Duolingo is getting interesting

I’ve had a glimpse of what TikTok will be like if American users are blocked. I keep getting ads for a British micro series called Desired By My Unknown Husband. It involves one man who marries another man to please his grandmother, but neither of them know the identity of the other, drama ensues

I got a Christmas card from the NZ Attitudes and Values Study (Auckland Uni). The card design is a surreal AI landscape with an aggressively large pohutukawa and an invasion of fur seals.

AI doesn’t apparently doesn’t know that pohutukawa grows in the north and fur seals are found in the south

Spotify Wrapped is still fun but I liked it better before they laid off the genres guy and started making up genres like this. (RIP Escape Room)

Every time Miss Universe comes around, I'm always interested to see what Miss NZ wears (or if there even is a Miss NZ). This year NZ was represented by Filipino-NZer Victoria Vincent. Her costume is designed by a Filipino designer in collaboration with a Maori designer and represents a piwakawaka

I’m reading this book that’s a history of Hamilton City and I turn the page and suddenly it’s become a weird sci-fi story?

This is my favourite historical NZ news story, from 1 June 1926. A (probably rich) dude took his friends for a drive up Mount Eden in his flash motorcar. They parked, went for a walk and admired the views. When they came back to the car, they discovered IT HAD FALLEN INTO THE CRATER

It is delightful that the NZ Herald’s article about Lorde celebrating her birthday spends a couple of paragraphs trying to work out if Lorde had marijuana “cigarettes” at her party

People talk about boomers being fooled by clownishly obvious AI pics (Shrimp Jesus, etc) but I have seen cases where boomers will look at a hand-coloured B&W photo from the 1940s and be like "jeepers, the river was so clear and blue back then"

Photo source: nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/...

Forget Guy Fawkes. Every 5 November I think about the time in 1927 when the footbridge in Hamilton was closed to due an angry swarm of bees 🐝

Cool, a mobile weed mobile!!!

Though funnily enough, no one is nostalgic for the concrete igloo at the lake that always smelt like stale pee