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VUWSA has decided to request $7000 from the VUWSA Trust to fund Re-O Week: a three-day, glorified party scheduled for the second week of Trimester Two. The request alone is concerning. Why would VUWSA consider a party to be a reasonable use of Trust money? Just weeks ago, students were left homeless after flooding damaged their flat. Across the University, demand for the community pantry has increased by 400% since 2024, as reported by Salient. It remains unclear whether VUWSA will have the funding to continue Stress-Free Study Week, at least in its current form. And, of course, VUWSA has spent its entire organizational life telling students, and just about anyone who will listen, that it is underfunded. Against this backdrop, requesting $7000 from the Trust for a party is irresponsible, confusing, and insulting. When criticised that the money could be better spent elsewhere, VUWSA President Aidan Donoghue told the Executive that “these aren’t mutually exclusive.” If VUWSA needed to dip into the Trust to fund the community pantry or Stress-Free Study Week, he said, he would consider it. But that argument falls apart under the slightest pressure. In theory, funding Re-O Week and funding student support are not mutually exclusive. In practice, they are. VUWSA is not dipping into the Trust to meet demand for student support—demand it already appears unable to meet. It is dipping into the Trust for Re-O Week. Then, in response to concerns about the allocation of funds, one Executive member, who I could not identify by voice, said what may be the most confusing line of the whole meeting: “We’re never going to be able to pay to fix poverty in Wellington, but this is something we can pay for.” What? No one is asking VUWSA to end poverty in Wellington. That is not the standard. But VUWSA could invest in the community pantry. It could support students affected by the floods. It could protect Stress-Free Study Week. It could use Trust money for something materially useful. Instead, the Executive appears to have looked at student hardship, shrugged, and decided a party was more achievable. This also raises a question: why is VUWSA pursuing Re-O Week at all, when there is no evidence students actually want it? So far, there has been no meaningful consultation about whether students support Re-O Week, or whether they think it is a good use of $7000. Donoghue indicated that consultation may happen later, after the Trust has approved the money. But that is not consultation—that is retrospectively asking students to bless a decision already made. The obvious defence is that students elected Donoghue, and Donoghue campaigned on Re-O Week. Therefore, the argument goes, the student body endorsed it. That logic has a number of flaws. First, it assumes VUWSA elections are meaningfully representative of the wider student population. At a university with more than 20,000 students, Donoghue received around 1,000 votes — and that figure includes the benefit of the STV roll-down. A small turnout should not give the Executive a blank cheque to spend Trust money without proper consultation. Second, it assumes students voted after carefully weighing each candidate’s policy platform. That is also doubtful. One of the criticisms of Donoghue’s campaign, raised on VuW: Meaningful Confessions, was that he gave cake to students in exchange for a vote. That does not exactly suggest a deeply informed democratic mandate for his presidency, let alone for taking thousands from the Trust to fund Re-O Week. This is what makes Re-O Week look like a vanity project. It appears less like a response to student need, and more like an attempt to fulfil Donoghue’s campaign promise for the sake of his own reputation. Because if students were not consulted, and no demand has been shown, who exactly is this for? All of the justification for Re-O Week seems retrospective. It appears the Executive started with the conclusion that Re-O Week should happen, then worked backwards to find reasons to support it. One example came from Education Officer Aría Lal, who argued that Re-O Week would be good for international students, many of whom arrive in Trimester Two and need opportunities to meet people. On its face, that sounds reasonable. But it does not hold up. From my experience working in the International Office, international students often do not attend O-Week events. So why assume they would attend Re-O Week? More importantly, Lal’s point overlooks the fact that international students already have dedicated Trimester Two events designed for exactly this purpose. The International Office runs International Welcome Night, alongside a full week of orientation events for incoming international students. I have never seen the VUWSA Executive at any of those events. If VUWSA genuinely wants to support international students, there are better ways to do it. It could partner with the International Office. It could show up to International Welcome Night. That would likely be more targeted, more useful, and far cheaper than $7000. That is what makes the justification feel so thin. International student connection is being invoked as a convenient argument for Re-O Week, rather than treated as a real issue requiring a thoughtful response. In that sense, a comparison to Trump’s ballroom is not as absurd as it may first sound. The scale is different, but the logic is the same: public or collective money is being used to fund a symbolic project for the benefit of the Executive, while the people it is supposed to serve are facing material hardship. The most shocking part is that the Re-O Week proposal passed at a VUWSA Executive meeting with only two members objecting: Welfare Vice President Aspen Jackman and Treasurer-Secretary Sanjukta Dey. That leaves nine Executive members, excluding Donoghue, who somehow decided this was a responsible use of Trust money. Perhaps Donoghue delivered the speech of his life—although, after reviewing an audio-recording of the meeting, I doubt that is the case. It seems more likely that nine people in the room accepted the proposal without giving it the scrutiny student money deserves. Either way, it is hardly a ringing endorsement of the Executive’s collective judgement. This decision also comes at a time when VUWSA is already under fire surrounding their transparency and democratic processes. Last month, Save Our Clubs exposed VUWSA’s plan to take over club administration. As previously reported by Salient, one of the major criticisms of VUWSA’s approach was its lack of proper consultation before advancing the proposal. Re-O Week follows the same dodgy pattern: a decision made at the top, justified without any student consultation, with students left to piece together what the hell just happened. And any consultation that does occur happens after the decision was already made. The lack of transparency is not helped by the fact that, while preparing this article, I tried to find relevant VUWSA meeting minutes. None of the meeting minutes for any of the 2026 Executive Meetings (of which they have had four to date) have been made available, despite students having the right to know this information. Taken together, the Re-O Week proposal reflects a troubling pattern: dress up a vanity project as student service, scramble for justification after the fact, and look past the hardship of the people you claim to represent. VUWSA should not be asking students to accept that Trust money is available for a party, but only hypothetically available for welfare. If the Executive wants to prove it understands the reality students are facing, it should start by putting student need before student spectacle.

