Pirates | Issue 04

VOL. 79 issue 04 / pirates / 16 march HUNG UP ON GENDER” 20 07 “NOT Chancellor’s comments spark concern

YO HO HO BRO Inside the Wellington industry

rum

26 CTRL-C/CTRL-V Kopimi and how the pirates won

Contents News: 06-19

Regular Content:

Holy Fuck! Vic Uni Ruled by White Men: 07 University Post-Dom: 10

Features: 20-31 Better the Neville You Know Than the Neville You Don’t: 18 Yo Ho Ho Bro: 20 Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V: 26 Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Pirates: 32 The History of Pirate Bay: 34

Editor Sam McChesney Designers Ella Bates-Hermans Lily Paris West Senior News Editor Sophie Boot News Editor Nicola Braid Chief Sub Editor Kimaya McIntosh Feature Writer Charlotte Doyle Distributor Beckie Wilson News Interns Emma Hurley Charlie Prout Francesca Shepard Beckie Wilson Elea Yule

Section Editors Ruth Corkill (Science) Sharon Lam (Visual Arts) Baz Macdonald (Gaming) Jayne Mulligan (Books) Alice Reid (Music) Fairooz Samy (Film) Other Contributors Tim Grgec, Rick Zwaan, Jonathan Gee, Gerard Hoffman, Brittany Mackie, Ollie Neas, Kate Robertson, Sarah Dillon, Livné Ore, Cameron Gray, Patrick Savill, Gus Mitchell, Brontë Ammundsen, Bridget Pyć, Cassie Richards, Tom and Luke

Editorial: 03 Letters: 04-05 VUWSA: 13 The Week in Feminism: 16 Being Well: 15 Comics: 36 Music: 37 Film: 38 Games: 40 Visual Arts: 41 Science: 42 Food: 44 We Drank This So You Wouldn’t Have To: 43 Books: 46 The Moan Zonew: 47

Contact Level 2, Student Union Building Victoria University P.O. Box 600, Wellington Phone: 04 463 6766 Editor: editor@salient.org.nz News Editor: news@salient.org.nz Website: salient.org.nz Twitter: @salientmagazine Facebook: facebook.com/ salientmagazine Advertising Email: sales@vuwsa.org.nz Phone: 04 463 6982 Printed By Guardian Print, Ashburton

About Us Salient is published by, but is editorially independent from, the Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association (VUWSA).

Salient is a member of the Aotearoa Student Press Association (ASPA) and the New Zealand Press Council. Salient is funded in part by Victoria University of Wellington students through the Student Services Levy. The views expressed in Salient do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, VUWSA, or the University.

Complaints People with a complaint against the magazine should first complain in writing to the Editor and then, if not satisfied with the response, complain to the Press Council. See presscouncil.org.nz/ complain.php for more information.

Sam in his idealised childhood

Ten reasons I didn’t write an editorial this week Sam McChesney 1. It’s Thursday, and I slept in the office last night. When I woke up and realised I still hadn’t written an editorial, or even come up with a topic, the crushing weight of my poor life choices proved too demoralising.

2. This week’s theme is Pirates. The only pirate-related topic that sprang to mind was how much I wanted the Black Seas Barracuda lego pirate ship when I was a child. Childhood disappointment and trauma is never a fun subject, so I decided not to write anything.

3. But seriously, Google that lego ship, it’s fucking awesome.

4. It’s got cannons, and a plank, and two masts.

5. And a monkey.

6. Last week the Chancellor said some dumb things about gender diversity on Uni Council (page 7). I’d normally write about that, but Rick Zwaan (page 13) has taken up this week’s quota of tall white straight cis able-bodied men sticking up for the oppressed, so I didn’t.

7. How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

8. God I’m tired.

9. Instead of wasting your time with a dumb editorial, I’d rather just tell you to go read Charlotte Doyle’s feature on rum (page 20) or Ollie Neas’ feature on Kopimi and the philosophy of file sharing (page 26).

Seriously, they’re way better than anything you’re going to read here, so you may as well just turn the page now.

10. Unopened sets of the Black Seas Barracuda from 1989 still sell on Ebay for around US$1000. It’s not too late.

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issue 4 | pirates

Notices

Letters

Victoria University TaeKwonDo Club (WTF/ Olympic style)

I love erotic guessing games

Interested in Taekwondo? New to Taekwondo?

Learned Taekwondo before?

You are all welcomed! Great way to keep fit and have fun! Come along and join us, we are a friendly bunch.

Training times: Tuesday 6.30 - 8.00pm Long Room, Kelburn Campus, Victoria University Recreation Centre Saturday 3.30 - 5.00pm Dance Room, Kelburn Campus, Victoria University Recreation Centre What you need: Drink bottle, comfy trousers/shorts, t-shirt (or Taekwondo Uniform if you have got one)

Hi Salient, Two things on vicbooks: shitty how the ‘have here’ cappuccino cup has shrunk in size so much.

But also, the past three days I have had the best coffee I’ve ever had. I never write letters, but the tall tanned man with the hat is some sort of barista God. The first time I actually ejaculated loudly and involuntarily ‘this coffee is perfect’. The second time I made a purring sound in the middle of a lecture.

The third time I wrote this letter. God knows what I’ll do next.

Yours, Buzzed

Contact us: vuwtkd@hotmail.com We are affiliated to the TaeKwonDo Union of NZ (TUNZ)

Look into its eyes (and on page 14) To whom it may concern,

Corrections The article “Clubbing on campus”, published in issue 2, stated that Student Health displayed a “spot the sperm” exhibit. This exhibit was displayed by the Science Society, not Student Health.

The article “Blink’s 182nd Project”, published in issue 2, referred to a band sponsored by Becks and identified the band as Trust Punks. The band in question is actually Ghost Wave.

While reading last week’s issue of Salient, I was alarmed to find an entire page dedicated to a cartoon image of the face of current VUWSA President Rick Zwaan. Not only is this image highly offensive to me, I also know Rick personally and am aware of the psychological damage this image may cause him.

Mr Zwaan has an increasingly inflated ego and my concern is that the presence of this cartoon in your publication may create an expectation - the images growing exponentially in number each week such that eventually the entirety of Salient will consist of his face.

I am also disturbed by the lack of similar images of our wonderful Welfare Vice President, Madeleine Ashton-Martyn.

I trust these issues will be corrected in due course.

Kia Ora.

www.salient.org.nz

05

Godwin’s law?

Panda h8r

Dear Salient

Dear Salient,

Have just read your article ‘Mind the Gap: Students failing to get UE Ushered into Uni anyway’. The reality is that prospective students need to have a good grounding to cope with academic life at university. Having gained University Entrance back in the Dark Ages (1983 to be precise at Wellington High School) and coming to Victoria decades later, I was grateful that I had UE and had the grounding needed to study at university level. Academic study at university is hard and not for the faint hearted and I have seen fellow class mates struggling with basic level understandings of what is required of them to be able to produce academic work.

giant pandas make me so angry. If there is any corruption of natural selection it’s keeping the idiots alive. They’d be dead already if humans weren’t obsessed with cute. The idiotic animals spend 16 hours a day eating 20kg of bamboo because they chose to diet off one plant that isn’t nutritious enough to keep them alive beyond sleeping when they’re not having a snack. We even have to help them have sex by making panda porn. Then if the miracle of giving birth graces this brainwashed earth said panda then freaks out and smacks it to death.

They’re expensive and are too selfish to reciprocate any kind of contribution to the global ecology. We need to sort out our priorities.

I am shocked and surprised how some of these students manage to get beyond 100 level study.

Many withdraw as they can’t cope with the academic level needed to succeed. Maybe the NCEA system is not preparing students for university study compared to my days at school.

Anyway in my opinion the university needs to ensure that students are able academically to cope with academic requirements and if that means having to send students back to school, then this is a good idea.

Yours, Harsh Realities

Mature Student.

Letters policy Salient welcomes, encourages, and thrives on public debate—be it serious or otherwise—through its letters page.

Letters must be received before 4pm on Thursday for publication the following week. Letters must be no longer than 250 words. Pseudonyms are fine, but all letters must include your real name, address and telephone number—these will not be printed. Letters will not be corrected for spelling or grammar. The Editor reserves the right to edit, abridge, ordecline any letters without explanation.

Email: editor@salient.org.nz Post: Salient, c/- Victoria University of Wellington Hand-delivered: Salient office, Level 3, Student Union Building (behind the Hunter Lounge)

editor@salient.org.nz

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issue 4 | pirates

Person of the Week: Maia Weinstock MIT News deputy editor Maia Weinstock has decided to celebrate women in law by creating customdesigned LEGO figurines of US Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Although the minifigures are not for sale as they go against LEGO’s “no politics or political symbols” rule, they join Weinstock’s other figures of Jane Goodall and singer/activist Janelle Monae. Salient, however, loves these mini-plastic bastions of gender equality, and we say Get it Gurl!

By the Numbers 9 years How long a human spends watching television on average, along with four years driving a car, 92 days on the toilet, 48 days having sex and 25 years asleep.

66% Proportion of students who care more about their iPhone than sex, drugs and parties, according to a survey conducted on 1,200 US undergrads. Students’ love of iPhones was closely followed by coffee, texting, Facebook, iPads and Instagram.

10,000 Copies of The Interview that will be airdropped by balloon across the North Korean border by activist Park Sang-Hak.

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Rihanna tattoos that have been etched on 23-year-old British woman Sarah Ridge in her pursuit of ultimate fandom. Her ink is even said to include a replica of the singer’s own chest tattoo.

91% Proportion of respondents who admitted to picking their nose in a Wisconsin medical survey.

www.salient.org.nz

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NEWS. KEE N EYE FOR NEWS? S END ANY T IPS , LEADS OR GOSSIP TO NE WS @S ALIENT.ORG.NZ

Holy Fuck!

Vic Uni Ruled by White Males Emma Hurley, Nicola Braid and Sam McChesney

V

ictoria University Chancellor Sir Neville Jordan has said he is “not hung up on gender”, amid mounting concerns that white male dominance on the uni’s governing body may grow.

Victoria University Chancellor Sir Neville Jordan told Salient that while he supported more Māori representation and the retention of at least one student seat, he did not see the Council’s 13:6 gender balance as an issue.

despite the fact that the majority of our students identify as female, along with the majority of general staff, there are systemic barriers to them fully participating in the tertiary sector.”

The comments come in the wake of new legislation that will reduce the Victoria University Council’s size, at a time when women and Māori are already underrepresented and an expert has warned that the Council may be in breach of its Treaty obligations.

“It’s not a problem—it would be better to have more of a balance, but I’m not hung up on gender… we have no dominant alpha males [on Council].”

Zwaan further stated that “in my short experience of University Council, the critical mass of old white dudes around the table normalises casual sexism to the extent that it’s not vocally challenged despite the many silent cringes.”

The Council is Vic’s governing body and is responsible for the University’s policies and strategic plan and the appointment of its ViceChancellor. The nineteen-strong Council, which currently contains only six women and no Māori or Pasifika, will be slimmed down to twelve before the start of 2016 after the passage of the Education Amendment Act (No 2).

While the Act will require at least one Māori representative on Council, it has removed the guaranteed staff and student seats (of which there are currently five) and contains weak and non-binding guarantees on gender balance.

Despite the reduction in council size, the number of Ministerial appointees will remain at four.

Sir Neville’s remarks were condemned by Women’s Group President Chrissy Brown and VUWSA President Rick Zwaan.

Brown told Salient that “the further you go up in University ranks the more male-dominated it becomes. I think ignoring it is not the best way to deal with it.”

Brown expressed concerns that the requirement to reduce the Council’s size would further negatively affect female representation on Council, “unless they just get rid of half of the dudes and kept all of the women there.”

Zwaan said Sir Neville’s comments were “seriously concerning... particularly within the university context where we still see institutionalised sexism throughout all levels of the institution.

“Evidently Sir Neville fails to recognise that

“It’s fair to say that Vic hasn’t done very well in terms of Maori representation” Māori input on Council currently comes in the form of an advisory committee, Te Aka Matua, that sits beneath the Council. The committee has 13 members, seven of whom are Pākehā. The committee has no direct influence within the Council.

Dr. Carwyn Jones, a senior lecturer at Vic’s Law School and an expert on Treaty law, said the current lack of Māori on the Council could amount to a breach of the Treaty principle of partnership, a key aspect of which is Māori participation in the governance of public institutions. Dr. Jones pointed to a recent report by the Waitangi Tribunal that found advisory bodies such as Te Aka Matua were

editor@salient.org.nz

NEWS

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issue 4 | pirates

The Victoria University Council

Current Ministerial appointees on New Zealand University Councils Women 6/32

Maori 4/32

Men (13/19)

Women (6/19)

The Maori Advisory Committee (Te Aka Matua) Maori (6/13)

Maori and Pasifika (0/19)

not sufficient to meet the Crown’s obligations under the Treaty where significant Māori interests were concerned.

“It’s fair to say that Vic hasn’t done very well in terms of Māori representation at that governance level.”

A spokesperson for Māori students’ association Ngai Tauira said that lack of Māori representation has been a “longstanding issue” at Victoria, and that Ngai Tauira has “continuously lobbied the University and its Council to create a position to represent Māori interests… However, [Māori] are still not directly part of the decision making process. This university needs to move us from advice providers to decision makers.

“Māori should determine what is best for Māori... we shouldn’t allow non-Māori, Pākehā councillors to determine what they think is adequate representation.”

Sir Neville confessed that he did not know why there were no Māori on Council, but that he was disappointed by the record.

The requirement to have at least one Māori member on each university council has already proved a bone of contention.

Universities New Zealand (UNZ), which

www.salient.org.nz

Pakeha (7/13)

represents the country’s eight universities, has stated that at least one of the Minister’s four appointees should be a designated Māori appointee, as it is the Crown who is bound by the Treaty. Steven Joyce’s press secretary stated that the requirement was the joint responsibility of the Minister and the Council as a whole.

