Now this is more like it…

Laconic and understated, this short spot is the West Coast’s "Find Your Cool" Campaign — part of the much maligned "Everyone Must Go" initiative, aiming to attract Australian visitors to the West Coast of New Zealand.

The chubby filter

Cue massive eyeroll.

The filter, which was made available via CapCut allowed users to toggle between their current appearance and a digitally inflated version of themselves, with many pairing the effect with the song Anxiety by Doechii. Thin users were often shown laughing at their digitally altered “bigger” selves.

Dr Emma Beckett, a food and nutrition scientist told the BBC that the filter—and the jokes around it—amplify false ideas that equate larger bodies with laziness or lack of self-control. According to Beckett, the fear of weight gain this type of content fuels is what drives diet culture, disordered eating, obsessive exercising, and reliance on unproven wellness products.

TikTok pointed to CapCut and they said the filter has been removed and any content still circulating won’t be recommended and won’t appear on teen accounts.

Rebecca Shaw writes in the Guardian about the cult of thinness and the shift from body positivity, back to non-acceptance.

“If you spend any time on TikTok or social media now, you’ll see disgusting, awful, hateful, fatphobic comments on every post from a woman over size 12…There’s been a recent rise on TikTok of young fat girls doing videos crying about how much they hate their life, alongside a very scary rise of pro-anorexia accounts…a throwback to the heroin chic, deathly anti-fat era of the 90s and 00s, and it’s dangerous for everyone.”

We do not live in a classless society

In New Zealand the haves and the have-nots are more distinct than ever and as the middle class is being hollowed out, this is thought-provoking stuff from Ruby Payne an American educator and author best known for her book A Framework for Understanding Poverty.

Merica is an ass

A woman arrested for having a miscarriage? Well sort of. She was not charged for the act of having a miscarriage but for her alleged actions afterward. Police report says a 24-year-old Selena Maria Chandler-Scott, after she was found unconscious and bleeding, and had a miscarriage. She was arrested following a witness who said they saw her put fetal remains in a dumpster.

Georgia law that gives foetuses the same legal rights afforded to a person, because of this she has been charged with concealing the death of another person and of throwing away or abandonment of a dead body prohibited. There is a law on the proper disposal of aborted foetal remains, but that law does not mention foetal remains due to miscarriage. Similarly, a law on registering foetal deaths but it only governs what a physician should do, not the person who was pregnant.

Reverse Selfie

Semantic bleaching according to Merriam Webster

When we say that we hope this post is ‘awesome,’ we don’t mean we want it to be expressive of awe or terror. We mean that we hope you like it. This reduction of a word's intensity is called ‘semantic bleaching.’ Words like fantastic amazing awful very really ultimately actually have meanings that have become less literal over time. Even ‘literally’ has been a victim of semantic bleaching.

We sometimes find NSFW terms enter our everyday vocabulary through semantic bleaching. ‘Food porn’ isn’t anything scandalous, it’s just appetizing pictures of food. ‘Pimp my ride’ means making additions to your car (i.e. putting a PlayStation 2 in the trunk).Thank you for reading and we hope you have a terrific day! Also, when we say ‘terrific’ we don’t mean have a day that is frightful, or very bad.

Mind the Gap

My dear friend Emma Woodward, who selfishly moved from 2 minutes down the road to the other side of the world 6 months ago, is a child psychologist. She is compassionate with others and tries to be with herself. She shared this and I thought I would too…

The Irish language offers a gentler way to hold our emotions.

In Irish, you don’t say “I’m sad.” Instead, you say “Tá brón orm”, “The sadness is upon me.”

You don’t claim the emotion. You don’t become it. You allow it to visit, to rest on you for a time. It’s not you, it’s something external, something that will pass.

This subtle shift in language carries a powerful truth, that our emotions are not permanent.

They are weather systems moving through us, not fixed identities.

In English, we tend to become our feelings, “I am anxious”, “I am depressed” “I am angry”.

But the Irish way reminds us that feelings are not who we are, just what we’re experiencing. This approach creates space, a gap to be mindful of.

A gap for compassion.

A gap to acknowledge pain without being consumed by it.

And maybe even a gap to talk more openly about mental health, because it becomes something we carry, not something we are.

There’s a gentleness in the Irish phrasing that invites us to see emotions differently.

Instead of ownership, there’s visitation. Instead of blame, there’s understanding.

“Tá brón orm”. The sadness is upon me.

And one day, it will lift…

If that doesn’t work for you, maybe this poem Twat by John Cooper Clarke will.

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