Salient Celebrates New Zealand Music Month! Vera Ellen: HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT TIME Happy New Zealand Music Month, bitches! While all you caffeine-addicted trackie-wearing zombies file in and out of your Maclaurin lecture theatres, ears stuffed full of musical garbage, just know that somewhere in the crowd I’ll be there with my dad’s vintage Workshop jeans and my Vera Ellen tunes. One decaf flat white, please! Just kidding! I’ve relapsed on caffeine, of course. But I still do my best to listen local. Aotearoa’s music culture has a few key strains, historically speaking, one of which encircles the label Flying Nun Records, which became known in the early 80s for their jangly, lo-fi, post-punk band sound. Vera Ellen, since her sophomore album signed to the label, in some sense comes out of that tradition, adding to the stylistic blend her charm; her lightness of touch. Ellen’s new record, HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT TIME, comes out of a period of writers’ block, apparently—but from the music you wouldn’t think that was the case at all. Her lyrics are sharp, with a tendency to tip over into playful exaggeration. “I was the dancer in the kitchen, you were the choir / I was the loner in the ballroom starting the fire,” runs a couplet from the brilliant “thaw”—the effect, though, is less surreal than candid, especially as its chorus straightens out these complexities and we get the message clear and good: “Goddamn me, I can’t think / You touch me, romance me.” Swooning between the straight-talking choruses and the rambling verses, evenly balanced in their length (choruses are usually shorter), the song offers a complete picture of infatuation for how its lyric thrives on intensity, a laserlike focus on feeling—and also for how, in all its love-drunkenness, it’ll suddenly manifest a real shudder of a line: “I think I just remembered life”! If “thaw” is pure Ellen, you’ll have to forgive me for remarking that there’s something a little The Beths-y about “big shot jr.” It’s not just that Ellen sings in her Kiwi accent—it’s that guitar figure, rushing and dawdling around the pulse; it’s those corners the band turns when they drop the downbeat of a measure and come whopping in on the two; it’s how the chorus melody stretches up above the verses, then gives way to a harmonic detour in the post-chorus. What makes it unmistakably Ellen’s? For one, it’s that big empty bar after the first phrase in the chorus. “You’ve come a long way since high school”—she lets that linger, then follows up with just a wee “Yeah” a bit later. Yeah. HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT TIME in fact oscillates between feeling off-the-cuff, silly, rambly, lo-fi, and feeling manifest and purposeful as an album. I find the vibe quite compelling for how it raises the campy and dampens the lofty, even when it lets Ellen get away with flourishes that on paper you’d raise an eyebrow at (“You give me gayfever” goes the chorus of, um, “gayfever”). Or even when it lets her sink into a stodgier adult-contemporary vibe, as on the Hemi Hemingway duet “when it’s over”: it’s performed gorgeously but plays things a little too straight. Ellen seems to have saved her best for last—the final two tracks display, for me, in their intelligence and grunge, the influence of Mitski. “Tell me less; you say it best / When you say nothing” goes a lovely internal rhyme on closer “getting told off by mum” as the music swells into an extended synth-backed coda. Every city needs its real songwriters, and she’s one of ours. Aldous Harding: Train On The Island As one of our most successful and critically-acclaimed singer-songwriters, Aldous Harding needs no introduction. So let’s not give her one! It’s apparent to anyone with ears that she’s got one of the loveliest and stretchiest voices put to record in recent memory: she sounds mousy on parts of “Coats,” an affectation; but there’s real technique, too, as she gradually covers the vowels on the outro of “If Lady Does It” until the lyric sounds half-swallowed; then she’ll sing a song rather straight, as on the highlight “One Stop,” set in her lovely upper chest voice, a gently funky drum beat coming in over the track’s second half. The recording and playing on this album is particularly ace (it’s the smooth sounds of Seb Rochford drumming on that previously mentioned track; elsewhere John Parish plays beautifully in the tight studio band). Everything is gorgeously mixed and Harding’s gift for melody is still absolutely astonishingly intact, as it was on Designer back in 2019 but which got a little stifled, I thought, on 2022’s Warm Chris. Yes, the melodies are there—I’ll be singing “Big thick coats on the dogs of people just trying to help” for the next ten business days—but I’ve always found the quote-unquote “cryptic” aspects of her lyrics a little underwhelming (“Eating rocks and plants / I pray for the incel” is the latest Hardingism we’ve been gifted (“Worms”)). You don’t want an artist as meticulous and skilled as this to fade into background music, dinner party music, bookstore music, which is my fear for her unassuming, quietly-confident style that at times eschews wedding sound with semantics, largely the dominant feature of, you know, the song form itself. But even when her songs, musically speaking, aren’t quite special enough to survive the obliqueness of their lyrics, Harding retains her posture, her artful distance, her ear for polish, her epigrammatic turn of phrase. “I cut my hair, nobody loved it” (“Venus In The Zinnia”). It’s not chilly—it’s cool.

A Guide to Forgetting One and Remembering The Other Harry Hughes “You have heard of the ocean?” My older sister asks incredulously after I tell her my plan: to cycle from England to New Zealand. I laugh. Not the worst response I’ve had so far. Since I left school five months ago, I’ve been looking for something. Something big. In Whanganui, I’ve felt stuck, ready to burst out into the world and do something real. I sat at dinner with my dad three months ago, staring at my Sprite as it fizzed, chewing on my local Indian place’s lamb rogan josh. Average, but comfortingly so. He raised an eyebrow at my proposal: travel. Not groundbreaking, except… England to New Zealand. My birthplace to my adoptive home. By bicycle. Cheaper? Hopefully. A great story? Definitely. To him, just another idea destined for the dustbin. I sit shivering on the 1 a.m. ferry from Dover, England to Calais, France. Two hours earlier than planned, I make the crossing I have been thinking about for months, ready to begin. For a brief 48-hour window, I was truly free. I could go wherever I pleased, eat and drink whatever I wanted. One moment stands out: halfway through my initial cycle in France, from Calais through Lille and past Valenciennes. Tired and wanting a break from my bony behind on the angular bike seat, I found a small bend in the road. I hid my bike in some nearby foliage and settled onto some grass by a pile of golden dirt. Ah! My Laurie Lee moment. Taking in a beautiful day of spring in the French countryside, surely the first of many. But in hindsight, after taking so many deep breaths in the weeks and months leading up to this, I forgot to exhale at the pivotal moment. I wake up. The sun has already risen, and the road is quiet. The day before, I cycled over 200km, drastically shortening my predicted time to cross Europe from 60 days to a mere 15. A mistake. I realise a second mistake as my eyes open and I roll over in my sleeping bag: French weather forecasts are not to be trusted. Among the waves of fatigue and impatience the night before, after finding a suitable roadside ditch, I had briefly checked my phone's weather app, flicking on my costly roaming package for mere seconds, before deciding that pitching my tent would not be necessary. My soaking sleeping bag tells me something different. I sheepishly wipe down and pack up my gear, hoping no judgmental French families will drive past and see the sorry, sopping English boy emerging from a roadside trench. If you have read Laurie Lee’s memoir As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, you may be thinking this is where I meet a fellow intrepid traveller of the French countryside backroads, or perhaps you are wondering at what point in this essay I will wheel