According to Joyce’s office, of his 32 current appointees on councils nationwide there are seven women and four Māori, although Salient counted only six women.

Sir Neville told Salient that “on the face of it”, the Minister’s appointments had been insufficiently diverse, but that “that’s up to the Minister... in terms of the ones we can control, I’d like to be more diverse.” Dr. Jones said Joyce “could be doing a better job” of ensuring diversity on councils.

“Less emphasis on the intellectual, cultural, and public good benefits” In yet another demonstration of the general pointlessness of select committees, the Act passed last month despite over a thousand public submissions against it and only one in favour. Victoria University, UNZ, VUWSA and the Tertiary Education Union

all submitted against the Bill, which was seen as undermining the independence of universities and wananga.

UNZ Chair and University of Otago ViceChancellor Harlene Hayne said last year she felt the select committee did not listen to her submission, and she was “disheartened” at the committee’s “dismissive and cavalier” attitude toward student submitters.

Dolores Janiewski, one the Victoria Council’s two academic staff representatives, said the Act “increases the influence and control of the Government, which means a decrease in University autonomy by definition.”

Janiewski said the changes are “likely to mean greater emphasis on narrowly-defined economic outcomes and less emphasis on the intellectual, cultural, and public good benefits of university education. “[The Minister’s] promotion of an approach which emphasises future salaries as the main consideration for a choice of major, and his refusal to increase the funding for all courses for the last few years except the STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) is suggestive of the sort of education he wants to support and how he wants students and their parents to choose,” Janiewski said.

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Turnout for the 2014 University Council elections 453/~1140

NEWS

General Staff

Academic Staff 288/~880

Students

1469/~19,960

However, Sir Neville believed there was “nothing in the Bill” that threatened the University’s independence.

“If you look at the percentage basis you could say maybe [it does], but with this current Government, with this current Minister, there has been zero influence exerted. I’ve met him on just one occasion since I’ve been on Council; he said ‘how’s it going?’, I said ‘good’, and that was it.”

Sir Neville told Salient that the new legislation signalled a shift away from a “representative” model on Council and towards a “skillsbased” model. However, Dr. Jones claimed this argument was a red herring.

“To say that representation and expertise are two separate and discrete things is kind of glossing over what’s really going on here, because the point of having those different kind of representatives there is to provide a different skill set and different expertise.

“The idea that limiting the representative kinds of positions makes a better decisionmaking body is quite flawed. If you think about what a university does, it’s an important public institution, it’s not a private corporate business.”

“It’s not about having a post on there or not”

changes to be confirmed before the 2016 positions are elected.

There are currently two student seats on Council, one elected at large and one reserved for the VUWSA President. It is unclear how many seats students will retain on the new Council, or how these seats will be filled, although the general expectation is that students will retain one seat.

As this article went to print, Auckland University had proposed to maintain one seat for students, and one each for both academic and general staff representatives. Lincoln University is seeking one student and one academic staff seat.

Despite this, and in contrast to the position of his predecessor Ian McKinnon, Sir Neville gave no assurances that student seats would be maintained. Instead, he didn’t see “any reason” why “students couldn’t vote for or nominate a person who might have graduated but will be their voice on Council for more than one year.

“It’s not about having a post on there or not, it’s about having someone to represent students, which is very different,” he said.

Zwaan said the Chancellor’s refusal to commit to guaranteed student seats was “contrary to the position the University has publically had during the passage of the legislation.”

Tertiary Education Union President Sandra Grey has called for guarantees to be put in place that one-third of the seats on councils (up to four seats) be allocated to student and staff representatives in order to “provide a counterbalance to the Minister’s growing power”.

Pasifika Students’ Council President Karl Moresi was ambivalent about the TEU’s recommendations, noting that while the proposal would “guarantee staff and student representation”, it also contains no assurances about the diversity of staff and student voices within those four seats.

Consultation on the makeup of the new Council will take place until June, with

editor@salient.org.nz

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NEWS

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University, Post-Dom Beckie Wilson

V

ic students are disappointed after a three-week absence of the Dominion Post on campus was confirmed to be the new reality. Fairfax has officially stopped its distribution of free daily newspapers to Victoria University campuses during term time.

Although the Dom Post has traditionally been “donated” to impoverished students, following a general economic downturn in print media students will now be expected to access their beloved quizzes and crosswords online instead.

Fairfax’s marketing manager Paul Williams told Salient that the company hoped it had “encouraged a healthy appetite in the consumption of quality news amongst students” during its 10-year deal with the University—presumably to counteract certain other corrupting paper-based influences on campus—but confirmed that the decision had indeed been made to “call time on the newspaper partnership”.

According to a spokesperson from the University, its long-standing arrangement with Fairfax ended after the company failed to “offer the same benefits to Victoria for the financial investment required” and there are currently no replacement plans.

VUWSA will not be replacing the papers either, as the cost is prohibitive. VUWSA President Rick Zwaan told Salient the cost, at face value, of the 350,000 papers delivered to campuses last year would be more than VUWSA’s entire operational budget, which isn’t really saying much.

www.salient.org.nz

Headlines you may miss from the Dom: “It’s going to be hot” “Igloos stuck in people’s minds” “Lifting tank a big job for a crane” “I’ve just been a silly old lady” “They say he killed that fella in town” “Short can be troublesome or seriously dangerous” “Burglar thought he was in Lord of the Rings” “New study: holding a door open is ‘sexist’” The University says that students can still gain access to news online either via their own devices or one of the computers on campus, conveniently omitting to mention a certain other news source that springs to mind.

Nonetheless, Zwaan accepted that students enjoyed reading a physical paper.

In response to the paper’s absence, some students on social media have claimed they want to “retract their compulsory student levy”. Others suggest “starting a riot”.

One student Salient spoke to, Jane, claimed taking away “an accessible practical form of news” would only exacerbate claims of

“how ignorant youth are”. Others admitted they didn’t read the paper and felt it was an unnecessary expense.

Zwaan blames former ACT MP Heather Roy for ushering through Voluntary Student Membership in 2011, which resulted in decreased funds to spend on things like papers. Zwaan then picked up a whip, walked over to a nearby dead horse, and began to flog it repeatedly.

Salient would like to remind students that we’ll always be here, supplying you with news about weed and wanking that the Dom never would.

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NEWS

Got green?

University reminds students to say hi to each other Charlie Prout Victoria University has revealed a new wellbeing campaign for 2015, with the initiative including a poster campaign and a push to reduce waiting times for counselling services.

Last year saw the restructuring of the counselling services’ intake process in an effort to reduce waiting times. Under the restructuring, thirty-minute consultation appointments with an intake counsellor were also introduced for those students who had not attended counselling before.

The changes have meant a reduction in waiting times for initial appointments, with Gerard Hoffman, the Manager of Student Counselling, stating that most patients are seen within two, occasionally three weeks.

Last year saw an increase of students using the counselling services from 1837 students in 2013, to 2135 in 2014.

VUWSA Welfare Vice-President Madeleine AshtonMartyn said VUWSA has been working with the Advisory Committee for the Student Services Levy (ACSSL) towards “additional resourcing for prevention so students don’t hit that crisis point where support is required”. The ACSSL is the body that recommends to the University how the Student Services Levy is spent.

Tim Grgec Whether you worship the 420, or just enjoy a good David Attenborough documentary after exams, one thing is apparent: Welly is out of weed.

North Island spokesperson for the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party, Alistair Gregory, explains Wellington is “certainly” facing a shortage of cannabis at the moment.

Gregory attributes the lack of wacky backy to police involvement within the region, with numerous growers having recently been “about to harvest” only to get “busted”.

Stoners are feeling the pinch. Cuzz, a weed user and dealer living in Lyall Bay, says there has been much “anguish and frustration” among fellow Wellington green fiends. “There’s been a lot of pacing in the lounge, lots of group texts trying to suss tinnies.”

“At the moment, we’re scraping what we can off the grinder.”

Further up the hierarchy, S, a cultivator and dealer living in Te Aro, is also trying desperately to acquire the green stuff. He admits the shortage is “particularly bad” this year, though early March is “always a struggle” when sourcing consistent buds.

S explains that majority of New Zealand’s cannabis production is grown “outdoors”, which means the plants are grown over summer and then harvested from late March to June. At present, Wellington has “fuck-all stocks left from last season” and “only indoor to fill the gap.”

However, Hoffman pointed out that shorter waiting times were not a complete solution to improving the wellbeing of students at Victoria University. “Whilst changing our intake process has definitely significantly shortened wait times for new counselling appointments, it is not a magic answer for all the pressures that we face and at times students will still be expected to wait for follow up appointments,” he told Salient.

S believes that New Zealand is yet to advance its “indoor” resources to the point of meeting consumer demands. “Our indoor game is still weak.”

Similarly, Ashton-Martyn agreed that although the current wait times are “far from ideal”, there is “a lot of working being done to ensure they are reduced in the future.”

As to the current situation, S reassured Salient “give it a few weeks, bro, and we will be in the green; the gangs will harvest and it will flood down.”

Student Health has developed a social mindfulness campaign, Connect, with the aim to reduce stress and help develop resiliency among students. The campaign has developed a range of engagement resources, posters, tips and advice brochures that will be rolled out progressively throughout 2015.

Dan, a student at Victoria and regular pot user, says the current marijuana drought “fucking sucks” as “there is just nothing around”. However, he was hopeful dealers would be “holding” in the coming weeks.

Along with the restructuring, the counselling service has also had a budget increase of 1.27 per cent, meaning it will receive a total of $1.5 million of per year.

Asked where he grew his weed, S was elusive. “These plants [cannabis sativa] are hearty little motherfuckers. If they can grow on the slopes of the Himalayas, then they can grow in the overgrown parking lot behind your flat.”

So fear not: by the end of March you can go back to weeknight trips to McDonald’s, listening to Dre’s The Chronic and reaching that next star on Call of Duty.

Under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975, it is illegal to possess, cultivate or traffic cannabis.

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 4 | pirates

NEWS

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Students are flat out done with house-hunting Elea Yule

Wellington students are struggling to find flats, especially if their criteria include quality and affordability.

In recent years, a surge in student numbers has turned the flat-hunting game into a competitive league.

Student Sophie Williamson said that her flat started looking on 5 January and had to couch surf for two months, until securing a place last Thursday. “It was just crazy hard!”

VUWSA Welfare Vice-President Madeleine AshtonMartyn said VUWSA regularly heard stories of students being forced to couch surf “for as long as they’re welcome and then some”, with a lack of student housing impacting mental health and even leaving students forced to find refuge in “tents and homeless shelters.”

Many students Salient talked to suggested that while they found several places to view and apply for, property managers and landlords often failed to keep in regular contact regarding the availability of their properties.

One student said they experienced countless situations where a landlord had failed to simply show students the property, while those that did were often overly-cautious about who they housed. “A lot of places don’t like anyone who has ever studied commercial law. Knowing your rights is a huge turn-off to landlords, particularly if you’re a student.”

“We’ve had so much drama. Our [current] landlord is illegally living in our garden shed, and this landlord has two student properties and a long list of tenancy cases.”

With such high demand for Wellington properties, some landlords have begun manipulating the system in order to squeeze more rent from potential tenants.

Many students accused certain property managers of consistently dodgy practices, with Te Aro Tenancies in particular singled out for criticism.

Ashton-Martyn states “over the past four months, we’ve seen an increase in the number of landlords auctioning the rent price of their property.”

Student Anthony Grant found a five-person flat at $600 a week, only to discover it was too good to be true. “We looked up Te Aro Tenancies and found they had multiple one-star reviews with people complaining that they had been ripped off and had their bonds taken, [or that Te Aro Tenancies was] refusing to pay for repairs on flats.”

Rent increases—up 9 per cent on average over the past year—for often sub-par living conditions have put further strain on students to ensure their average government allowance of $172 per week foot the bills.

As a result, more students are seeking hardship grants and emergency food parcels from the university.

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NEWS

VUWSA

Academic Vice-President Rick Zwaan

Jonathan Gee

This week our Chancellor, Sir Neville Jordan, has been quoted as saying he’s “not hung up” on the fact that the University Council has a despicable gender balance (currently 13 men, six women).

Welcome to Week 3. Chances are you’re reading this in your Monday morning lecture, packed with 100+ students (probably more like 50, seeing as it is week 3), intermittently scrolling through Facebook while jotting down lecture notes. I can’t talk—I’m writing this piece while in an Art History lecture.

Before I get into a discussion about another white dude in power, I’ll let you know a little bit about me. I’m a Pākehā (my Dad was born in Holland, as were my mum’s parents—so about as white as you can get), towards the straight end of the Kinsey Scale, and am an able bodied cis male with money in my bank account a roof over my head and the odd Apple device. While I’m not a trust fund kid (my mum has had a teacher’s salary most of her career and dad earns shit-all growing organic veges) I fully acknowledge that I’m in a very privileged position at the top of an organisation.

Don’t get me wrong, I feel really bizarre even writing this column about women in governance, given that I’m not one. But I think it’s crucial that dudes call other dudes out on their bullshit as long as we don’t speak over women in the process.

Sir Neville Jordan, is in an extremely privileged position. While he has built up a huge amount of wealth and power, in my interactions he comes across as a humble, kind-hearted generous person. However, he doesn’t appear to acknowledge the doors that were open, simply because he’s a white dude, that helped him achieve what he has.

By not acknowledging the issues with the gender balance on University Council, the Chancellor is demonstrating ignorance of the systematic barriers faced by women (and virtually anyone who hasn’t won the privilege lottery). He is not alone in this. Overwhelming male dominance in positions of power is a global phenomenon as a product of the glass ceiling effect. Universities have a role to play in changing this dynamic. If Vic wants to be a leading capital city university, then surely the person at the head of the institution should at least have a solid understanding and consideration of gender equality.

