Salient Issue 11 - Volume 88

you guys weren't needing to use this ladder, right?

ISSUE #11

Editor

Phoebe Robertson

Designer & Cartoonist

Jim Higgs

Sub-Editor

Holly Rowsell

News Writers

Dan Moskovitz

Martha Schenk

Ryan Cleland

Otis Whinney

Ali Cook

Columnist

Guy van Egmond

Critic-at-large

Jackson McCarthy

Comic Artists

Grace Elzenheimer

Jack Graham

Contributing Writers

Tamanna Amin

Zia Ravenscroft

Christopher Curtis

Social Media Manager

Will Tickner

Photographer

Sophie Spencer

Centrefold Artist

Arnav Puri

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To contribute to Salient, you can submit poetry, creative writing, artwork, comics, puzzles, features, and other ideas. Feature articles must be pitched to the Editor before writing; send pitches to editor@salient.org.nz. Artwork should be sent to designer@salient.org.nz. Creative writing submissions are accepted through the form on our website. All other contributions, including puzzles and general ideas, should be emailed to the Editor. Submissions are welcome from first-time and returning contributors.

Well team, we have some updates here at the Salient offices.

Last week, we were informed that Shardonnay would be no more. When we came into the office, she was… smothered? Wrapped up like some ancient Egyptian deity? Made safer for students?

Man, if that picture doesn’t say the University is finally turning a profit, I don’t know what does.

But it’s okay. A Te Herenga Waka staff member came into our office a few days later and told us she was actually getting fixed this week.

Forgive me for being jaded.

Our contacts at the University seem to think so, too. When I asked them about the window, David Stevenson, Director of Property Services, said:

“A temporary repair has been made to the window. A glazier and abseiler team were scheduled to replace the window last Friday, but due to weather conditions this was not possible. They have rescheduled this work for this coming Friday.”

For our diligent little readers, the Friday referenced here is the Friday just passed. Will Wellington’s weather hold up for it? My personal forecast isn’t particularly promising.

If it feels like I’m being needlessly jaded, then I would respond: 4 March 2024, 17 November 2025, 9 February 2026, 26 March 2026. These are four different dates, across three years, on which we tried to get this window fixed. And I am entirely sure there were others.

Not to mention, on 24 April, WorkSafe decided “not to intervene”—the bolded “not” is verbatim from their email.

Now the roof of the building threatens to blow off, and they decide to finally fix it?

Hell, they weren’t even all that concerned when, in August last year, a glass window pane detached from the Hunter Lounge and fell onto the same pathway our window overlooks. Do with that piece of information what you will.

I don’t mean to be grumpy in this editorial, or to detract from the issue itself: we have many great features inside. Harry Hughes takes us on a bicycle ride all around Europe. Andy Lester explains why the concept of intelligence is deeply flawed. Pedro Hay has managed to write a piece that feels more like a conversation than a feature, all about “Walking Armoured Beach Frisbees.” You just gotta read it, trust me.

In news, Martha Schenk discusses the Nuku breach, Dan Moskovitz reports on the Government scrapping the Fees-Free scheme, Aerie Joe critiques the University’s maintenance, Ali Cook critiques VUWSA’s priorities—I told you we’d be back—and Otis Whinney rounds it out by being quite possibly the most up-to-date person on global news I have ever met.

I don’t bring up the window to detract from these fantastic authors. I bring up the window to say: if you couldn’t fix this for us, what are you not fixing for other students who don’t have a platform to call you out on it?

Phoebe Robertson

Kia ora editor!

The news piece on Aidan Donoghue’s election promises was one of the toughest Salient reads in my three years at Vic… oof.

It makes me think of an alternative reality, where a student Christopher Luxon tries to answer questions….

“Well what I would say to you is, it is on the back burner…”

Sincerely, a disgruntled voter

editor, i don’t like reading the newspaper. is there a reason my uni breath-of-fresh- air is not fulfilling my need for hyper- colour? why am i finding myself doom- paging my way through my beloved salient waiting to get my fix? please make this paper prettier and more colourful, i need to get off my phone

sincerely a procrastinator

Correction:

Last week's “Octo Opens” news piece incorrectly referred to Aro Video as “AroVision.” Aro Video is the name of the store, while AroVision is the company’s ondemand streaming service. We regret the error.

To My Knight and Shining Armour

The Vic House coffee machine is running full steam ahead and morale is UP! To celebrate I had 4 hot chocolates on Saturday.

Sincerely, Your Friend, And the grateful, Not so thirsty anymore, Vic House Resident

Dear Salient, 47 possible words? More like 5 words that were imPUZZible to find! As hardcore puzzheads we were thrilled to take on the most recent word wheel, and very quickly found the word “broke”. U tryna tell us something? We confidently thought “we’ve soooo got this”, however we were swiftly humbled and began to shout the same words over and over again as if we’d just thought of them. This is simply unacceptable. Next time, pls dumb the puzzles down, or buy us a packet of chitchats to replace the one we stress ate while trying to solve this monstrosity.

P.S: Remy found ur mouse and u ignored him (twice). Thats so not on.

everything about my flat was included in the ref flags thank god for hindsight

Submit to the Letters page by emailing editor@salient.org.nz

Best letter each week will win a FREE PIZZA from the Hunter Lounge!

About the centrefold artist - Arnav Puri

"I'm Arnav, I sketch sometimes like once every 5 or 6 months. I play badminton a lot tho, lemme know if you play badminton, I got a voucher to book a court. Studying comp sci btw (barely). @gg_arnav on Insta, tell me where the best restaurants are, I got paid for the centrefold."

Go to page 20 to see the centrefold, then rip it out and put it on your wall !

Salient is published by, but remains editorially independent from, the Victoria University of Wellington Students Association (VUWSA). Salient is funded in part by VUWSA through the Student Services Levy. Salient is a member of the Aotearoa Student Press Association (ASPA) and the New Zealand Media Council. Complaints regarding the material published in first be brought to the VUWSA CEO in writing (ceo@vuwsa. org.nz). If not satisfied by the response, complaints should be directed to the Media Council (info@mediacouncil.org.nz).

WINNER

salient collage by anonymous

Final Year Fees-Free Goneburger; Cost-of-Living Crisis Remains

Dan Moskovitz

The government has moved to scrap final year fees-free, resulting in up to $12,000 of extra costs for future and current students.

When announced by Labour in 2018 (then as first year feesfree), the policy had four major goals: to reduce financial barriers to education, support life-long learning, reduce learner debt, and increase participation.

A 2024 Ministry of Education analysis found that out of the four goals, the policy had only reduced learner debt and recommended scrapping it altogether.

National instead switched to a final year fees-free system in 2024, before subsequently removing it from 2026 onwards.

Final year fees-free only went into effect on 1 Jan 2025, so those who graduated in 2025 or 2026 would have had their first year-free.

Undergraduates who started in 2025 haven’t had their final year yet. And therefore, won’t get the fees-free they were promised.

This leaves first and second-year students in 2026 at the short end of the stick with neither option accessible to them.

Therefore, many second years feel as if the rug has been pulled out from under them.

“First year fees-free was definitely a big incentive for why I wanted to go to university in the first place,” said secondyear student David Houghton.

“When that changed to final year, I still thought it wasn’t so bad because final year courses are more expensive than first year, so I was getting a better deal. But now there’s just ridiculous debt.”

Houghton said the change meant he was planning to only take three courses each trimester next year, rather than the four he had been intending on when final year fees-free was still in effect.

“It’s not a great feeling, knowing our debt is going to be a lot higher than it could have been,” said Will Robinson, another second year student.

“I’m at the point where I’ve got to really work a lot harder with my finances.”

Robinson said if he knew he would be paying for all three years, he would have worked to be much better funded coming into uni.

The move comes after the government allowed universities to increase course fees by up to 6% in 2025. In the previous six years prior, course fee increases had been limited to between 2 and 2.8%.

VUWSA Academic Vice-President Ethan Rogacion said removing fees free erected further financial barriers at a time where students were struggling.

“It absolutely makes sense to review fees free, but the worst thing the government could do is cut it outright. Students are facing some really tough decisions about whether they go to university and study, or go straight into work.”

Compounding it all, most relevant parties appear to have been blindsided by the announcement. Spokespeople from both VUWSA and Te Herenga Waka confirmed neither had been consulted on the axing.

Tertiary Education Minister Penny Simmonds did not

University Digitalisation a ‘Hack’

Martha Schenk

The cybersecurity breach of online learning platform Nuku has caused alarm for students and staff alike, calling Te Herenga Waka’s reliance on digitised learning into question.

Reports indicate that Instructure, the company that owns Canvas, and the software on which Nuku runs, were made aware of a “cybersecurity incident perpetrated by a criminal threat actor” on 1 May 2026, that was “contained” by the following day.

On Wednesday 6 May, the University informed students and staff that the online learning portal had suffered an “incident,” and that some personal information may have been accessed.

The announcement read that “it is possible that names, email addresses and student ID numbers may have been disclosed.” And that “It is also possible that the content of messages exchanged in Nuku are included in the data.”

This update came four days after the first statement from Instructure. The university was officially made aware of their involvement in the hack on Monday 4 May, two days prior to notifying students and staff.

By the morning of Friday 8 May, Nuku had been disabled, with the university predicting that the earliest time the service would be back online would be 8am on Wednesday 13 May, five days later.

On the same day, it became known that hackers had taken roughly 3.65 terabytes of student and staff data from 8809 institutions globally, with Auckland University of Technology and the University of Technology also affected within New Zealand.

The group, under the name ShinyHunters, issued a ransom request that read; “If any of the schools in the affected list are interested in preventing the release of their data, please consult with a cyber advisory firm and contact us privately at TOX to negotiate a settlement.”

ShinyHunters had previously breached Instructure in 2024, and were also responsible for hacking Ticketmaster that same year.

This time, an estimated 275 million users were affected, with the main concern being targeted phishing emails, scams, and identity fraud. Instructure does not believe birthdates, passwords, government identifiers, or financial information were impacted.

Nuku was restored on Monday 11 May, following reassurance from Instructure that the platform was safe to use.

It became known on Wednesday 13 May that Instructure had “reached an agreement with the unauthorised actors,” which cybersecurity professionals suggest indicates that at least some of the ransom was paid out. This remains unconfirmed by the company.

Instructure insists that they have received “shred logs” as digital confirmation that copies of user’s data has been destroyed, but experts warn that criminal assurances that data won’t be sold on is unreliable, and users should remain cautious.

The incident is believed to be the largest recorded educationsector breach in history, and created significant disturbance for students, tutors, and lecturers alike.

A tutor told Salient: “we got a lot of concerned emails from students right off the bat, especially in the lead up to exams, as Nuku is their go-to resource.”

“We’re definitely seeing a little less preparation for the tutorials earlier in the week, just because they couldn’t access the resources, and of course that impacts teaching and engagement.”

She says she was lucky to have a responsive course manager, who sent a comprehensive email detailing the way forward, but knows that “it was not the case for all courses.”

Senior lecturer Dr Angi Buettner says that the Nuku outage has “added a lot of confusion and stress” to what is already a difficult time in the trimester. She says that when her course materials were suddenly not accessible, her teaching process was endangered.

Her co-convenor Dr Lewis Rarm emphasised that “first-year students seem to be more alarmed,” and that disruptive events such as this one “provoke more anxiety in students.”

Together, they have pushed back the deadline for an assignment that was originally due on Monday 11 May, so that students have more time to access resources. At the time, they couldn’t be certain that Nuku would even be back up and running in time for students to submit their assessments on Wednesday 13 May.

