JAK SAID HE NEEDED ART, I REPLIED... here."

— LIAM HALL.

he also said “I’m chill with whatever hey. like I’ll print literally anything.”

- Tehana De Klerk

If anyone read this column last year, you might remember me talking about some out of pocket movies (specifically anything produced or distributed by A24). For this piece, I’ve decided to take a different approach and talk about the heights cinema reached in the 2010s with dystopian teen fiction, and why it needs to make a grand comeback.

I think we can all remember the hype around films like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, and Divergent (I won’t lie, I wasn’t a fan of that last one). It’s almost as if there was just an era of really good young adult books and their film adaptations, and they’ve left an imprint in our minds. There are more films, but these three franchises/trilogies are what really stick out to me. There was just something about them that made life a little cooler, you know? And I know that whenever books are adapted into movies, there’s a lot of details missing out, but you can’t deny that these films were a highlight of the last decade.

With a special focus on The Hunger Games, many agree that the success of the first instalment launched a craze of adapting other young adult dystopian book series to the screen. And while romance does play a role in this series, many people were influenced by the appearance of a strong female protagonist. And while I’m one of the few people that enjoy watching Twilight, it was so great to see a female lead whose life didn’t revolve around boys. Additionally, the general idea of the book was just crazy! A dystopian North America split into twelve (well, thirteen) districts where kids are sent to an arena to fight to the death? How does someone come up with that?

We later saw success with The Maze Runner, Divergent, and a few other films, but I feel like this era of movies eventually fell off which is quite disappointing. I remember reading The Fifth Wave trilogy and expecting a really cool film adaptation, but it clearly wasn’t as successful as its predecessors. I haven’t read or watched anything recently that can relate to this genre of film, but I feel like there needs to be a comeback that really brings us back to the feeling of watching these movies for the first time. We’ve had so many reboots and CGI-ridden movies that I feel as if it’s time we have a brand new story that really makes an impact in cinema again.

Here’s a fun topic of debate, shower sex. It’s truly a controversial choice as those who love it, REALLY fucking love it. Same goes for those who don’t. But this week I don’t intend to give you advice on how to have sex but to complain about people who decide on it without thinking about the major repercussions of it. Because guess what friends,

CUM. ISN’T. WATER. SOLUBLE.

So for all my shower sex enthusiasts, I’ll break that down. When you’re going balls deep and enjoying fucking each other, the pull out and cum every where results in the kids going down the hydroslide and getting stuck to the build up of hair and whatever the fuck else gets stuck inside the drain. Which then becomes an immovable mass with major sentience. Meaning that when I glove up and clean the bathroom, I’m left with a handful of gummy offspring and long kinky black hair. It’s not as hot being on the other end of the shower fucking. Sure there’s probably other reasons as to cousin IT occupying our drains but cum is indistinguishable.

Advice for better options: Fuck

In The Car

There’s an element of risk involved with it but remember to lay down a towel if you don’t have leather seats. On that, make sure all parties are aware of where mechanical parts of the car are located. Gear stick, hand-brake… horn.

In your bedroom

Call me old-fashioned but whatever happened to lighting candles and deflowering a virgin to continue the seed of your people, winter is coming and we need more gatherers to help push us onto another harvest.

On the couch in a communal space when they have friends over

You’re already making us all listen to the underwater applause, may as well look my mum dead in the eye while giving sloppy toppy.

On the Fairfield bridge

It seems you don’t care about cleanliness all that much so why not spice it up and head to the humpy bridge and do the humpy bridge.

Commiting to a life of abstinence ������

Jokes aside, please consider the flat cleaner when you decide to fuck in the shower with reckless abandon. That is unless you’re willing to commit to pulling out the hair out of the drain and cleaning the abandoned children in the dark. Happy Mothers/Fathers day.

Football. Soccer. Whatever you wanna call it, it’s a great game. The best game, ever.

First off, before I properly begin, let’s not blow over the fact that football is rugby’s daddy. Quite literally. It was the game those lads in England were originally playing when some dickhead decided to pick up the ball and run with it. Yet, for some reason, we herald this as some groundbreaking moment in sports history. I mean, he broke the rules of the bloody game. Rugby is glorified cheating and we've made it our national sport. What’s worse is they named the World Cup after the same prick who wasn’t good enough to kick the ball into the goal. Pretty much sums it up to me. Point one to football.