In my short experience of University Council, the critical mass of old white dudes around the table normalises casual sexism to the extent that it’s not vocally challenged despite the many silent cringes. As Helen Clark said in a speech recently, “making progress for women can be accelerated when women have that critical mass of seats at decision-making tables.”

We need a Council that reflects Victoria’s community with an equitable gender balance. This year we have a chance to change the makeup of Council to address these long standing issues and I urge the Chancellor to rethink his position and support such moves.

But behind every 50-minute lecture you attend (or not), the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes is huge. From the writing of the lecture, to making sure that assessments fit with university policy, a crazy long process takes place to ensure that Vic is providing you with a quality education.

But sometimes, things fall through the cracks. Lecturers may go through their slides too quickly, compulsory tutorials may be overly harsh on students juggling study with other commitments, or a piece of assessment may be way too difficult for its year level.

So that’s where VUWSA comes in. As Academic VP, I represent you on Vic’s Academic Board and Committee. These committees discuss both major and minor changes to your courses, degrees and academic policies. Whether it’s introducing a new one-year Master of Political Science, or changing the Major requirements for a BA in Education, VUWSA is your student voice. We make sure that Vic’s goal of providing you with a quality education is a student friendly one.

But student representation doesn’t stop there. We support faculty delegates who are your voice at Faculty Boards, and we facilitate and train your wonderful class representatives. In fact, class reps are your best first port of call when you have an academic issue. We train class reps and equip them with a snazzy handbook so that they can effectively represent your class, in asking a lecturer not to go through his slides too quickly, or direct you to the VUWSA Student Advocate if you feel that the university hasn’t treated you right.

So, at your next lecture, have a chat to your class rep. Tell them what you think about your course (and tell them to sign up for a class rep training session at vuwsa.org.nz ASAP!!). And if your class doesn’t have a class rep yet, chase up your lecturer to make sure you have one.

At VUWSA, we want you to value your education. If ever you want a chat, my door is always open—drop by our office, flick me an email (jonathan.gee@vuw.ac.nz) or send me a tweet (@JonathanPWGee)— I’m here to help!

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 4 | pirates

NEWS

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NEWS

BEING WELL

Making Student Wellbeing a Priority at Victoria Gerard Hoffman So goes the wording on the brightly green coloured posters and handouts that you will no doubt have noticed all over the place during the past two weeks. These posters are part of a year-long social marketing campaign that the University and VUWSA are leading, which aims to challenge both students and university staff to think more often about how we look after ourselves.

There is plenty of evidence pointing to the reality of university life being very pressured, and too many students spend too much time feeling overwhelmed, stressed, guilty and unmotivated. The unwanted noise and rushing thoughts in our heads all too often get in the way of us finishing that assignment or having the life we desire.

Feeling connected to others and to this place is actually proven to make a significant difference in how well you will do academically.

It’s also true that successful life beyond a university degree requires students to have developed skills in managing themselves, their time and their emotional state, and in being able to cope with both the successes

and the disappointments that will happen.

That is life! We all know that the world is also full of challenging people and relationships, and finding ways to manage these whilst maintaining a zen-like calm is a high level achievement.

Get along to one of the free Personal Development and Wellbeing Workshops like meditation and mindfulness classes, dealing with procrastination and lots of others. These could change your life.

So what do we suggest?

Wellbeing is a doing word and needs you to take action every day to build healthy routines and to prioritise your sleep, leisure, relaxation, social contact and fitness. Get good at spending time alone, but also learn when you need to be around others.

Recognise that finding out about yourself, what makes you tick, and building your mental resilience to handle the harder things in life may well be the most valuable learning you do during your years at Victoria.

Check out Victoria’s brand new Wellbeing website for details: http://www.victoria. ac.nz/students/support/wellbeing

Look out for the rest of the Wellbeing Campaign posters and handouts this year.

Read them carefully, collect the set, stick them on your bedroom wall and have a go at the really good ideas and tips suggested. The ideas have come from other students who have been there before!

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 4 | pirates

The Week in Feminism

NEWS

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Brittany Mackie

S

ydney held its third All About Women conference on 8 March as part of celebrations for International Women’s Day. The conference aims to inspire discussion on important issues that matter to women and put the spotlight on Australian perspectives. Many feminist guest speakers were featured including columnist and author Roxane Gay, bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert, and media critic and blogger Anita Sarkeesian.

The speakers talked about their books and took part in panels discussing the women’s defence force, women’s part in countering global warming, and inequality in the workforce. Many of the talks and panels were streamed live to New Zealand and other parts of the world via satellite.

However, if you missed it, the entire day’s events have been recorded and are available on YouTube. I recommend watching the “Women Warriors” panel which discusses what it’s like to be a woman in the military. “Conversations with Muslim Women” is another must-see panel discussion, featuring Muslim women shedding some light on the intersectional obstacles in Australia’s Muslim community, how to fight sexism within Islamic communities, and societies reactions to Muslim women as feminists.

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eminist website Femsplain was temporarily taken down by hackers on International Women’s Day. The hackers shut down the website by overloading the server, making the site appear unavailable to other users. It is so far unclear as to who hacked Femsplain, but the site has received threats of hacking by anti-feminist 4chan users in the past.

This day marked the start of the All About Women Festival which runs through to March 29. The All About Women Festival is part of the Sydney Opera House’s Ideas at the House program—a year-long program that showcases ideas, conversations and debates from leading thinkers and motivators.

Founder of Femsplain Amber Gordon says that hack attempts are common, but they have previously been able to prevent them by pre-emptively blocking the attackers’ IP addresses. Gordon believes that an attack this severe on a day intended to celebrate women is no coincidence—“it’s unfortunate but the reality of our mission.”

So what effect did these tech-savvy bastards have on Femsplain’s website? Fortunately the site was up and running within three hours of the hack. Due to coverage of the attack on social networks, Femsplain managed to turn the shitty situation around by raising their small site’s profile. This serves as a good example of the measure some people are willing to go to in order to prevent women from having a voice in safe forums and, given the day that it happened, celebrating our victories.

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resident of UN Women Aotearoa New Zealand Angela McLeod made a realistic, if not slightly disheartening, speech at a Parliament breakfast celebrating International Women’s Day. She presented the statistics that indicate serious gender inequality in New Zealand: one per cent of CEOs in the top NZX companies are women, the gender pay gap still hangs around 13 per cent, and violence towards women and girls has increased over the last 20 years. She followed this with the assurance that they are aware of the challenges facing New Zealand women and they are aware of the measures necessary to overcome them.

The unspoken question, then, is why we’re not seeing constant and tangible changes and why some of the statistics have actually gotten worse. McLeod says that these changes “essentially require political will.” Well in that case, I looked forward to next year’s speech with the same statistics—or worse if our domestic violence rates continue to increase—and the same empty rhetoric.

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NEWS

What a wanker In a real jerk move, a man was witnessed publically masturbating at his Terrace home last Sunday. Taking to “performing” the act on his own rooftop, it was safe to say he didn’t look to be getting off any time soon.

Taking transparent policies too far @PriestDavid

An OIA request was lodged with the Prime Minister’s office last week to ask whether Epsom MP David Seymour was in fact, a hologram. Seymour responded to the request in his usual quasi-robotic voice, “you’d think if you were going to create a person from scratch, you would’ve done a bit better.”

A bit grave What a knock-out A car thief has been dubbed Ireland’s “dumbest criminal” after knocking himself out whilst trying to steal a car. After throwing a brick at the car window, the thief was knocked out cold by the rebounding weapon, only to be found moments later by local police.

A US woman has taken to digging up her deceased father’s grave in an effort to claim her bequest. After excavating the nine-year-old grave and sifting through the coffin in search of the “real will”, the woman was disappointed to find only cigarettes and empty vodka bottles.

A US man who claims to be a priest is kindly offering people absolution via a Snapchat.

Despite his intentions to reach out to young people and make confessions easier, the so-called “priest” doesn’t appear to be a member of any recognisable church. For those seeking digital absolution, the holy deal will only be around until 16 March. Forgive us Father, we’re not convinced.

Ireland’s in an Ekky Situation Penned in A Southland man is hoping to claim the Guinness Book of Records title for the world’s largest pen collection as he continues to cultivate his 25-year long passion. However, these aren’t just your average Bic biros. No no, they come in all shapes and sizes, some of which are international souvenirs or have an added bonus of lip gloss.

The Irish Court of Appeal struck down a 40-year-old law last week which inadvertently made the possession of ecstasy and benzodiazepines legal. Legislators are currently seeking to reinstate the ban under urgency, leaving Irish drug users 24 hours or so to give a new meaning to the name Moll(ie) Malone.

editor@salient.org.nz

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issue 4 | pirates

Better the Neville you know than the Neville you don’t Sir Neville Jordan was elected Chancellor of Victoria University in December last year, succeeding Ian McKinnon. Sir Neville is a Victoria alumnus with a background in science and engineering, and is founder of MAS Technology, the first New Zealand company to be listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange. More recently Sir Neville has served as President of the Royal Society (2006-2010), and was named Wellingtonian of the year in 2012. For the last 25 years he has chaired the Jordan Foundation, which provides tertiary scholarships to those otherwise unable to afford university. Salient met with Sir Neville in the plush milieu of the Wellington club to discuss University Council, stag hunting, and self-actualisation.

What made you decide to stand for Chancellor?

At a certain stage in your life you reach that self-actualisation level, and right now I like to try and do a third business, a third recreation, and a third good works. The University is certainly a good work, it’s an amazing institution and Victoria’s doing really well. So when the opportunity came along I thought I would like to be Chancellor—and I haven’t been disappointed.

Can you describe what a typical day is like in this role?

A typical day is atypical. This week we’ve had a Finance Committee meeting, campus development meeting, preparing for the Toihuarewa meeting and we’ve got a Council meeting in a few weeks’ time. There’s a multiplicity of stuff around the official committees, plus of course keeping up with the complaints that are going on around Weir House and alcohol and stuff like that. There’s

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a lot of minutia. I don’t have a lot to do with Weir House and those complaints but it’s useful to know as Chancellor what the young people are up to. And last week I opened the Katherine Jermyn hall, which was a fantastic experience.

How would you describe the role of Chancellor to a student and what that role means for the average student?

This is interesting, because the average student doesn’t even know who the ViceChancellor is, nor indeed the Council, let alone the Chancellor. The only time they get to meet the Chancellor is when they shake hands at the Graduation Ceremony… so other than that they have no idea. I just liken it to the board of a big charity or company; it’s all about stewardship of the organisation, making sure that we choose a good ViceChancellor and have proper goals for him [sic] to achieve and then we support him in every way possible.

Do you see as an issue that students don’t really have the awareness of what a chancellor does and what a Vice Chancellor does?

It is a bit of an issue, and this is a really good opportunity to say hey, this is the organisation at the University, you see it through your lectures and deans and associate deans, through the pro-vice and the Vice-Chancellor. Just be aware there are other levels as well all looking after the University to make sure its successful and that students have a good experience all the way through.

What do you hope to achieve in the position?

Probably two things: I think that our Māori representation needs improving, the number of students needs improving and the number of Māori graduates needs improving. The whole environment for universities is changing so fast. The big Chinese universities are now coming to New Zealand, looking for

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“At 17 when I got to Victoria I found three things: I got in the Judo team […] and I discovered alcohol and girls.” our bright young people to go Shanghai and Beijing to be taught in English… Australians are coming here to grab our young people, it’s a very hot environment and we need to be changing quite fast. So the other objective is to help build in some resilience to the institution so we can adapt quite fast to the changing market.

my whole life. I grew up in Petone. I worked in the freezing works as my first full time job at 18, because my father had died when I was quite young and I had to earn money. It was a pretty rudimentary town in those days, a couple of fish and chip shops and that was your lot. In Wellington there were maybe one or two coffee bars and that was it.

What was your university experience like?

My father was in the First World War, was essentially a bush man, when I came along he was 60 and my mother was 25. He decided at 60 to take a welding apprenticeship, with a baby… it’s an unusual background.

I was Dux at my secondary school and so I started at Victoria at age 17, about a year younger than most people. I grew up with a largely solo mother and no brothers and sisters. At 17 when I got to Victoria I found three things: I got in the Judo team and represented Victoria and got into the New Zealand Judo team, and I discovered alcohol and girls.

How do you think the student experience is different today?

At that stage there were probably 8,000 students or so yet there’s 20,000 odd now.

The café below the student union was the sole food outlet, the quad was a wet, windy place—the lecturers and professors were fantastic but the environment was pretty bad, things were fairly rudimentary.

When I look at it now and see the quad, the art gallery, all of the McDiarmid labs, the new chemistry labs, the facilities down at Rutherford House, the Design School, they’re fantastic facilities. And there’s the offshore opportunities, 100 or so corresponding universities. In my view the student experience and opportunities are a thousand times better.

Have you lived in Wellington your whole life? How’s it changed since your childhood?

I spent a number of years in UK then came back to Wellington. I’ve pretty well lived here

What do you for your one third of recreation?

I used to have an ocean racing yacht. I did about 30,000 miles in ocean racing, mostly round the Pacific Islands, the Mediterranean.

I learnt how to ride horses while I was in the UK and I did stag hunting and fox hunting on horseback. I’ve scuba dived in the Antarctic under the ice, in the Red Sea, the Galapagos Islands and the caves in Mexico. I had a motor yacht and I lived on that for about two years all around the Caribbean. I’ve ski-mobiled in Alaska. Oh, and I ride motorbikes. [...] I’ve been to over 100 countries, so I’ve travelled a lot.

What inspired you to set up the Jordan Foundation?

What inspired it was seeing people in difficult circumstances, and I grew up in those circumstances, and knowing that these people needed to be helped. And I was in a position to help them.

