From The Lord of the Rings to Border Patrol: how Sweden sees us

My visits to Sweden have been few and far apart, since it is quite a distance to travel from New Zealand: summer 2002, autumn 2003, winter 2010, and summer 2024. There are many interesting observations one can make with so many years in between, seeing how society has changed with brief snapshots from each visit, […]

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As we grow and chart a new direction, a fresh site for JY&A Media

  JY&A Media has a new website, to tie in with the new direction we have for the business. I think it was evident that when we created the Autocade Yearbook and built our e-commerce shop, Libriz, that things were changing. Whereas JYA Creative and JY&A Fonts work with clients to help realize their branding, […]

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Tech misdeeds are now too numerous

You don’t need me keeping score: misdeeds in the tech industry, from Adobe using user content for its “AI” tools to Elon Musk being a Nazi, are a daily occurrence now, and plenty of others are writing about them. At the top end, it seems such a poisonous area to be in, especially with so […]

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Google sacks its own team for protesting

I had bookmarked this a while back: the statement by former Google employees who were sacked for not supporting the company’s involvement with the Israeli government and military. Some were not even part of the employees’ sit-in protests. But Google is too weak to be able to handle dissent, and clearly doesn’t support the welfare […]

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To our Sunday colleagues, you should still be on air

Above: Sunday host Miriama Kamo.   [Originally published in Lucire] To our colleagues at Television New Zealand’s Sunday, including Lucire alum Mava Moayyed, we bid you godspeed and good luck. Your programme didn’t deserve cancellation. This country needs proper, long-form current affairs, and with Sunday airing its final episode [on Sunday] night, this has come […]

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Which other Glen A. Larson production did this girl group appear in?

  This girl group appears in three Glen A. Larson productions that I can think of, and probably appears in more. Switch, Knight Rider and Cover Up are the three I know of. Their fashions and hairstyles, plus those of the audience, would place this in the first part of the 1970s—by the time they […]

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For the sake of our city, it’s important to take the opportunities to move forward

The late 1990s were a heady time here in Aotearoa. The web—pre-Google, pre-monopolies—was indeed the great leveller: anyone with the right skills could create something online that competed at a global level. Aotearoa, which had for years felt a little backward in time—TV shows would arrive here two to three years after they aired in […]

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Healthy jumps on Autocade

I’m happy to note that Autocade has had a few high-traffic days again, the first time the daily rate has exceeded 30,000 page views since we put the site behind Cloudflare. After the site was reinstalled in 2022 and the counter reset, Autocade’s Mediawiki totals only update once a day.   April 18: 8,633,966 total […]

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Do you really want a Nazi brand association?

Dan Gillmor wrote:     I share Dan’s view. Not only that, why would anyone want their brand—corporate or personal—to be tarnished by Musk and his simplified swastika? Yes, my account is still there, inactive (and locked), making sure no one takes the handle. That’s just prudent, because the one thing worse than having your […]

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Online reviews: no safeguard against piling

There is a certain satisfaction in reading statuses like this:     But at the same time it confirms what I said years ago about Google My Business and its ilk. There are no safeguards for piling. Thanks to Google’s bugs, I believe my business has a listing but it’s been nicely messed up so […]

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