Why you should meet your heroes 🌞
➕ South Korea legally recognises same-sex couples for the first time, & a dispatch from London Laura 🌹
Angels it’s been a BIG week of press for your gal!! Yesterday I fangirled SO hard because I got to chat with Kate from Embedded (my fave newsy as I’m sure you ALL know) for a piece she’s writing, followed by the gorg PJ (from the PJ Podcast) and I’ll tell you what - after those two and Gemma I am sick of hearing about myself!! It’s such a gorg part of my job that I really do love, but it’s nice to be able to come here each morning and hear about how all of you are in the comments each day. So how are you?? What’s filling your cup (or shoe) this week? Let me know!!!
ANNNNND thank you so much to all of you who’ve done our survey so far 🥺🥺
It makes our jobs SO much easier when I hear what you actually want from us (not a hot take but love you for being so cute and kind in the responses.) We’re gonna keep running our annual SYSCA survey for about a week, so please fill it out - it won’t take long!!!
It’s a very pop-cultureish edish today - hope you dig it!
How The Internet Drives Fandom To New Heights
🌞London Laura: Meet Your Heroes! 🌞
🗺Around the world 🗺
Supporting children affected by Cyclone Gabrielle, Andrew Tate’s detention extended, and South Korean court recognises legal status of same-sex couples for first the time.
Can we separate the art and the artist?
Fact Check: Euphoria Star Angus Cloud Reportedly Involved in Hit-and-Run Collision
A collection of my favourite fandom articles!!
This section was brought to you by my FAVOURITE APP IN THE WORLD - POCKET. Pocket is an app where you can find the best articles from across the internet and save them to your personal library - it’s how I save literally everything I write about in here!!
One quirk about Shit You Should Care About (which you may or may not have noticed) is that in between telling you the news of the day, or explaining how something works, you’ll see a photo of Harry Styles, a TikTok of Matty Healy, or maybe even Lizzo on the cover of a magazine. That’s because we are die-hard fangirls, and because we know that multiple things can be true at once. You can be a Harry Styles fan AND care about the ongoing protests in Iran. You love Beyoncê and the environment? Dope! Same!
Being a fangirl taught me how to edit (thanks to reading typo-riddled fanfiction), photoshop (if I’m not going to meet Harry Styles I should at least be able to crop myself into one of his photos), community build on Tumblr and Twitter, make memes, make friends, and most importantly, feel part of something. Shit You Should Care About was built on the foundations of these skills, yet I never ever felt like I could put them on a resume, so today, I’m here in defence of fandom.
Some examples of what’s in the collection:
You should seriously go and read/ watch/ listen to everything I’ve collected up, and let me know if you have any other bits of content that fit into this genre!!
🌞London Laura: Meet Your Heroes! 🌞
Laura is our resident ray of sunshine and co-host of Culture Vulture (our weekly pop culture podcast!) 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.
In keeping with tradition I’m writing this on a ✨journey✨ - this time in Portugal with Ru aka Stanley Tucci lite, surf widowed (but he is also my sober driver so can’t complain too much) on a beach near the teeeneeny fishing town we are staying in and buzzing from seeing the sun for the first time in what feels like months. Why am I the best version of myself when I am near the ocean?? I’m interested to know if this is a universal experience or if this is an Aotearoa thing, but the second I even smell the sea I morph into the version of myself I’d love to always be and suddenly gravitate towards dreaming/doing/writing all the things I feel way too tired to do day to day.
Which brings me to today’s musing - meeting your heroes!!! This was both inspired by Luce’s meet cute w Gemma Styles, and when I overshared about my question time with Stanley Tucci in last week’s intro as Luce’s new CULTURE VULTURE SIDEKICK (tune in next week for our first official one!!!!!!!!!!).
Back when I was a publicist, part of my role was looking after artists when they were in NZ and taking them to do media interviews, shows etc etc. And aside from learning people are almost always shorter in person, I also just couldn’t agree less with the “don’t meet your heroes” rhetoric. I shared a bit of this on the pod, but my greatest learning from that role is artists are very human - and humans are normally pleasant to be around / want to at least be perceived as such.