I was finding there were a lot of people who heard that I was interested in supporting young people, particularly ones who could not get to university, particularly younger woman who had children.

The foundation funded a young Vietnamese

violinist who couldn’t afford performance course at Auckland, a young Samoan boy at age 5 who turned out to be a piano prodigy, and it grew from there.

What sort of work is the foundation doing now?

A lot of scholarships, particularly at tertiary level. It’s all mostly anonymous and we hear of people from high schools where they can’t afford equipment through to mostly undergrads, because after that there are mostly plenty of scholarships around.

We fund lot of mature people who haven’t had the chance. Bright, but haven’t had the chance so we work with them. Plus the performing arts, they’re not known for being highly paid so there’s been some work there with theatre.

What can you tell us about your business interests?

My academic background is electronics and maths so that was my graduating major… and so I worked in IBM for a while and in air-traffic control, then I got a Rotary Scholarship to go to the US and that totally opened my eyes. I came back and said I need my own company so I started it, just me in my bedroom in my mother’s home in Petone, designing and making electronics equipment. It grew to quite a major company which we then put on the Nasdaq stock market in the US so that’s where it all started.

Any advice to students?

That’s a really hard question—I mean it is hard work and you know what to do, you know it’s hard work. Most young people are not in that top .001 per cent that get huge scholarships overseas, so to me it’s application, stickability at the course so you graduate. And I would say don’t fritter the time away, that’s so easy to do. You’ve one shot at this, don’t squander it.

editor@salient.org.nz

Yo Ho Ho Bro It was once the drink favoured by society’s most notorious thieves and brigands—the Cody’s of the high seas. Now rum is enjoying a renaissance as a respectable and classy affair, roughness bought at $60 a bottle. Charlotte Doyle talks to the Wellington brands leading the liquor’s trendy reinvention.

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Rum,

the devilish drink with a controversial history.

Defined as any spirit distilled from sugar, rum was first discovered by slaves in sugar plantations who noticed the by-product of sugarcane was naturally fermenting in the Caribbean sun. With the by-product rejected by plantation owners who preferred their European cognac and port, slaves had the freedom to get creative, eventually distilling it into what is now known as rum. The original homebrew. The result was dark and rich, needing a lot of additives to make it drinkable, and was given the nickname “Kill-Divil”. A placebo effect was achieved using chillies to make it taste stronger. The word rum is most likely to have originated from the word rumbullion, a slang term for “uproar”—which somewhat accurately captures its effect and explains why it then became so popular.

Rum has a long association with shipping. Free rations of rum, called “tots”, were given to British sailors, justified at the time for “medical” reasons, perhaps improved mental health. Royal New Zealand Navy sailors were the last in the world to enjoy this privilege, finally dropped in 1990. It was such poor quality the rum had to be mixed with water, creating what was called “grog”. With a typically 51 per cent or higher alcohol content, the liquor has always been a test for anyone’s tolerance.

The spirit has a trading history unmatched by any other. The increasing European obsession with sugar in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to an obsession with rum. Stored in oak barrels, it was easy to move and less likely than gold to attract pirates.

In the American Colonies rum was served to voters in an effort to persuade the masses of the candidate’s generosity; literally liquid gold.

Slavery, unfortunately, helped fuel the craze. Now called the Triangular Slave Trade, huge numbers of slaves were taken to the Caribbean from Africa. Slave labour supported the export of sugar to Europe or New England, where much of it was distilled into rum, and the rum profits were used to fund the purchase of yet more slaves.

Think about this colonial history while enjoying your rum cocktail.

Even the colonies couldn’t escape the addiction. Australia’s only successful armed government takeover, surprising considering its convict history, is also popularly dubbed the Rum Rebellion because the conflict was partly fuelled by a state attempt to quash the rum imports at the time. Rum has always had a tendency to cause conflict.

It’s thought the implementation of the Sugar Act in 1764 even helped cause the American Revolution.

Today the Caribbean has the strongest claim over the rum market.

Havana Club intimately connects its brand with the legends, music and culture of Cuba. Now owners of the largest privately-owned spirits brand in the world, the Bacardi family played a key part in the Cuban Revolution of 1953-59, which installed Fidel Castro. With a longstanding cultural and economic significance, rum is so much more than an avenue to just get wasted. Robert Louis Stevenson famously wrote in Treasure Island “Drink and the devil be done for the rest, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum”, which isn’t too far from the truth.

When the region created white rum—which is lighter and far more drinkable—the cocktails started to emerge. Rum and Coke is now the

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issue 4 | pirates Bolstered by the extensive research into pirates he conducted during his History major at Victoria University, this man can easily be considered a world expert on both rum and the explosive he experiments with.

Think of traditional gunpowder as a novelty form of seasoning. It has historically been used as a preservative, excellent for making jerky and salami. When Napoleon’s surgeon in the Battle of Aspern-Essling ran out of salt to season the horse meat being fed to the wounded, he used gunpowder instead. Gunpowder is a combination of potassium nitrate, sulphur and charcoal, all ingredients that human beings are made of themselves and that are used individually as remedies.

Gunpowder would be used to augment the flavour of rum. There are only four traditional gunpowder mills left in the world, mostly located in the United States, which typically sell it to people who “like to play pirates” or re-enact the American Civil War. Benedict imports traditional gunpowder and then infuses it (through secret means) into rum sourced from the Caribbean. Modern gunpowder used for bullets and bombs is extremely poisonous, so cracking a firework into your rum and coke will probably kill you.

If suspicions arose that the rum had been watered down, gunpowder could also be used to prove its spirit level. If it burned with a blue flame it was over 57.1 per cent alcohol and 100 per cent genuine. Pirates were also rumoured to mix rum with gunpowder, human blood, and soil from a freshly dug grave in a voodoo ritual appropriated from Haiti.

second most popular drink in the world. It may be a highball cocktail but it isn’t exactly highbrow. Instructions are to mix one part rum to two parts coke and add a bit of lime (making sure it is cut exactly into sixths)—resulting in a cocktail mix almost as simple buying a bottle of tonic from the dairy and pouring in some gin. On drinkmixer.com it gets a 9.7 per cent popularity rating. Rum is now an easy drink.

There

is a guy roaming Wellington who, down to the eyeliner and beaded dreadlocks, looks exactly like Jack Sparrow.

After seeing him walking down the street with planks of timber on one shoulder, I wondered if he would turn out to be the local gunpowder rum creator I had arranged to interview.

Benedict Simpson, founder of Smoke and Oakum Manufactory, remarks upon meeting that “many people are disappointed that I’m not dressed like a pirate.” Despite the contemporary clothing, lack of beard and no apparent monkey sidekick, he admits to a subtle endeavour to be “trying to live the pirate life”. As well as swordfighting for a hobby, Simpson also runs a business that replicates a rum enjoyed by the infamous Blackbeard three hundred years ago.

In keeping with a “Smuggler” theme, Simpson first trialled the rum when he was working at Motel Bar. He was inspired by Blackbeard, the “poster boy for gunpowder rum”, who would set mugs of rum sprinkled with the explosive on fire to terrify anyone in the vicinity.

Simpson describes customer reactions as generally being “give me a shot of gunpowder rum… disgusting, give me another.” Yet in spite of its unusual taste the drink became highly popular, giving Simpson the impetus to evolve it into a fully-fledged business concept in 2007.

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For a long time there was very little rum in New Zealand other than Caribou—a watered-down rum created specially for the Kiwi market, which cannot be found anywhere else in the world. Rum, however, has recently come back into fashion. As one of the first to start selling rum in this recent wave of popularity, Simpson has been consulted by other rum enthusiasts around the country for advice on how to sell an appealing product. After awarding Simpson’s gunpowder rum with a highly sought after five-star rating, the UK’s CLASS magazine instructs readers to “sip, light touch paper, stand back and ponder the Kiwi mentality”. If anyone is bourgeois enough to understand what that means, this is the drink for you.

The sub-Antarctic climate of New Zealand does not let rum age gracefully. Fermentation relies upon specific temperatures and the presence of a sugar cane field. To create a refined specialty product, Smoke and Oakum, among most other businesses, imports rum from the Caribbean. It is then diluted with water from the Petone aquifer, which “if the government department thinks is good enough to fill up their jury cans with, must be good enough for me.” Chillies, black tobacco and gunpowder are then added to create Simpson’s contemporary “firewater” and historical relic.

The end result is distinctive and addictive, with a potency that cannot be smothered by Coke. Huffington Post described the taste in a review last year as, “surprisingly smooth with a smoky finish that lingers like Russians on the Ukrainian border [wish I had come up with such a creative simile], a little bite from the chili and then something indescribable, not quite metallic, not quite organic, yet quite lovely, if impossible to define.”

This boutique rum is not an easy drink to get hold of. Almost as rare as the pirate lifestyle it references, the bottles sell for $95 in Moore Wilsons and you have to put your name on a waiting list. The rum belongs to a niche community who “like to play pirates” and enjoy drinking something that challenges the sweet, syrupy favourites of today. Rum was rough in the 1700s and Simpson wants it to be rough now despite the price. It’s real “firewater”. Who could resist.

23 far classier affair. For C G R Merchants and Co, the selection of a dark, spiced or white rum is crucial to creating a delectable drink. White rum is milder in flavour whereas dark is deeper. Then there’s spiced.

Sometimes it’s as simple as the colour, in other occasions it’s more of a chemical balance in enhancing the flavour potential.

The Facebook page promises the salted caramel will never run out— just in case you haven’t had enough of the flavour’s pushy involvement in every other culinary experience that week.

Slaves,

pirates and the navy loved it hundreds of years ago. Today, rum is enjoying a comeback. When it comes to New Zealand produced rum, Stolen Rum refuses to be ignored.

Awarded a Double Gold medal at the San Francisco Spirits Awards a month after the business was launched, the brand has attracted significant global attention. Stolen were unwilling to interview for this issue as the brand’s premise is an explicit rejection of mainstream associations with pirates and the Caribbean. Instead it panders to a more “modern” audience by throwing exclusive parties for the newest I Love Ugly store in Newmarket.

Stolen’s success stems from its innate desire to be, historically and contemporaneously, different. Or plain cheeky. The brand conducted a series of blind tests in 2011 comparing their rum with the giant Bacardi. With over half of the participants preferring Stolen White Rum, the New Zealanders then sent a letter to their competitor suggesting Bacardi steal their recipe.

Large

jars of full of brown, orange, red and purple liquids sit behind the bar at C G R Merchants and Co (which stands for Cocktail, Gin and Rum). It has a simple menu structured around $10 rum and gin infusions, inspired by whatever ingredients are in season and customer suggestions. The focus is not on having a large stock of each spirit. Instead, the staff create concoctions on-site with dried apricots, plum, lavender and even carrot. The most popular flavour is salted caramel, unsurprising given the current fashion to salt and caramelise anything in sight.

Rum absorbs the flavour from whatever is added into it, like an alcoholic tea. Research into culinary oil infusions sometimes helps to successfully create the flavour. When a woman asked how to make a pumpkin infusion for Halloween, the bartenders baked a pumpkin pie from scratch then dunked the entire thing into a cask of rum.

Cooking with alcohol.

It has been illegal to import any rum that has not already been aged into Australia for over 100 years. Bundaberg rum needs protection.

To circumvent the archaic rule, Stolen recruited “mules” to smuggle its white rum across the ditch. The volunteers wore t-shirts plastered with the word MULE through the airports and donated the bottles to local bars. The rum smuggling lives on.

Rum

promises a fun time. To use an analogy from Benedict Simpson, “if you had two islands and you had a choice between a rum island and a gin island, gin island might be people drinking martinis in suits. Rum island will be full of people on the beach getting toasted.”

The solids are filtered out and the bartenders begin determining how best the drink is served. The infusion process usually reduces the alcohol content to around 37.5 per cent, making it smooth to drink.

The bar matches the infusions with different local beers and ciders. A refreshing option is to order a glass of beer on the side to complement the flavour of whatever rum you’re drinking.

The spice trade, rather than pirates, inspired the vision for the bar’s aesthetic. Large old maps are spread across the walls, sacks line the roof and ladles hanging above the bar are used to measure out the shots. Archaic. Gin and rum were historically bartered for exotic spices that would then be transported to England. Sailors from wealthier backgrounds would drink gin and the poorer would be left with the devilish rum. With aged rums today, drinking has become a

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Ethan Grigg

Percy’s Waterfall, Wellington Digital photography www.ethangrigg.com

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BY OLLIE NEAS

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On March 26th 2000

, five executives from Jive Records met at The Palm restaurant in New York to celebrate.

They ate lobster. They deserved it. It had been a big year. The third album from the Backstreet Boys—the label’s golden goose—had broken sales records, and the debut album from their latest discovery, an 18-year-old named Britney Spears, had spawned five singles and earned the label millions. They planned to release a second album for her in a few months’ time and another for the Backstreet Boys by the year’s end. But they were toasting neither of these artists tonight. They were there for NSYNC, whose second album, No Strings Attached, had been released five days earlier.

Even before the results of the SoundScan albums chart came in, they knew that the news was good. Fans had reportedly lined up outside CD stores across the country to get their hands on a copy. Many stores had stayed open until midnight to cater to the demand, even though it was a Tuesday. There were even reports of fans buying numerous copies just to boost the album’s sales performance. That the album had been met with a middling response by critics (Entertainment Weekly had called it an album of “unintentional parodies of R&B”) didn’t matter. The SoundScan charts said it all: No Strings Attached had sold 2.4 million copies in the US in its first week, more than double the previous record that Jive Records had themselves set with Backstreet Boys’ Millenium less than a year prior. Jive president Barry Weiss told Rolling Stone just how he was feeling that evening: “Look at us five schmucks around the table—we just made history.”