Senior lecturer Dr Emma Tennent also provided her course with a blanket extension, because they were unable to access feedback from previous assignments. She said the outage posed challenges for her tutors as “they were not able to finish grading and upload feedback in the time they had allocated.”

“As lecturers, we have been encouraged to put our material on Nuku to the extent where I don’t have full backups of all my course material outside the platform.”

“It was really a wakeup call for me about how dependent we—both the university and tertiary educators more widely—are dependent on these platforms over which we have so little control.”

As with Buettner and Rarm, Associate Professor Dr Nikki Hessel shares this sentiment.

“We are all better off with books in our hands, pens at the ready, and sitting together in community. Incidents like this only make me more sure of that.”

When contacted for comment, the University delayed answering questions regarding reconsideration of digitised systems, citing that it is still an active incident.

Held Together with Ratchet Straps

Arie Joe

The most damning indictment of the state of this Victoria University of Wellington’s building stock is presently on public display above the front doors of the Student Union Building. There, in plain view of every passing student, are blue cargo straps rated to 2,500 kilograms apiece, doing the job that the architects and structural engineers were paid to do thirty-odd years ago. Namely, keeping the roof attached to the rest of the building.

Now consider that Wellington is the world’s windiest capital city. So, on a hilltop campus that catches every gust off Cook Strait, what did someone decide to build?

A Student Union Building with a roof shaped like a kite. Two great cantilevered planes flaring outward from a single slender central post.

Visually striking, no doubt. The trouble is that nature applies wind uplift to the widest, least-supported edges of the kite, where the roof does all the rocking and the centre post does all the worrying. If the branches are bigger than the trunk, something is generally wrong with the tree. In this case, something plainly is.

Some architect scribbled up a roof design, then handed it to a structural engineer in the cheery expectation that the laws of physics would politely yield to the laws of aesthetics. They did not. And so, three decades on, engineers have been called in to lash the building to itself with ratchet straps while everyone works out how to fix what should never have been built that way in the first place.

On architectural awards generally

The prefix "award-winning" applied to a New Zealand commercial or institutional building is, in my observation, a near-perfect predictor of inconvenience for everyone obliged to use it. Real estate agents will quietly admit that "award-winning" attached to a house listing is a nearguarantee of buyer hesitation. The media periodically run admiring photo features on award-winning architectural houses, all of which on close inspection turn out to be visual and functional dogs. Living rooms with no obvious place for a sofa. Kitchens reachable only by ladder. Bathrooms with full-length glass walls facing the neighbours.

Meanwhile every sensibly sited, well-laid-out building in Wellington gets ignored, and the prizes go to whichever firm has produced the most photogenic curiosity that year. The Student Union Building belongs in this tradition. Nice from a distance. Disastrous on contact with weather, students, and the actual day-to-day business of being a building.

The rest of the dog

The atrium was designed without natural ventilation, condemning the building to permanent and audible mechanical wheezing, a constant droning reminder that somebody, somewhere, was paid to fail to think

[OPINION]

about windows. Anyone who has tried to study, relax, or have a conversation in the atrium knows the sound. An architectural cleverness being paid for by every kilowatthour drawn from the grid and every dollar drawn from the maintenance budget.

The doors into the atrium are absurdly narrow. A wheelchair user, or anyone trying to bring in a bike, a piece of stage equipment, or a delivery of any size, can vouch for it. This is an "award-winning" building. The judges, I assume, were not in wheelchairs, on bikes, or carrying anything heavy at the time of their deliberations.

The Student Union Building’s compliance schedule and maintenance records make for sobering reading on their own. The scheduled-maintenance register runs to roughly 300 separate planned jobs across two years. The reactive-maintenance log for a single recent period runs to nearly 300 more, dominated by electrical-lighting faults, plumbing leaks, HVAC faults, blocked toilets, fixture failures, and roof issues. This is what is meant by highmaintenance design.

Bear that figure in mind, because it is occasionally floated that the Students' Association should take ownership of the building. Bear in mind also that VUWSA is already operating on the smell of an oily rag, with the President’s election promises lying conspicuously unfulfilled for want of money. Now picture six hundred maintenance jobs every two years, and a rusty, corroded glazing bill that would devour any sensible Association budget several times over. Taking title to this place would be the financial equivalent of catching a falling knife. Whatever VUWSA’s current financial troubles look like, becoming the owner of a poorly maintained, leaking, and strap-bound awardwinner is not the rescue plan.

And then there are the Gordon Wilson Flats

If the Student Union Building shows what happens when the University commissions a building, the Gordon Wilson Flats show what happens when it buys one.

In 2014, Housing New Zealand sold the University an asbestos-laden, earthquake-prone, eleven-storey concrete wreck that they themselves had decided was beyond economic repair. A government agency, with all its engineers and consultants, looked at the building, looked at its books, and concluded that the prudent course was to dispose of it. The University, which likely trained those engineers and consultants, looked at the same building and concluded that the prudent course was to buy it. For more than $6 million.

Eleven years, several abandoned plans, a lost Environment Court case, and a special amendment to the Resource Management Act later, the bill for getting out of this brilliant decision is now $7.25 million for demolition alone, with works dragging on into 2027. The University has no firm design and no committed funding for whatever is supposed to replace it.

This in a year when the institution has just clawed its way back to a $7.7 million surplus after years of financial struggle and a recent round of staff cuts, while the Tertiary Education Commission still rates it a mediumhigh financial risk. In short, the cost of demolishing one mistake is roughly equal to the entire annual surplus. One firm whisper from the demolition contractor about cost overruns, and there will be cost overruns, and the University is back in deficit.

And there is only ever one place that money comes from: your fees. The bill for somebody else's award-winning pile thirty years ago, and somebody else's bargain-of-thecentury property purchase a decade ago, will land in your bank account in the form of next year's tuition increase, and the next, and the next. Welcome to higher education. There is the further assertion, occasionally heard, that the new build will be "warm, affordable and sustainable student accommodation." Warm, possibly. Sustainable, perhaps. Affordable on a brand-new bespoke build on a difficult Terrace site overlooking the city, with all the associated groundworks, structural engineering, exterior cladding, and consenting costs of a from-scratch project?

The far likelier outcome is premium-priced rooms aimed at students whose parents can comfortably absorb the rent. That is not what the city's student housing problem requires.

What ought to have been done, and still could be

The two buildings are different stories with the same moral. In both cases, the bill is being paid by students, staff, and a maintenance budget that was never sized to absorb such contingencies.

What ought to have been done instead of the current Gordon Wilson site plans is what the Wellington City Council has been doing rather successfully. Convert tired old office buildings, of which the city has plenty, into accommodation. You buy the shell, you fit out the interior, and you skip the groundworks, the structural works, the foundations, the exterior cladding, and the worst of the consenting saga. It is faster, cheaper, lower-risk, and produces genuinely affordable rooms rather than what a brand-new bespoke build is going to deliver.

The Gordon Wilson site itself was always best suited to its original and frankly more useful purpose: a gateway from Willis Street up onto the Kelburn campus. The Kelburn campus is inaccessible from the flat without a hike, which is a pleasant arrangement for the able-bodied and most travel by bus. Sort the gateway out first. Then put affordable accommodation on the flat where the access exists, in buildings the University does not have to invent from scratch.

As for the Student Union Building, a costly permanent fix is required. Whether the lesson stays up is another question entirely. An institution that cannot reliably keep its own roof attached or tell a bad property deal from a good one, has no business pretending it is short of better things to spend its money on.

VUWSA, What Are Your Priorities?

Ali Cook

VUWSA has decided to request $7000 from the VUWSA Trust to fund Re-O Week: a three-day, glorified party scheduled for the second week of Trimester Two.

The request alone is concerning. Why would VUWSA consider a party to be a reasonable use of Trust money?

Just weeks ago, students were left homeless after flooding damaged their flats.

Across the University, demand for the community pantry has increased by 400% since 2024, as reported by Salient

It remains unclear whether VUWSA will have the funding to continue Stress-Free Study Week, at least in its current form.

And, of course, VUWSA has spent its entire organizational life telling students, and just about anyone who will listen, that it is underfunded.

Against this backdrop, requesting $7000 from the Trust for a party is irresponsible, confusing, and insulting.

When criticised that the money could be better spent elsewhere, VUWSA President Aidan Donoghue told the Executive that “these aren’t mutually exclusive.” If VUWSA

[OPINION]

needed to dip into the Trust to fund the community pantry or Stress-Free Study Week, he said, he would consider it.

But that argument falls apart under the slightest pressure.

In theory, funding Re-O Week and funding student support are not mutually exclusive. In practice, they are. VUWSA is not dipping into the Trust to meet demand for student support—demand it already appears unable to meet. It is dipping into the Trust for Re-O Week.

Then, in response to concerns about the allocation of funds, one Executive member, who I could not identify by voice, said what may be the most confusing line of the whole meeting: “We’re never going to be able to pay to fix poverty in Wellington, but this is something we can pay for.”

What?

No one is asking VUWSA to end poverty in Wellington. That is not the standard. But VUWSA could invest in the community pantry. It could support students affected by the floods. It could protect Stress-Free Study Week. It could use Trust money for something materially useful.

Article continues on next page.

Instead, the Executive appears to have looked at student hardship, shrugged, and decided a party was more achievable.

This also raises a question: why is VUWSA pursuing Re-O Week at all, when there is no evidence students actually want it?

So far, there has been no meaningful consultation about whether students support Re-O Week, or whether they think it is a good use of $7000. Donoghue indicated that consultation may happen later, after the Trust has approved the money. But that is not consultation—that is retrospectively asking students to bless a decision already made.

The obvious defence is that students elected Donoghue, and Donoghue campaigned on Re-O Week. Therefore, the argument goes, the student body endorsed it.

That logic has a number of flaws.

First, it assumes VUWSA elections are meaningfully representative of the wider student population. At a university with more than 20,000 students, Donoghue received around 1000 votes—and that figure includes the benefit of the STV roll-down. A small turnout should not give the Executive a blank cheque to spend Trust money without proper consultation.

Second, it assumes students voted after carefully weighing each candidate’s policy platform. That is also doubtful. One of the criticisms of Donoghue’s campaign, raised on VuW: Meaningful Confessions, was that he gave cake to students in exchange for a vote. That does not exactly suggest a deeply informed democratic mandate for his presidency, let alone for taking thousands from the Trust to fund Re-O Week.

This is what makes Re-O Week look like a vanity project. It appears less like a response to student need, and more like an attempt to fulfil Donoghue’s campaign promise for the sake of his own reputation.

Because if students were not consulted, and no demand has been shown, who exactly is this for?

All of the justification for Re-O Week seems retrospective. It appears the Executive started with the conclusion that Re-O Week should happen, then worked backwards to find reasons to support it.

One example came from Education Officer Aría Lal, who argued that Re-O Week would be good for international students, many of whom arrive in Trimester Two and need opportunities to meet people. On its face, that sounds reasonable. But it does not hold up.

From my experience working in the International Office, international students often do not attend O-Week events. So why assume they would attend Re-O Week?

More importantly, Lal’s point overlooks the fact that international students already have dedicated Trimester Two events designed for exactly this purpose. The International Office runs International Welcome Night, alongside a full week of orientation events for incoming international students.

I have never seen the VUWSA Executive at any of those events.

If VUWSA genuinely wants to support international students, there are better ways to do it. It could partner with the International Office. It could show up to International Welcome Night. That would likely be more targeted, more useful, and far cheaper than $7000.