out a violin to help make ends meet. If so, unfortunately, you have been taken by the romance in a similar way that an 18-year-old me was while planning this trip. Not only did I not meet any fellow wanderers, I didn’t see anyone at all, either on foot, two wheels or on four, for nearly six hours. So I did what any self-respecting global explorer would do: I parked up my bike, sat on the side of the road, began to cry, and called my mum. For a couple of days, I hole up in a hotel in a small French town at my parents' suggestion. During this time, I run the included breakfast buffet out of all bread-related products, something I think, at this point, I realise is much more in my wheelhouse than cycling from England to New Zealand. I look again at the next week's weather forecast, closer this time. Perhaps my first admission that this trip isn’t what I thought, or perhaps just in search of some more favourable weather, I book a bus to Nice at the opposite end of the country. The bus leaves 24 hours after I check out of my hotel in Valenciennes, a 160 km ride. Almost immediately upon exiting the city limits, I feel an explosion inside my knee. As I hobble off my bike and onto the pavement, I immediately begin to doubt the wisdom of any of it. I inhale an unhealthy number of ibuprofène and flex my knee. I look at the clock on my screen saver and set off again. As the sun begins to set, and I shake the last drops out of my 500ml water bottle, I start to scan the roadside for a source of drinkable water. Nothing. A lack of planning and an excess of naivety had led me to believe that, like back home in New Zealand, drinking fountains would be plentiful across the European continent. Unfortunately not. So when I see an empty truck stop, my thirst insists I at least check whether the truck-cleaning hoses are working. They are not. However, a bucket of stagnant water begins to look rather appealing, and so I take a big scoop into my bottle and take a sip. Soap. It is literally a window cleaner. Disgusting. Not only am I now without water for the remaining 70km of cycling, but all I can taste is soap and the equally disgusting cherry Bakewell gel that was my sole remaining food source. After sleeping in the woods on the outskirts of what I have since found out is a French military base—once again sans tent; don’t learn my lessons, do I—I get back on the road. And I do eventually make it. Loudly amping myself up, I trundle at an embarrassing speed over the final hills and into the station. Famished, I inhaled some bakery items and two bottles of water, to the visible horror of the elderly American tourists sitting next to me. Cut to: me, several days later, halfway up a corniche between the Mediterranean coasts of France and Italy, a French woman stopped me and asked if I was okay. Looking at me, she probably knew the answer. Comically dressed in full biking attire and with about 15kg of gear strapped to my bike, it’s a miracle I wasn’t met with laughter. Instead, she offered me a water refill and chocolate. It was either at this moment, or sometime after, that I became acutely aware that the explorer-traveller life was not for me. Within four weeks of my arrival by bus in Nice, I was sitting on a British Airways flight to Australia, via Istanbul, minus one bike. There is a hope, I think, that among the people who knew of my trip, the illusion has yet to be broken for some. That, despite my own disappointment, perhaps someone I spoke to in the street, or someone who I never knew was watching, still thinks I’m out there. While the wheels both figuratively and literally fell off quite some time ago now, for someone out there, perhaps I am now far away, exuberant but exhausted, drifting off to sleep like Laurie Lee in a golden field of wheat, the sun still shining. I really did get out of the trip what I wanted to. Good stories, a bit of exercise, and the knowledge that no matter where you go, people are generally pretty decent. Still, there are probably easier ways to learn this. I have also learned that it is inadvisable to make decisions throughout your life, whether small or big, through the lens of how it would sound in a well-distributed and read obituary. Though, a good story is still a good story, even when the person telling it has gone home early.

Dalas Kruger A perpetual tourist, bags forever packed, passport forever full. Never truly calling anywhere home. I live between arrivals— half in translation, half erased. Each place a version of myself I almost become: the coffee here is darker, the rain speaks slower, names blur in the mouth, and I forget which language I dream in. Worlds keep folding and unfolding, their borders breathing like lungs. Maybe the world is my home, maybe I have never been a citizen anywhere. I know how to disappear in airports, how to smile through plate glass, how to make warmth from strangers’ weather. I know how to go, but not how to arrive, I don’t know how to stay. Somewhere, my childhood is still unpacking itself— the smell of sea and sun and dust trying to fit inside a carry-on. I’ve learned to keep what doesn’t belong to me: postcards, accents, the way light bends differently in every city’s morning. I am fluent in departure. I am native to nowhere. I am the forever foreigner.

Christopher Curtis After playing Persona 3 and Persona 4 over the past half-decade, and admiring the wider series from the sidelines for years, I’ve finally made my dive into the broader Megami Tensei Franchise with Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance, the enhanced edition of the latest mainline entry. The concept alone is alluring: demons, deities, creatures, and mythological figures from world folklore, all embroiled in a war between law and chaos amidst a post-apocalyptic Japan. Yet as much as Vengeance sold me on the franchise, it also left me utterly perplexed. A valley of extreme highs and lows—sometimes in the very same aspect—this was a difficult game to evaluate. Vengeance begins with an intense hook; less than 30 minutes after you’re introduced to the protagonist and his school friends, the world just ends. Awakening in Da’at, the netherworld that now stands in place of Tokyo, you’re left to wander the wasteland, ally with whatever demons will listen to you, and eventually become entangled in a divine war over the recreation of the world. This is the broad narrative thrust, but how the story unfolds will depend on which of the two campaigns you choose. The original release’s story is preserved here as the Canon of Creation, while the new Canon of Vengeance offers a reimagined tale with its own focus, villains, and branching endings. For my two cents—which you probably want, since you’re reading this—Canon of Vengeance is the way to go if you only intend to play this game once. It massively expands the supporting cast and introduces the Qadištu, a spectacular group of villains of Kabbalistic origin. By contrast, Canon of Creation drags its feet too often, with very few characters—including you the protagonist—feeling particularly compelling. Canon of Vengeance is radically more enjoyable. Your friends this time are far more involved in the war, with active and compelling arcs that make their shifting loyalties all the more tragic. Unfortunately, no matter what route you pick, actually exploring Da’at is frankly boring at best and genuinely painful at worst. I understand it’s a wasteland, but surely there could be something to discover besides sand, right? Regardless of route, the gameplay loop remains the same: recruit demons, fuse them into stronger allies, and brace yourself against an onslaught of enemies who simply want you dead. These demons range from pixies and slimes to Odin himself, and building the right party becomes the heart of the experience. Thankfully, Vengeance features a deeply engaging combat system. It rewards party diversity and system knowledge with extra actions and advantages. However, any system you can exploit, your enemies can exploit too. Cover your weaknesses well if you want to live. The result is intensely strategic turn-based combat that, despite its complexity, never feels slow or tedious. This dichotomy is why I feel torn about this game. On one hand, the combat and demon fusion are deeply engaging, with diverse boss battles that greatly reward familiarity with these mechanics. The presentation is also spectacular, backed by some of the most gorgeous 3D animations I’ve ever seen. And when the story wants to be, it’s utterly captivating. Chaos representative Yoko Hiromine is one of the most relatable characters in fiction for me—make of that what you will. On the other hand, the world is a chore to explore, and the story can do a terrible job of explaining itself. Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance is bewildering, positively and negatively. I can’t recommend it blindly, but I would absolutely encourage anyone intrigued by its premise to look into its particular brand of punishment, strategy, and storytelling method. Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance is available on PC, Xbox One and Series X/S, Playstation 4 and 5, and Nintendo Switch and Switch 2. Gameplay: 8/10 Writing: 7/10 Aesthetics: 10/10