Weiss was more right than he knew. NSYNC’s record would not be broken. But this would stand not so much as a triumph for the music industry, but as the beginning of the end. The days when labels had control over how their music was to be consumed, and at what price—the model that got CDs off the shelves and dollars into record labels’ pockets—were coming to a close. New technologies were emerging that allowed people to access music directly from one another without paying a cent to the artists, let alone the labels, who made it. Within half a decade one in five internet users would use these technologies. By the end of the decade, fewer than 40 per cent of US music consumers would pay for the music they acquired.

Revenue from music sales would drop by more than half. Retail

giants like HMV and Tower would come toppling down, filing for bankruptcy. Jive Records itself would disappear. The music landscape was to change so drastically that when NSYNC’s Justin Timberlake released his most successful album as a solo artist in 2013, The 20/20 Experience, it would sell 968,000 units in its opening week—less than half of NSYNC’s record.

But with NSYNC riding a historical high, the Jive Records big wigs could imagine no such thing. Names like Limewire, Kazaa and BitTorrent rang no bells. The name Napster they did know. It was an internet application created by some college dropout that had caused somewhat of a stir by making it easy to download pirated mp3s.

College kids loved it, but it was no major concern. Napster was theft and, in America, theft doesn’t fly. The nation’s best copyright lawyers were already working to shut the thing down.

The lobster was delicious.

Twelve years later

a curious wedding occurred in Belgrade, Serbia. The bride, dressed in a flowing black and white panel dress, was Romanian. The groom, a red-headed Italian, wore a 17th century tunic with Elizabethan neck ruff. The priest’s identity was concealed—he wore a Guy Fawkes mask and spoke through a computer. Opera played softly in the background.

“We are here to announce a new pair of noble peers,” the priest said, Microsoft Sam’s voice, not his, ringing out from the overhead PA system. “Copying of information is simply right. Dissemination of information is ethically right. Copying and remixing information communicated by another person is seen as an act of respect. The internet is holy. Code is law.” The priest turned to the groom. “Do you want to share your love, your knowledge, and your feelings with [the bride] as long as that information exists?” The bride and groom said their “I dos” and they were married.

The marriage was the first under the Missionary Church of Kopimism, a religion founded only 18 months prior and officially recognised in

editor@salient.org.nz

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“Copying of information is simply right. Dissemination of information is ethically right.

Copying and remixing information communicated by another person is seen as an act of respect.

The internet is holy.

Code is law.”

Sweden, the country from which it came, only that year. While it is bizarre in ceremony, in ideology Kopimism is radical. Copying, the Church proclaims, is sacred. It is not simply a useful process for the communication of information, but something holy in its own right.

And it is all around us—from the objects that inhabit our homes, all copies of designs reproduced over and over again in manufacturing lines in far-away factories, to the basis of life itself, emerging anew through the duplication of DNA. Originality is an illusion. Copyright, the legal tool to protect originality, is sacrilege. Information must be shared. File-sharing is worship. Ctrl-C. Ctrl-V. The marriage ceremony was a celebration of love as the deepest form of communication, but to industry executives like Barry Weiss, whose empire had crumbled over the last twelve years, the ceremony was closer to Satanic pact. The Church represented the purest essence of the force that the music, film and software industries knew by one name, a name that conjures a distinctly non-spiritual impression: piracy.

These were people who not only refused to pay for the music and movies they enjoyed, but who opposed the entire institution of copyright. These people were worse than those behind Napster, who had at least been amenable to the idea of cutting a deal with the music industry. And they weren’t limited to a few zealots in a church.

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These people were a part of a broader movement that had produced in Sweden a Piracy Bureau and Pirate Party. The former distributed anti-copyright literature, while the latter amassed 50,000 members, Sweden’s largest youth political wing, and two seats in the European Parliament. Pirate parties now sailed political seas across the world— Kim Dotcom’s Internet Party was a part of the fleet.

While Weiss and the Jive boys could see little beyond skulls and crossbones, the group’s motivations were diverse. Not all were there for reasons as heavenly as the Kopimists. Others, like John Perry Barlow, saw file-sharing as part of a broader dream. Barlow, a cattlerancher turned internet freedom activist, was part of the early wave of internet users who saw in the “electronic frontier” the hope of a space free from the coercive influence of government and big business. In his 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace—a rebuttal to attempts by the US government to regulate internet activity—he outlined his vision.

“We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.”

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The internet was a place where true democracy and freedom might be achieved. File-sharing is a tool to realise this dream; its suppression jeopardises it. Copyright law cannot be enforced without the monitoring and surveillance of internet activity. To Barlow, this is when the dream dies.

Others simply saw nothing to fear. The hubbub over file-sharing was simply a case of the film and music industries seeing innovation as an existential threat, just as they had with VCRs, cassette recorders and cable TV. File-sharing was a shake-up, but all that would be lost would be the corporate middlemen. But with them gone, artist and audience would be brought closer. Album sales might decline, but this would be more than compensated through increased reach and exposure.

Barlow often pointed to a personal experience from the days before the internet as an analogy. In what may as well have been another life, he had written lyrics for legendary American rock band, The Grateful Dead, a band renowned for embracing the bootlegging of their own music and merchandise. At concerts the band would often stride onstage in knock-off merchandise, rather than the authorised versions their label sold, and widely circulated fan-made recordings of their shows were held in as high regard as the band’s studio work.

To the band, this approach wasn’t a sacrifice. It was good economics.

File-sharing would simply make this the normal means of business.

These were no ordinary pirates.

On 9 December

last year Swedish police raided a guarded bunker built into a mountain on the outskirts of Stockholm.

It was the nuclear-proof, “secret mountain complex” that The Pirate Bay, the world’s most popular torrenting site, had previously boasted of. Police closed down the servers, seized computers, and arrested one member of staff. To the file-sharing community, this was groundhog day. To the music industry it was an offensive in a battle that they had already lost.

For the last fourteen years the music and film industries have been trying desperately to stop the unstoppable. The killing of Napster by court order in 2001 gave the industry false hope. Napster had closed its servers in compliance with an injunction, but the swift appearance of replacement sites like Aimster and Audiogalaxy indicated that others were not so concerned about the views of the United States judiciary on vicarious liability for copyright infringement. And building replacements was no difficulty—Napster was, after all, created by one college student in a matter of months. Other lawsuits

followed. Some sites, like BearShare and Kazaa, followed Napster’s lead and bowed to legal pressure, but most simply moved their servers abroad—Somalia’s .so domain was a popular choice.

A second strategy—scaring off those who use file-sharing applications—has been no more successful. Beginning with a massive litigation campaign in September 2003, music and film companies around the world have made examples of individual internet users, bombarding them with infringement notices and demanding compensation. This approach was felt in New Zealand— in 2011 Parliament passed the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act, implementing a three-strikes policy for illegal downloaders.

As with its overseas equivalents, it has had little effect. Under the legislation only 18 prosecutions have been successful, even though an estimated 50,000 illegal downloads occur in New Zealand daily.

Furthermore, the effect of this approach has been simply to punish the innocent or ignorant. As it is difficult to identify individual users on a shared wifi network, account holders are often targeted for the copyright infringing activity of their friends, flat-mates and neighbours. In one case, soldier was found liable for downloading that occurred on his New Zealand wifi account while he was on tour in Afghanistan. The existence of sites like dietrolldie.com, dedicated to the testimonies of internet users hounded into submission by copyright lawyers, indicates the New Zealand experience has been far from unusual.

As with its predecessors, the closure of Pirate Bay had little effect.

Users quickly shifted to equivalent services. Hundreds of mirror sites appeared. By 1 January, a pirate flag, hosted from servers in Moldova, appeared on the Swedish domain. By the end of January, The Pirate Bay was back online. The file-sharing debate is no longer a question about what is possible. Whoever you are, wherever you are, free content is yours for the taking.

To the Kopimists

and their friends, this is the end of the story. In 2007, The Piracy Bureau held a book burning. On what was declared a “Walpurgis Night”—the night when witches are said to gather and when the Church of Satan was founded—all remaining copies of their manifesto, Copy Me, were incinerated. There were not needed anymore. The file-sharing debate, they declared, was buried.

“From when we talk about file-sharing from now on it’s as one of many ways to copy,” they said. “We talk about better and worse ways of indexing, archiving and copying—not whether copying is right or wrong. Winter is pouring down the hillside. Make way for spring!”

editor@salient.org.nz

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To the book-burners, the debate was, and remains, a battle between those who believe in the potential of file-sharing technologies and those who do not. Even then, before the Pirate Bay’s secret bunker was raided and before the Italian married the Romanian, they were right that this battle was over. The possibility of putting a lid on the file-sharing was impossible. However, the declaration was not simply a description of what was possible, and this has never been the full picture. Another question has always been there—how and when should we copy? Implicit in the Bureau’s statement was an answer to this question: anyway and always.

In this respect, the debate was far from over.

Since Napster, the industry had shifted. Slowly they have accepted that file-sharing is not some fringe activity, but the new landscape.

Reluctantly they have searched this landscape for a place of their own.

It started with the development of avenues for legal downloading.

While the first digital music sale was in 1997, when Capitol Records sold off a Duran Duran single, the launch of the Apple iTunes store in 2003 signalled an acceptance from the industry that the old days were no more. A diverse catalogue of music, TV and film became available for purchase. Among Google Play, Amazon and TuneTribe, it is now the largest of a diverse market of legal alternatives.

Then legal access was made free, or close to it. Spotify—a service that allows users to stream music for free with advertisements or without advertisements for a small subscription fee—was launched in Sweden in 2008. In 2011 it came to the US and New Zealand.

20 million songs were yours for nothing, or next to it. It now has 60 million users, 15 million of whom are paying subscribers. Apple plans to launch a competitor service this year, and says it’ll be even cheaper. Even for those not converted to Spotify, there are now numerous alternatives. Pandora functions as a radio stations tailored to your unique listening habits. Soundcloud and Bandcamp host a vibrant community of independent musicians. Music videos are now released on Youtube as a matter of course—indeed, a recent survey found that YouTube was the main way young people discovered new www.salient.org.nz

music. For all but vinyl aficionados, the notion of paying for discrete items of music has become passé. The pirate’s dream has become legitimate business.

These changes have had an impact on file-sharing services. By 2012, the percentage of internet users in the US downloading music via peer-to-peer file-sharing services was down by nearly a half from 2005 levels. This wasn’t just correlation. According to a study from that same year, the primary reason for consumers stopping or reducing their usage of file-sharing networks was an increased use of free, legal streaming services. Clearly, for many, the deal on offer is a good one. For minimal effort and money, nearly anything you like can be enjoyed and the artists’ wishes respected. The choice between low cost access and doing the right thing no longer needs to be made.

Yet for many, this clearly isn’t good enough. As the book-burners and the curious marriage in Serbia is testament to, many—one in ten of us—continue to download illegally. What justification remains?

When the deal offered by the industry is so easy to accept, why do we refuse to accept it?

There are a few defensible reasons. Some content is just too hard to acquire legally. Many TV shows, for instance, are impossible to access legally online. Some downloads may be for content that we have earlier paid for. But it would be naive to suggest that these reasons account for all illegal downloads. Perhaps others just believe strongly, as those like Barlow do, that file-sharing is an essential tool of a free internet and must be protected.

Using legal alternatives when the artists and labels wish it, however, does not require that file-sharing as a tool must end; you can oppose the closure of Pirate Bay but still use legal means to listen to music.

It is true too that services like Spotify and Pandora are not free from criticism. Recently it has come under fire for cutting artists an unfair deal. 80s alternative rock group Galaxie 500, for example, made more money from each individual LP they sold in the late 80s than from all 13,760 times the same track was played on Pandora and Spotify.

“For minimal effort and money, nearly anything you like can be enjoyed and the artists’ wishes respected. The choice between low cost access and doing the right thing no longer needs to be made.”

Indeed, last year Taylor Swift pulled her entire catalogue from Spotify in protest. But the protest these artists are making is not for more illegal downloading—they claim they deserve more for their work, not less.

Perhaps religion offers some answers. To the Kopimists and their friends there is nothing to answer for. If copyright is sacrilege, the question of paying an artist for their work is no question at all. If originality is a fiction, who has the right to profit off an idea? There is a logic to this—the power of religion is that belief trumps all else. But the Church of Kopimism is small, numbering only in the low thousands. How many of us can honestly profess to being true believers?

It was not easy accepting that the lobster would not last. While Justin Timberlake could bring sexy back, he could not bring back the past.

No longer could Barry Weiss and the team at Jive Records get rich while the rest of us stacked our trolleys with CDs and videotapes.

Maybe it hadn’t been the fairest way of doing business in the first place, but if they could have kept things that way they would have.

The business was theirs and it worked for them. In 2015, as we pursue a pirate’s dream in a world where this is no longer necessary, perhaps we are not so different. Like the Jive boys, we do it because we can.

editor@salient.org.nz

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Alice Reid

1.

Pirates didn’t just wear earrings to look cool—it was believed that they could help cure bad eyesight, among other things. It was thought that precious metals like gold and silver had healing powers and prevented seasickness, and that a gold earring would serve as a talisman to protect a sailor from drowning.

3.

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Pirates were pretty liberal. They were accepting of homosexuality and had their own form of gay marriage. “Matelotage” was a contractual permanent union, a civil union of sorts, between two consenting males. Matelotage partners openly had sex with each other, shared their property and belongings, fought side by side and lived together too.

2.

Pirates may have thrown people overboard but they very rarely made people “walk the plank”. It’s not really that practical if you think about it, especially not when you’re busy swordfighting and blowing things up with cannons.

4.

Pirates rarely buried their treasure, mostly ‘cos they spent it all before they got the chance to.

Which makes sense really, why bury it when you can spend it?

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5.

Piracy was a much more lucrative career than other work on the seas.

Sailors were underpaid, routinely cheated of their wages, beaten at the slightest provocation and often forced to serve. On pirate ships, booty was equally distributed amongst the crew and the living and working conditions for pirates were significantly better than that of merchant and navy ships. In other words, being a pirate was a way sweeter deal than being a lawabiding seaman.

