiod.com and visit their Instagram page at @helloperiodco!!
Whattaboutism is killing the internet
The other day I read this brain-opening piece in The Hedgehog Review about ‘Whattaboutism” and I’ve wanted to write about it ever since. So here I am, back on my internet bullshit! ‘Whattabouttism” is a phenomenon that I know too well - it’s the idea that if you’re talking about/ caring about one thing (particularly on social media) someone will always hit you up in your comment section saying something along the lines of ‘but what about this??’ or ‘why aren’t you talking about this too then?’ etc etc etc (just peep at any of our comment sections and you’ll find some examples.) Or, as the author of this piece B.D. McClay says, it’s when “someone who is outraged by one thing but not visibly outraged by another is called a hypocrite, a bad faith interlocutor, even if no real mismatch between values and actions is present.”
Why Whattaboutism thrives on social media
Because besties, there are receipts everywhere. Here’s what McClay McSay’s, which McSlays:
Attention is finite, the record of how we spend it public, and it is easy enough to check if somebody who tweets every day about Ukraine has ever tweeted about Yemen.
The Internet, however, has only one currency, and that currency is attention. On the Internet, we endlessly raise awareness, we platform and deplatform, we signal-boost and call out, and we argue about where our attention should be directed, and how.
Most scrutiny of how other people spend their money is driven by the zero-sum fact that a buck spent here cannot be spent there. But with attention, the zero-sum fact, as everyone acknowledges, is that one cannot pay attention to everything. Yet lapses in attention are always subject to judgment. Sure, you can’t pay attention to everything. But to this? Now, that is telling.
Big yes to just ALL OF THIS!! The internets currency is attention, and unlike money which is private/ kept in a bank (or a crypto wallet if u will) on social media, the receipts of your attention (not all of it, just the online stuff, but trolls often think the online world is the only world... which is the very problem here) are there for the world to see and scrutinise!!
If you're anything like me, what you post online is only a TINY percentage of what's consuming your brain (and this is coming from someone whose job it is to post about what's in her brain), so to be judged on that as if it's the entirety of your worldview???? Not it.
What to do about Whattaboutism
“As a remedy, I propose a solution that, like many antidotes, involves a little of the original poison. When somebody accuses another person of selective attention, ask yourself how often you have seen this particular person default to that retort, and how often you have seen him engage with the other person’s claims. If you come to the conclusion that the accuser is generally fixated on motives, add him to a little list titled “Clowns.” Remove the clowns from your sphere of attention, and keep the people whom you judge to be worth taking seriously. Repeat as often as necessary. Then log off.”
Some sound advice, McClay.
An A.I.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize. Artists Aren’t Happy.
Liv and I have talked… kinda at length about DALLE-2 and what it might mean for the future of art/artists, and I read this piece over the weekend where a dude won an art competish by using a similar software, and felt like we should chat about it.
“This year, the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition gave out prizes in all the usual categories: painting, quilting, sculpture.
But one entrant, Jason M. Allen of Pueblo West, Colo., didn’t make his entry with a brush or a lump of clay. He created it with Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program that turns lines of text into hyper-realistic graphics.
Mr. Allen’s work, “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” took home the blue ribbon in the fair’s contest for emerging digital artists — making it one of the first A.I.-generated pieces to win such a prize, and setting off a fierce backlash from artists who accused him of, essentially, cheating.”
So Mr. Allen entered a prompt into Midjourney, an A.I software, and it spat out his award-winning artwork. He said that he was open about its origins - he wasn’t trying to pull one over on anybody (though a spokeswoman for the fair said the judges didn’t know what Midjourney was, even though it was disclosed), but people were still not happy about him taking home the $300 prize.
Some artists that The New York Times spoke to for this piece said that it wasn’t that different from using Photoshop or other software to digitally manipulate and create images, while some draw issue with the fact that these new A.I programs are trained on the work of artists who don’t get credited.
I’m keen to hear all of your thoughts on this! Is this a smart use of new tech, or is it… not the vibe?
Oh, and you should listen to our podcast all about A.I art here:
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. Listen wherever you get your pods!
A link to show you what the internet was like 10 years ago today
https://neal.fun/ten-years-ago/
Click this damn link!! It’s so cool and interesting to see what the big news sites looked like/ were reporting on 10 years ago!!
Here’s what was being watched on the BBC:
Here’s what the front page of Reddit looked like 10 years ago:
Click that link and get lost for hours!!
Twitter is getting an edit button
I have to say… personally, I don’t care heeeeaps about this. You all know I love a low-stakes error and find the odd typo kinda… charming. What I will say though is that I can see the ✨dangers✨ of an edit button. The idea that someone could tweet something, have it go ✨viral✨ and then edit it to say something completely different could be pretty fucked up/ messy (there could also be some hilarious use cases but I’m not putting any ideas into the universe.)
But ALSO, here's a different take from Ryan in Garbage Day which is super interesting:
“Around, let’s say, 2015, we all started treating Twitter like some kind of reliable public record because it’s one of the last social networks that you can search, it’s used by some of the most powerful and influential people on Earth, and, I’d argue, it didn’t have an edit button, which created the illusion that what we post there is somehow locked in stone. Which is a ridiculous way to treat any website, let alone Twitter.”
What Twitter are planning to do is have an edit history, where you can see the past versions of the tweet, there will be a limit on how many times a tweet can be edited, and you will also only be able to edit a tweet up to 30 minutes after it’s been posted. I'll believe that an edit button is truly happening when I see it!
Does it make you irrationally angry when someone enters the kitchen while you’re cooking?
For me? Yes. For you?
62% say yes
38% of you have the patience of saints.
And finally:
Launching a Rocky & Eating Some Choccy (The Shit Show)
Barbie Ferreira’s Departure & Child Stars (Culture Vulture)
Jane Fonda: Hollywood star having chemotherapy for cancer (BBC)
The Post-Colonoscopy Male Friendship Test (The New York Times)
Under pressure, security firm Cloudflare drops Kiwi Farms website (The Washington Post)
Winnie The Pooh horror film trailer (Youtube)
SYSCA playlist (✨Supporters only✨)
Our HUGE SYSCA reading list! (✨Supporters only✨)