Within the span of a week, I’ll be trying to accomplish a long-term task just to see if it’s possible, and to see what I can get out of it. Life lessons, skills, resilience training? The stimulation alone should be enough motivation. Currently, I work a lot. By day I slave in the Salient office, but by night I’m my alter ego: hospitality Front of House. My parents always forcefully encouraged me to have a job or two during study. In the past three years, I’ve complained to them endlessly about wanting to find a new job that pays better, and how hard job hunting always is. They always respond the same way: “Why don’t you just cold call and hand your CV into some places?” And in response I go, “Boy, what a stupid idea. What is this, the 80s, Helen?” In my head, obviously. Never disrespect Helen Tickner, working mother-of-two, to her face. As of late, I’ve realized I’ve never actually cold-called on places for a job. I’ve always painstakingly tailored CVs and cover letters for specific roles, cherry-picked applications online, and nervously handed in papers to outlets that advertise they’re hiring. I decided to finally take the advice of Generation X and ask for a job face-to-face, to see if I can get an interview from cold-calling within a week. What better place to try than Lambton Quay? Lambton Quay contains numerous retail spaces, banks, and major corporate buildings. Nearly a kilometre long, it bustles with people bunched in big suits and fancy clothing. As a Cuba Street kid, I hate it. But there are smaller places, such as the occasional cafe or salon, that aren't big businesses requiring a 9-5 commitment. Therefore, it's an excellent smorgasbord of establishments to go on a tirade announcing that I desire a job. There are countless buildings on Lambton, so I decided to simply print off 100 CVs and 100 cover letters, all exactly the same and stating the same general things. I think I’d rather peel 100 hangnails than write 100 individual resumes that say the same thing. After everyone in the Salient office rightfully ripped the wording and punctuation of my cover letter to shreds—and reworked it, thank you Sub-editor Holly—I went out on the town with a stack of CVs to beg for a job with. Editor’s Note: I didn’t check Will’s CV very hard when he went to hand it out; I just helped him print it. But I did redact items from it when it was going to print. And my advice, on reflection, is this: check your spelling of “permanent” in your CV. Will spelled it wrong… very “Creative Thinking” of him. When I approached each establishment on Lambton, I’d say the exact same thing at every front desk: “Hello, I’d like to apply for any and all open positions you have. Here’s my CV and cover letter. I’m looking for anything from casual to full time. I am available Monday through Friday, and am flexible on weekends.” My deliveries of desperation began at the banking end of Lambton, home to the Kiwibank, ANZ, and BNZ buildings. Handing in my papers to big banks with no warning was my biggest worry, but I was pleasantly surprised at how professional their staff was. I struck up a genuinely nice conversation with the lady at the front desk of Kiwibank about how poor the job market was, and she told me that while they didn’t have any open positions, they would post positions online to Seek & Indeed. I thanked her, and she told me she’d pass my CV onto her manager. As I skipped away, my happiness began to dwindle as I slowly started hearing these exact same answers from nearly every single place. “You can actually just apply online.” “I will pass this on to my manager.” “We actually just hired a whole bunch of people.” “Sorry, we are not hiring at the moment…” “...but we will keep it on-hand in case we are.” By the time I got to Countdown, I had started to get so jaded hearing the same rejections. At Cotton On, I finished the worker's sentence about applying online. Some places outright didn’t accept physical CVs due to sustainability, such as Lush and Mecca. Other places didn’t accept my CV because I’m probably too good for them, like Swarovski Crystal. I was doing the same mundane task and saying the same thing over and over to the point of autopilot. For example, at Shosta Vape Shop, I accidentally said to the girl at the counter, “Here's my CoverC and VLetter." As I turned to leave, I’m fairly certain I heard her tear my paper in two and scrunch it into a ball. While there’s no problem getting rid of trash, the least that girl could do was wait till I was out of the store. After handing out about 80 papers in one day, I put a pause on my rejection therapy. Stores were beginning to close. I started my second day flying my papers by heading up the elevators of the Lambton skyscrapers. I’ve always been curious as to what’s up in the sky above my emergency grocery shopping. While most of the floors required ID, it was surprisingly easy to get public access to certain floors simply by waltzing in. In those tall buildings, I felt completely out of my depth asking for a job at law firms and consultants. I reminded myself this was mostly just for kicks to ask for a job as an underqualified applicant to The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists. Despite how depressing this all was, I did find some pretty funny moments. There’s a lot of women's clothing fashion stores, and I handed my CV into all of them, including Bendon Lingerie. It’s sexy, dark, mysterious, and full of mannequins in bras. I entered nervous, beet red, and very much not wanting a job there. However, the young girls at the counter were so nice, and the three of us had a laugh about being desperate for a job in this economy when I told them, “Please don’t hire me.” On the other end of the spectrum was the men's clothing store Barkers. I came in and did the whole spiel I usually did, expecting to be told nothing but “thanks.” Instead, the guy at the counter started to give me a full mini interview right then and there. Taken off guard, I lost my confident autopilot behavior. I dropped the ball and waffled on about how retail and hospitality are the same—they’re not—so they should probably offer me a job. I don’t think I’ll be working there anytime soon. Going into this, I knew there was no way I was going to get an interview in a week. To rub salt in the wound, a lot of older people would shoot me down, and then follow up with, “It’s so great to see you’re doing this, getting up and out there trying!” Eugh. Thanks. It’s now one week later and I’ve had no interviews for potential jobs on Lambton. Out of the 100 CVs I handed out, I received only two responses back: one from a law firm, another from a consulting group, both including the words “unfortunately.” They were quite nice responses, however, both taking the time to read through my CV and offer me alternatives with proper explanations. If I could do anything differently, I would have dressed myself more presentable and shaved before going out, instead of looking like a scraggly unemployed creature. It seems that the days of cold-calling in Wellington are over, and the era of online job application hell is here to stay. If I could recommend anything though, it would be handing in a physical CV and applying online. Or do whatever it takes to annoy businesses to remember your name and consider employing you. I may have failed this week's challenge, but that doesn’t mean you have to fail the challenge of being employed. Embarrass yourself and try to get a job.