So cue my hero - my favourite artist in the world, Leon Bridges. His song River is intrinsically tied for me to a particularly hard spell (read breakup), and one month I look in the press calendar and see he is coming to town. Initially I was excited, but when the day came to go meet him I became so nervous I almost called in sick - I remember getting in the work elevator, white-knuckling the keys to the promo car and just focusing on being normal. But of course, he was LOVELY and his show was amazing - I didn’t even try hide the fact I was singing along to every word / harmony because we LOVE fan culture around here (duh). I listen to his albums w even more enthusiasm now and I can’t believe I almost missed that opportunity because I was worried he wouldn’t live up to whatever ‘perception’ I had.
And there are so many examples of this!!! Take the SYSCA Harry’s House listening party that we were all literally crying at, or when this NME journalist who used to essentially run an Arctic Monkeys fan account interviewed them last year, and the bits of colour added in from being a true fan just made the whole interview SHINE. Passion is💘 chic 💘 and while that doesn’t mean your hero owes you a picture or for their privacy to be violated in any way - I also think we don’t, and shouldn’t, believe the worst.
I want all your thoughts on this - perhaps a CV ep on meeting our heroes??
Your forever fan, London Laura xxxxx
🗺Around the world 🗺
NZ:
Each day I’ve been trying to share a new and trusted way that we can donate in support for those affected by Cyclone Gabrielle. Today I wanted to share KidsCan’s (who we’ve worked with in the past) “$15 for Floods” appeal which is raising money for the children who’ve been affected by the Cyclone.
If you want to support kids who are currently being affected by the floods - donate here.
How to help in the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle (The Spinoff)
Europe:
Andrew Tate has detention extended for third time (BBC)
Andrew Tate and his bro (who have been arrested on suspicion of human trafficking) have had their custody extended for a THIRD time and will now be staying in detention until at least the end of March 🙂
South Korea
South Korean court recognises legal status of same-sex couples for first the time (The Guardian)
A court in South Korea has just ruled that same-sex couples are “entitled to the same spousal coverage under the national health insurance service as heterosexual couples” - which is the first time the country has legally recognised the martial status of a gay partner. Even though this feels like a small win (because of course same-sex couples should be recognised) same-sex marriage is still illegal South Korea, but pressure is mounting to change the law. Here’s hoping!
Can we separate the art and the artist?
Reuploading this ep because it feels SUPER relo right now (and because London Laura is currently LISBON Laura and was unavail for a record!!)
This ep is all about when/ how/ and IF you can separate the art from the artist. Spoiler - there's no right or wrong answer here - it's an incredibly personal and introspective topic, but we give you so many tools to add to your toolkit when it comes to unpacking and reconciling your love for someone/something when the artist has done something Very Bad.
Today’s mundane poll:
Fact Check: Euphoria Star Angus Cloud Reportedly Involved in Hit-and-Run Collision
Everyone’s fave chiller (or maybe not anymore) Angus Cloud (best known for playing Fez on Euphoria) has reportedly been involved in a hit-and-run in California. When I first saw this story it was from the very prestigious news source PopCrave:
So naturally, I went and read up about it, and found from this article in Complex that it’s been… taken out of context a little bit on Twitter (shocker.) What this article states is that Cloud and another man “were driving around in an SUV that rear-ended a Toyota and then took off into a nearby parking lot,” and that Cloud is not an official suspect, but at this stage “his name has been floated for possible involvement.”
The article DOES say that at least one person was allegedly hurt in the accident:
A witness told the outlet that at least one person “suffered injuries to her legs and arms, with bruising and redness.” The same witness sought out the actor and his companion in the aforementioned parking lot but was unable to find them.
To get my Friday diary entry, a whole bunch of links and recommendations, and Bel’s Saturday morning newsy ‘No News Is Good News,’ become a paying supporter 💌
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I met the leader singer of my fav band. Not a small band, but we’re not talking 1D level. Anyway would agree with Laura to meet our heroes cos we’re married now xoxo
Does Laura only travel to cities starting with L 😅