Pākehā, dream avatar of gender magic. PhD student working on political & social polarisation, trying to make data scientists read Laclau. Opinions mine. he/him 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈 Mastodon, where I am not active but there are DMs: @sageanastasi@mastodon.nz
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I'm kinda fascinated by the "bisexual men are just gay" myth, because it's super prevalent in the culture but not backed up in the stats at all. Any time you get a gender & orientation breakdown, there are the same number of gay men & lesbians, but less bi men than bi women. We're just closeted.
🧵 Also, the post about people keeping folders of our topless images is why I rarely share images of my body. Being an object since birth isn't great
To be clear they are scrapping rules they introduced last year. www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360...
this is a perfect answer. my current tolerance for “queer suffering” in media - as in specifically suffering BECAUSE you are queer - is close to zero. I’m just not available to it right now. that’s totally different from putting an ensemble which features queer characters into a Situation
Sheffield researchers doing The Lord’s work. Great study. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
you'd think the governor of illinois basically going "we're being invaded by an authoritarian" would be something you'd see real easy on the front page of most everything an hour later
Sigh. More misinformation floating around For the local election: Voting papers will start arriving from Sept 9th - start. arriving. from. If your papers don't arrive, you need to contact Council and ask where you can pick them up from - in Hamilton, that's our libraries or the council building
the whole what
i got distracted by the history of murrine and forgot to post that there's new stuff in the shop, including worry stones. one of them is bisexual. nora.jewelry
I think maybe I didn't mention this here - but National Library has undergone a big structural change and now I'm curator with a portfolio covering Cartoons, Comics, Illustrated books and Children's Literature. So - if I'm talking more in these realms (beyond cartoons and comics) that's why.
Again, the key divide within the Democratic party does not map onto a left/right axis: It is between those who want to fight back forcefully, like Pritzker, and those who can’t/won’t shake the impulse to accommodate, appease, and uphold “normalcy.”
In a guest lecture for my Masters via Zoom with someone from Scotland who works in England, to the best of my knowledge has never been to NZ, and she's opened her lecture in Te Reo Māori and has read up on te ao Māori perspectives because she knew she'd be speaking with us.
been thinking it for a while but im just going to say it out loud. cis “allies” have made me feel the worst overall in the last year with the way they talk about trans men. they are incapable of supporting trans women without beating down their siblings who are men.
Australian slur technology is the most advanced in the world
I think he's solved it. No over-engineered "nerds can't figure this out" shit: The takeaway lesson: Often people who are less technical can find better solutions, because technical people are generally egotistical people and over-commit to an idea for the sake of it when nontechnical people don't.
Saving the critically endangered kākāpō. Can Aotearoa New Zealand vaccinate its rare species before bird flu gets to them? In the last continent to remain untouched by the virus, hopes are being pinned on immunisation as migration season approaches. 🧪🦜💉🦠 www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Hope it goes well!
VOTE 1 ANDREW FOR LITTLE MAYOR
I know we've got our own problems in the US but Britain seems like it's teetering on the brink of pogroms?
The Sharp Tranket transistor radio (1960)
You know what, fair play to Scooby Doo villains. They walk into a room dressed as a ghost, see a talking dog on its hind legs making the world’s biggest sandwich and somehow manage to stay in character.
Since we're on the topic, on the old site, Gail once asked people to post our own version of a Gail Simone tweet. My entry got some numbers: "Did Stephen King ever adapt any of his movies? It feels like they'd make pretty good novels."
I'd say I told you so but it was always going to happen wasn't it?
It could never be made in New Zealand because we can't even buy water ships, let alone spaceships
The idea that your ICC warrant doesn't apply if you're speaking at a college or on your way to speak at a college may be open for abuse
This paper gives more detail, for people that are interested ojs.aut.ac.nz/pacific-jour...
WAKE UP
Every time I hear Health NZ representatives say the nurses are putting people at risk I think: no, Health NZ, you are putting people at risk and this strike is Nurses trying to stop your harm
Ethics classes can teach the content of various theories, and thereby impart knowledge and skills which are useful to ethical cognition. But they can't make someone care, they can't make someone good. It's a fundamental mistake re what university education can or should do to hope they'll do that.
