My YouTube Party of Five is a new series in which we invite people to share their five favourite YouTube videos, the ones hold closest in their heart, the ones they’ll play at 2am while drunk at a party. This week: Spinoff staff writer Jihee Junn. My kind of party is a YouTube party – … Read more
Five years ago, Mark Rickerby crafted code to analyse the full text of the Whaleoil blog after Dirty Politics. That experience, and the unveiling this month of a language model trained on internet text that can generate startlingly coherent prose, offer a profound warning of the dangers of allowing AI innovation to be controlled by … Read more
Two years after David Farrier helped to unearth the exploitation of children on YouTube, the sexualisation of children on the platform continues – and NZ companies are inadvertently appearing alongside it. Oskar Howell reports. New Zealand businesses are advertising their goods and services alongside softcore pornographic videos on YouTube; they just don’t know they’re doing … Read more
Bringing you the best weekly reading from your friendly local website. Michelle Langstone: I adore NZ cricket. But I won’t watch until the silence on Kuggeleijn is broken “There’s an elephant in the changing rooms and his name is Scott Kuggeleijn. As New Zealand Cricket’s governing body you are well aware of the charge of rape … Read more
There’s a dearth of queer work in Aotearoa, and very little of it is supported by our mainstages. Homos, or Everyone in America is a gleaming light in the darkness. Sam Brooks responds to the play, and talks to the director about its urgency. (For the purposes of this piece, the label ‘queer’ stands in for LGBTQI+ … Read more
Ever wanted to work for The Spinoff? Now is the hour. The Spinoff is seeking a new member for our commercial team to come and work in our sunny city fringe offices. The focus on the role will be ensuring our existing clients are kept happy and fulfilled, while also bringing in new business to … Read more
House of Drag winner Hugo Grrrl says his Wellington events company has had over 100 events disappear from Facebook. Wellington events organiser and drag king George Fowler has been left “devastated” after a targetted attack on Facebook caused the entirety of his companies’ events to be removed. Winning TVNZ’s House of Drag as drag king … Read more
The only plausible explanation for the Radio Sport host’s diatribe against my colleague is an elaborate attempt at performance art – the alternative is heroic incoherence and worse, writes Toby Manhire It was a belter of a night at Eden Park on Friday. A sell-out crowd. A sea of mostly Indian flags; drumming and chanting. … Read more
My YouTube Party of Five is a new series in which we invite people to share their five favourite YouTube videos, the ones hold closest in their heart, the ones they’ll play at 2am while drunk at a party. This week: Tiny Portions sculptor Rose Young. I tend to treat YouTube as a test, forcing … Read more
Bringing you the best weekly reading from your friendly local website. Madeleine Chapman: There’s something off about the London Waitangi Day Pub Crawl “Drinking on Waitangi Day is fine – it’s a public holiday after all. And performing a haka overseas is cool. But combining all of those things has created a Frankenstein’s Monster of cultural … Read more
Sources suggest the New Zealand editorial arm of the global youth media giant is shutting down, reports Duncan Greive. A huge round of redundancies being rolled out worldwide by youth media giant Vice has reached the New Zealand office. Staff were told today that the team faces being slashed to one to two positions – with … Read more
Bringing you the best weekly reading from your friendly local website. Emily Writes: What does a rapist look like? “I have devoted so much of my life to working to dismantle this culture we live in where we victim blame and apologise for ‘good blokes’ who were just ‘not sure’ whether someone was consenting – and … Read more
Spare a thought, please, for the commentators, battling desperately to string together coherent ideas as the mercury hits ridiculous. The weather was hot in New Zealand this week, as documented for posterity by our newspaper of record in cover lines such as “In for a scorcher”, “HEATWAVE”, “Keep your cool, the heat’s here all week” … Read more
Back in all their misspelled, verbatim glory, we present 10 more of the most entertaining complaints made to and dismissed by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) from July – December 2018. Read more: No grounds to proceed: this year’s best TV ad complaints rubbished by the ASA How meaty is Meat Week really? (December 2018) What was … Read more