That is what makes the justification feel so thin. International student connection is being invoked as a convenient argument for Re-O Week, rather than treated as a real issue requiring a thoughtful response.

The most shocking part is that the Re-O Week proposal passed at a VUWSA Executive meeting with only two members objecting: Welfare Vice President Aspen Jackman and Treasurer-Secretary Sanjukta Dey.

That leaves nine Executive members, excluding Donoghue, who somehow decided this was a responsible use of Trust money. Perhaps Donoghue delivered the speech of his life—although, after reviewing an audio-recording of the meeting, I doubt that is the case. It seems more likely that nine people in the room accepted the proposal without giving it the scrutiny student money deserves.

Either way, it is hardly a ringing endorsement of the Executive’s collective judgement.

This decision also comes at a time when VUWSA is already under fire surrounding their transparency and democratic processes.

Last month, Save Our Clubs exposed VUWSA’s plan to take over club administration. As previously reported by Salient , one of the major criticisms of VUWSA’s approach was its lack of proper consultation before advancing the proposal.

Re-O Week follows the same dodgy pattern: a decision made at the top, justified without any student consultation, with students left to piece together what the hell just happened. And any consultation that does occur happens after the decision was already made.

The lack of transparency is not helped by the fact that, while preparing this article, I tried to find relevant VUWSA meeting minutes. None of the meeting minutes for any of the 2026 Executive Meetings (of which they have had four to date) have been made available, despite students having the right to know this information.

Taken together, the Re-O Week proposal reflects a troubling pattern: dress up a vanity project as student service, scramble for justification after the fact, and look past the hardship of the people you claim to represent.

VUWSA should not be asking students to accept that Trust money is available for a party, but only hypothetically available for welfare. If the Executive wants to prove it understands the reality students are facing, it should start by putting student need before student spectacle.

Broadcasting Standards Authority to be scrapped, replaced with brand-new Winston AI

Ryan Reinolds

Last week, the decision was made to dismantle the Broadcasting Standard Authority. In explaining the move, Minister for Media and Communications Paul Goldsmith cited, among other things, inconsistencies between digital and print media, along with removing more “red tape.”

In order to keep up with consistent regulations, Goldsmith has announced an AI replacement for the authority: Winston AI. The new system is eponymously named after not once, not twice, but thrice-former Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters.

Using the brand-new state-of-the-art Invercargill AI data centre, the latest large language model has reportedly been trained entirely on Winston Peters’ Facebook page.

Speaking to The Horse’s Mouth, Peters said: “In order to weed out the cultural Marxists and their wacky woke ideologies, we have trained our chatbot on the only thing I know I can trust: myself.”

Peters refused to comment any further, telling The Horse's Mouth he believed the wider publication, Salient, to be “fake news” and “liberal propaganda."

Early testing of Winston AI has reportedly shown promising results. When asked whether climate change is real, the chatbot allegedly responded, “That’s a very good question, sunshine,” before changing the topic to immigration statistics from the 1990s and demanding to know who funded the interviewer.

Under the bill, all media reporting would be checked for inherent bias and categorised into one of three groups: Communist, probably Communist or New Zealand First Policy.

However, critics have raised concerns over the transparency of Winston AI after the system repeatedly refused to answer questions directly, instead accusing journalists of “running a smear campaign” and somehow bringing Jacinda Ardern into entirely unrelated discussions about fishing quotas.

The Government has defended the rollout, arguing that the reforms represent the future of modern governance.

A spokesperson for New Zealand First told The Horse's Mouth: “People are sick and tired of these elitist experts telling us what we can and cannot report on.”

The spokesperson went on to say that so-called “experts” probably received their degree “thanks to that socialist Labour policy of handing out fees-free education.”

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is yet to comment on the proposed reforms. However, a spokesperson from the Prime Minister' s office noted that, once operational, Winston AI would play the role of “kingmaker” in the formation of future New Zealand governments.

There has even been some suggestion that, to ensure a stable coalition, Winston AI will also share the Deputy Prime Minister’s position with ACT Party leader David Seymour. Where this will leave physical Winston is yet to be clarified, as some sources tell us he has already been replaced by Winston AI and we are just yet to notice.

Meanwhile, Seymour has welcomed the move, proposing that all future school history curriculums also be reviewed by AI “to ensure children are protected from dangerous concepts like

CINEMA

Michael (2026) is a lesson for studios to more accurately title their films. Going into the cinema, I was not sure which Michael the title was referring to—Jordan? Phelps? Keaton? Cera? J. Fox? Pretty quickly, I did realise the movie was about non-problematic King of Pop, Michael Jackson. (Maybe Michael Jackson: The Movie would be more appropriate.) The film faithfully recreates all of Michael (Jackson’s) most iconic moments from 1966-1988. I suppose they are saving the post-1988 iconic moments for the sequel, I will be seated!

Ryan Reinolds

Expert review by Gus Saddleton

This weeks film: Michael Antoine Fuqua (2026)

Movie buffGus Saddleton

The Horse's Mouth

STRICTLY 4 THE ISLANDS

Weekly Pacific News with Otis Whinney

Going Band For Band on Immigration Policy

26 votes to 22 have decided the fate of Solomon Islands’ Prime Minister Jerimiah Manele. The vote of no-confidence for his leadership finally took place on May 7, the third time the parliament of the Solomons had attempted to push him out in this manner. Former foreign minister Peter Shanel Agovaka—who crossed the bench to help take out Manele—threw out allegations that Manele was facilitating corruption among his ministers, while 1000 police patrolled the capital to prevent unrest that has previously broken out during other political events such as this. Manele didn’t step down quietly, directing comments to the leader of the opposition, Matthew Cooper Wale, arguing he should “be very careful of who you are dealing with and sitting next to.” Considering some of Manele’s own allies switched up on him to remove him from power, maybe the warning should not be taken lightly.

Manele has done his best to balance his country's relationship with China and the West, so his ousting is significant. A diplomatic move to recognise the People's Republic of China over Taiwan in 2021 sparked enough unrest in the streets for Australia to deploy troops and police to the islands, and a 2022 security and defence pact between the Solomons and China raised many eyebrows among the usual suspects. Whether a move towards or away from China is on the cards, or whether the new leadership seeks to maintain the status quo, remains to be seen. A new vote for a replacement is due to take place before this article releases, so we cannot consider this whole debacle over just yet.

Niue is also having some changes in government, but is doing it the normal way by having a general election. Incumbent Dalton Tagelagi managed to retain his position as Prime Minister, but the biggest shock came in the demographic changes. The Fono Ekepule (Niue Parliament) now holds 7 woman MPs out of the possible 20, boosting their representation to 35%. Moments like this are significant, as it shows a shift in how people are perceiving leadership in a region that is still

untangling itself from generations of misogyny. We obviously still have a long way to go, and progress on this front will depend heavily on how these new MPs perform in their role, but thanks to these results, the opportunity is there for the taking.

Unfortunately, our leadership in Aotearoa cannot change until November. But time is ticking on the coalition, and every party in government has already begun slinging mud to convince as many voters as possible that all our country’s problems are because of the other guys. One of the key issues right-wing parties across the globe have been bringing to the forefront is immigration. Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Pauline Hanson; the world seems to be assembling the racist Justice League. New Zealand is no stranger to this; immigrants have been used as a political tool since Richard Seddon was bad-mouthing our Chinese community to win over racist miners in the late 19th century. We had irrational restrictions on immigrants from China in the 1880s, and of course the dawn raids under Robert Muldoon in the 1980s. In the modern day, we have Shane Jones calling Indian immigration a “butter chicken tsunami” while Brian Tamaki radicalises the people of Facebook. In short, this whole debate has been in our midst for a long time, and our good mate David Seymour claims he has the solution.

David Seymour and the ACT party have officially released their new plan to solve New Zealand’s immigration crisis. It's a six point platform that includes making it easier to deport migrants who are serious offenders, stronger English language requirements, and a dedicated enforcement unit to deal with overstayers. Now, it's not ridiculous to claim that New Zealand needs to update its stance on immigration. Migrant exploitation and worker shortages in key sectors are just some of the things successive governments have been kicking down the road for the next lot to solve. But ACT’s platform, to me at least, seems more like a series of signals to a certain type of voter in the run up to an election.

Seymour’s immigration stance has always been interesting. He has, at least recently, presented himself staunchly in favour of immigration and consistently claims that this country was founded by it. When defending these policies

to Sean Plunkett on his openly far-right radio show, Seymour still refused to play along with Sean’s more radical outbursts, even saying that “we all, at some point in our family history, have a story of immigration, and in many ways New Zealand, being the last major landmass to be settled by humans, is the country of immigration.” A perfectly reasonable statement, in sharp contrast to Donald Trump claiming Haitians are eating people's dogs during a televised debate. Even as Sean threw out a daft reference to Shane Jones’s butter chicken comment, Seymour declined to engage in that kind of anti-Indian racism.

A similar story played out as Seymour spoke to Duncan Garner, another far-right media personality who parrots those anti-immigration talking points. Even when speaking on a platform that gives him carte blanche to say whatever he wants about anyone, Seymour won’t budge. This is less surprising when you consider the ACT party’s frequent race-baiting over this term in Government towards Māori, pandering to the many who believe Te Tiriti is being abused in favour of Māori over others. Things like the Treaty Principles Bill and his constant references to apartheid pander to this demographic, draping the want to erode Te Tiriti’s legal power in assertions that all New Zealanders should be equal under the law. Seymour and ACT have always been about “cutting red tape,”removing regulations and allowing the private sector to have more freedom in how they operate and make money, regardless of the consequences for things such as the environment, or the people who work in it. Te Tiriti has been a significant roadblock to this for some time. Seymour needs the right to vote for him, so these new immigration proposals seek to activate that crowd, but he’s got to toe a line, lest he break his own argument that all New Zealanders are equal. On the other hand, since when have politicians been consistent?

Unfortunately, it seems like our right-wing parties are entering a sort of anti-immigration arms race to see who can demonise this group most effectively. After ACT released this platform, Winston Peters took to social media to argue it “doesn’t even touch the sides,” and that Seymour needs to “watch this space” for what a real man’s immigration policy looks like. Minister of Immigration, National’s Erica Stanford, has also been showcasing proposed changes to immigration laws, including making it much harder to appeal deportation on humanitarian grounds. The coalition is going band for band on immigration, and the escalating rhetoric will have ripple effects through not just the Pacific community in this country, but to the many other diasporas that call Aotearoa home.

The endless rise of anti-Indian sentiment specifically in this country should worry us all, and as Pacific peoples we should be more aware than most about where this could end up taking us. South Asians have been disproportionately affected by racial abuse and hate crimes in the past few years, with Police hate crime data reporting 4767 hate incidents involving South Asian victims in this country occurring between January 2022 and October 2025. All it takes is our politicians to continue to lean into this racism to gain support (as Seddon and Muldoon did before) for this to end up mirroring some of our most shameful moments in history. So let’s hope we can collectively see the forest for the trees when it’s time to tick those boxes in November.

To Be Totally Free and Totally Alone

AGuidetoForgettingOne andRememberingTheOther

“You have heard of the ocean?” My older sister asks incredulously after I tell her my plan: to cycle from England to New Zealand.

I laugh. Not the worst response I’ve had so far. Since I left school five months ago, I’ve been looking for something. Something big. In Whanganui, I’ve felt stuck, ready to burst out into the world and do something real.