Now it’s inevitable this argument is gonna come up, as it always does when discussing the superior sport, so I’ll get it out of the way now: fans. Out of the 8 billion people on this globe, over 3.5 billion of them are footy fans. Now all my Math and Engineering majors out there will know that if we do some very complex equations, we can find that that is close to half the population. Buzzy as. But, these aren’t the type of fans that struggle to fill out a Chiefs game on Saturday. These are then fans who created an officially recorded earthquake in Barcelona from celebrating Sergi Roberto’s game winning goal in 2017. This passion isn’t just a one off either. Turkish fans recorded 131.76 decibels with their chants and cheers, while the loudest ever recorded rugby crowd was 30 decibels off. Point two to football.

As much as it hurts to see players younger than me kicking about for the biggest clubs in the world, the feeling when a 17 year old wonder kid scores a game winner in stoppage time for your club is out the gate. More established player names like Ronaldo, Messi, and Neymar are at the height of global influence with their names and numbers being printed across millions of people's backs. If you don’t watch football, you can see their value in their financial worth, with all three of those previously mentioned players being named in the top 5 highest paid athletes of 2022. Point three to football.

I touched on it a bit already but football's best moments become synonymous with pop culture. Man City’s premier league winning goal by Aguero(oooooooooo!!!), Ronaldo's siu celebration, and Diego Maradona’s hand of God goal. Meanwhile, the best moments in Rugby history get a bit of a clap and, if you’re lucky, an All Blacks chant. Point four to football.

Just because I feel Jak’s gonna touch on it, let’s talk about diving. While it can be annoying, it is an absolute art form. It's the same thing as drawing a foul in basketball but the players aren’t 7 feet tall and can bench a school bus. Plus, it makes for good entertainment for the non-football fans who get to shout offensive things at the players to make them feel good about themselves. Point five to football.

Now my very unbiased score has counted 5-0 to football. An absolute walloping in a Soccer game. Cheers for coming Rugby.

Rugby is the backbone of our nation. While I was more of a physics kid in school, could one of my bio bros confirm that the spine is more important than an injured knee? Or some fake injury that those players will use as an excuse to not complete one season of soccer. I’m looking at you diving. Could someone explain what the fuck can be benefited from throwing yourself on the pitch? More on that later. Maybe, or I could just not finish it. Like every soccer player with a season of soccer.

Rugby is more competitive in higher leagues (opinion) and is salary capped which makes for closer competition (fact). Soccer is, for the most part, just dull. While I can agree that there is a massive amount of skill on show here, does it really play much into the result of the game? Territory and possession play a big part in what makes a game exciting, both of which don’t have any real consequences in Soccer, and there are only a handful of moments in a typical game that might have any bearing on the result. While I don’t always agree with union rule changes, this is where it excels. Both territory and possession matter, and both are contested in every play, so every play matters. Even a low scoring game of union can be enthralling if it is two closely matched teams fighting over ownership of the field.

I’m sure Seamus will argue global marketability but unlike my illegitimate child, I care about how my country establishes national identity and pride through the uplifting of our tangata whenua. Is this an argument against Māori Seamus? Polynesians perhaps? I understand that having your name known in homes and on the lips of horny teens seems like it would be the goal, but how about being number 1 in a field that has fewer teams contesting them than those attending a Phoenix match. C'est la vie. Or something.

Let’s circle back to money earnt for a second. The average professional Footy player is getting between $75k and $195k. The average annual salary of a player in the Premier League is just under $3.9m. I know it’s sort of moot because worldwide averages are always varying but understand my argument comes from looking at professional teams and nation value. Explain how someone aimlessly kicked around a ball and sustaining a sprained ankle has more value than life long brain injuries and broken faces and shit. Seems a bit dicky right?

My final point that I want to make, sportsmanship. Now I can’t speak for soccer but I assume they all hate each other since they act like little bitches every time they lose a goal on the field. Suck it up. Rugby players will knock seven shades of shit out of each other during the game but then shake hands and go to the bar, sinking major piss and forgetting the loss. The level of camaraderie - we’re not just teammates, we’re brothers and sisters on and off the field.

