Kaikoura, Te Wai Pounamu, Aotearoa (Kia Kaha, Aroha to all) Superthread

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Yeah, honestly that song and much of See Ya Round make more sense as Crowded House tracks than as Enz ones. I'm particularly fond of "Breaking My Back" and "Years Go By", and they sure sound a lot more like the self-titled Crowded House album than much of Split Enz's discography.

And Neil's been quite fond of doing "Only Talking Sense" lately. I think I've seen him do it about three times in the last couple of years. He's also been doing "Last Day of June" a bit. Interestingly it seems to be mainly Neil who plays stuff from that album. I can't think of Tim doing much from it in recent years.
 
Just another symptom of the marketisation of everything. Sorry, I've got nothing more profound.

See, we always say that 'this kind of thing can't go on'. And things that can't go on, don't. Eventually there is a reckoning, but that's cold comfort in the meantime when we could be talking decades, which is easily a given person's working lifetime.
 
Yep, marketisation has not helped, and I expect that market imperatives will only become more influential in the short/medium term - with negative consequences.

The system is definitely not going to look the same in fifty years. The university existed with little change for centuries until the mid-twentieth century, and its expansion into a provider of mass education has been pursued with little attention paid to whether it can structurally support this or how this expansion conflicts with some of its core purposes and affects its essential culture. That reckoning is happening, but in a slow-burn sort of way across the world but without cohesion and with fragmented vision, usually led by people at the pointy end of the hierarchy whose daily interactions rarely include students or junior staff.

But you can tell I ran out of steam in those last couple of tweets when I realised I had no great answers to offer, certainly none I could compress into a pithy tweet. I just had to respond to that Guardian article, especially as it acted as if this was some breaking revelation. Fuck no, everybody in the sector knows how shit this is and some of us have tried to bring attention to it. Our success is conspicuous by its absence.
 
Axver said:
Yep, marketisation has not helped, and I expect that market imperatives will only become more influential in the short/medium term - with negative consequences.

The system is definitely not going to look the same in fifty years. The university existed with little change for centuries until the mid-twentieth century, and its expansion into a provider of mass education has been pursued with little attention paid to whether it can structurally support this or how this expansion conflicts with some of its core purposes and affects its essential culture. That reckoning is happening, but in a slow-burn sort of way across the world but without cohesion and with fragmented vision, usually led by people at the pointy end of the hierarchy whose daily interactions rarely include students or junior staff.

But you can tell I ran out of steam in those last couple of tweets when I realised I had no great answers to offer, certainly none I could compress into a pithy tweet. I just had to respond to that Guardian article, especially as it acted as if this was some breaking revelation. Fuck no, everybody in the sector knows how shit this is and some of us have tried to bring attention to it. Our success is conspicuous by its absence.
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What is Twitter for? I'm not even kidding. Nobody can say anything in 140 characters that isn't a slogan.

I didn't see the Guardian article that set you off, but most of their articles act as though things are breaking revelations. Here's why.

I suppose one answer would be to unionise, but is that even a thing? Can that even be a thing, in that line of work?
 
I'm still not entirely sure what Twitter's for, but it's actually proven quite useful for meeting other people in my field and keeping up with the news. I also try to popularise some of my work when I publish something but I'm not sure how successful that has been.

And yeah, there is a union, the NTEU. Problem is it's a blanket union for the whole sector, and for many years it's been perceived as the union of our bosses - i.e. it's focused on the concerns of tenured professors rather than the insecure conditions of early career researchers. That's starting to shift and the NTEU is making more noise on behalf of casuals, but I still haven't joined yet because I remain suspicious of it.
 
Maybe there needs to be another, new union.

Ah, I'm talking bollocks, but in theory, that's the sort of thing that should happen. It's easier said than done.
 
Twitter is useful for catching news and when you've got enough dopey thoughts that you don't want to annoy your Facebook friends with status updates.