I sat at dinner with my dad three months ago, staring at my Sprite as it fizzed, chewing on my local Indian place’s lamb rogan josh. Average, but comfortingly so. He raised an eyebrow at my proposal: travel. Not groundbreaking, except… England to New Zealand. My birthplace to my adoptive home. By bicycle. Cheaper? Hopefully. A great story? Definitely. To him, just another idea destined for the dustbin.

I sit shivering on the 1 a.m. ferry from Dover, England to Calais, France. Two hours earlier than planned, I make the crossing I have been thinking about for months, ready to begin. For a brief 48-hour window, I was truly free. I could go wherever I pleased, eat and drink whatever I wanted. One moment stands out: halfway through my initial cycle in France, from Calais through Lille and past Valenciennes. Tired and wanting a break from my bony behind on the angular bike seat, I found a small bend in the road. I hid my bike in some nearby foliage and settled onto some grass by a pile of golden dirt. Ah! My Laurie Lee moment. Taking in a beautiful day of spring in the French countryside, surely the first of many. But in hindsight, after taking so many deep breaths in the weeks and months leading up to this, I forgot to exhale at the pivotal moment.

Harry Hughes

I wake up. The sun has already risen, and the road is quiet. The day before, I cycled over 200km, drastically shortening my predicted time to cross Europe from 60 days to a mere 15. A mistake. I realise a second mistake as my eyes open and I roll over in my sleeping bag: French weather forecasts are not to be trusted. Among the waves of fatigue and impatience the night before, after finding a suitable roadside ditch, I had briefly checked my phone's weather app, flicking on my costly roaming package for mere seconds, before deciding that pitching my tent would not be necessary. My soaking sleeping bag tells me something different. I sheepishly wipe down and pack up my gear, hoping no judgmental French families will drive past and see the sorry, sopping English boy emerging from a roadside trench.

If you have read Laurie Lee’s memoir As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, you may be thinking this is where I meet a fellow intrepid traveller of the French countryside backroads, or perhaps you are wondering at what point in this essay I will wheel out a violin to help make ends meet. If so, unfortunately, you have been taken by the romance in a similar way that an 18-year-old me was while planning this trip. Not only did I not meet any fellow wanderers, I didn’t see anyone at all, either on foot, two wheels or on four, for nearly six hours. So I did what any self-respecting global explorer would do: I parked up my bike, sat on the side of the road, began to cry, and called my mum.

For a couple of days, I hole up in a hotel in a small French town at my parents' suggestion. During this time, I run the included breakfast

buffet out of all bread-related products, something I think, at this point, I realise is much more in my wheelhouse than cycling from England to New Zealand. I look again at the next week's weather forecast, closer this time. Perhaps my first admission that this trip isn’t what I thought, or perhaps just in search of some more favourable weather, I book a bus to Nice at the opposite end of the country. The bus leaves 24 hours after I check out of my hotel in Valenciennes, a 160 km ride.

Almost immediately upon exiting the city limits, I feel an explosion inside my knee. As I hobble off my bike and onto the pavement, I immediately begin to doubt the wisdom of any of it. I inhale an unhealthy number of ibuprofène and flex my knee. I look at the clock on my screen saver and set off again.

As the sun begins to set, and I shake the last drops out of my 500ml water bottle, I start to scan the roadside for a source of drinkable water. Nothing. A lack of planning and an excess of naivety had led me to believe that, like back home in New Zealand, drinking fountains would be plentiful across the European continent. Unfortunately not.

So when I see an empty truck stop, my thirst insists I at least check whether the truckcleaning hoses are working. They are not. However, a bucket of stagnant water begins to look rather appealing, and so I take a big scoop into my bottle and take a sip. Soap. It is literally a window cleaner. Disgusting. Not only am I now without water for the remaining 70km of cycling, but all I can taste is soap and the equally disgusting cherry Bakewell gel that was my sole remaining food source.

After sleeping in the woods on the outskirts of what I have since found out is a French military base—once again sans tent; don’t learn my lessons, do I—I get back on the road. And I do eventually make it. Loudly amping myself up, I trundle at an embarrassing speed over the final hills and into the station. Famished, I inhaled some bakery items and two bottles of water, to the visible horror of the elderly American tourists sitting next to me.

Cut to: me, several days later, halfway up a corniche between the Mediterranean coasts of France and Italy, a French woman stopped me and asked if I was okay. Looking at me, she probably knew the answer. Comically dressed in full biking attire and with about 15kg of gear strapped to my bike, it’s a miracle I wasn’t met with laughter. Instead, she offered me a water refill and chocolate.

It was either at this moment, or sometime after, that I became acutely aware that the explorer-traveller life was not for me. Within four weeks of my arrival by bus in Nice, I was sitting on a British Airways flight to Australia, via Istanbul, minus one bike.

There is a hope, I think, that among the people who knew of my trip, the illusion has yet to be broken for some. That, despite my own disappointment, perhaps someone I spoke to in the street, or someone who I never knew was watching, still thinks I’m out there. While the wheels both figuratively and literally fell off quite some time ago now, for someone out there, perhaps I am now far away, exuberant but exhausted, drifting off to sleep like Laurie Lee in a golden field of wheat, the sun still shining.

I really did get out of the trip what I wanted to. Good stories, a bit of exercise, and the knowledge that no matter where you go, people are generally pretty decent.

Still, there are probably easier ways to learn this.

I have also learned that it is inadvisable to make decisions throughout your life, whether small or big, through the lens of how it would sound in a well-distributed and read obituary. Though, a good story is still a good story, even when the person telling it has gone home early.

INTELLIGENCE

IS FUCKING

STUPID

I hate the concept of intelligence. I hate even more the way we use that word.

At first glance, it’s pretty unassuming. You’ve probably used it plenty of times and thought nothing of it, whether you were talking about the smart person in your course or someone who you find particularly inspiring.

But as students, the word “intelligence” can be hugely detrimental to us, our confidence, and our learning. To understand why, we first have to ask…

What is Intelligence?

Intelligence is only really brought up when we talk about doing hard things. Let’s narrow this down to mental tasks specifically, such as problem solving, remembering stuff, or being able to create stuff. Seems like a good start. But somehow, you’re not considered intelligent for remembering to wash your dirty plate after dinner (though your flatmates might still call you stupid if you don’t). Despite the fact that this is solving a problem and involves remembering something, it doesn’t quite pass as an intelligent feat. I believe this is because tasks such as this are something most people can do without much difficulty.

So, we need to have a quick chat on difficulty.

If you want to know how difficult a task is, ideally you want some objective measurement of the difficulty that applies to anyone attempting it. The problem is, that’s just not possible. We can feel something is difficult to ourselves relative to the amount of effort we exert in completing that task, but that’s our subjective experience only.

Because difficulty is an experience rather than some God-given value assigned to every task in existence, everyone is going to have a different experience and feel a different amount of difficulty, meaning no task can have a fixed, universal difficulty.

Instead, we compare our subjective experience to as many other peoples’ experiences as possible and use that to judge approximately how difficult a task is.

Imagine you just did a pull up and it was the most gruelling, excruciating five minutes of your life. After putting in all that effort, you’re very proud of yourself (as you should be!). But you don’t know how difficult a pull-up is, only how difficult it was for you. You know your subjective experience.

Andy Lester

If one day, you walk past a playground and see someone effortlessly doing mad pull-ups, looking like a juiced-up jack-in-the-box, then this adds a new dimension:

It’s clearly not taking as much effort for this stranger to do a pull-up as it did for you. A pull-up is a much easier experience for them. And suddenly, you stop thinking that pull-ups are hard. Instead, you think that you’re bad at pull-ups, and this person is good at doing pull-ups. You now think they’re more capable than you.

I think of capability like a ratio between how much effort someone puts into a task, and their output for that given task. I find this effort to output ratio a really helpful idea, and we’ll come back to it soon.

But capability for mental tasks isn’t a one-for-one definition of intelligence. The sentence “I’m capable of doing algebra, I’m not capable of doing calculus,” is different from “I’m smart enough to do algebra, I’m not smart enough to do calculus.”

Capability is particular to a given task, and can change with practice, learning, and training. Intelligence, meanwhile, is thought of as some inherent trait in each and every one of us and applies to every mental task we complete in every aspect of our lives. You’re smart or you’re not. Simple as.

But in practice, because the difficulty of any mental task is inherently comparative, intelligence is also inherently comparative.

So, what’s the big problem?

What I mean by this is that intelligence doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The same way we don’t have a basis for how hard a pull-up is until we see other people do it—which then defines how capable you are at that task—we can’t know how “intelligent” we are until other people do the same thing and we can assess how much effort they put in.

And we can’t compare apples and oranges. Different disciplines often require vastly different skills: doing maths isn’t objectively harder than writing essays and believing anything along those lines is pointless (coming from someone majoring in physics and theatre, I back this 100%).

We will have the best judge of “intelligence” for people who do similar mental tasks to us: people in our courses, our jobs, clubs, and so on. The similarity of mental tasks we must complete through assignments and tests offer many opportunities to compare ourselves to our peers. Unfortunately, this makes it very easy for us to form ideas about how intelligent other people in our courses

are. And the people who we are most likely to perceive as intelligent are usually going to be the people who do better than us. Not surprising, but important to note.

Rather than attributing a person’s success to their efforts first, we often find ourselves attributing it to their natural intelligence more than anything else.

On top of that, intelligence is often thought of as an unchangeable quality of a person. You can’t get more intelligent.

This leads to my biggest gripe with intelligence. When we take this for fact and believe that you can only do better than you are now by being more intelligent (which, for some reason, we also believe can’t happen) we believe we’re fated to do either the same or worse than we are now, forever! How good!

This doesn’t have to be the case.

I work for a tutoring company, and so I see this often materialises in an internalised belief students hold that “I’m not a maths person,” or “I’m not an English person.”

These beliefs are entirely self-inflicted blows. If you approach a subject already thinking “I’m bad at this, and I’ll always be bad at this,” it’s not surprising that you hold yourself back.

This marks the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. Students with a fixed mindset often find it harder to motivate themselves to start and complete necessary work, as they don’t believe it will yield any results regardless of how helpful any given chunk of learning may truly be.

But the upside of your mindset being entirely selfinflicted is that it’s also in your control. You can choose not to believe it.

By doing so and instead believing that your effort is what will give you the results you want, suddenly everything you do is no longer defined by some roll of the dice that determined how intelligent you’re destined to be. You take your life back into your own hands.

What we need to do as individuals is to shift what we believe causes academic progress and broader learning from intelligence towards effort. As it stands, if you believe intelligence matters, then progress primarily sits under an external locus of control, rather than an internal one. Similar to a fixed and growth mindset, a locus of control says how much we believe we can change the outcome of our lives and surroundings. An external locus means you’d believe outside factors control your life more than your choices and efforts, and an internal locus of control is the opposite.

Remember that imaginary pull-up that you did?

It was hell. But you did it. Firstly, congrats on your imaginary accomplishment. Do you think that that effort would be meaningful? From the perspective of a person wanting to improve, wanting to get fitter, wanting to do something, I think that effort is something you should

always be proud of. Regardless of how difficult it was for anyone else, the act of putting in that effort showed that you can do hard things.

This is what I want. I want you, reading this article now, to know that when you put in effort, you make progress. That progress doesn’t look the same every time and certainly doesn’t look the same for everyone. But it’s progress.

Even if you look at every other person who’s ever done a pull-up, or ever done an essay on To Kill a Mockingbird or Fallen Angels, and take all the notes on how they do it, the only way you’re going to actually improve is by going for that pull-up, writing that essay, and making that effort.

As students, everything that we do should be focused on improving ourselves and our knowledge. We will not benefit from constantly comparing ourselves to the people around us, so why keep using a word that has its entire basis in petty comparison?