Good news stories (and more) for the planet Kia ora, Salient reader! Welcome to our fortnightly column on the environment, sustainable living, and the small, stubborn act of hope amongst a world on fire! Check in every second week for waste-free recipes, genuinely good news, and practical ways to lend a hand—nudging a happier, healthier earth a little closer into view. Who Are We? You may have wondered, who is behind this strange new surprisingly-hopeful page in the back of my Salient? Maybe you’ve tried one of the recipes and been blown away by the simplicity and deliciousness of what you’ve just created. Well, here’s a little about us: We are a group of university students flatting just down the road from Kelburn campus who, perhaps like you, have noticed that we are facing some fairly big concerns for our planet. Rooted in a Christian faith, we feel that whilst things are pretty (really) bad, there is still reason to feel hopeful, and the least we can do is try. Most of us authors have made the call this year to cut all of the plastic out of our groceries, not because we think we’ll change the world, but as an act of hopeful defiance against a system that is choking our planet. So far the contributors to this column have been Simon, Leah, Jachin, Claire, and Micah. If you’d like to put a face to a name, ask us a question, or come check out our epic jar pantry, feel more than free to send an email to simonlangham06@gmail.com. In the meantime we will keep bringing you fortnightly recipes, good news stories for our planet, and ways that you can get involved in our local area—making a small, but important difference. Waste-free recipe of the week: Hummus—that gloriously flavoursome, deliciously spreadable, protein rich super food. It’s just a shame it has to come in those pesky single-use plastic tubs. If only there was a way to make it at home, for a fraction of the price with none of the waste? Well, you’re in luck! There could not be a simpler or more time, energy, and cost efficient treat to make than hummus. You will need: A can of chickpeas (or two) A blender, food processor, or whizz stick (immersion blender for the less whimsical of heart) A splash of oil (olive is extra delicious but canola works just fine too!) Some flavours (for a classic blend try tahini, lemon, garlic, salt and pepper; I have also tried adding varying combinations of brown sugar, balsamic vinegar, and paprika—all with delicious results!) To take your hummus to the next level, roast some of your favourite veges beforehand and add them into the mix too Now that you have collected your supplies, blitz them all together and watch as the hummus emerges before your eyes. If it appears too chunky, simply add some water and keep blending! Happy dipping, spreading, or just eating with a spoon! Get involved: Ever wander through Kelburn campus with a banana skin, some last morsels of your muesli bar you just can't stomach any more, or a smooshed piece of sandwich you dropped? Never fear, for a compost bin is near!! We have the scoop on a new compost initiative on the corner of Kelburn Parade and Salamanca Road. Why are we chucking perfectly good garden fertilizer into our rubbish just to sit in a dump and smolder? On your way down the hill—to the city, the train station or your flat—drop all your greenery into the signed bin! Be a part of the cauldron of juices brewing for gardens around Kelburn! BUT, please be nice to this new compost bin. Only put food items in, guidance will be provided on a sign.

Arie Joe The most damning indictment of the state of this Victoria University of Wellington’s building stock is presently on public display above the front doors of the Student Union Building. There, in plain view of every passing student, are blue cargo straps rated to 2,500 kilograms apiece, doing the job that the architects and structural engineers were paid to do thirty-odd years ago. Namely, keeping the roof attached to the rest of the building. Now consider that Wellington is the world’s windiest capital city. So, on a hilltop campus that catches every gust off Cook Strait, what did someone decide to build? A Student Union Building with a roof shaped like a kite. Two great cantilevered planes flaring outward from a single slender central post. Visually striking, no doubt. The trouble is that nature applies wind uplift to the widest, least-supported edges of the kite, where the roof does all the rocking and the centre post does all the worrying. If the branches are bigger than the trunk, something is generally wrong with the tree. In this case, something plainly is. Some architect scribbled up a roof design, then handed it to a structural engineer in the cheery expectation that the laws of physics would politely yield to the laws of aesthetics. They did not. And so, three decades on, engineers have been called in to lash the building to itself with ratchet straps while everyone works out how to fix what should never have been built that way in the first place. On architectural awards generally The prefix "award-winning" applied to a New Zealand commercial or institutional building is, in my observation, a near-perfect predictor of inconvenience for everyone obliged to use it. Real estate agents will quietly admit that "award-winning" attached to a house listing is a near-guarantee of buyer hesitation. The media periodically run admiring photo features on award-winning architectural houses, all of which on close inspection turn out to be visual and functional dogs. Living rooms with no obvious place for a sofa. Kitchens reachable only by ladder. Bathrooms with full-length glass walls facing the neighbours. Meanwhile every sensibly sited, well-laid-out building in Wellington gets ignored, and the prizes go to whichever firm has produced the most photogenic curiosity that year. The Student Union Building belongs in this tradition. Nice from a distance. Disastrous on contact with weather, students, and the actual day-to-day business of being a building. The rest of the dog The atrium was designed without natural ventilation, condemning the building to permanent and audible mechanical wheezing, a constant droning reminder that somebody, somewhere, was paid to fail to think about windows. Anyone who has tried to study, relax, or have a conversation in the atrium knows the sound. An architectural cleverness being paid for by every kilowatt-hour drawn from the grid and every dollar drawn from the maintenance budget. The doors into the atrium are absurdly narrow. A wheelchair user, or anyone trying to bring in a bike, a piece of stage equipment, or a delivery of any size, can vouch for it. This is an "award-winning" building. The judges, I assume, were not in wheelchairs, on bikes, or carrying anything heavy at the time of their deliberations. The Student Union Building’s compliance schedule and maintenance records make for sobering reading on their own. The scheduled-maintenance register runs to roughly 300 separate planned jobs across two years. The reactive-maintenance log for a single recent period runs to nearly 300 more, dominated by electrical-lighting faults, plumbing leaks, HVAC faults, blocked toilets, fixture failures, and roof issues. This is what is meant by high-maintenance design. Bear that figure in mind, because it is occasionally floated that the Students' Association should take ownership of the building. Bear in mind also that VUWSA is already operating on the smell of an oily rag, with the President’s election promises lying