7.

9.

6.

The infamous Blackbeard, real name Edward Teach, actually lost his leg to diabetes. That’s why he had a peg leg—which is not exactly a cool story to tell ya mates when you’re trying to keep up your scary pirate image.

Julius Caesar was captured

by Sicilian pirates. They first demanded a ransom of 20 talents, to which Caesar pointed out that they obviously didn’t know who he was and insisted they ask for 50. He spent 38 days captive, in which he wrote and recited poetry, gave speeches, and demanded that the pirates not talk when he was trying to sleep. After the 38 days, his ransom was paid, he was freed and, of course, he immediately manned ships and came straight back to capture the pirates. Moral of the story: you don’t fuck with Caesar. Unless you’re Cassius, Brutus and all those other dudes.

Ching Shih (1775–1844) was a Chinese prostitute-turned-pirate, commanding a fleet of hundreds of ships and at least 20,000 pirates (and up to 80,000 at the height of her career). The Red Flag fleet never lost a battle under the leadership of Ching Shih. She retired rich after much negotiating, which resulted in her being pardoned and able to keep her loot.

8.

10.

Jeanne de Clisson (1300– 1359), a French woman whose husband was beheaded for treason, swore revenge and sold her family lands to buy three warships. For the next 13 years she went on a pirating binge, targeting King Philip VI’s ships and personally beheading the French noblemen she captured with an axe.

And of course, pirates are still around these days. Britney Spears songs are used by British naval officers to scare off Somali pirates on the east coast of Africa. Somali pirates are said to hate the music (and Western culture) so much that they move along quickly whenever the pop songs blast.

editor@salient.org.nz

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issue 4 | pirates Early 2006: Svartholm and Neij discover they are under 24hour surveillance from private investigators.

September 2003: The Pirate Bay is founded by Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm (aka Anakata) and Fredrik Neij (aka TiAMO), members of Swedish anti-copyright group Piratbyrån.

The website is launched in Mexico, and is hosted on a server owned by the company where Svartholm worked.

July 2005: With 80 per cent of the site’s traffic coming from outside Sweden, The Pirate Bay launches several foreign-language versions and is redesigned to more or less the version seen today.

End of 2005: The Pirate Bay now tracks over 2,500,000 peers.

31 May 2006: The Pirate Bay’s servers in Stockholm are raided by 65 Swedish police officers and the website goes down. Servers belonging to Piratbyrån, as well as several companies unrelated to internet piracy, are also confiscated.

The three site admins are held in custody and charged with copyright infringement,

3 June 2006: Three days after the raid, the website goes back up. The publicity from the raid results in a spike in traffic, almost crashing the servers.

20 June 2006: A Swedish official says the US threatened Sweden with World Trade Organisation sanctions unless it took action against The Pirate Bay. July 2006: The Pirate Bay breaks the mark of one million registered users.

Registration is required to post torrent files, but not to download them.

April 2007: Carl Lundström, a Swedish businessman and financier of various far-right and xenophobic political parties, is revealed to have been The Pirate Bay’s primary financier.

July 2007: Various media outlets speculate that The Pirate Bay brings in tens of thousands of dollars a week in advertising and funnels it through a Swiss front company after a reporter poses as an advertiser and receives advertising prices.

Sunde, Svartholm and Neij all deny they receive substantial income from the site.

November 2008: The number of peers tracked

by The Pirate Bay hits an all-time peak of over 25 million, more than the entire combined population of Scandinavia.

31 December 2008: Alexa names The Pirate Bay the internet’s 97th most visited website in 2008.

The site overtakes Mininova as the world’s most popular torrent site.

A HISTORY O Early 2004: The site moves to Sweden, where it is hosted on Neij’s Pentium III 1 GHz laptop, which boasts 256MB of RAM. Late 2004: The Pirate Bay’s tracker is coordinating a million peers and over 60,000 torrent files.

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2006: Sunde, Svartholm and Neij transfer ownership of The Pirate Bay to Reservella, a shell company with no employees.

Reservella is registered in the Seychelles, a deregulated tax haven. Sunde, Svartholm and Neij retain effective control of The Pirate Bay’s operations, although they all insist Reservella is owned by a third party.

although the only crime Svartholm admits to is having assassinated the Swedish Prime Minister.

At the time it is estimated that 20 per cent of all torrents globally are tracked by The Pirate Bay.

1 June 2006: Swedish TV reports that the raid was ordered by the Minister of Justice following talks in Washington, DC with US government.

January 2007: The Pirate Bay tries to buy the Principality of Sealand, a micronation located on an abandoned sea fort that was seized in 1968 by “Prince” Paddy Roy Bates.

The Sealand government rejects the sale on the basis that file sharing represents “theft of property rights”.

31 May 2008: The Pirate Bay celebrates the first Pirate Independence Day, held on the anniversary of the 2006 raid.

June 2008: Warner Brothers, one of the complainants in the ongoing case against The Pirate Bay, admits that the policeman leading the investigation is an employee of Warner Brothers, and was working for Warner Brother while leading the investigation.

April 2009: Sunde, Svartholm, Neij, and Lundström are found guilty of assisting copyright infringement and each sentenced to a year in prison and a joint fine of 30 million Swedish krona (NZ$4,800,000).

The four appeal; in November 2010 their sentences are reduced but the fine increased to 46 million krona (NZ$7,400,000).

Following the trial, all four end their involvement with The Pirate Bay, leaving the identity of the site’s owners unclear.

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November 2009: The owners take the site’s BitTorrent tracker offline, turning The Pirate Bay into a torrent indexing site only.

Soon after, the site replaces its torrent files with magnet links, ushering in a new era of trackerless and decentralised downloads.

2009-2010: The Pirate Bay’s owners massively increases the site’s revenue by displaying ads for porn and Viagra.

September 2012: Gottfried is extradited from Cambodia to Sweden to serve his prison sentence. Days later, Sweden sends Cambodia a US$59 million aid package.

25 April 2013: After its Greenlandbased domains are suspended, The Pirate Bay switches to Iceland’s .is domain.

November 2014: Neij is arrested in Thailand. Thai media reports that US film companies hired a law firm to track him down.

30 April 2013: The Pirate Bay again switches its domain, this time to thepiratebay.sx, registered in the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten (population 37,000).

9 December 2014: Swedish police again raid The Pirate Bay and take the site offline. Rival site Kickass Torrents experiences a 600 per cent jump in traffic.

January 2015: The Pirate Bay sheds most of its staff in advance of its planned comeback. A former site admin, WTC-SWE, blasts the company owners and warns visitors that with no admins, the new site could be rife with spam and malware 21 December 2014: The Pirate Bay domain comes back online with a pirate flag and a countdown timer set to expire on 1 February 2015.

31 January 2015: The Pirate Bay comes back online, seven weeks after the raid on its servers—its longest ever absence.

OF PIRATE BAY May 2011: The Pirate Bay moves its servers to “a mountain cave” near Malmö in southern Sweden.

January 2012: The Pirate Bay adds a “physibles” category for files that can be printed using a 3D printer.

Late 2012: The Pirate Bay moves its servers to the cloud, making it harder to take down.

9 April 2013: The Pirate Bay receives word that Swedish authorities plan to seize its .se domain, and switches to Greenland’s .gl domain.

10 August 2013: The Pirate Bay releases PirateBrowser, a browser designed to circumvent internet censorship.

10 December 2013: The Sint Maarten domain registry seizes The Pirate Bay’s .sx domain.

The site switches to thepiratebay. ac, registered in Ascension Island.

The domain changes twice more in the following week, before returning to its original Swedish .se domain.

11 December 2014: Pirate Bay cofounder Peter Sunde writes on his blog that The Pirate Bay should remain closed, citing its buggy code and sexist ads and claiming the site had lost its soul. Meanwhile, mirror and spinoff sites begin to spring up, and many—such as oldpiratebay. org—develop steady userbases of their own.

4 January 2015: File-sharing news site TorrentFreak names Kickass Torrents the top torrent site on the internet.

Because it is still down, The Pirate Bay is not ranked (although oldpiratebay.org is fourth)—thus losing the position it had held every year since 2008.

TorrentFreak state that even before the raid, Kickass Torrents had overtaken The Pirate Bay.

February 2015: Members of hacker collective Anonymous claim that the newly resurrected Pirate Bay is in fact an FBI honeypot designed to trap file-sharers.

Present day: The Pirate Bay is the 332nd most visited site on the internet, according to Alexa.

Immediately before the December 2014 raid it had ranked in the top 100.

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 4 | pirates

Conspiracy Comix

COMICS

36

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MUSIC

#WHOISBECK Kate Robertson The Grammys: the only award show that would give Kanye an aisle seat, and a place where the appreciation of music can sometimes be turned into a straight up mockery. Wind the clock back a month and it’s safe to say the 2015 awards show did not disappoint. The social media frenzy that unravelled following the 2015 Grammys very quickly brought the world’s attention to the fact that most people were blissfully unaware who the strange, middle-aged, album-of-theyear-winning bohemian Beck actually was.

So one year on from the release of Morning Phase, it seems only fair to shine a light on who this dude is and how exactly he managed to swindle the much-coveted Album of the Year.

For those unfamiliar with Beck, let’s just say that he’s been around the block a few times.

After a stint in New York as a homeless musician in the late 80s, he started fresh in the early 90s writing cool, LA-inspired folkie music. Unfortunately for Beck, his fairly niche genre just didn’t have a market back then (think Childish Gambino trying to release Kauai in the heat of the 1980s punk era. It just wouldn’t have worked). Two mediocre folk albums later and a frustrated Beck spat out a couple of angsty alt-rock tracks that were only meant to be throwaways. These songs sparked quite the buzz among the Simon Cowells of 1993, and so came to be Beck’s reinvention.

This reinvention was a full 180 from what he had previously released. Remember that grimy, street scum-esque song “Loser”? Yeah well that was Beck. Yes, you heard correct.

The weird, furry vest-wearing boho we saw awkwardly approach the stage at the 2015 Grammys was once upon a time the unofficial leader of the 90s slacker movement. The song

was born out of the frustration he was facing as a struggling musician trying to get by on minimum wage jobs.

The song very quickly became an anthem for the underappreciated and downtrodden humans of the world and gave Beck the invaluable exposure he’d been so desperately seeking. Two reasonably successful alt-rock albums followed “Loser”, before Beck made a bold move back to the folkie stuff he loved so dearly. The gamble paid off and his music was finally reaching the audiences he’d hoped it would. Despite this continued success, his low-key nature meant that his “celebrity” very quickly demised.

Cue 2014: the year of the full-blown Beck comeback. After a six-year hiatus from recording, Beck released his 12th studio album, Morning Phase. Masked beneath the mellow sound of his “acoustic” album, things are pretty bloody heavy. The interlude tracks “Cycle” and “Morning” are warm like a California sunrise and will undoubtedly lure you in. This mood, however, doesn’t remain quite so light. As the album deepens, so too do the songs. Light-as-a-feather fingerpicking is phased out and an eerie melancholy ensues (see “Phase” and “Waking Light”). Each track adds a layer and everything is in its place for a reason. The lyrics are raw and the recurring references to pain and misery will make you wonder what exactly happened during Beck’s six-year hiatus that led to such an abyss of darkness. Regardless of the underlying themes, it becomes clear very quickly why Morning Phase was crowned Album of the Year—it’s just that good.

If you’re a pretty laxed out person by nature, Beck’s post-1995 stuff will be right up your alley. On the contrary, if you’re highly-strung and struggle to sit still for more than five minutes, I suggest reaching for the new Drake album instead. His works are expertly thought out and arranged to be listened to in full,

none of this shuffle-play business. With this in mind, next time you’re feeling particularly calm and ethereal, I recommend sitting down with one of his albums and taking it in in all its glory… because Beck.

TEN THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT BECK 1. He got Kanye’d by Kanye at the 2015 Grammys, only to appear star struck by Yeezy’s presence.

2. He’s a Scientologist.

3. Album of The Year 2015 was his fifth Grammy. The prior awards were well before Gen Y’s time.

4. He was pursued by the creators of Mad Men to compose the theme several times and still said no.

5. His albums Odelay and Sea Change were ranked in Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums of all time.

6. He features in The Lonely Island song “Attracted To Us”.

7. He launched the “Record Club” in 2009, a club where musicians come together and cover an entire album in one day.

8. He contributed a song to The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.

9. The musical genius that is Beck has actually been lurking around this entire time… we just never noticed.

10. Morning Phase beat out Beyonce.

‘Nuff said.

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 4 | pirates

FILM

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Mr Turner

The Theory of Everything

Directed by Mike Leigh

Directed by James Marsh

Livne Ore

Cameron Gray

Directed by Mike Leigh, this biographical drama of the eccentricyet-great British painter, J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) is two and a half hours long and, in this reviewer’s opinion, drags out rather a bit.

Lauded by critics, with a bevy of Oscar nominations including Best Director, Best Actor, Best Costume Design and Best Cinematography, as well as two wins in the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, Mr Turner also received enthused reviews by The Guardian and our own NZ Herald.

Nevertheless, audiences seem underwhelmed by the film, with many commenting on the lack of structured plot and relatively slow pace.

When we think of Stephen Hawking, we tend to picture the worldfamous physicist as a brilliant mind whose body has failed him, requiring machinery simply to move and to communicate. Rather unfortunately, the fact that Hawking’s disability requires him to use technology often makes us forget that there is a man behind the computer after all.

Something everyone agrees on, however, is Timothy Spall’s fantastic performance as leading man, known to us as the irascible “Mr Turner”. Though he slightly recalls Wormtail from the Harry Potter series in the animalistic nature of his character, the physicality of Spall is transformed into a great, grunting boar, rather than a timorous rat.