And no buts.

Now, there are some alternatives for how people measure intelligence.

For example, the effort-to-output ratio mentioned earlier. This is what some people believe really defines intelligence, but as it has to be considered for a given skill. I earlier called this a capability, but proficiency is also a good word for it.

In terms of learning a given skill, I should make you aware that memory is something we can also train! In fact, there are actually memory tournaments, where people who dedicate their lives to remembering compete to see how many random numbers or sequences of images they can recall. The human species is really fascinating, huh?

But they all use a set of techniques to help them remember these unconnected bits of information, not just their ‘natural ability.’

For problem solving or similar displays of already held knowledge, I raise the counter argument that applying learnt knowledge is something we also have to learn how to do and is subject to the same arguments as above.

Believing another person’s success to be entirely because of their natural talent or intelligence does nothing for you. Actually, it does worse than nothing: it denies the impact of any of their efforts to get to where they are now. It helps no one and only stops you from checking out a winning strategy.

If you completely delete the word intelligence from your life here on out, and disregard it in your learning, you’ll be better able to focus on your own learning and make the changes you want to see in yourself.

Intelligence is fucking stupid, but you’re not.

my appreciation for walking armoured beach frisbees

Pedro Hay

There is a good chance many people read that title and immediately threw their copy of Salient into the bin, because surely nothing good can come from an article with such a nonsensical bullshit headline. It sounds like something clearly cooked up by a dangerous raving maniac.

Well, unfortunately for those people, they will now never know what makes these frankly insane creatures so special. They will not understand why they matter, why we should care about them, or how there may even be some life advice hiding beneath their armoured little shells.

The horseshoe crab—yes, a much more boring name than “walking armoured beach frisbee,” but what else was I meant to do, gently invite your attention?—is an armoured little tank of a specimen that belongs to the phylum Arthropoda. That group includes insects, crustaceans, arachnids, and other weird creepy things with too many legs. Despite its name, the horseshoe crab is actually more closely related to spiders than to anything you would reasonably expect to find in a seafood platter. There are only four surviving species of the horseshoe crab today, mostly found across South and East Asia, with one species living along the Atlantic coast of Northern America.

As far as lifestyles go, horseshoe crabs are basically living Mortal Engines. They crawl around the ocean floor on their six walking legs, pinching up whatever small prey they come across before shoving it into the grinder on their underside. Cute!

called gnathobases, located at the base of their legs, right where the legs meet the body. As the crab walks, its legs move in opposite directions, grinding the gnathobases together while pushing food toward its mouth. Basically, the horseshoe crab spends all day scuttling around with an industrial shredder attached to its stomach.

You’ve got to respect a creature that is, quite literally, always on the grind.

By now, you may be thinking, “Oh my god, these things are screwed up, what could be so important about these freaks?” To which I reply: you are being SO impatient and, quite frankly, rude. I’m getting there.

First of all, horseshoe crabs have been around for a LOOONG time. The tuatara outside the TTR block? Infantile compared to these guys. Horseshoe crabs have remained practically unchanged since the Triassic period, around 250 million years ago. Fossil evidence from similar ancestral species suggests their lineage may stretch back even further, to roughly 445 million years ago. That would mean these little bastards were crawling around before trees existed.

Somehow even wilder than that, horseshoe crabs also carry a secret goldmine inside their creepy little bodies; something so ridiculous it sounds like I'm making it up.

They have bright blue, medicinally valuable blood.

Horseshoe crab blood is copper based, giving it a vibrant blue colour—the complete opposite to our red, iron-based blood. And while looking like “liquified Smurf” is already interesting enough, this blood is far more than a freaky party trick. It contains cells called amoebocytes, which are crucial in testing vaccines and other medical products for bacterial contamination. Specifically, blood from the Atlantic horseshoe crab is used to create a clotting agent called limulus amoebocyte lysate, or LAL.

For decades, LAL has been used to test vaccines for dangerous bacterial toxins. When contamination is present, LAL clots around it, acting like a tiny biological fire alarm. In other words, the blood of this weird ancient frisbeespider has helped keep modern medicine safe.

Naturally, because this blood is extremely valuable—worth thousands of dollars per litre—humans did what humans do best and exploited the hell out of these beautiful creatures. Creatures, by the way, that have existed peacefully on this planet for FAR longer than we have.

Every year, more than 1 million horseshoe crabs are hauled out of the ocean and taken to biological facilities to be bled. There, they can have up to 30% of their blood drained by machines that sound, quite frankly, like something a vampire would design.

An estimated 10% to 15% of horseshoe crabs die during the bleeding process, and scientists suspect even more die after being released back into the ocean. It does not take a marine biologist to see how grim that is.

The good news is that research centres around the world have been developing alternatives to LAL. These alternatives do not require sucking these poor little things dry. Thanks in part to this process, horseshoe crab populations in parts of North America are beginning to recover, slowly clawing their way out of the “vulnerable” category.

Yay. Finally, some good news.

But before we all start jumping for joy and clapping like the credits are about to roll, it is time to sit back down. Because, of course, it is not all peaches and cream.

Across Asia, horseshoe crabs are still in serious trouble, driven down by overfishing, pollution, and habitat loss. The tri-spine horseshoe crab, despite having an objectively badass name, is now considered extinct in Taiwanese waters. Across much of greater Asia, its populations continue to slide toward deeper endangerment each year.

Depressing, I know. I did not want to end this piece there, because while it is easy to sink into the despair of what can feel like an impossible fight against humanity’s casual disregard for nature, there is still hope. Annoying, stubborn, inconvenient hope.

There is always something that can be done.

Next time you are at the supermarket, maybe skip the can of tuna. It smells weird anyway. Take power away from the fisheries that keep pushing further into the habitats of our ugly little scuttling marine friends. Go to the conservation talk advertised outside the lecture hall you have been avoiding. Look online and find out what you can do, even if it feels tiny. Especially if it feels tiny.

Do not let hopelessness consume you. Be like the horseshoe crab. Get up every day and keep crawling. Keep moving forward. Maybe even keep shoveling small worms into your terrifying grinding stomach-mouth. Progress does not always have to be graceful. Sometimes, it just has to keep going.

P.S: They can backflip.

Yes, I saved that until the very end. Sometimes horseshoe crabs get stuck upside down, and then they simply launch themselves into a little prehistoric backflip and flip themselves upright again. Hell yeah.

Petrol Prices

Zara Boon

I sit and listen as my belly dancing class discusses petrol prices. The other Arab person in the class isn't here today.

I miss her familiar words, the warm accent, the laughter as we trade dialects. They worry about the shipping costs of their costumes. I regard those prices with a bleak indifference. For me, no strait has to be closed to leverage power. I would pay a fortune in transport fees if it meant my olive trees were left alone. Instead, they burn, and I hold my hands out to the flames. It's important to take warmth where you can get it.

Petrol prices are high.

The Forever Foreigner

Dalas Kruger

A perpetual tourist, bags forever packed, passport forever full.

Never truly calling anywhere home. I live between arrivals— half in translation, half erased. Each place a version of myself I almost become: the coffee here is darker, the rain speaks slower, names blur in the mouth, and I forget which language I dream in.

Worlds keep folding and unfolding, their borders breathing like lungs. Maybe the world is my home, maybe I have never been a citizen anywhere. I know how to disappear in airports, how to smile through plate glass, how to make warmth from strangers’ weather. I know how to go, but not how to arrive, I don’t know how to stay.

Somewhere, my childhood is still unpacking itself— the smell of sea and sun and dust trying to fit inside a carry-on.

I’ve learned to keep what doesn’t belong to me: postcards, accents, the way light bends differently in every city’s morning.

I am fluent in departure. I am native to nowhere.

I am the forever foreigner.

some will suffer. that’s a sacrifice i’m willing to make. the government is gonna announce a new Policy.

oh my god! what am i doing! all this harm so i can have a fourth rental ProPerty and cushy corPorate joB after leaving Politics...

i wonder what it’s going to Be today! i hoPe it has a Positive imPact...

let’s go live to the Beehive now....

these Politicians have their ’emPathy switch’ turned off for some reason.

let’s turn it Back on...

i have now learned that my decisions have imPacts on real PeoPle. let’s focus on what matters, helPing kiwis.

today i am excited to announce a new Policy that will Benefit a few wealthy PeoPle and aBsolutely harm everyone else.

has he gone woke? that will cost us.

emPathy is hard!!!

welcome to the real world, minister...

During O-week, on the Tuesday night, my friends had walked away when I went to dance at the back of the moshpit! Not too long after that, some girls came up to me and danced and one of them asked me if I wanted to go into the moshpit closer to the stage, (Holy shit she was so gorgeous) she grabbed my hand and 2 minutes after I looked at her and she gave me the look, we immediately start making out (she's a amazing kisser) and she wanted to use the bathroom, when we got in the stall she said "I didn't need to use it", I replied "I know", we both take our clothes off, and we make

Oh Yes, Oh No is where sex stories go to be judged. Was it hot? Was it a disaster? You decide. All stories are submitted by readers, published anonymously, and guaranteed to make you say 'oh yes' or 'oh no'. Scan the QR code to submit your own and see if it makes the cut.

out while she grinds on me against the wall, we suck each other's boobs and gives me head for 10 minutes which was so hot omg! (We were in there for 30 minutes) We continue to make out and I f*ck her! At the end of the night, I talk to my friend about it and he looks at me funny because he worked as part of the safe room for O-week, they were told that someone was hogging the bathroom for 30 minutes, omg it was me hahahaha absolute peak moment! It was very hot sex, I love woman so much! #IloveO-Week

submitted by anonmous

Once in my first year of University I met this cute girl in my courses, we starting talking and it got pretty serious, we decided to meet up at her house to just “hang out” we started making out and I went down on her and fingered her. She was enjoying it and finished so she said it was my turn but holy fuck. It was the worse thing I ever experienced. She squeezed my stick the hardest she could and it hurt. I told her to stop and try again but every time she would just squeeze and I did not to fake a finish. When she went down on me her teeth immediately

scrapped me so I just told her today was not my day and I would not be able to finish. I went home since my flat was nearby and pretended nothing was wrong because I did not want to embarrass her. I did like her so I continued going down on her throughout the tri but I always said i didn’t want anything in return just in case. We eventually faded out but I still cringe whenever I remember the teeth scrapping and the painful squeeze...

submitted by anonmous

The only way for me to stop bed rotting all the time and actually get to work despite my obvious depressive episodes is to rub one out before I lock in on an assignment so that I have enough dopamine to get the work done. It's a tried and true method everyone, I suggest it if you're cripplingly mentally ill!

Disclaimer: there's also a 40% chance I fall asleep post-climax and get no work done. submitted by anonmous

Long distance boyfriend sent me a dick pic while I was studying in the library, got so distracted I had to leave. Next day he told me he also needed to study, so I sent him a picture of my boobs as payback. A picture he (accidentally) opened full screen on his laptop while his best friend was right beside him. Whoops submitted by anonmous

what do you do when your crush is giving you mixed signals? how do you know if someone likes you in a romantic way without having to ask?

hey hunk unc, hi hunk unc,

i'm taking a break from the apps, but i'm kinda nervous about how to build and show off rizz. any tips?

Students, today your Unc is combining three different questions that all essentially ask the same thing.

All of these questions come down to one thing: vibe.

Mixed signals are mixed vibes. Not wanting to ask someone directly is trying to catch a vibe without making things awkward. Wanting to build “rizz” is wanting to improve the vibe you’re putting out into the world.

