THIS WEEK ONLINE – Terminally Reddit-Pilled Eugenicist Dorks

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Hello darkness
and hello friends!

No theme this week. You can pick your own. Whatever you'd like baby.

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• How to make magazines cool again
• Australian music faces existential threat [Music Australia]
• ‘There is no right or wrong here’: NZ contest where children hunt feral cats scrapped 
• ‘Elite breeding couple’ are just terminally Reddit-pilled eugenicist dorks
• There are pentagrams everywhere for those with eyes to see
• :^)

Do you remember magazines? Hard-copy websites? Long-form Instagram? I do… barely… I vividly recall that they were too expensive and mum wouldn’t buy them for me and I’d cry with joy at finding a three-year-old copy of Nylon at the op shop for 50 cents. They must’ve been, what? Like 10, $13? And to think, now I barely blink at paying $8.50 for an iced coffee… 

It’s time for magazines to make a comeback. And Francesca Nwokeocha, creator of 614 Magazine, knows it.

614 is making magazines better than they ever were before. A Black woman owned publication, run by a team that is 90% people of colour, it’s made by the community, for the community, spotlighting artists deserving of recognition yet largely ignored by the commercial sector. At the centre of the magazine’s genesis was the question: why wait for the status quo to include us, when we can make something for us, by us, better than they ever could? 

“We're powered by the community and made by the community, and it's about time we get the recognition we deserve,” Nwokeocha told VICE.

[ here ]

In February, Australia was guinea-pig-ified by TikTok, which was trying to see whether popular music was driving the time users spent on the app. Australian artists were limited to posting a certain amount of songs. Later TikTok Australia told the Guardian only half its users had been impacted by the test.

But it left Australian musicians rattled. That’s because it’s getting increasingly harder to find new audiences, and for audiences, it’s getting increasingly harder to find new Australian music. This disconnect between creators and consumers has only widened in recent years, as audiences move away from traditional platforms like public radio and television, and towards TikTok. TikTok has become a huge driver of discoverability, but it’s fickle, driven by capital lust, and naturally doesn’t give a shit about up and coming Australian artists. Meanwhile, Australian artists are disappearing off ARIA charts, as well as weekly charts. And Music Australia hasn’t done shit. Despite being created with the sole purpose of addressing the issue.

[ here ]

In rural NZ, a competition for children to purge feral cats for a cash prize has been cancelled after backlash from animal rights agencies.

The island nation has been struggling to maintain control over various invasive species, including feral cats, which pose a critical risk to native flora and fauna. Similar to all other feral-animal-culling-spats, the topic is polarising. But the specs of this particular competition are completely batshit. As the New York Times reported, “The cat-culling event was new this year, and it was open to children under the age of 14, with the winner receiving 250 New Zealand dollars, or about $155. 

The event, in North Canterbury on the south island, had few details about how it would be regulated, except that “participants would be disqualified if a killed cat was found to be microchipped.”

One of the organisers said it wasn’t about deliberately encouraging children to kill cats, but more about invasive species control. They’d already be hunting rabbits, possums, rats and other invasive species with rifles as part of the competition, “so they’re going to be out here anyway, and we might as well include the cat because it’s the worst of the lot.”

[ here ]

God, if you somehow missed this story I am envious of you. The couple who took to the Telegraph to espouse their “pronatalist” breeding kink are actually a couple of historically active Redditors who have gone viral before. The pronatalist thing is a conservative reaction to falling birth rates, where those who believe themselves “elite” reckon in order to save the world, they need to populate it with future children just like them: white, upper-class, losers. It’s eugenics, it’s weird, and it’s off-putting. But where were we?

Yes, this particular couple who were instantly and ceaselessly mocked online had actually gone viral before, when the dude [Malcolm] proposed to his girlfriend [Melanie] on Reddit and wrote an op-ed about it for the Huffington post, and Melanie ordered Malcolm a custom dakimakura [a body pillow usually printed with a sexy anime lady] with an anime version of herself on it.

[ here ]

The theme of this here blessed month of April is THE OCCULT, and in the first dispatch, I investigate a half-baked Reddit rumour that early Melbourne was designed by occultists, and that the original prime-numbered tram terminuses, when connected on a map, formed a giant pentagram across the city. 

As it turns out, there are pentagrams everywhere for those with eyes to see.

[ here ]

BE INFORMED BE SMART LISTEN NEWS WATCH TIKTOK <3

[ here ]

they put in so much effort for us <3

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