michael lascarides

The lessons from Brazil and Serbia? Don't concede one inch of ground to the far right. Don't appease. Don't triangulate. Don't grovel. Don't say they have "legitimate concerns". Mobilise your base, and fight them with all the democratic means at your disposal.

With multiple polling places at my workplace during the working week, I will vote in the next few days, but for those who want to vote on Day 1 to set the precedent, map.vote.nz/voting-places

Final reminder: You have until midnight to enrol to vote

It's increasingly clear that the major threat of AI is not super intelligence but the poisoning of every community built around collaboration, communal labor or democratically negotiated standards. www.rnz.co.nz/life/music/u...

"AI will destroy humanity" has always and only been an attempt to distract from "AI will leak your login credentials to the internet"

There was a fucking hole in our planet’s *atmosphere* Like a legit, no joke, “this will unravel our entire ecosystem” hole in the world, and then we fixed it by working together across national and political lines As a species we decided, “we will survive” Let’s do that some more

Vote.nz to enrol. Make sure the young people you know are enrolled.... Vote.nz

If you don't enrol to vote by this Sunday you won't be allowed to vote this year. If you need to change address, it has to be done by October 25 too Mad pic by Yeehawboys

The first genuinely honest ad for generative AI I've ever seen, from Microsoft / CoPilot A mediocre white guy sees his non-white colleague getting praised for good work, he asks AI to *literally copy it*, and then he gets all the praise instead: www.ispot.tv/ad/SoDi/micr...

147000 kiwis are not enrolled to vote. this election, you CANNOT enroll on the day. don't let your apathy allow the billionaires get their way. enroll, NOW: www.webworm.co/elections/

Democracies letting platforms carry on as imperial powers is the same thing as surrendering to infinite permanent gerrymandering and election interference and just telling people to vote harder every time to keep up.

It's hard to fathom where these cuts can even come from. Archives NZ has already cut services that would normally be considered essential. When I tell Australians in the sector over here that in 2024 Archives NZ wound up its digitisation unit and digitisation-on-demand service, they're gobsmacked

Shout out to Samuel Parnell who was such a shit-hot carpenter he could refuse to work more than 8 hours a day and his employers had to agree to it but instead of just taking the win he worked to get the 8 hour day for OTHER WORKERS. my.christchurchcitylibraries.com/labour-day/

10/ Austerity is costly and deadly. It destroys people's potential. Crucially, austerity makes countries more fragile and less resilient to future shocks. When public health workers or firefighters lose their jobs now, who will put out the fires later? phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the...

Make sure you’re enrolled to vote before the sun sets on Sunday! vote.nz

In case of emergency, locate and unbend a paperclip

“The internet is a store but it used to be a library” hits me like a slug to the chest

If you are looking for a cheap EV to make the move, Turners has dozens and dozens of Hyundai Kona's coming on the yard at the moment as a bunch of big fleets come off their 2022 rebate lease splurge. They are all white, ex NZTA, DHB, councils etc. Well-maintained etc

something that occurred to me is, everyone knows it’s possible to become a musician with work and practice. but you can’t work on and practice music while staring slackjawed at your phone. the real promise of generative AI is the ability to ‘make’ ‘art’ without reducing your slackjawed scroll time

It would be really great if, instead of trying to make an alternative to Wikipedia, the people complaining about the representation issues actually got engaged with Wikipedia communities and what's actually being done on the ground, and uplift that work being done by thousands of women globally.

municipal and cooperative energy utilities have also been at the forefront of deploying community-owned gigabit fiber networks at prices much better than the local telecom monopoly

Surprised to see 2007 me in this article about pay equity but just to add my bit about librarianship, library assistants have degrees if not post-graduate ones and qualified librarians often have a masters degree in library science. It is far from unskilled labour. newsroom.co.nz/2026/10/14/s...

No joke. I think this is the most important video I have ever seen about mobile games. This guy breaks down how this game psychologically profiles you, and makes the game harder or easier in order to show you ads

in an alternate universe where storefront space remained cheap and wealthy people were taxed at a sane rate this man is a moderately successful trading card game store manager and outside the handful of shop regulars he subjects to his petty tyrannies he's leaving everyone else well enough alone

Just to note that both the TVNZ Archives and the National Film Unit Collection are managed by ... Getty Images.

Occasionally I would like to remind people that I wrote a whole book about this. Intelligence is multiple, embodied, and relational, and what matters is different intelligences working together for mutual flourishing.

Many people like to laugh at medieval illuminations of stag-snails, oh those funny medieval artists making up anim...

Why does Korea have a holiday for the alphabet? Because unlike other writing systems that evolved over centuries, Hangul was the work of one dude who solved mass illiteracy by sitting down and creating a brand new fully-formed system from scratch that anyone can learn almost instantly.

I was recently reminded about this. It's cool. peoplesgdarchive.org

I recently got an email from my bank telling me *my loan had been approved* and it was so barely literate and typo-ridden that I would have binned it straight to the phishing folder had I not instigated the conversation myself. Shit is getting dire.

Minami Yoshida and Chris Wang have just launched their first board game after spending hundreds of hours perfecting it. They have used the Tūranga laser cutter to prototype many parts of their boardgame. www.newsline.ccc.govt.nz/news/story/b...

Reminder that this will probably be an objectionable publication in Aotearoa (and other civilised countries), and any murder-porn fetishist who watches it here could face 14 years in jail.