If it weren't for your gumboots, where would ya be? You'd be in the hospital or in the infirmary.
i met anubis in the realm of the underworld, big strong guy by the way, had a dog’s head, i’m not so sure about that. and he said to me, mr president, you’ve got the heaviest soul we’ve ever weighed down here. can you believe it? they’ve never seen a soul that heavy in all of duat
So, ah, quick request
Using one photo already on your phone, what is the announcement tomorrow at 2?
Pretty sure it's the Government's refusal to improve staffing levels, pay equity, and pay rates that's "disrupting more than 13,000 surgeries and appointments". But this Government's generally not great at acknowledging or addressing upstream health determinants, so no surprise really.
#NZ Don’t wipe with these! The article says to return them for a refund. www.odt.co.nz/star-news/st...
It's bonkers that sleep apnea has like a 10% incidence rate and it never gets mentioned in the sleep hygiene guides!
I keep a folder of screenshots of compliments people have given me, and also a journal of "cool stuff I saw" (less loaded version of a "gratitude journal"; I'm not *grateful* to see a guy skateboard past playing a guitar, but it was *cool*). It helps counter the "oh no everything is always bad".
If regular sleep hygiene isn't working, a) talk to a doctor about a sleep study and b) try out all the pieces individually. Some parts of my sleep routine are the opposite of the usual advice because that's what works for me. Here's a post (not mine) about it ms-demeanor.tumblr.com/post/7333782...
If you have bad experiences with mindfulness or meditation, check out these guys; they're a mental health org run by a doctor who's researching that area. Negative effects seem to have a 7-10% incidence rate (basically the same as other treatments) www.cheetahhouse.org
Other options are Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (CBT's big brother; has specific modules on emotional regulation and distress tolerance) and Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (good if your anxiety relates to feeling out of step with your values or ineffective at achieving them)
This orphaned reply to a long-lost post deserves to be read and remembered.
Not to fearmonger, but considering the state of reproductive rights in the US and Oura's new partnership with Palantir, I don't think anyone with a uterus should be using one. Or any other device that can track your period.
Testing out a generative AI for info sessions I am running at the moment, I gave it a 2018 computer tutorial (word doc) and said to "update it to making the contents current". Its claim of success in doing that was producing a Word doc identical except for references to 2018 changed to 2024.
This ‘blue states closed schools too long’ narrative is becoming increasingly entrenched in the Polite Center but it’s arguable at best. Republican states had far more deaths during COVID and their students have roughly comparable learning loss.
Reading the NZSIS threat environment report for 2025 and I just think it’s fascinating how quickly they can go from talking about extremism and foreign interference and transnational repression and then immediately go “together with our Five Eyes partners we put together this useful resource…”
People are melting down at a Tribune article about CHSD 230 considering adding Arabic to its language learning electives. I wasted time in the comments, which I normally avoid doing since it's useless and awful, but it led to possibly the funniest thing anybody's ever said to me about France.
What I'm reading here is how traditional (white) patriarchal ideals of womanhood and manhood are being perpetuated in a loop of content driven by an algorithm that's trained on the same content. It's a good illustration of how offline attitudes are supercharged online. www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/i...
One interesting crossover of this that I’ve seen: mom influencers who film car content from pick-up lines. It’s a whole genre, complete with subgenres.
I once suggested that the old black men in my life think of their cars as an extension of their underground economy hustle and we need to think more comprehensively about how people see their cars. And I had to block 500 people on Twitter.
This rings true to things I’ve witnessed and read. We cannot blame individuals for systematic failures but we should be able to acknowledge group based status behaviors as reinforcing those systemic failures.
new paper on because-prefaced utterances (BPUs) in child interaction: utppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3... @teacherscollege.bsky.social @iscaupdates.bsky.social #lansibunch #emca
If you’ve ever worried whether art matters. It does.
The Guardian, in their write up of the reshuffle, completely omit mentioning that Tim Allen, new director of comms, was a Trustee for anti-trans hate group Sex Matters. Instead he gets "Allan’s past colleagues describe him as charming and collegiate". Yikes. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
The thing that often blows by is not only is crime the lowest its been for any non-senior citizen's life, it has been roughly that safe for *fifteen years*. We have had fifteen years of steady, low crime while the irrational freakout over crime has relentlessly grown to a fevered, disordered pitch.