I have met some quality people through it whom I ensure to remain in contact with.
 
Axver said:
Yeah, honestly that song and much of See Ya Round make more sense as Crowded House tracks than as Enz ones. I'm particularly fond of "Breaking My Back" and "Years Go By", and they sure sound a lot more like the self-titled Crowded House album than much of Split Enz's discography.

And Neil's been quite fond of doing "Only Talking Sense" lately. I think I've seen him do it about three times in the last couple of years. He's also been doing "Last Day of June" a bit. Interestingly it seems to be mainly Neil who plays stuff from that album. I can't think of Tim doing much from it in recent years.
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I honestly flip-flop on which version of "I Walk Away" I prefer.

I'd say that overall Crowded House is more my vibe than Split Enz, but holy shit I just saw what my Spotify and Last.fm have to say about me.
 
I can't remember the last time I wrote anything longer than a forum post. In some ways I'm really degenerating. Internet fucks up my brain and reading books becomes much harder than it used to be, though not impossible. Writing? God help me, it's all too much effort.
 
coolian2 said:
Also, I remember when 1000 words seemed daunting. Now I feel like I can't even get one coherent thought out in that space, let alone 3,4,5,6.....
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I'm the dude who had to trim his PhD thesis by 25,000 words because apparently I just found 100,000 words too short on first go and blew right past that limit. In the end I managed to get it down, making for a better thesis and then book.
 
coolian2 said:
I honestly flip-flop on which version of "I Walk Away" I prefer.

I'd say that overall Crowded House is more my vibe than Split Enz, but holy shit I just saw what my Spotify and Last.fm have to say about me.
Click to expand...

I used to be the same until this new edit with a longer outro appeared on the reissue of the first Crowded House album. That's now the definitive version for me.

My last.fm has the Crowdies as one of three bands to break 10,000 plays, while the Enz are just shy of 5,000 at the moment.
 
Kieran McConville said:
I can't remember the last time I wrote anything longer than a forum post. In some ways I'm really degenerating. Internet fucks up my brain and reading books becomes much harder than it used to be, though not impossible. Writing? God help me, it's all too much effort.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure whether to blame the Internet or my work for my increasing difficulty to sit down and read a book cover-to-cover. Probably a bit of both.

But geez I do love to write. Who could tell, eh.
 
Heh, who could tell indeed.

I do blame the internet for a lot of things, but really I blame social media for a lot of things. I think of my other little forum, and when it started. There was plenty of bad going down in the world in 2003, but somehow we took it in stride. Now every major event in the news seems to call for a week of silence. I resent it but try to respect that most other people are on a whole different wavelength to me now. Bit by bit we'll all just shut up and leave the field to the loudmouths, the righteous and the unhinged. I've got everything to say, and nothing to say.

Time to finish a few books, I think. You ever hate that thing where you get stuck on a novel that seems duller than you'd hoped, but you feel compelled to see it out just out of simple self-respect? Like, it's not rubbish or you'd throw it across the room, but it's not compelling either. At a certain point, one has to see something through.
 
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If I start a novel, I have to finish it. It's very rare for me to give up on something. And of course that kills my rate of reading because I have little drive to read the current book and won't start another until I finish this one. Though there have been a couple that I basically hate-read, wondering if they could possibly get worse or if the story would finally deliver something of value.

One of those was C by... Tom? McCarthy. I'm sorry but no book should ever be written in the present tense.
 
I've had a think on the Brian Tamaki situation. I will refrain from comments on legitimacy of faith, however, you claim earthquakes are caused by effectively, what you deem as sexual deviancy, whilst you take money from poor people, telling them that lining your pockets will solve their problems.

Who is the real sinner?


Context: Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki blames earthquake on gays | NZNews | Newshub
 
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There does seem to be a current narrative, made in various forms on various sides of politics, that you cannot comment on something if you have not experienced it.

So apparently literally all fiction and history should not have been written.
 
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