conspicuously unfulfilled for want of money. Now picture six hundred maintenance jobs every two years, and a rusty, corroded glazing bill that would devour any sensible Association budget several times over. Taking title to this place would be the financial equivalent of catching a falling knife. Whatever VUWSA’s current financial troubles look like, becoming the owner of a poorly maintained, leaking, and strap-bound award-winner is not the rescue plan. And then there are the Gordon Wilson Flats If the Student Union Building shows what happens when the University commissions a building, the Gordon Wilson Flats show what happens when it buys one. In 2014, Housing New Zealand sold the University an asbestos-laden, earthquake-prone, eleven-storey concrete wreck that they themselves had decided was beyond economic repair. A government agency, with all its engineers and consultants, looked at the building, looked at its books, and concluded that the prudent course was to dispose of it. The University, which likely trained those engineers and consultants, looked at the same building and concluded that the prudent course was to buy it. For more than $6 million. Eleven years, several abandoned plans, a lost Environment Court case, and a special amendment to the Resource Management Act later, the bill for getting out of this brilliant decision is now $7.25 million for demolition alone, with works dragging on into 2027. The University has no firm design and no committed funding for whatever is supposed to replace it. This in a year when the institution has just clawed its way back to a $7.7 million surplus after years of financial struggle and a recent round of staff cuts, while the Tertiary Education Commission still rates it a medium-high financial risk. In short, the cost of demolishing one mistake is roughly equal to the entire annual surplus. One firm whisper from the demolition contractor about cost overruns, and there will be cost overruns, and the University is back in deficit. And there is only ever one place that money comes from: your fees. The bill for somebody else's award-winning pile thirty years ago, and somebody else's bargain-of-the-century property purchase a decade ago, will land in your bank account in the form of next year's tuition increase, and the next, and the next. Welcome to higher education. There is the further assertion, occasionally heard, that the new build will be "warm, affordable and sustainable student accommodation." Warm, possibly. Sustainable, perhaps. Affordable on a brand-new bespoke build on a difficult Terrace site overlooking the city, with all the associated groundworks, structural engineering, exterior cladding, and consenting costs of a from-scratch project? The far likelier outcome is premium-priced rooms aimed at students whose parents can comfortably absorb the rent. That is not what the city's student housing problem requires. What ought to have been done, and still could be The two buildings are different stories with the same moral. In both cases, the bill is being paid by students, staff, and a maintenance budget that was never sized to absorb such contingencies. What ought to have been done instead of the current Gordon Wilson site plans is what the Wellington City Council has been doing rather successfully. Convert tired old office buildings, of which the city has plenty, into accommodation. You buy the shell, you fit out the interior, and you skip the groundworks, the structural works, the foundations, the exterior cladding, and the worst of the consenting saga. It is faster, cheaper, lower-risk, and produces genuinely affordable rooms rather than what a brand-new bespoke build is going to deliver. The Gordon Wilson site itself was always best suited to its original and frankly more useful purpose: a gateway from Willis Street up onto the Kelburn campus. The Kelburn campus is inaccessible from the flat without a hike, which is a pleasant arrangement for the able-bodied and most travel by bus. Sort the gateway out first. Then put affordable accommodation on the flat where the access exists, in buildings the University does not have to invent from scratch. As for the Student Union Building, a costly permanent fix is required. Whether the lesson stays up is another question entirely. An institution that cannot reliably keep its own roof attached or tell a bad property deal from a good one, has no business pretending it is short of better things to spend its money on.

Students, today your Unc is combining three different questions that all essentially ask the same thing. All of these questions come down to one thing: vibe. Mixed signals are mixed vibes. Not wanting to ask someone directly is trying to catch a vibe without making things awkward. Wanting to build “rizz” is wanting to improve the vibe you’re putting out into the world. The annoying truth is this: every single person on this planet is different, and every single person communicates differently. Some people flirt like they’re auditioning for Love Island. Some people flirt by standing three metres away from you at a flat party and asking if you’ve done the readings. Some people seem keen because they reply fast, and some people seem uninterested because they’re simply bad at texting, busy, shy, emotionally constipated, or all of the above. I could tell you that eye contact, little touches, or looking at you when everyone laughs are signs someone likes you. And sure, sometimes they are. But sometimes they’re just friendly. Sometimes they’re flirting with no intention of doing anything. Sometimes they’re only looking because you’ve got your high-protein spinach-and-egg-white breakfast stuck in your teeth. Romance is a cruel sport. So when someone gives mixed signals, don’t make their confusion your full-time job. If someone likes you, their behaviour should make you feel more secure over time, not more confused. A bit of mystery is fun. Constantly analysing what “haha yeah maybe” means is not flirting. That’s admin. As for building “rizz,” I hate to say it, but the best way to become more attractive is to look after yourself. Not in a weird grindset podcast way. I don’t need you waking at 4.30 a.m. and yelling affirmations into the mirror. I mean basic good-human maintenance. Wear clothes that fit. Lint-roll your pants if they look like you’ve been wrestling a golden retriever. Use cologne or perfume, but don’t gas the room. Get a haircut if you need one. Ask people questions. Listen to the answers. Got a crush? Give yourself a fighting chance. Invite them for coffee. Ask if they want to grab a drink. Mention a hobby you’ve wanted to try, then actually try it so you have something to talk about next time. Be someone with a life, not someone hovering nearby hoping they’ll notice your romantic suffering. But here’s the real kicker: there is no secret way to know for certain if someone likes you without asking. You can read the signs, consult the group chat, and stare into the spiritual abyss of their “liked your story” behaviour, but eventually, you either ask or accept not knowing. And if you’re too scared to ask, ask yourself why. Is it fear of rejection? Fair enough, but you can get over that. Is it because being with them is a terrible idea? Maybe they’re taken, your flatmate, or your mate’s ex. In that case, keep crushing from afar and don’t turn your life into a messy group-chat incident. Rizz is not magic. It’s confidence, care, and the ability to ask questions and listen to answers. Go well, team. And floss.

