FNC - I like ads now

Kia ora! Welcome to Friday Night Chats! How are you? I'm in Tāmaki Makaurau today for a podcast recording. Back to Pōneke tomorrow. Let's chat!

I am writing to you from my dad's place. He's got a skylight, and whenever I stay here, I freak out thinking the day has started and I'm late, but it's always only 7am. We have a nice routine of my dad and me hanging out in the morning with a coffee, shit-talking until it's time to start the day properly.

It's funny how your relationships with your parents change as you get older. I've always been very close to my dad because it was just him and I for a long time. But as we have both aged we've become even closer.

It's a really lovely thing and I hope my kids feel the same way about me as I do about my dad when they're older. I hope they'll ask me for life and career advice and talk to me about politics. I played him Josh's meditations and he was hooting with laughter and I felt very chuffed!

Speaking of Josh, he'll be here soon and we'll be recording the podcast together! In person! I'm very excited! Then I'll be taking Eddie to record a podcast with Anika Moa. Very exciting. It's a great podcast and I look forward to telling you more about it when it's announced!

Eddie and I have had a nice time since arriving. I've had to work but we went for a long walk in the evening and had a big deep and meaningful about how life is going for him. I always find it's in the car or on a long walk that he opens up to me.

Often if he says, 'do you want to go for a walk?' or 'do you want to go for a drive?' it means there's something he wants to talk about.

I have a lot of books about raising teenagers that I have bought and not read because my God there are not enough hours in a day, so I feel like at least I know this. And at least for now he is talking to me a bit!

What I'm reading:

Making Girls Made Lena Dunham Sick

Her second book is her first work to come from a place of deep hindsight.

VultureMadeline Leung Coleman

Knowing isn’t half the battle

There’s this little aphorism that I’ve heard floating around: “knowing is half the battle.” I don’t think it is.

Two Rurutworuru

The Return of the “Ugly Oppressor”: How Imagery is Dismantling Israel’s Visual Propaganda

Why is a single photo in an Italian magazine causing a diplomatic stir in Tel Aviv? It’s not just about the incident—it’s about the face of the soldier.

Jehad's SubstackJehad Malaka’

An extinct echidna the size of a small child once roamed Victoria, new fossil shows

More than a hundred years after it was found in Foul Air Cave in Victoria, the fossil is granting us new insights into deep time.

The ConversationTim Ziegler

we’re fans, not freaks

Fandom is an increasingly powerful cultural force, why is the coverage of us so awful?

★culture vulture★Sacha Judd

There’s a wave of attacks on the ruling class

People have reached a breaking point. American consumer sentiment is terrible, registering at the lowest level ever recorded this week. Gas prices just jumped more in March than they have in any month since 1967. The Iran War was historically unpopular from the beginning, and now the massive economic ripple

New MeansJ. P. Hill

Men deserve better than Scott Galloway. Men deserve the Greek God Dionysus.

Seeking a more expansive male mythology.

Matriarchal BlessingCeleste Davis

Connor Storrie, Tonic Masculinity, and the Rise of a New Male Star

The rise of the “Heated Rivalry” star gives us cause to hope for a better future for men, for Hollywood stardom, and for all of us.

OmnivorousDr. Thomas J. West III

I always wanted to have children – $100,000 later, I’m still trying

One woman’s heart-wrenching story of trying to conceive in New Zealand.

The SpinoffGuest Writer

The many ways our government is failing in its response to the fuel crisis

The opportunity is here for a cultural reset. Why won’t the government take it?

The SpinoffSimon Wilson

Gay Hockey, Frivolous Stories, and What Romance Novels are Allowed to Do - Harvard Political Review

At its core, “Heated Rivalry” isn’t just a story about hockey or even queer love. It is a romance working to reconfigure how intimacy, masculinity, and power can function within the real-life institutions it mirrors.

Harvard Political ReviewMadison Kang

Inside a Corporate Retreat That Went Very Badly Wrong

My Body Stopped Producing Testosterone, So I Injected $7,500 of Filler Into My Balls

DJ Boomer Banks shares how a procedure helped him regain confidence after TRT shrank his bulge.

Them.Mikelle Street

What I'm watching:

The Pitt remains very depressing. I'm still watching. But thank goodness for Company Retreat, the second season of Jury Duty. It's so wholesome! I cried watching it! I love it so much!

I am torn about Love on the Spectrum. On the one hand, we watch it as a family, and it's nice to see a representation of our family on TV. Our son Ronnie sees himself in the autistic adults featured, and we all learn quite a lot from it.

But there are times when it does feel like it's laughing at high support needs autistic people rather than with them. And I found out none of the autistic people on there are being paid, and that grosses me out.

We had talked about how weird it was that everyone on the show seemed really wealthy. They live independently or have large homes that have sleep-outs or smaller homes connected to them. That's not the reality for most families with disabled children, who are far more likely to live in poverty. But I don't want to be a buzzkill about it. I dunno. We have fallen in love with some of the folks featured...

Euphoria is back. I suffered through the first episode. It was so bad I won't be watching more, even for Zendaya.

During the weather bomb, my teenager and I watched a movie that was confusingly titled Thrash which was about a cyclone that broke levees in a little town and filled the town with sharks and a woman gave birth in the floodwaters and cut the AI baby's umbilical cord with a tree branch and then used the same tree branch to stab a shark.

What I'm listening to:

I started listening to the audiobook for Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke and the narrator has the perfect voice for it. The book is about a Christian tradwife influencer who wakes up in 1855 and actually has to live the gender performance she claims to love.

I did not watch any Coachella performances on the weekend. The more I read about how it's owned by Philip Anschutz, a right-wing billionaire who donates every year to anti-queer organisations, the less I wanted anything to do with it.

But I did see some of the 'Justin Bieber in front of his laptop' discourse, and I loved this line by Kelsey Weekman: “In straight male culture, showing someone a YouTube video means you love them. I thought Justin Bieber was perfect.”

I LOVE the new Laufey video clip for Madwoman, which features love-of-my-life Hudson Williams:

I also love that Katseye has featured some gorgeous dolls including Elon Musk's estranged daughter Vivian Wilson in their latest video clip. The song is truly terrible though. And did they have an advertisement in the middle of the freakin song???? Corporate music y'all. What a ride.

What are you reading? Listening to? Watching?

Next week, I'm MCing the Whakamana i te Ao Mokopuna Progress in ECE summit. I'm really looking forward to it. The kids are back at school next week (hopefully/finally). And I have our flu shots booked in!

I hope you have a great weekend!

Still bored?: I'm still an anti-capitalist leftist, but I watched this ad 800 times.

Still, still bored?: Just because I'm watching that ad on repeat it doesn't mean I don't have time to watch this ad on repeat. Agree with the comment that whoever put him on that cropped tank top deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.