“I heard the same message from Pope Leo that I heard from Pope Francis, which is the desire to welcome all people, including LGBTQ people,” the Rev. James Martin, S.J., told the AP. “It was wonderful. It was very consoling and very encouraging and, frankly, a lot of fun.” https://to.pbs.org/46hrN7l
Bluntly, this is often the reason people take longshot judicial reviewws (tho imo this one, even tho it lost, wasn't really a longshot), not victory but delay. Delaying a decision can mean millions for a corporate, or a shifting in the political winds for people with a particular policy hobby horse.
The persistent idea that something can only be British cuisine if it’s invented by white people, despite south asian and afro-caribbean influences being an inextricable part of British culture for centuries, is one of the most pervasive casually racist ideas the US has about the UK.
UK showing just how fast a country slides when the center-left party tries to compromise with fascism
This is a tactical, as well as moral, error. Musk is spectacularly unpopular in the UK. There's a chance to take the patriotic high-ground, calling out foreign billionaires stoking up violence in Britain, without being seen to dismiss "ordinary people". And you can challenge Reform to back you.
Years of dealing with racists has taught me that all racists are also misogynists, so when they say “protect our women and girls”, they are only speaking half the sentence out loud. The full sentence is “protect our women and girls because they are OUR prey”.
Rupert Lowe's proactive encouragement of the most racist faction in the UK - the group which leaving an ethnonationalist party for not committing to the forced deportation of Badenoch and Sunak - and the extent to which Elon Musk is now a lot further right than Tommy Robinson are much under-reported
Hey yeah, here's some news! I'm still The Sewphist, and I always will be... but now I actually own a company with my beloved R, and we'll be selling both of our art, as prints and on homewares and gifts. We're bringing production in house where possible, so yes to NZ Made! Give us a follow maybe?💙
“Private care does not "free up a bed" because the same limited pool of doctors and nurses work in private as well as public care. … Who will really benefit from an influx of government money into the private system - patients in need of vital healthcare or business owners?” Vital question to ask👇
i think this is a blind spot medical professionals have: gender is treated as a “public” field (true if you’re cis) whereas something like “sexual orientation” is understood to be sensitive and therefore disclosed only as need-to-know. unfortunately, GPs forget that “trans status” is sensitive too
simple rule of thumb: never use a public field to disclose any LGBTIQ identity status unless you have explicit consent to do so. people forget that applies to the T just as much as it applies to the LGB. don’t out people without permission. it’s not hard to
Want to improve #Māori hearing healthcare in Aotearoa & become a Kaimātai Ororongo/audiologist? We're offering 4 Māori scholarships for the Master of Audiology at UC, covering fees for the entire degree! Applications for 2026 close 1st Dec. Please share widely through your networks across the motu!
Algorithms are feeding you sexist and otherwise problematic material, and feminist media scholars have been saying so since recommender systems become commonplace in 2016. www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/i...
LMAO look who's an example of AI misuse in Wikipedia!
I follow a lot of women’s fitness subreddits and have been DELIGHTED how many women are openly talking about putting on muscle because they like the way it looks and feels, if you’d told me in 2003 this is where we’d be I would have laughed in your face
Collins has been consistently - if sometimes more muted than I'd prefer - on the side of an independent, competent, professional judiciary. And it says something about the current government just how much that contrasts with her colleagues.
Submitted my thesis! 🥳
As someone who has worked in central/local govt for the last 20+ years and who has been through so many restructures I can't keep count, this is the thing that has always maddened me: Nobody ever assesses if the restructure achieved what it was purporting to achieve. It NEVER happens. It's WILD.
Turns out I had done almost all the steps for a past 30 day map challenge. Using the basic country coordinates in the maps package, while they are not detailed, has the advantage they are easily changed. #rstats code at gist.github.com/thoughtfulbl...
NO! co-starring cary elwes and jason statham! and the director is actually using the whole frame! look! blocking and deep focus!! snappy ass dialog too
Trying to remember two (sorta trippy) documentary films I saw in the 2000s(?) by a NZ filmmaker based in Japan. They both dealt with the emergence of a kind of animist digital culture: the internet as a spirit world & other weird fascinating ideas. Anyone know these films (or who made them)?
