The very simple Maramataka and Chinese lunar calendar conversion table

When I first started commemorating Matariki a few years ago, I had figured out, since both ancient Māori and Chinese worked out the lunar calendar, that it was roughly five lunar months after ours. I was also told that it marked the Māori New Year. Maybe it’s due to local iwi, but my recollection was […]

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My notes from RNZ’s The Panel, Wednesday, June 22

I write notes for my appearances on RNZ’s The Panel, and while I don’t read them verbatim, they are useful for copying and pasting into this blog afterwards. (Anyone who has ever attended a conference where I’ve spoken might find this familiar: I’ll upload the notes but they aren’t a word-for-word reflection of what I […]

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We have been warned

Let fellow Tweeters have the say on today’s events in the USA. I feel 0 smugness about living in NZ right now. America is exporting their brand of fascism. It’s already here. We are 18 months from a potential change in government. We’ve seen how quickly a country goes backwards. I was there for it. […]

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Pirate sites, content mills and splogs exist because of Google

In chatting to Alexandra Wolfe on Mastodon about the previous post, I had to draw a sombre conclusion. If it weren’t for Google, there’d be no incentive to do content mills or splogs. I replied: ‘People really are that stupid, and itʼs all thanks to Google. Google doesn’t care about ad fraud, and anyone can […]

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Stealing an article and hotlinking its images are bad ideas

Last night, in the spirit of Matariki, and because Lucire’s 25th anniversary in October is almost upon us, I paid tribute to a lot of our team. We also put up on our website our 2019 feature on Violett Beane, which I was always very proud of, since it was the first shoot I organized […]

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Political coverage is not based around merit

How fascinating. Eight years ago, I had high hopes for this Christopher Luxon, according to this blog. Who knew that as a politician, the guy would really let me down? I Tweeted: Remember how the Dom Post treated me in two elections? This is the opposite. A lot of the media love their rich white […]

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Send out warmth, get it back

I’ve had a nice resolution after reaching out to FashioNZ over their Instagram tagline and a claim made on their website. There was a delay in their response due to the site being sold to its fifth owners (I must be out of touch, as I never knew who the second and third were!), but […]

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One award, one interview—positive publicity for May–June 2022

  On to more positive things. Earlier this year, Luxlife got in touch with us, to say Lucire had been shortlisted for their awards. It was later confirmed that we had become their ‘Most Pioneering Online Fashion Magazine 2022’, which I was very happy about—especially as we started 25 years ago. The judges did know […]

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More evidence that contextual advertising is better than creepy, programmatic behavioural ads

Cory Doctorow posted a link to his collection of links at Pluralistic for August 5, 2020. The first one’s heading piqued my interest: ‘Contextual ads can save media’. It’s worth having a read, especially about the BS behind behavioural advertising (i.e. surveillance advertising) and the ‘real-time bidding’ that so many ad networks have been trying […]

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Here’s the latest book I worked on: Panos: My Life, My Odyssey out May 26

  [Originally posted in Lucire] Toward the end of next week, Panos Papadopoulos’s autobiography, Panos: My Life, My Odyssey, comes out in London, with an event in Stockholm following. This is an intimate memoir about Panos’s rise, from childhood poverty in Greece to the ‘king of swimwear’ in Scandinavia. Not only do I have an […]

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