Pedro Hay There is a good chance many people read that title and immediately threw their copy of Salient into the bin, because surely nothing good can come from an article with such a nonsensical bullshit headline. It sounds like something clearly cooked up by a dangerous raving maniac. Well, unfortunately for those people, they will now never know what makes these frankly insane creatures so special. They will not understand why they matter, why we should care about them, or how there may even be some life advice hiding beneath their armoured little shells. The horseshoe crab—yes, a much more boring name than “walking armoured beach frisbee,” but what else was I meant to do, gently invite your attention?—is an armoured little tank of a specimen that belongs to the phylum Arthropoda. That group includes insects, crustaceans, arachnids, and other weird creepy things with too many legs. Despite its name, the horseshoe crab is actually more closely related to spiders than to anything you would reasonably expect to find in a seafood platter. There are only four surviving species of the horseshoe crab today, mostly found across South and East Asia, with one species living along the Atlantic coast of Northern America. As far as lifestyles go, horseshoe crabs are basically living Mortal Engines. They crawl around the ocean floor on their six walking legs, pinching up whatever small prey they come across before shoving it into the grinder on their underside. Cute! This grinder is made of bristly structures called gnathobases, located at the base of their legs, right where the legs meet the body. As the crab walks, its legs move in opposite directions, grinding the gnathobases together while pushing food toward its mouth. Basically, the horseshoe crab spends all day scuttling around with an industrial shredder attached to its stomach. You’ve got to respect a creature that is, quite literally, always on the grind. By now, you may be thinking, “Oh my god, these things are screwed up, what could be so important about these freaks?” To which I reply: you are being SO impatient and, quite frankly, rude. I’m getting there. First of all, horseshoe crabs have been around for a LOOONG time. The tuatara outside the TTR block? Infantile compared to these guys. Horseshoe crabs have remained practically unchanged since the Triassic period, around 250 million years ago. Fossil evidence from similar ancestral species suggests their lineage may stretch back even further, to roughly 445 million years ago. That would mean these little bastards were crawling around before trees existed. Somehow even wilder than that, horseshoe crabs also carry a secret goldmine inside their creepy little bodies; something so ridiculous it sounds like I'm making it up. They have bright blue, medicinally valuable blood. Horseshoe crab blood is copper based, giving it a vibrant blue colour—the complete opposite to our red, iron-based blood. And while looking like “liquified Smurf” is already interesting enough, this blood is far more than a freaky party trick. It contains cells called amoebocytes, which are crucial in testing vaccines and other medical products for bacterial contamination. Specifically, blood from the Atlantic horseshoe crab is used to create a clotting agent called limulus amoebocyte lysate, or LAL. For decades, LAL has been used to test vaccines for dangerous bacterial toxins. When contamination is present, LAL clots around it, acting like a tiny biological fire alarm. In other words, the blood of this weird ancient frisbee-spider has helped keep modern medicine safe. Naturally, because this blood is extremely valuable—worth thousands of dollars per litre—humans did what humans do best and exploited the hell out of these beautiful creatures. Creatures, by the way, that have existed peacefully on this planet for FAR longer than we have. Every year, more than 1 million horseshoe crabs are hauled out of the ocean and taken to biological facilities to be bled. There, they can have up to 30% of their blood drained by machines that sound, quite frankly, like something a vampire would design. An estimated 10% to 15% of horseshoe crabs die during the bleeding process, and scientists suspect even more die after being released back into the ocean. It does not take a marine biologist to see how grim that is. The good news is that research centres around the world have been developing alternatives to LAL. These alternatives do not require sucking these poor little things dry. Thanks in part to this process, horseshoe crab populations in parts of North America are beginning to recover, slowly clawing their way out of the “vulnerable” category. Yay. Finally, some good news. But before we all start jumping for joy and clapping like the credits are about to roll, it is time to sit back down. Because, of course, it is not all peaches and cream. Across Asia, horseshoe crabs are still in serious trouble, driven down by overfishing, pollution, and habitat loss. The tri-spine horseshoe crab, despite having an objectively badass name, is now considered extinct in Taiwanese waters. Across much of greater Asia, its populations continue to slide toward deeper endangerment each year. Depressing, I know. I did not want to end this piece there, because while it is easy to sink into the despair of what can feel like an impossible fight against humanity’s casual disregard for nature, there is still hope. Annoying, stubborn, inconvenient hope. There is always something that can be done. Next time you are at the supermarket, maybe skip the can of tuna. It smells weird anyway. Take power away from the fisheries that keep pushing further into the habitats of our ugly little scuttling marine friends. Go to the conservation talk advertised outside the lecture hall you have been avoiding. Look online and find out what you can do, even if it feels tiny. Especially if it feels tiny. Do not let hopelessness consume you. Be like the horseshoe crab. Get up every day and keep crawling. Keep moving forward. Maybe even keep shoveling small worms into your terrifying grinding stomach-mouth. Progress does not always have to be graceful. Sometimes, it just has to keep going. P.S: They can backflip. Yes, I saved that until the very end. Sometimes horseshoe crabs get stuck upside down, and then they simply launch themselves into a little prehistoric backflip and flip themselves upright again. Hell yeah.

Andy Lester I hate the concept of intelligence. I hate even more the way we use that word. At first glance, it’s pretty unassuming. You’ve probably used it plenty of times and thought nothing of it, whether you were talking about the smart person in your course or someone who you find particularly inspiring. But as students, the word “intelligence” can be hugely detrimental to us, our confidence, and our learning. To understand why, we first have to ask… What is Intelligence? Intelligence is only really brought up when we talk about doing hard things. Let’s narrow this down to mental tasks specifically, such as problem solving, remembering stuff, or being able to create stuff. Seems like a good start. But somehow, you’re not considered intelligent for remembering to wash your dirty plate after dinner (though your flatmates might still call you stupid if you don’t). Despite the fact that this is solving a problem and involves remembering something, it doesn’t quite pass as an intelligent feat. I believe this is because tasks such as this are something most people can do without much difficulty. So, we need to have a quick chat on difficulty. If you want to know how difficult a task is, ideally you want some objective measurement of the difficulty that applies to anyone attempting it. The problem is, that’s just not possible. We can feel something is difficult to ourselves relative to the amount of effort we exert in completing that task, but that’s our subjective experience only. Because difficulty is an experience rather than some God-given value assigned to every task in existence, everyone is going to have a different experience and feel a different amount of difficulty, meaning no task can have a fixed, universal difficulty. Instead, we compare our subjective experience to as many other peoples’ experiences as possible and use that to judge approximately how difficult a task is. Imagine you just did a pull up and it was the most gruelling, excruciating five minutes of your life. After putting in all that effort, you’re very proud of yourself (as you should be!). But you don’t know how difficult a pull-up is, only how difficult it was for you. You know your subjective experience. If one day, you walk past a playground and see someone effortlessly doing mad pull-ups, looking like a juiced-up jack-in-the-box, then this adds a new dimension: capability. It’s clearly not taking as much effort for this stranger to do a pull-up as it did for you. A pull-up is a much easier experience for them. And suddenly, you stop thinking that pull-ups are hard. Instead, you think that you’re bad at pull-ups, and this person is good at doing pull-ups. You now think they’re more capable than you. I think of capability like a ratio between how much effort someone puts into a task, and their output for that given task. I find this effort to output ratio a really helpful idea, and we’ll come back to it soon. But capability for mental tasks isn’t a one-for-one definition of intelligence. The sentence “I’m capable of doing algebra, I’m not capable of doing calculus,” is different from “I’m smart enough to do algebra, I’m not smart enough to do calculus.” Capability is particular to a given task, and can change with practice, learning, and training. Intelligence, meanwhile, is thought of as some inherent trait in each and every one of us and applies to every mental task we complete in every