Wikipedia editors trying to fend off the onslaught of AI crap have crowdsourced some telltale signs of LLM-generated writing; it might be handy for editors and proofreaders generally. Thanks to @ellenrykers.com for pointing me to it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...
You can vote in the New Zealand local elections from 9 September to 11 October 2025. 😁 If you are wondering who to vote for or want to look into what policies the candidates have, then I highly recommend checking out this handy website. 👇👇👇 policy.nz/2025
i think some of what’s happening here is many cishet white leftists inadvertently revealing their belief that LGBTQ people only care about ourselves and that progressive policy is a zero-sum game. marginalized people who are accustomed to banding together for survival often don’t see it that way
My Listener column about talking to Auckland business owners. It's not just a slump, it's a consequence of the government wiping out existing systems without having a clear idea of how to replace them. www.nzherald.co.nz/the-listener...
Paywalled story by Julia Grabel but the graphs with the plummeting lines are all on Datawrapper: national figures here www.datawrapper.de/_/q63Ca/ and Auckland here www.datawrapper.de/_/iqv4G
To be fair I've been a PhD student since I was 23 so there's been no anchor for the fact that I've been aging. It's like how this is the first time I've lived in the same house for several years in a row since I left home, and I recently threw out a bag of flour from 2022
I'm 27!
We’ve published an Open Letter calling on NZ leaders to deliver risk-based AI regulation & a national oversight body. AI has huge potential, but harms (deepfakes, gendered abuse, bias) are real and rising. Read the Letter (and sign it if you agree!) #nzpol regulateai.nz
Even when people wave that off as "you're not a professional athlete though", they usually shut up when I tell them that at my height and build (5'2, stocky), I would have to have *0% body fat* to have a "healthy" BMI
Yeah, we talked a bit about the human rights side and he said that he's optimistic about countries in the bloc whose human rights issues are linked to underdevelopment, but not about the ones where it's fascism.
This year, the first week of spring coincides with Te Wiki o Te Taiao — Conservation Week — run by @docgovtnz.bsky.social Aotearoa is home to around 200 species of native birds. Below is a 1959 poster made by the Department of Internal Affairs as a reminder that native birds are protected by law.
Aotearoa -- did you know there's a new daily game for guessing NZ birds? I'm off to a great start! 😌 Birdle 🇳🇿 01/09/2025 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 birdle.nz
I was talking to an Indian friend recently about BRICS and apparently they're looking at setting up their own reserve currency, which could be another hit to the USD.
I'm BAAAAAAACK! That's right! it's me, Doc, and I'm here to tell you all about guns in first person shooters, hopefully helping you be way more creative in your weapon design by breaking 'em down into the basics that's right, it's FPS Design 102: da guns docseuss.medium.com/the-way-of-t...
Attn all femme neuro-atypicals: You are no longer "info-dumping," you are "shelucidating."
drug addiction is not a moral failure. drug addiction is a failure of intelligent design.
you can become your own “I know a guy” Guy! the secret is SMALLTALK with EVERYONE i got a great handyman recommendation from a lady i bought a chair from last week and i ask any good plumbers etc i meet if they know any other guys, bc a good guy knows good guys
Participating in the "I know a guy" economy is more mutual aid praxis than the average activist could dream of.
My favourite line in this is when they say “this woman has had three and a half whiskeys- under the legal limit.”
Yes, but ... they're not rlly incels: the large majority of participants in the March for White Australia in Naarm were white, middle-aged blokes (w partners & children), some wearing union merch, & generally from the 'burbs. Ordinary Dumbs & Mads, in other words.
Still reading it but dear god I can't wait for the paradigm of framing everything as hormones/neurotransmitters to end. "I fundamentally feel as though I need someone outside me to love me in order to fix my brokenness; this is, of course, a problem with what they do to my hormones"
I can
Scottish police do not know where their sensitive data is going, because they trusted it to an American multinational (Microsoft) which simply refuses to tell them. Remember this when the US screams about Europe wanting to regulate the big tech players.