The annoying truth is this: every single person on this planet is different, and every single person communicates differently. Some people flirt like they’re auditioning for people flirt by standing three metres away from you at a flat party and asking if you’ve done the readings. Some people seem keen because they reply fast, and some people seem uninterested because they’re simply bad at texting, busy, shy, emotionally constipated, or all of the above.

I could tell you that eye contact, little touches, or looking at you when everyone laughs are signs someone likes you. And sure, sometimes they are. But sometimes they’re just friendly. Sometimes they’re flirting with no intention of doing anything. Sometimes they’re only looking because you’ve got your highprotein spinach-and-egg-white breakfast stuck in your teeth.

Romance is a cruel sport.

So when someone gives mixed signals, don’t make their confusion your full-time job. If someone likes you, their behaviour should make you feel more secure over time, not more confused. A bit of mystery is fun. Constantly analysing what “haha yeah maybe” means is not flirting.

As for building “rizz,” I hate to say it, but the best way to become more attractive is to look after yourself. Not in a weird grindset podcast way. I don’t need you waking at 4.30 a.m. and yelling affirmations into the mirror. I mean basic good-human maintenance.

Wear clothes that fit. Lint-roll your pants if they look like you’ve been wrestling a golden retriever. Use cologne or perfume, but don’t gas the room. Get a haircut if you need one. Ask people questions. Listen to the answers.

Got a crush? Give yourself a fighting chance. Invite them for coffee. Ask if they want to grab a drink. Mention a hobby you’ve wanted to try, then actually try it so you have something to talk about next time. Be someone with a life, not someone hovering nearby hoping they’ll notice your romantic suffering.

But here’s the real kicker: there is no secret way to know for certain if someone likes you without asking. You can read the signs, consult the group chat, and stare into the spiritual abyss of their “liked your story” behaviour, but eventually, you either ask or accept not knowing.

And if you’re too scared to ask, ask yourself why. Is it fear of rejection? Fair enough, but you can get over that. Is it because being with them is a terrible idea? Maybe they’re taken, your flatmate, or your mate’s ex. In that case, keep crushing from afar and don’t turn your life into a mess just for a chance with them.

Rizz is not magic. It’s confidence, care, and the ability to ask questions and listen to answers.

Go well, team. And floss.

Christopher Curtis

Shin Megami

This week's game:

Tensei V: Vengeance

After playing Persona 3 and Persona 4 over the past halfdecade, and admiring the wider series from the sidelines for years, I’ve finally made my dive into the broader Megami Tensei Franchise with Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance, the enhanced edition of the latest mainline entry.

The concept alone is alluring: demons, deities, creatures, and mythological figures from world folklore, all embroiled in a war between law and chaos amidst a post-apocalyptic Japan. Yet as much as Vengeance sold me on the franchise, it also left me utterly perplexed. A valley of extreme highs and lows—sometimes in the very same aspect—this was a difficult game to evaluate.

Vengeance begins with an intense hook; less than 30 minutes after you’re introduced to the protagonist and his school friends, the world just ends. Awakening in Da’at, the netherworld that now stands in place of Tokyo, you’re left to wander the wasteland, ally with whatever demons will listen to you, and eventually become entangled in a divine war over the recreation of the world.

This is the broad narrative thrust, but how the story unfolds will depend on which of the two campaigns you choose. The original release’s story is preserved here as the Canon of Creation, while the new Canon of Vengeance offers a reimagined tale with its own focus, villains, and branching endings.

For my two cents—which you probably want, since you’re reading this—Canon of Vengeance is the way to go if you only intend to play this game once. It massively expands the supporting cast and introduces the Qadištu, a spectacular group of villains of Kabbalistic origin. By contrast, Canon of Creation drags its feet too often, with very few characters—including you the protagonist— feeling particularly compelling.

Canon of Vengeance is radically more enjoyable. Your friends this time are far more involved in the war, with active and compelling arcs that make their shifting loyalties all the more tragic. Unfortunately, no matter what route you pick, actually exploring Da’at is frankly boring at best and genuinely painful at worst. I understand it’s a wasteland, but surely there could be something to discover besides sand, right?

Regardless of route, the gameplay loop remains the same: recruit demons, fuse them into stronger allies, and brace yourself against an onslaught of enemies who simply want you dead. These demons range from pixies and slimes to Odin himself, and building the right party becomes the heart of the experience.

Thankfully, Vengeance features a deeply engaging combat system. It rewards party diversity and system knowledge with extra actions and advantages. However, any system you can exploit, your enemies can exploit too. Cover your weaknesses well if you want to live. The result is intensely strategic turn-based combat that, despite its complexity, never feels slow or tedious.

This dichotomy is why I feel torn about this game. On one hand, the combat and demon fusion are deeply engaging, with diverse boss battles that greatly reward familiarity with these mechanics. The presentation is also spectacular, backed by some of the most gorgeous 3D animations I’ve ever seen. And when the story wants to be, it’s utterly captivating. Chaos representative Yoko Hiromine is one of the most relatable characters in fiction for me—make of that what you will.

On the other hand, the world is a chore to explore, and the story can do a terrible job of explaining itself. Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance is bewildering, positively and negatively. I can’t recommend it blindly, but I would absolutely encourage anyone intrigued by its premise to look into its particular brand of punishment, strategy, and storytelling method.

Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance is available on PC, Xbox One and Series X/S, Playstation 4 and 5, and Nintendo Switch and Switch 2.

Writing: 7/10 Aesthetic: 10/10

Ngā Hua te Taio Good news stories (and more) for the planet

Who are we?

Kia ora, Salient reader! Welcome to our fortnightly column on the environment, sustainable living, and the small, stubborn act of hope amongst a world on fire! Check in every second week for waste-free recipes, genuinely good news, and practical ways to lend a hand—nudging a happier, healthier earth a little closer into view.

Waste-free recipe of the week:

Hummus—that gloriously flavoursome, deliciously spreadable, protein rich super food. It’s just a shame it has to come in those pesky single-use plastic tubs. If only there was a way to make it at home, for a fraction of the price with none of the waste? Well, you’re in luck! There could not be a simpler or more time, energy, and cost efficient treat to make than hummus.

You will need:

• A can of chickpeas (or two)

• A blender, food processor, or whizz stick (immersion blender for the less whimsical of heart)

• A splash of oil (olive is extra delicious but canola works just fine too!)

• Some flavours (for a classic blend try tahini, lemon, garlic, salt and pepper; I have also tried adding varying combinations of brown sugar, balsamic vinegar, and paprika—all with delicious results!)

• To take your hummus to the next level, roast some of your favourite veges beforehand and add them into the mix too

Now that you have collected your supplies, blitz them all together and watch as the hummus emerges before your eyes. If it appears too chunky, simply add some water and keep blending!

Happy dipping, spreading, or just eating with a spoon!

Creative corner:

You may have wondered, who is behind this strange new surprisingly-hopeful page in the back of my Salient? Maybe you’ve tried one of the recipes and been blown away by the simplicity and deliciousness of what you’ve just created. Well, here’s a little about us:

We are a group of university students flatting just down the road from Kelburn campus who, perhaps like you, have noticed that we are facing some fairly big concerns for our planet. Rooted in a Christian faith, we feel that whilst things are pretty (really) bad, there is still reason to feel hopeful, and the least we can do is try. Most of us authors have made the call this year to cut all of the plastic out of our groceries, not because we think we’ll change the world, but as an act of hopeful defiance against a system that is choking our planet.

So far the contributors to this column have been Simon, Leah, Jachin, Claire, and Micah. If you’d like to put a face to a name, ask us a question, or come check out our epic jar pantry, feel more than free to send an email to simonlangham06@gmail.com. In the meantime we will keep bringing you fortnightly recipes, good news stories for our planet, and ways that you can get involved in our local area—making a small, but important difference.

Get involved:

Ever wander through Kelburn campus with a banana skin, some last morsels of your muesli bar you just can't stomach any more, or a smooshed piece of sandwich you dropped? Never fear, for a compost bin is near!! We have the scoop on a new compost initiative on the corner of Kelburn Parade and Salamanca Road. Why are we chucking perfectly good garden fertilizer into our rubbish just to sit in a dump and smolder? On your way down the hill—to the city, the train station or your flat—drop all your greenery into the signed bin! Be a part of the cauldron of juices brewing for gardens around Kelburn! BUT, please be nice to this new compost bin. Only put food items in, guidance will be provided on a sign.

KC Cafe

What: Cantonese

Price: $7.00 - $16.00

When: 11:00am – 11:30pm, Sunday –Thursday, and till 1:30am on Friday and Saturday.

One of Wellington’s best, even for those on a budget.

Of all of the iconic jewels studded in the grubby yet glittering tiara that is Courtenay Place, KC Cafe & Takeaway deserves top billing. Not as glittery as St. James or The Library, but it is bursting with charm and prowess. Nick Iles, of Two Bear Sandwich Club fame, writes a fierce ode to this place: its rich wood panelling and 60s-chic interior design, the glittering meats that hang in the kitchen window and the behemoth of a menu that wraps around the walls. And that’s before he gets to the food. KC Cafe is a beautiful place that never ever disappoints, and I will always stand against any presumptive, colonial insinuations that this restaurant, by its cuisine, is at all cheap or dismissable.

So then, why is it featuring in your feedfor-fuck-all column, Guy? Right, yes. Thankfully, KC’s legendary status is not exclusionary. While most of the menu does look upwards from the $20 mark, there are a handful of excellent dishes for those with a bit less to dish out. For these we turn to the section ‘Soups/Starters/Congees’ (numbers 30. through 53. on the menu).

A FEED FOR F*CK ALL

Working our way backwards, the Fish Congee is the easiest to review: not very good on its own. This rice porridge would, I imagine, be a comfort food for many, but the kind that you have to grow up with to like. Unfamiliar, I found the congee to have an unpleasant texture: too watery to try and chew, but too lumpy to spoon like soup. I was surprised by the flavour of the light, salty broth and ginger, but the combination of white rice and white chunks of fish made for a big bowl of $10 plain.

The same could not be more false to say about the Wu Xi Pork Ribs. Equally priced but infused with flavour, this starter is a thing of beauty. Dripping with a syrupy red braising, they’re almost caramelised but with a deeper, spiced umami. As you bring each piece to your mouth (with chopsticks or fingers; you’d be forgiven for using your hands to pick every last piece off) you can smell the orange oils and the ginger in the glaze that cut through what could otherwise become sickly and cloying. These tender, flaky ribs are like the refined older cousin of the sticky ribs from the gastropub down the way, but just as moreish. It’s not a big enough plate to call it a meal by any standard, but with a side of rice and some choy sum it could go a long way. Honestly, it’s good enough to order as a side regardless.

What does suffice as a meal are the soups, which max out at $14. Everyone at the table let out a ‘woah!’ when my bowl was set down, a bowl I could wrap my arms around and cradle as the steam warmed my face. I picked the Roast Duck, Gai Choy, and Tofu soup, which was a whole meal for

$12. The tofu was silky and soaked up lots of the savoury broth, as did the leafy parts of the gai choy, while the stalks remained crunchy and burst between my teeth. The thick-cut roast duck breast, sliced from one of the golden birds hanging on display, was tender and gamey. It was a little impractical to eat; I ended up pulling the meat off the little bones with my fingers in the end—so worth it. The seared skin went soggy in the soup, but still a deliciously salty fried addition. This is genuinely one of the best meal deals I’ve found so far, for its size, quality and nutrition. I could come back to this for days on end.