aspect of our lives. You’re smart or you’re not. Simple as. But in practice, because the difficulty of any mental task is inherently comparative, intelligence is also inherently comparative. So, what’s the big problem? What I mean by this is that intelligence doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The same way we don’t have a basis for how hard a pull-up is until we see other people do it—which then defines how capable you are at that task—we can’t know how “intelligent” we are until other people do the same thing and we can assess how much effort they put in. And we can’t compare apples and oranges. Different disciplines often require vastly different skills: doing maths isn’t objectively harder than writing essays and believing anything along those lines is pointless (coming from someone majoring in physics and theatre, I back this 100%). We will have the best judge of “intelligence” for people who do similar mental tasks to us: people in our courses, our jobs, clubs, and so on. The similarity of mental tasks we must complete through assignments and tests offer many opportunities to compare ourselves to our peers. Unfortunately, this makes it very easy for us to form ideas about how intelligent other people in our courses are. And the people who we are most likely to perceive as intelligent are usually going to be the people who do better than us. Not surprising, but important to note. Rather than attributing a person’s success to their efforts first, we often find ourselves attributing it to their natural intelligence more than anything else. On top of that, intelligence is often thought of as an unchangeable quality of a person. You can’t get more intelligent. This leads to my biggest gripe with intelligence. When we take this for fact and believe that you can only do better than you are now by being more intelligent (which, for some reason, we also believe can’t happen) we believe we’re fated to do either the same or worse than we are now, forever! How good! This doesn’t have to be the case. I work for a tutoring company, and so I see this often materialises in an internalised belief students hold that “I’m not a maths person,” or “I’m not an English person.” These beliefs are entirely self-inflicted blows. If you approach a subject already thinking “I’m bad at this, and I’ll always be bad at this,” it’s not surprising that you hold yourself back. This marks the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. Students with a fixed mindset often find it harder to motivate themselves to start and complete necessary work, as they don’t believe it will yield any results regardless of how helpful any given chunk of learning may truly be. But the upside of your mindset being entirely self-inflicted is that it’s also in your control. You can choose not to believe it. By doing so and instead believing that your effort is what will give you the results you want, suddenly everything you do is no longer defined by some roll of the dice that determined how intelligent you’re destined to be. You take your life back into your own hands. What we need to do as individuals is to shift what we believe causes academic progress and broader learning from intelligence towards effort. As it stands, if you believe intelligence matters, then progress primarily sits under an external locus of control, rather than an internal one. Similar to a fixed and growth mindset, a locus of control says how much we believe we can change the outcome of our lives and surroundings. An external locus means you’d believe outside factors control your life more than your choices and efforts, and an internal locus of control is the opposite. Remember that imaginary pull-up that you did? It was hell. But you did it. Firstly, congrats on your imaginary accomplishment. Do you think that that effort would be meaningful? From the perspective of a person wanting to improve, wanting to get fitter, wanting to do something, I think that effort is something you should always be proud of. Regardless of how difficult it was for anyone else, the act of putting in that effort showed that you can do hard things. This is what I want. I want you, reading this article now, to know that when you put in effort, you make progress. That progress doesn’t look the same every time and certainly doesn’t look the same for everyone. But it’s progress. Even if you look at every other person who’s ever done a pull-up, or ever done an essay on To Kill a Mockingbird or Fallen Angels, and take all the notes on how they do it, the only way you’re going to actually improve is by going for that pull-up, writing that essay, and making that effort. As students, everything that we do should be focused on improving ourselves and our knowledge. We will not benefit from constantly comparing ourselves to the people around us, so why keep using a word that has its entire basis in petty comparison? And no buts. Now, there are some alternatives for how people measure intelligence. For example, the effort-to-output ratio mentioned earlier. This is what some people believe really defines intelligence, but as it has to be considered for a given skill. I earlier called this a capability, but proficiency is also a good word for it. In terms of learning a given skill, I should make you aware that memory is something we can also train! In fact, there are actually memory tournaments, where people who dedicate their lives to remembering compete to see how many random numbers or sequences of images they can recall. The human species is really fascinating, huh? But they all use a set of techniques to help them remember these unconnected bits of information, not just their ‘natural ability.’ For problem solving or similar displays of already held knowledge, I raise the counter argument that applying learnt knowledge is something we also have to learn how to do and is subject to the same arguments as above. Believing another person’s success to be entirely because of their natural talent or intelligence does nothing for you. Actually, it does worse than nothing: it denies the impact of any of their efforts to get to where they are now. It helps no one and only stops you from checking out a winning strategy. If you completely delete the word intelligence from your life here on out, and disregard it in your learning, you’ll be better able to focus on your own learning and make the changes you want to see in yourself. Intelligence is fucking stupid, but you’re not.

Ryan Reinolds Last week, the decision was made to dismantle the Broadcasting Standard Authority. In explaining the move, Minister for Media and Communications Paul Goldsmith cited, among other things, inconsistencies between digital and print media, along with removing more “red tape.” In order to keep up with consistent regulations, Goldsmith has announced an AI replacement for the authority: Winston AI. The new system is eponymously named after not once, not twice, but thrice-former Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters. Using the brand-new state-of-the-art Invercargill AI data centre, the latest large language model has reportedly been trained entirely on Winston Peters’ Facebook page. Speaking to The Horse’s Mouth, Peters said: “In order to weed out the cultural Marxists and their wacky woke ideologies, we have trained our chatbot on the only thing I know I can trust: myself.” Peters refused to comment any further, telling The Horses Mouth he believed the wider publication, Salient, to be “fake news” and “liberal propaganda." Early testing of Winston AI has reportedly shown promising results. When asked whether climate change is real, the chatbot allegedly responded, “That’s a very good question, sunshine,” before changing the topic to immigration statistics from the 1990s and demanding to know who funded the interviewer. Government officials insist the AI will improve efficiency across the media sector. New legislation introduced to Parliament this week aims to operationalise Winston AI. The oddly named Not My First Rodeo Bill 2026 proposes to give Winston AI sweeping powers over media regulation. Under the bill, all media reporting would be checked for inherent bias and categorised into one of three groups: Communist, probably Communist or New Zealand First Policy. However, critics have raised concerns over the transparency of Winston AI after the system repeatedly refused to answer questions directly, instead accusing journalists of “running a smear campaign” and somehow bringing Jacinda Ardern into entirely unrelated discussions about fishing quotas. The Government has defended the rollout, arguing that the reforms represent the future of modern governance. A spokesperson for New Zealand First told The Horses Mouth: “People are sick and tired of these elitist experts telling us what we can and cannot report on.” The spokesperson went on to say that so-called “experts” probably received their degree “thanks to that socialist Labour policy of handing out fees-free education.” Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is yet to comment on the proposed reforms. However, a spokesperson from the Prime Minister' s office noted that, once operational, Winston AI would play the role of “kingmaker” in the formation of future New Zealand governments. There has even been some suggestion that, to ensure a stable coalition, Winston AI will also share the Deputy Prime Minister’s position with ACT Party leader David Seymour. Where this will leave physical Winston is yet to be clarified, as some sources tell us he has already been replaced by Winston AI and we are just yet to notice. Meanwhile, Seymour has welcomed the move, proposing that all future school history curriculums also be reviewed by AI “to ensure children are protected from dangerous concepts like empathy and public transport.”