His vigorous painting style capture Turner’s frenetic genius, and his taciturn, piggish nature gives a tremendous performance on screen, especially when paired with Marion Bailey’s more maternal and jolly Mrs Booth (his mistress). He and his father, “Daddy”, played by Paul Jesson, make quite a matched pair. Indeed, the drama lives up to its name with the two monumental death scenes of Messrs Turner, complete with rattling last breaths, bright yellow light transfiguring a dying face and the breakdown of the loved one left behind. The other supporting actors and actresses all give strong performances, well-outfitted with appropriate Dickensian prose and costume.

Mr Turner is very technically beautiful, with a well-articulated Victorian feel to it, and haunting music that swells as the camera pans across the gorgeous vistas and stunning landscapes Turner frequents. The cinematography is a poignant visual reminder of the advancing nature of human endeavours, complementing the film’s narrative offerings of Turner’s reactions to the introduction of steam engines and the camera. Quite self-reflective as a whole, Mr Turner also includes some hilariously magniloquent talk of art. It describes the tensions of the British arts scene at the time with both humour and tension, picking up on Mr Turner’s respected position and fondly accepted advice, as well as his royal humiliations as a member of the Royal Academy of Arts.

The final word? If you like Mike Leigh, you’ll like this. If you’re after a gripping, tear jerking drama, perhaps not. But it certainly garnered a good few chuckles from my neighbours.

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The Theory of Everything, adapted from Jane Wilde Hawking’s memoir, is a film which aims to restore Hawking’s humanity to his public image by portraying the development of both himself and those closest to him. As a person with a disability myself (though mental, not physical), I understand how difficult it is to survive in the real world without the support of relatives and loved ones. What this film does is show that for many years, there was a great woman behind the great man, who was constantly by his side even in the darkest of times. Jane was married to Stephen for 30 years and was a constant supporter of him and his work, even as ALS continued to eat away at his body.

The film gives a very honest portrayal of their relationship that will resonate heavily with anyone who lives with a disability, whether they actually have it or support someone who does, as this is often difficult and thankless work.

The performances of Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones, therefore, are a revelation. They have committed themselves to roles which carry heavy implications for the lives of actual disabled people and their carers, and have done so with incredible respect and authenticity while keeping a sense of humour. It is equally tragic to see Redmayne’s Hawking go from sprightly young PhD student to a respected but paralysed physicist of international renown, as it is to see Jones’s Jane Wilde struggle to keep up and help the man she loves live a fulfilling life. Redmayne dearly deserves his Oscar.

The Theory of Everything clearly has great admiration for the people it portrays and the events they experience, which is refreshing to see in a market where other biopics lack any sort of respect for their subjects, or even for truth. While it slightly glosses over Hawking’s actual work, presumably in favour of keeping the mainstream audience, it nonetheless succeeds in presenting the dynamics between a disabled person and their loved one in an honest fashion.

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FILM

Wild Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee Sarah Dillon “God is a ruthless bitch.”—Cheryl Strayed Of all the comments Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) leaves in the register books that mark her journey along California’s Pacific Crest Trail, this is the only original one. The rest are apt but ever-so-slightly twee remarks that span pretty much everyone from Shakespeare to Joni Mitchell. Strayed’s own comment is a fist-pump moment in Wild.

It’s not in the least about who or what or even if you think God is: it’s the voice of a gutsy 26-year-old protagonist finally owning her anger and working through it. Wild gifts us a series of windows into Strayed’s background—her mother’s death, failed marriage, drug use—to show the motivation behind her impulsive trip to the Trail, but what’s best about the film is how it avoids becoming a complete cheesefest to instead say something pretty powerful.

The wilderness journey isn’t necessarily any less of a trope than the therapy on the couch, right? Strayed’s shtick is that she’s a woman doing this alone; that she’s walking around 1800 kilometres, and that she has no idea what the hell she’s doing. Any of these elements could’ve turned her into a joke—but director Jean-Marc Vallée has more sense. While Wild contains a few laughable moments, he doesn’t seem particularly interested in manipulating the audience to feel, well, anything specific. It lends a nice rawness. On one side, the woman and her journey; on the other, a plethora of different audience experiences responding as they see fit. The whole stripped-back thing is something I really enjoy, particularly in a narrative that ran the risk of becoming too Hornby-esque at the hands of its screenwriter.

The director’s hand is probably most evident in the way he weaves Strayed’s memories in and out of her walk. A lot of this traces the narrative structure of the real Strayed’s memoir, on which the film is based. The memories are fragments that shouldn’t really work, and definitely don’t chronologically. The way Vallée evokes them, though, is exquisite: how they insert themselves at unwelcome moments and with unwanted consequences, the way they play with touch and smell as well as the visual. It’s a lovely way to get to know a character, and the sensory tactic really brings us closer to the film.

This approach is all part of a strange kind of Hollywood-cum-arthouse style that it seems Vallée’s been trying to cultivate: we remember Dallas Buyers’ Club, yeah? Let’s be honest, though—Wild looked terrible. The trailer left me wincing. I just watched it, and grimaced again. Have a little faith though, friends. Aside from one cringeworthy CGI fox that was meant to be oh-so-symbolic but instead made me want to crawl under my seat every time it emerged, the film is not so Hollywood. It’s subdued, but nonetheless captivating. Wild is homespun, gritty, rough, and every other adjective you’d expect from a film with that name. It runs a whole gamut of emotion, and takes a really good shot at mimicking a working through process, instead of neatly packaging grief.

I doubt that Reese actually ripped her toenail off for the role, and she strangely enough managed to shave her legs throughout “three months on the trail”, but she brings a little something that’s not Elle Woods. Laura Dern steals the show, and I want Bobbi to be my mother (except that she died). Wild presents us with a bunch of male characters who range from just plain nice to harmless misogynist to really genuinely threatening. Perhaps the most important thing this film brings us, though, is a female protagonist who is “strong”, but not an action hero, a Marvel character, or Scarlett Johansson. We’re used to defining females in terms of their interactions with others, and it’s nice to see Strayed undergo a transformation that only essentially involves herself, the landscape, and a fuckload of sheer grit. I’mma go climb a mountain.

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 4 | pirates

GAMES

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The Order: 1886 Developed by Ready at Dawn, Published by Sony Platform(s): PS4

Baz Macdonald Upon completing The Order: 1886’s roughly seven-hour campaign, I was filled with an overwhelming feeling of disappointment.

The kind of deep, dark disappointment that comes from something truly promising, utterly failing to live up to its potential.

Playing The Order: 1886 is a frustrating experience for many reasons, but none more so than how clearly you can identify what the game’s failings are and how easily they could have been avoided. Worse still is being able to recognise how slightly different design choices could have resulted in a truly amazing gaming experience.

The root of The Order: 1886’s evils clearly stem from its obsession with being a cinematic experience. This preoccupation is evident in every moment of the game, from the annoying aspect ratio to the gratuitous cutscenes. To be fair, the developer Ready at Dawn truly succeeded in this attempt. The game is a cinematic feat, gloriously gorgeous at every moment, slick and clean in its visual delivery. The trouble is that The Order: 1886 is not a film, it’s a game, or so it says on the box. But having completed the campaign, it’s not easy to call it a game. More apt would be a film with brief moments of poorly-designed and alienating interaction.

I can’t fault Ready at Dawn’s intentions; the cinematic approach was clearly implemented

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in an attempt to create an evocative narrative experience. In some ways they succeeded.

I was often provoked by the story; I could appreciate its nuance and structure as well as its cast of interesting characters and relationships, but only as a passive observer.

I never felt personally involved or responsible for the narrative—rather I felt frustrated at my lack of control and alienated from what could have been a rather compelling story.

After all, the The Order: 1886 has a fascinating premise, telling the story of an alternate-history Victorian London in which technology has progressed much faster than in our reality. Victorian London itself is still recognisable in its tone and figures, but in this reality there are gigantic blimps in the sky and people wield powerful weapons harnessing chemicals and electricity in ways we have never seen before.

You follow Galahad, a member of the Knights of the Round Table, or the Order, as it has become known. As part of this centuriesold society bent on maintaining stability and quelling threats, you are tasked with hunting down and putting an end to an insurgency of rebels who are somehow linked with The Order’s greatest and oldest threat: The Lycans.

Aspects of the story are as clichéd as they sound, but overall the assimilation of a completely new alternate reality, with a wellmaintained tone, make the story itself quite interesting.

Though many may find the seven-hour campaign painfully short for a AAA title, it was actually a perfect amount of time to tell the story. The irritation I had with the game’s timing was much more a matter of pacing than of length. As I have said the game uses cutscenes abhorrently, often giving players minutes without any need to even hold the control. Though this is bad, what’s even worse

is giving players literally seconds of control just to walk several feet before you are pulled into yet another cutscene. This is a large part of what makes the pacing of the game so bad; you are never comfortable in any given action knowing that you are only moments away from having control once again taken away from you.

However, in the end you are not missing much—The Order: 1886’s version of gameplay often consists of nothing more than largely boring environment exploration or two-dimensional cover-based shooting. The environment exploration could have been interesting, but, as with every other moment of the game, you are given no control over discovery. You can pick up objects, but the objects lack any content to discover, rather Galahad just tells you what is interesting about it the moment you pick it up. The coverbased shooting is equally unimpressive, often feeling more like a way to pad the game out, rather than a fun experience or compelling way to progress the story.

The way to make this game an exponentially better experience is clear. Ready at Dawn should have focused on making a narrative experience for the medium they chose: video games. They should have realised how key interaction is to this medium and forgone lengthy cutscenes and visual prowess for meaningful interactivity and fun gameplay.

The Order: 1886 had every opportunity to be amazing: a world-class developer, a financially generous publisher, and some really great narrative ideas. Yet these factors were squandered on an overly cinematic experience that should have been vetoed early on in its development. But it wasn’t. And now all we have is disappointment and the bitter question rolling around our minds—what if?

41

ARTS

Banksy: A Pirate Artist Sharon Lam You know when you were at school and it was cool to scratch your name into the desk, doodle in the margins of your 1B5 and draw all over your hands? Some cool kids bring this habit with them to university lecture theatres; Banksy’s innocent doodles at his Bristol high school were his gateway into the graffiti world.

Like any vaguely capable pirate, the real identity of this edgy street artist and his background are veiled in mystery, because, when you’re running around the world committing illegal acts it’s kinda important that you get through border patrol.

Banksy is anti a lot of things—anti-war, anti-capitalist and anti-establishment. His humour is dark and his social commentary startlingly on point. The intelligence and craft that Banksy throws into his work puts to shame the dogs who piss their tags onto council water meters. He has gained an international reputation and helped raise the status of the graffiti artist—something we still can’t quite wrap our heads around when the medium of graffiti is generally considered dirty and painted over. (FYI, anyone painting over a Banksy work would be regretting that now—one of his latest works, Mobile Lovers, sold for over £400,000.)

Last month Banksy was in Gaza painting kittens on rubble, because the internet is more obsessed with watching fluff balls than learning about the destruction happening in the Middle East. Before the last Olympics, he was depicting athletes throwing missiles instead of javelins. For a whole month he set up art installations in public spaces in New York City, which included selling authentic art for US$60 to people who had no idea and were later able to sell the pieces for over US$200,000.

It is a small irony that celebrities and others have paid a shit tonne for Banksy’s work, when he is so anti-capitalist and critical of consumer culture. His work is interesting and worth noting because of its accessibility outside of the gallery space, and because it causes us to question the legality of his means of making artistic comment.

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 4 | pirates

SCIENCE

42

Patrick Savill

Sergio Canavero will propose the launch of his new project to transplant a human head in June, at the annual conference of the American Academy of Neurological and Orthopaedic Surgeons, AANOS. The project, if successful, will be used to help people with severe nerve damage and degenerative muscle diseases. The world’s first head transplant was performed on a monkey by a team led by Robert White, at the University School of Medicine in California in 1970. No attempt was made to join the spinal cord, so the monkey was paralysed from the neck down. The monkey survived for nine days, breathing without assistance, before the donor body’s immune system rejected the head.

Canavero’s proposed procedure involves joining the spinal cords after the two bodies have been cooled. The cooling is essential to prolong the time before irreparable cell degradation occurs. The neck tissues are dissected and major blood vessels linked up by tubes to prevent brain death and blood loss. Then both spinal cords are cut, decapitating both bodies before the patient’s head and donor’s body are moved together. The tricky part, if it weren’t tricky enough already, is joining the spinal cords.

If the neck cord is broken during everyday life the victim dies very quickly. The brain can no longer control the diaphragm, resulting in lung collapse and suffocation. However, the heart will continue to beat as it produces its own electrical impulses for control—hence why defibrillation is needed to restart a heart regardless of brain activity.

Lung collapse will be avoided by machine assisted respiration in the procedure. The two spines then need to connect so the patient’s brain has control of bodily function when awakened.

As yet, no successful spinal cord join has occurred in any procedure.

Canavero believes that the chemical polyethylene glycol will change this. The chemical encourages the fat in a cell’s membrane to connect

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to all neighbouring cells. When applied correctly, it will join the cords together and avoid joining to the bone itself. This method isn’t used in existing spinally damaged patients as it would fuse all cells together and cause harm.

Muscles and arteries will then be sutured before the patient is put into a month-long coma for monitoring and healing to occur. Implanted electrodes will stimulate the spine for this period so the new nerve connections are strengthened. To prevent the rejection of the head, drugs already used in organ transplants will be administered.

Canavero predicts the patients should be able to talk upon waking and walk within a year.

Obtaining ethics approval rests upon the spiritual dilemma of where a human’s sentience comes from. Patricia Scripko, a neurologist and bioethicist in California, sees no issue. “I believe what is specifically human is held within the higher cortex [of the brain]” she says. “In this case you’re not altering the cortex.” She does acknowledge that many cultures and belief systems see the soul as occupying the entire body, and many are already opposed to organ transplants. Quite simply, the world may not be ready for this. William Mathews, chairman of AANOS, agrees. “I embrace the concept of spinal fusion… but I disagree with Canavero on the timing. He thinks it’s ready, I think it’s far in the future.”