Honestly Soccer is an okay sport that values marketability and theatrics over establishing an actual sport with well-constructed plays and actual strategy. When Soccer finally shows me that, maybe I’ll watch a game of grown men dramatically flailing themselves under other men on screen. I mean…

Rolled Ice Cream place

Ever seen those tiktoks of people scraping ice cream and rolling it up and stuff? One of those places just opened on Cambridge Road (Next to the shosha and across from the Super Liquor (Really they make a nice tricycle of shops to visit)). I went in there during their soft opening and it was cool as shit, they chop up the fillings into the ice cream and scrape it all together. It's real nice. I got chatting to the owners, apparently they used to get lines of cars out of their driveway so people could get a try of their epic creamage, and they've upgraded to an actual shop. I should also mention that I left one of our infamous Nexus meetings to go to this shop, commitment to the craft I reckon.

The ordering system works as follows:

9.5 / 10

- You go in, talk to the kid at the counter and ask NICELY for your base flavour, a mix in (Oreos, maltesers, that sorta stuff) and your choice of three toppings. Awesome!

- Then they make it in front of your own eyes and you can marvel at their adeptness, it's fun to watch.

- And then you say thank you very much, eat your ice cream and be goddamn grateful, goddammit (it's good shit man).

The place is really clean and nice looking, and it's family run so they're super nice. They're new in town, so go give them a visit and insert some rolled ice cream into your orifice.

I had originally planned to rate this film higher than a six, but then I thought that perhaps I was being a little bit biassed. The Scream franchise has for sure had its ups and downs, however I do feel that the two latest sequels were quite impressive. That is, until it came to the reveal of who Ghostface was and their motive behind the murders. For those who care, there will be spoilers in this review, so stop reading here. Just know that I do think this latest film is still worth the watch.

Scream 6 began with a phone call and a death (wow, shocking). It got hectic pretty quickly after that. I will say that the deaths in this film were a whole fucking lot more gruesome than before; Ghostface was on some Michael Myers type of shit this time. However, I actually think that more people should have died. Sydney wasn’t in this one (it was so weird to not see her), but no legacy characters or characters from the previous film actually died. Weird, right? Ghostface managed to kill off all the “important” extras, and while it was a bit of a bloody massacre, it wasn’t as impressive as those that have come before. I mean, Gale and Kirby (Scream 4) both survived this one. A bit odd I would say.

Moving on from that, I think the cast did a really great job. I love how they keep bringing Billy Loomis back to talk to his daughter; I think it’s great to see one of the OG killers playing a role in the movie. Additionally, going back to Ghostface, Scream 6 did something we haven’t seen before: there were three (well, technically four, but the guy at the start of the movie doesn’t count because he wasn’t the real one) killers. We’ve only ever seen the franchise divert from the two killers in the third movie, where Sydney’s half-brother acts alone. I thought it was a great twist to the story, however I did think that it was quite obvious to guess which characters were behind the mask. I’m no scriptwriter (fucking obviously), but it might have been cool to see Ghostface being someone with a relation to Stu Macher. That way, there would be a sort of reunion between Billy and Stu.

Anyways, there you have it. I can’t write too much, but I will end this saying that while Scream 6 was worth the watch, the ending was a bit of a let down. I wonder if they’ll make another one…

Microwave Poopcorn

DISCLAIMER: I used milk chocolate but dark chocolate would probably be fine idk

HOW TO:

Step one: Cut up your chocolate and put it in a bowl/mug (it does not matter) and throw that shit in the microwave for 30 second intervals, stopping and stirring each time until melty and nice.

Step two: Chuck your pop (not yet poop) corn in there. Depending on your microwave, it could take 2-3 mins, my go to is 2 minutes and 15 seconds (give or take 5 seconds depending on the humidity of the room). That's just me tho you can do whatever works for you :)

INGREDIENTS:

Step three: Put your popcorn in a big ass bowl and pour your chocolate over top. If it's cooled down too much to pour, give it a quick 10 seccy blast in the microwave before performing your pourover.

Step four: Mix that shit up. You could use a wooden spoon or a rubber spatula or if you're a real piece of shit you could just use your hands because who gives a darn fuck.

Step five: EAT! You might want to wait a bit so you won't get melty hands, but getting shit all over my fingers has never stopped me before! EAT POPCORN NOW!!!!!!!!!