KC Cafe’s menu is so extensive, there’s enough under budget to explore for another column. I, for one, won’t be complaining. I have so much love and respect for this institution; it’s no surprise the restaurant is coming up to its 30th birthday in a few years. If the menu is still daunting, check out Nick Iles’ articles at @twobearsandwich, as well as the icons at @kc_review who are eating their way through that phonebook of dishes and living my dream. Or head down with a random number generator, it’s very hard to go wrong. I’ll probably see you there!

Am I talking shit? Do you wildly disagree,

guy van egmond

critic-at-LARGE

Jackson McCarthy is Salient's Critic-at-Large. His first book of poetry, Portrait, is forthcoming from Auckland University Press later this year.

Salient Celebrates New Zealand Music Month!

Vera Ellen:

HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT TIME

Happy New Zealand Music Month, bitches! While all you caffeine-addicted trackiewearing zombies file in and out of your Maclaurin lecture theatres, ears stuffed full of musical garbage, just know that somewhere in the crowd I’ll be there with my dad’s vintage Workshop jeans and my Vera Ellen tunes. One decaf flat white, please!

Just kidding! I’ve relapsed on caffeine, of course. But I still do my best to listen local. Aotearoa’s music culture has a few key strains, historically speaking, one of which encircles the label Flying Nun Records, which became known in the early 80s for their jangly, lo-fi, post-punk band sound. Vera Ellen, since her sophomore album signed to the label, in some sense comes out of that tradition, adding to the stylistic blend her charm; her lightness of touch.

Ellen’s new record, HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT TIME, comes out of a period of writers’ block, apparently—but from the music you wouldn’t think that was the case at all. Her lyrics are sharp, with a tendency to tip over into playful exaggeration. “I was the dancer in the kitchen, you were the choir / I was the loner in the ballroom starting the fire,” runs a couplet from the brilliant “thaw”— the effect, though, is less surreal than candid, especially as its chorus straightens out these complexities and we get the message clear and good: “Goddamn me, I can’t think / You touch me, romance me.” Swooning between the straight-talking choruses and the rambling verses, evenly balanced in their length (choruses are usually shorter), the song offers a complete picture of infatuation for how its lyric thrives on intensity, a laserlike focus on feeling—and also for how, in all its love-drunkenness, it’ll suddenly manifest a real shudder of a line: “I think I just remembered life”!

If “thaw” is pure Ellen, you’ll have to forgive me for remarking that there’s something a little The Beths-y about “big shot jr.” It’s not just that Ellen sings in her Kiwi accent—it’s that guitar figure, rushing and dawdling around the pulse; it’s those corners the band turns when

they drop the downbeat of a measure and come whopping in on the two; it’s how the chorus melody stretches up above the verses, then gives way to a harmonic detour in the post-chorus. What makes it unmistakably Ellen’s? For one, it’s that big empty bar after the first phrase in the chorus. “You’ve come a long way since high school”—she lets that linger, then follows up with just a wee “Yeah” a bit later. Yeah.

HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT TIME in fact oscillates between feeling off-the-cuff, silly, rambly, lo-fi, and feeling manifest and purposeful as an album. I find the vibe quite compelling for how it raises the campy and dampens the lofty, even when it lets Ellen get away with flourishes that on paper you’d raise an eyebrow at (“You give me gayfever” goes the chorus of, um, “gayfever”). Or even when it lets her sink into a stodgier adult-contemporary vibe, as on the Hemi Hemingway duet “when it’s over”: it’s performed gorgeously but plays things a little too straight. Ellen seems to have saved her best for last—the final two tracks display, for me, in their intelligence and grunge, the influence of Mitski. “Tell me less; you say it best / When you say nothing” goes a lovely internal rhyme on closer “getting told off by mum” as the music swells into an extended synth-backed coda. Every city needs its real songwriters, and she’s one of ours.

Aldous Harding: Train On The Island

As one of our most successful and critically-acclaimed singer-songwriters, Aldous Harding needs no introduction. So let’s not give her one! It’s apparent to anyone with ears that she’s got one of the loveliest and stretchiest voices put to record in recent memory: she

sounds mousy on parts of “Coats,” an affectation; but there’s real technique, too, as she gradually covers the vowels on the outro of “If Lady Does It” until the lyric sounds half-swallowed; then she’ll sing a song rather straight, as on the highlight “One Stop,” set in her lovely upper chest voice, a gently funky drum beat coming in over the track’s second half. The recording and playing on this album is particularly ace (it’s the smooth sounds of Seb Rochford drumming on that previously mentioned track; elsewhere John Parish plays beautifully in the tight studio band). Everything is gorgeously mixed and Harding’s gift for melody is still absolutely astonishingly intact, as it was on Designer back in 2019 but which got a little stifled, I thought, on 2022’s Warm Chris. Yes, the melodies are there—I’ll be singing “Big thick coats on the dogs of people just trying to help” for the next ten business days—but I’ve always found the quote-unquote “cryptic” aspects of her lyrics a little underwhelming ( “Eating rocks and plants / I pray for the incel” is the latest Hardingism we’ve been gifted (“Worms”)). You don’t want an artist as meticulous and skilled as this to fade into background music, dinner party music, bookstore music, which is my fear for her unassuming, quietly-confident style that at times eschews wedding sound with semantics, largely the dominant feature of, you know, the song form itself. But even when her songs, musically speaking, aren’t quite special enough to survive the obliqueness of their lyrics, Harding retains her posture, her artful distance, her ear for polish, her epigrammatic turn of phrase. “I cut my hair, nobody loved it” (“Venus In The Zinnia”). It’s not chilly—it’s cool.

100 Resumes on Lambton Quay

Within the span of a week, I’ll be trying to accomplish a long-term task just to see if it’s possible, and to see what I can get out of it. Life lessons, skills, resilience training? The stimulation alone should be enough motivation.

Currently, I work a lot. By day I slave in the Salient office, but by night I’m my alter ego: hospitality Front of House. My parents always forcefully encouraged me to have a job or two during study. In the past three years, I’ve complained to them endlessly about wanting to find a new job that pays better, and how hard job hunting always is.

They always respond the same way:

“Why don’t you just cold call and hand your CV into some places?”

And in response I go, “Boy, what a stupid idea. What is this, the 80s, Helen?”

In my head, obviously. Never disrespect Helen Tickner, working motherof-two, to her face.

As of late, I’ve realized I’ve never actually cold-called on places for a job. I’ve always painstakingly tailored CVs and cover letters for specific roles, cherry-picked applications online, and nervously handed in papers to outlets that advertise they’re hiring. I decided to finally take the advice of Generation X and ask for a job face-to-face, to see if I can get an interview from cold-calling within a week.

What better place to try than Lambton Quay?

Lambton Quay contains numerous retail spaces, banks, and major corporate buildings. Nearly a kilometre long, it bustles with people bunched in big suits and fancy clothing. As a Cuba Street kid, I hate it. But there are smaller places, such as the occasional cafe or salon, that aren't big businesses requiring a 9-5 commitment. Therefore, it's an excellent smorgasbord of establishments to go on a tirade announcing that I desire a job.

There are countless buildings on Lambton, so I decided to simply print off 100 CVs and 100 cover letters, all exactly the same and stating the same general things. I think I’d rather peel 100 hangnails than write 100 individual resumes that say the same thing. After everyone in the Salient office rightfully ripped the wording and punctuation of my cover letter to shreds—and reworked it, thank you Sub-editor Holly—I went out on the town with a stack of CVs to beg for a job with.

Editor’s Note: I didn’t check Will’s CV very hard when he went to hand it out; I just helped him print it. But I did redact items from it when it was going to print. And my advice, on reflection, is this: check your spelling of “permanent” in your CV. Will spelled it wrong… very “Creative Thinking” of him.

When I approached each establishment on Lambton, I’d say the exact same thing at every front desk:

“Hello, I’d like to apply for any and all open positions you have. Here’s my CV and cover letter. I’m looking for anything from casual to full time. I am available Monday through Friday, and am flexible on weekends.”

My deliveries of desperation began at the banking end of Lambton, home to the Kiwibank, ANZ, and BNZ buildings. Handing in my papers to big banks with no warning was my biggest worry, but I was pleasantly surprised at how professional their staff was. I struck up a genuinely nice conversation with the lady at the front desk of Kiwibank about how poor the job market was, and she told me that while they didn’t have any open positions, they would post positions online to Seek & Indeed. I thanked her, and she told me she’d pass my CV onto her manager. As I skipped away, my happiness began to dwindle as I slowly started hearing these exact same answers from nearly every single place.

“You can actually just apply online.”

“I will pass this on to my manager.”

“We actually just hired a whole bunch of people.”

“Sorry, we are not hiring at the moment…”

“...but we will keep it on-hand in case we are.”

By the time I got to Countdown, I had started to get so jaded hearing the same rejections. At Cotton On, I finished the worker's sentence about applying online. Some places outright didn’t accept physical CVs due to sustainability, such as Lush and Mecca.

Other places didn’t accept my CV because I’m probably too good for them, like Swarovski Crystal.

I was doing the same mundane task and saying the same thing over and over to the point of autopilot. For example, at Shosta Vape Shop, I accidentally said to the girl at the counter, “Here's my CoverC and VLetter."

As I turned to leave, I’m fairly certain I heard her tear my paper in two and scrunch it into a ball. While there’s no problem getting rid of trash, the least that girl could do was wait till I was out of the store. After handing out about 80 papers in one day, I put a pause on my rejection therapy. Stores were beginning to close.

I started my second day flying my papers by heading up the elevators of the Lambton skyscrapers. I’ve always been curious as to what’s up in the sky above my emergency grocery shopping. While most of the floors required ID, it was surprisingly easy to get public access to certain floors simply by waltzing in. In those tall buildings, I felt completely out of my depth asking for a job at law firms and consultants. I reminded myself this was mostly just for kicks to ask for a job as an underqualified applicant to The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists.

Despite how depressing this all was, I did find some pretty funny moments. There’s a lot of women's clothing fashion stores, and I handed my CV into all of them, including Bendon Lingerie. It’s sexy, dark, mysterious, and full of mannequins in bras. I entered nervous, beet red, and very much not wanting a job there. However, the young girls at the counter were so nice, and the three of us had a laugh about being desperate for a job in this economy when I told them, “Please don’t hire me.”

On the other end of the spectrum was the men's clothing store Barkers. I came in and did the whole spiel I usually did, expecting to be told nothing but “thanks.” Instead, the guy at the counter started to give me a full mini interview right then and there. Taken off guard, I lost my

To whom it may concern,

Please accept my application to any role, position, or employment opportunity you have currently available at your establishment

My name is Will Tickner; I

confident autopilot behavior. I dropped the ball and waffled on about how retail and hospitality are the same—they’re not—so they should probably offer me a job. I don’t think I’ll be working there anytime soon.

Going into this, I knew there was no way I was going to get an interview in a week. To rub salt in the wound, a lot of older people would shoot me down, and then follow up with, “It’s so great to see you’re doing this, getting up and out there trying!”

Eugh. Thanks.

It’s now one week later and I’ve had no interviews for potential jobs on Lambton. Out of the 100 CVs I handed out, I received only two responses back: one from a law firm, another from a consulting group, both including the words “unfortunately.” They were quite nice responses, however, both taking the time to read through my CV and offer me alternatives with proper explanations.