Regardless of the conference’s outcome Canavero is content to wait.

“If society doesn’t want it, I won’t do it. But if people don’t want it in the US or Europe that doesn’t mean it won’t be done somewhere else” he said. Several people have already volunteered for the procedure.

43

SCIENCE

Gus Mitchell

Bridget Pyc

The discovery of hallucinogenic fungus preserved on a 110 million year-old grass specimen indicates that dinosaurs may have been tripped on LSD.

Computer scientist Randal Olsen was trapped inside during a snowstorm last month. With no work, and no chance to leave the house, what was he to do? Read a book? Play Where’s Wally? How about vanquish Where’s Wally once and for all (with science)?

The grass specimen was found preserved in fossilised amber, Jurassic Park style, and contains the psychotropic fungus ergot.

This fungus contains lysergic acid, which causes hallucinations, paranoia and muscle spasms when consumed. Since its discovery

by Albert Hoffman in 1938, lysergic acid has been synthesised into LSD. This has lead palaeontologists to speculate that, if a herbivorous dinosaur consumed enough ergot-contaminated grass, it could high, meaning fossilisation wasn’t the only way dinosaurs got stoned.

Paleo-entomologist George Poinar, Jr. believes that the fungus must have been consumed by dinosaurs but isn’t certain if he can grass any of them up for drug use.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that it would have been eaten by sauropod dinosaurs, although we can’t know what exact effect it had on them,” Poinar said in a press release.

Ergot co-evolved alongside grasses and wheat when it was first cultivated and has been consumed by humans. Ergot-contaminated wheat, ironically, can survive being baked, and has been consumed by humans for centuries. Historians believe that ergot poisoning is responsible for certain events of mass paranoia throughout human history, such as the Salem witch trials.

A bored mathematician claimed to have already developed a fool-proof strategy for finding the spectacled man in the striped jumper, but Olsen wanted to one-up this and “carve a trail of defeated Waldo searchers in my Wake”.

Olsen’s plan was to examine all of Wally’s hiding spots and to uncover one ultimate path to follow on any page. This is trickier that it might sound; for 64 hiding places the number of potential paths is 2.5 x 1096, greater than the number of atoms in the known universe!

This is where machine learning was utilised.

A computer took a given algorithm and continuously tinkered it, only keeping the results whereby the new algorithm yielded a better path than the previous one. Eventually a path was found which was able to cover the most spots where Wally likes to hang out without backtracking.

So you wanna know what this holy grail of Wally-hunting paths is? Well I’m not going to tell you, because as the developer himself said it’s actually way more fun just to look for him the old fashioned way.

Brontë Ammundsen We’ve all been there: you wake up in the middle of the night, stumble to the bathroom or kitchen like a zombie, when your most vulnerable toes are ambushed by cruelly placed furniture. “SHIIIIIIIT!” But why do we leap to profanity when faced with sudden pain? Researchers at Keele University set out with the hypothesis that swearing upon pain infliction would increase pain perception and reduce pain tolerance.

Instead, they found the exact opposite— when faced with pain and discomfort, our cursing is curiously cathartic.

Pain tolerance and pain perception in relation to swearing was examined with 64 students partaking the “Cold-Pressure” test. Participants were split into separate conditions, before submerging their hand in ice water for as long as possible. One condition required the student repeat a chosen swear word repeatedly, one group would repeat a “neutral word”. Those allowed to swear demonstrated significantly longer tolerance of the ice water, along with less perceived pain, and an elevated heart rate.

While the same hypothesis has been looked into by other researchers, as of yet there is no conclusive explanation why swearing reduces pain. However, it has been proposed that swearing triggers the “fight-or-flight” response, which accelerates the heart and reduces pain sensitivity.

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 4 | pirates

FOOD

44

Hannah Douglass

I

t could be a competitor for longest business name in Wellington: Pan de Muerto Mystic Mexican Cuisine and Tequila Bar. It could also give some of Wellington’s best a run for their money with décor; I love the look of this place—I could easily be sitting in the middle of olden-days Mexico instead of downtown Wellington. The walls are lined with sugar skull-faced skeletons dressed in sombreros and paintings of a similar style. The lighting is low, but by no means does it feel dark and dingy. I was accompanied by two friends, one of whom was entertained for the entirety of our time there by the fact that the tables are adjustable in height thanks to a device that looks vaguely like a car jack underneath the table-top.

The service was friendly and helpful, but it was disconcerting to be asked for our order as we were being seated—we hadn’t even seen a menu yet. Once the wait staff figured out the order of operation (sit down first, look at the menu, then order), they were great.

The menu offers a range of ways to eat, with both tapas-style small plates to share and larger main courses (if you’re like Joey from Friends and don’t share food). The three of us opted for the larger courses, having been out and about all day and not in any sort of headspace to be dividing food between

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ourselves. I ordered a chicken burrito, and it was fantastic, even if it was a little on the mild side. I realised once I was nearly finished that there was hot sauce on the table that I could have added, but by then it was too late to be fussing with that. My two companions both got the fajita, a platter-style dish of ingredients to construct your own food as you want it. The flavour of the fajita was a bit more intense and it was great, but I would like to see anyone manage to get all the filling into the three small pieces of tortilla that it comes with.

Desserts were traditional Mexican fare along the lines of churros and chocolate, but what impressed me was that they catered to the indecisive people of the world (like me), offering all dessert individually or as part of a tasting plate that included a little bit of everything. It was all delicious and very well presented.

Cost of a meal: $30 BYO: No.

45

Lydia and Mitch

Zubrowka Bison Grass Vodka Cost: $22 Alcohol Volume: 40% Pairing: Hellers pre-cooked sausages, Pam’s bread, homemade caramelised onions, $3.50 chicken wings from New World Verdict: “It would go very well with a Creamy Mayo Cheeseburger”* As radical (drunk) lefties, we like to think challenging authority is in our nature. With that in mind, we jumped when the opportunity came along to review a drink banned in several countries. This drink, Zubrowka Bison Grass Vodka, caught our eye after spending a long time in Discount Liquor on Dixon Street, also known as the best liquor shop in Wellington.** Zubrowka is a mysterious drink both in its blood-thinning properties and the inexplicable piece of floating grass in the bottle. However, it should be noted that Lydia fell over during the night and bled very normally thank you very much. Colour-wise, it was variously described as “pretty hydrated piss” and “God why is the vodka green?”

Reviewer and guest alike were enamoured with the very cute bison on the front and henceforth resolved to buy only animal-themed drinks.

Being sticklers for authenticity we decided to first try it on the notrocks, which is our way of saying that we drank it straight and warm from mugs. Having a series of guest contributors for this review, the range of opinions on this tasting was as wide as the range of actions that might seem appropriate to you after drinking this. Needless to say, we all took swigs and did a lot of dramatic choking for the benefit of the recording. Drinking Zubrowka was an interesting experience in that it seemed more vapour than drink. Complaints include burning, uncomfortable sensations in eyes, and plain disgust.

Never ones to be deterred, we next tried Zubrowka in a very traditional Polish cocktail which involved mixing it with Fresh Up Crispy Green Apple juice. This iteration of the drink is variously known as a “Polish Kiss” and “Frisky Bison”, both of which are excellent names for strip clubs and/or your first born. To our incredibly refined palettes, it tasted like apple pie. Which isn’t surprising given that we mixed it with fucking apple juice, we’re just not that creative.

At the end of the day, Zubrowka Bison Grass Vodka on the (not) rocks is uncomfortable. However, add a little apple juice and you’re on your way. Na zdrowie!

2 for 1 Margherita

pizzas every friday from 3pm

The Hunter Lounge

The Hunter Lounge

* Author’s note: Burger King, please sponsor us. ** Author’s note: Discount Liquor, please sponsor us.

editor@salient.org.nz

issue 4 | pirates If you’re feeling bereft over the finale of Parks and Recreation, don’t despair: you can still get your Poehler fix. Yes Please is the ferociously funny comedian’s memoir, although perhaps the term “scrapbook” is a more accurate description.

BOOKS

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Yes Please Amy Poehler HarperCollins 2014 Cassie Richards

Poehler shares stories from her childhood, her early days in comedy, her escapades on Saturday Night Live and her time playing everyone’s favourite fictional small-town government employee, Leslie Knope.

Anecdotes are mingled with pictures, poems, lists, and life advice in haiku form (“A facelift does not/ Make daughters comfortable/ When you chaperone”). This is not a bareall celebrity memoir, and Poehler stays away from any major revelations about her personal life, but the chapter about her two young sons and her time visiting orphanages in Haiti is candid and beautiful.

Going in to this book I was expecting another Bossypants, the memoir written by Poehler’s friend and “comedy wife” Tina Fey. Both women have helmed successful TV shows and have proven, without a doubt, that comedy is not an old boys’ club. Despite this, the similarities between their books are scarce. While Fey tended towards the self-deprecating in a way that I couldn’t help

Dunham and her work exist in a frenzy of praise and criticism; Dunham’s book, however, is a book in its own right, entirely separate from her TV show. Regardless of personal taste, she has come to stand as a role model of female empowerment and honesty, no matter how flawed—a position that has been waiting to be filled for a while.

While the very premise of the book is for us to figure out what kind of girl Dunham is, it simultaneously explores the complexity of understanding one’s own individuality.

Not That Kind of Girl Lena Dunham Random House Jayne Mulligan

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Dunham’s collection of essays begins in an act of justification: “There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman.” While promoting female memoirs and the didactic nature of them, she preempts criticism, but by the same vein, she has already self-aggrandised the task which she nobly sets herself. Throughout the collection, there is a sense that Dunham is stuck between the theoretical importance of the author and her own irrelevance. Her work is based in her individual experiences while promoting a universally shared experience, and refusing inhabit it.

There are moments in which Dunham could acknowledge her narrow field of vision; it’s

but laugh along with, Amy has gone for the inspirational, self-help angle. Yes Please is split into three parts: “Say whatever you want”, “Do whatever you like”, and “Be whoever you are”. Little bits of wisdom are dropped throughout, in bold letters on a double page spread: Everybody is scared most of the time; Calling people sweetheart makes most people enraged; Short people do not like to be picked up (my personal favourite).

For those familiar with her web series Smart Girls at the Party, where she interviews inspiring and successful women, and Ask Amy, where she fields questions from viewers in a cool-aunt kind of way, this won’t seem out of left-field; but for the uninitiated it might seem twee. I don’t doubt her sincerity; her dedication to empowering young women and providing viable role models for them is admirable and something that we only need more of.

While it didn’t provide as many belly laughs as I had been hoping for, I came away from reading Yes Please with an increased admiration for somebody who had already firmly earned themselves a place on my coollady index. This is the perfect companion for the Amy Poehler fan.

the privilege discussion. The same criticism has landed on a lot of her work, and yet here too she refuses to be baited by it. Dunham’s book is sprinkled with experiences and life lessons alien to many of the lives reading her book. In Dunham’s world, therapists become a ubiquitous requirement, a designerclothing store fills the post-degree void, “artist” is a financially sound career choice, and, duh, you live in New York City.

Yet for all its distance, Not That Kind of Girl felt like reading one of your best friends’ diaries. Unflinchingly honest, well-written and exercising her crafting skills, with a blend of modern language and imagery, it was refreshing and felt important to read. She’s had weird sex experiences too! She hated her body too! She felt bored and frustrated while studying too! Reviewers liked to compare her honesty within the book to her nude scenes in Girls. I get that. But being privy to her mind, and heart, her vaginal and uterine dilemmas, her anxiety and fear, her trials of love and loss, ambition and self-doubt, was a much more fulfilling experience than seeing Lena Dunham naked, or Marnie getting her butt eaten out.

47 But in actual fact, you have been invited to buy yourself dinner that you can’t afford and drink your own wine—such a generous invitation. You can bet your other left nut that it will be either a Thai restaurant or a restaurant that does Thai food, because you know what’s lacking in your hostel diet? Rice.

You will need some wine. But don’t neglect the Cindy’s—you will need them before you go if you are to complete your $9 bottle of piss with some French name you can’t pronounce written on the side. Not a great idea to Snapchat your parents the wine, you haven’t gotten more sophisticated by drinking moscato rosé when you are forced to.

BYOs

I

f you have truly fitted into uni life (but let’s face it, you have made it to the last page of Salient—so you probably haven’t), you will start to receive numerous notifications inviting you to a BYO. This week we guide you through BYOs, or as we like to call it “not being able to appreciate the best meal you’ve had since your mum’s lasagne, because alcohol has robbed you of your senses.”

You probably think that you are popular because you are one of the 52 people invited.

At any half-decent BYO there are three things up for grabs in the social Hunger Games that is first year uni: who is first to finish their bottle (if it’s not empty before the first main arrives, then get to the kiddies’ table sunshine); who is the most embarrassingly intoxicated; and who can steal the most valuable item successfully to add to the common room kitchen (Tom’s record is a seventeenth-century serving dish that once belonged to the Qing Dynasty—half full of food too).

the organiser then make sure you have a couple grand in overdraft to cover the people who somehow slip out without paying.

Bastards. Also look out for the elderly Chinese grandmother who co-owns the restaurant, because although the manager will be rubbing their hands together at the thought of your StudyLink dollars, the wisdom that comes with being 114 years old is knowing that the captain goes down with the ship when it comes to a BYO. Tip of the week: Don’t drink your wine too fast, or you’ll spend more time outside the restaurant then you will in it.

Happy dining, Luke and Tom P.S. Watch out for exploding Lindauer—that cork travels faster than the Moan Zone to the back of Salient.

While BYOs are a hoot to attend, if you are

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