Bringing you the best weekly reading from your friendly local website. Alex Casey: ‘I’m still living it’: a Roast Busters survivor’s story On Monday night, Joseph Parker, one of a group of young men investigated relating to alleged sexual offences, broke his silence, talking to Newshub five years after The Roast Busters scandal exploded. Many of … Read more
My YouTube Party of Five is a new series in which we invite people to share their five favourite YouTube videos, the ones hold closest in their heart, the ones they’ll play at 2am while drunk at a party. This week: Spinoff staff writer Don Rowe. Being forced to sit in front of YouTube videos … Read more
David Cohen remembers a man admired and loved by his colleagues in the media, in politics, and beyond. Journalists and other public figures spent Wednesday expressing their sadness amid the news that Rob Hosking, a senior political reporter and wry commentator for the NBR and other news outlets, had died of cancer. Rob, a former … Read more
The already dubious return to publicity of a former ringleader of the Roast Busters has a sordid twist: Joseph Parker appears to be using the spotlight of TV news as a way to promote his music. *This story has been updated with comment from Newshub. Joseph Parker, who was part of a group of teenage … Read more
Bringing you the best weekly reading from your friendly local website. Maria Slade: Transport’s dirty little secret: The truckers breaking the law just to survive “Aside from getting out of the truck to load and unload 100kg pallets of bread the driver did not stop from 10.30pm, when George met him at the truck depot, … Read more
My YouTube Party of Five is a new series in which we invite people to share their five favourite YouTube videos, the ones hold closest in their heart, the ones they’ll play at 2am while drunk at a party. This week: Sam Brooks. “Something bad, something good, or something funny?” Whenever I’m hosting a gathering … Read more
How two families, in the space of one week, brought out the worst in New Zealand media and public. Tragedy unites us. A shared pain can be what brings a nation together, with people from all backgrounds setting aside their differences to suffer, grieve, and rebuild together. But as it happens, there’s one thing that … Read more
Alex Casey guides you through the M. Night Shyamalan universe, and shares some tips on how you can live in it. Movie fans will know that this is a big week for the M. Night Shyamalan universe. His latest film Glass, opening today (January 17), marks his most ambitious project yet – even more ambitious … Read more
Henry Oliver reminds himself of eight songs from the Now That’s What I Call Music collection that hit once and never again. The very term ‘one hit wonder’ is contentious. Excluding straight-up novelty songs, call any song a one hit wonder and you’ll have that artist’s superfans chasing you down the street with pitchforks. So, … Read more
Toilet spray product VIPoo has haunted our televisions and pre-roll ads for over a year now. Alex Casey dissects one of the most challenging art pieces of the decade. You know what I was casually thinking, just the other day? Even Hollywood’s sweethearts need to punish the porcelain. If that’s a normal thing to say … Read more
Bringing you the best weekly reading from your friendly local website. José Barbosa: Red Dead Redemption 2 might be a hit, but Rockstar’s star is waning “Rockstar’s in the business of making games that are EVERYTHING. They’re at once both intense simulation games and quick fire shoot ‘em ups (Grand Theft Auto V), or sprawling Westworld-esque theme parks … Read more
Ahead of the release of his new film Glass, Alex Casey looked back at the best twists in director M. Night Shyamalan’s back catalogue. Try as I might, I never seem to see a twist in a movie coming. It doesn’t matter how hard I strain my eyes, how many maths woman calculations I do … Read more
New Year, new you? We hear that a lot in January. The focus tends to be on the body, but what if you have a shit personality online? What can you do to fix that? Emily Writes can help. I think 2019 should be the year that people who are assholes in comment sections try … Read more
A scrap with Facebook over a copycat Stuff page reveals how fine the line is between combating fake news and straight up censorship. This piece was originally published on June 16, 2018 Fans of the meme page NZ Stuffed would have probably noticed over this week that the content had vanished from their Facebook feeds. … Read more
Last year Seven Sharp aired a segment warning against the left-leaning political extremist groups, aka meme pages, on Facebook. Madeleine Chapman expands on the report. This post was originally published on 28 February, 2018 It’s a dangerous world out there for young people. No one drives safely, everyone drinks too much, and there’s MDMA laced with … Read more