If I could do anything differently, I would have dressed myself more presentable and shaved before going out, instead of looking like a scraggly unemployed creature. It seems that the days of cold-calling in Wellington are over, and the era of online job application hell is here to stay. If I could recommend anything though, it would be handing in a physical CV and applying online. Or do whatever it takes to annoy businesses to remember your name and consider employing you. I may have failed this week's challenge, but that doesn’t mean you have to fail the challenge of being employed. Embarrass yourself and try to get a job.

TICKNER

EDUCATION

Fighters

At a distance; away from home 6 The person writing this clue, informally

Cartoon trio from Ed, Edd n Eddy

Celebration of LGBTQ+ communities

Become less shiny or less impressive

Sum owed on a bill, for short

High drink glasses

marking

("The San Francisco Treat")

1 Opposite of hire

4 Match you might see on Sky Sport

8 Small parcel of surveyed land

12 Dad, in many kids’ books

15 Short laugh

16 Barked, in comics

17 Oval salad tomatoes

19 Word between choices

20 River on the German–Polish border

22 What a business tracks as “return on investment,” for short

23 Formal letter, in church or literature

24 Circle back repeatedly

26 Printed office logo at the top of a page

29 French word meaning “of”

30 Describing sounds made with the blade of the tongue, in phonetics

32 Completely absorbed in a story

33 Stretchiness

35 Moral wrongdoing

36 Controversial US radio “shock jock” Don, written as one name

38 Compass dir. between E and NE

39 Different sides of an issue

42 Troughs once used in winemaking

28 Powered or shaped by the wind

31 Dig sites for coal, gold, or stone

34 Word used in comparisons

37 Fashionable, as a trend

39 Marshal of France in World War I

40 Plant whose gel soothes sunburn

41 Kiss, in British slang

43 Snakes of Nile legend

44 Real standout, as in “a good one”

45 Start of a Bavarian beer festival’s name

46 Court of Arbitration for Sport, for short 48 Orchestra woodwind, for short

50 Managed-care health org., briefly

52 Ending of “broadcast”

54 Different ways of walking

56 Playground retort to “is too!”

59 Resident assistants in uni halls

61 Polish lowland sheepdog, for short

64 Major American TV network

65 Short uni talk, informally

66 Anatomy, on a course list

67 Hospital carriers for patients

68 Tattered clothes, informally

69 U.S. retirement account, for short

70 The way something is seen or understood

71 Places that pack out after fresh snow

72 Workshop device that pressurises air

73 Type of pitch thrown with a single raised ridge on the ball

74 French for “my,” before plural nouns

75 Corn dough used to make tortillas

76 Someone who devours book after book

77 Frost that coats branches on a cold morning

78 Plural of the letter that appears three times in “cheese”

79 Little sounds of sympathy

85 Letter shapes that look like curves or snakes

88 Fine wind-blown soil seen in cliffs and banks

90 Let a plant go past eating stage and form seed

92 Article before “hour” or “idea”

94 Old spelling of “badly”

96 Note sometimes below “do” in the scale

97 Scoop mud from the bottom of a harbour

99 Zulu leader whose name appears in history books

100 Short girl’s name, as in actress Zadora

101 See things the same way

102 Brand name on many packs of underwear

104 Pointy-eared folk in fantasy stories

105 Pleasant smell from a kitchen or café

106 Roman household guardian spirit

107 Part of a theatre where actors perform

113 Uni student’s overall grade average, for short

119 Exclamation in “yo-__-__”

46 Fizzy soft drink

47 Domino’s pizza-ruining ad mascot to “avoid”

49 To the ___ degree

51 Long-running brand of decaf instant coffee

53 NZ health-and-safety “Approved Code of Practice” (abbr.)

54 Spoil, as milk in the fridge

55 Musical speeds, in plural

57 Animals doted on at home

58 Absolute, unbearable pain

60 U.S. billionaire and third-party presidential candidate H. ___

62 Tech that tries to mimic human thinking, briefly

63 Word of refusal

64 Outings that can get students excited or exhausted

72 Shared lounge in a flat or hostel

80 Natural inclination

81 Spock’s father in Star Trek

82 “___ a time,” as in taking turns

83 What you get from a lookout point

84 Sudden fright

i'm getting cross now

ACROSS

1 One on a playground, perhaps

10 Novelist Rooney

15 What black and white squares do on a chessboard

16 Knife-like ridge

17 Amounts by which expenses exceed income

18 "Alice" actress Linda

19 Exclamations like "Phooey!"

20 Something to fasten in a car

22 "___ or it didn't happen"

23 Court filing

25 Home of the Greek philosopher Zeno

26 German pronoun

27 Easy to bend

28 Radiator sound

29 Rat out

31 Abbr. after an attorney's name

33 The sloth, among mammals

34 British pub offering

38 "___ in ice"

39 Foodborne bacterium found in contaminated meat or dairy

40 Short form of “association”

43 People from Tehran

45 Abbreviation meaning “and so on”

46 Strong unpleasant smell; or

Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones

47 Situation where no payment to Inland Revenue is required

48 Market or place of trade

49 Non-digital version or equivalent

51 Common Indian surname

52 Sends money to another place, especially abroad

53 Feature of someone looking hot or embarrassed

56 Watchful or attentive

57 Chronological sequences of events

58 Forms of verbs showing time

59 Scenery arranged for a play

DOWN

1 Play areas filled with sand

2 Relating to office work or administration

3 Be connected or fastened with

4 Becomes liquid through heat

5 People with professional skill or experience

6 Letters following “D”

7 Student hall advisers or supervisors

8 Periodic Mediterranean wind

9 Viewed again

10 Common seasoning or mineral

11 Ornamental design featuring intertwined lines or patterns

12 Flat surfaces or degrees of height

13 Game pieces in Scrabble bearing the letter L

14 Gossiping or meddlesome women

21 Evening-wear clothing brand or formal dress period

23 Expression of approval or divine favour

24 Violent public disturbance

27 Formal statement made in court

30 Objects or people that sparkle or shine

32 Standardised academic tests or short for Saturday

34 Woman’s name

35 Term of admiration for an outstanding person

36 Start over or return to original settings

37 Lacking sensitivity or diplomacy

39 Tackle or strike after the play has ended

40 Mountain in Turkey where Noah’s Ark is said to have landed

41 Showing signs of old age or mental decline

42 Sailors or naval crew members

44 Wakes or stirs someone roughly

48 Small scaly anteaters of Asia and Africa

50 Italian innkeeper

51 American actor known for playing Gomer in a classic sitcom

54 Informal contraction of “I am going to”

55 Slang for a negative mark or comment

INDUSTRIALISATION TIRITIOFWAITANGI PROVINCIALSYSTEM COLONISATION MISSIONARIES KATESHEPPARD URBANISATION CONSCRIPTION

)LQGWKHIROORZLQJZRUGVLQWKHSX]]OH :RUGVDUHKLGGHQ

IMMIGRATION WORLDWARONE WORLDWARTWO ROGERNOMICS SETTLEMENT PARLIAMENT REFERENDUM DEPRESSION

,1'8675,$/,6$7,21 7,5,7,2):$,7$1*, 3529,1&,$/6<67(0 &2/21,6$7,21 0,66,21$5,(6 ,00,*5$7,21 :25/':$521( :25/':$57:2 52*(5120,&6 6(77/(0(17

MULDOONERA MIGRATION LANDCOURT GALLIPOLI ECONOMICS AOTEAROA WAITANGI GOLDRUSH

mini tea time

08/'221(5$ 0,*5$7,21 /$1'&2857 *$//,32/, (&2120,&6 $27($52$ :$,7$1*, *2/'586+

GOVERNOR POUNAMU ANZAC WAKA HAKA PA

*29(5125 3281$08

$1=$& :$.$ +$.$ 3$

If you have a story, confession, or experience you’d like to share—whether it’s an anonymous crush, workplace

I am a major loner away from home and so to not worry my dedicated currently long distance friend group from home, I've made a fake friend group of fake people, all character designed and personalised by yours truly with fake socials too. Insane behaviour I know but anything is better than having to go up to introduce myself to someone. - anonymous

(go) downstairs, stairs · heke ki raro, tepe

Welcome to the puzzle page from Puzzhead, your resident Puzzler.

These puzzles are provided to be fun and challenging. The Salient team and our contributors aim for accuracy, but occasional errors may occur. If you notice an error, you may write to editor@salient.org.nz. Please note that our puzzlers and contributors are doing their best, and none are professionals or working on these puzzles full time. For the word find, words may appear diagonally and backwards. To access solutions for the crosswords and connections puzzles, scan the QR code next to Puzzhead.

To solve a Set Square, use arithmetic and logical reasoning. You are given a grid containing six sums: three reading across and three reading down. The arithmetic operations (division, multiplication, addition, and subtraction) are shown between the grid spaces. Place each of the numbers 1 to 9 exactly once into the grid so that all six sums are correct. Note that calculations are carried out in left-to-right order, not according to BEDMAS.

To solve connections, group the sixteen words into four sets of four based on a shared connection. Each word belongs in only one group. Continue until all four groups are identified. On our website, the groupings are uploaded one at a time, so if you get stuck, you can view the answer for a single connection without revealing the full solution.

To solve Word Wheels, form words of four letters or more using the letters in the nine-letter wheel. Every word must include the central letter. Each letter may be used only as many times as it appears in the wheel. The aim is to find as many valid words as possible from the target word list, including the nineletter word that uses all the letters.

leo

You’re Rutherford House this week. Shiny from a distance, corporate up close, and convinced you’re better than everyone else. You’re not. Try not to turn every conversation into a personal networking opportunity. Or at least update your LinkedIn first.

aries

You’re the Hunter Building this week. Iconic from a distance, but also dramatic and convinced the uni revolves around you. Try not to start drama just because you’re bored. Or do, but it better be worthwhile.

sagittarius

You’re Murphy Building this week. Social from a distance, but also impossible to navigate and somehow always in the way. Checks out, considering you’re late to everything you voluntarily agreed to. Try checking your calendar this week.

virgo

You’re Cotton Building this week. Useful, but stressed. You’re also convinced nothing would function without you. You’re probably right. Try not to correct people before they’ve finished speaking.

You’re Rankine Brown this week. Dependable from a distance, exhausted up close, and convinced everyone else’s issues are somehow your problem. Try not to confuse sitting in a study space with studying this week.

You’re the VC’s new office this week. Expensive and financially irresponsible. Which is awkward, seeing as the uni is falling apart from under you. Try reading the room this week.

gemini cancer

You’re the Te Aro Staff Parking Lot. Exclusive from a distance, confusing up close, and convinced being hard to access is the same as being interesting. Try not to make being unavailable your whole personality.

You’re Ngā Mokopuna this week. Beautiful and convinced you’re the only one in your flat trying to be a better person. Try not to take everyone’s behaviour personally this week. Also: I can confirm, you are better than everyone else.

scorpio libra

You’re Adam Art Gallery this week. Interesting from a distance, but also intimidating and probably funded by rich parents. Try to be grateful this week. Or, but at least buy someone else a coffee.

aquarius

You’re Alan MacDiarmid this week. Smart from a distance, but also confusing and convinced being niche is the same as being interesting. Try speaking slower in tutorials.

Strange travellers from distant constellations have beamed you up to the Mothership to deliver some good news and hard truths. Consider the gravity of their words (or don't). Current constellation TAURUS

You’re Old Government Building this week. Pretty enough from a distance, but also convinced you’re better than everyone else. Which is bold, considering you can’t even put posters on the walls. Try decorating your flat this week.

pisces

You’re Easterfield this week. Emotional, confusing, and difficult to get through. Work from home this week, watch your lectures online, and invest in an electric hot water bottle.

April 20May 20