The holy grail of lazy dinners for me was when we’d be left to fend for ourselves as we got a bit older. Instant meals were the light of my young life, making a mess of the microwave, feeling like I was on MasterChef when I seasoned the packets of pasta or added cheese all by myself.

Growing up, food tends to just be food. We have a palate of flavours we’re raised on until one day we move away from home. From here, the doors open to the wonderful world of food and we meet flavours we never knew existed.

I’m sure many of us have felt exhausted and frustrated as the health inequities of Pacific communities are framed as the individual failings of Pacific Islanders themselves.

I dropped the ball in issue one by not introducing our lovely team. So instead of sharing a picture of their beautiful faces, and a corny paragraph about their fake hobbies, I thought I’d let you judge them based on the state of their fridges!

We all have a special something we turn to when times are tough. When the grind is getting too much, or it’s not easy to leave the house, we all have a special meal we can rely on to get us through our bad patches.

Conversion therapy is the umbrella term for any practice which has a common belief that a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity can and should be changed. Any practice which falls under this umbrella term is incredibly outdated, designed to suppress a person’s rights and feelings about themselves for the sake of another or a group’s ideology.

In a world where the demand for media is constant, where we can’t eat dinner without watching something on TV because, God forbid, we are alone with our own thoughts for 10 minutes, there are constantly new forms of entertainment and new tools to distract us from the pain of being alive. One of these glorious new forms of media is the podcast.

It’s come to Massive’s attention that the Massey University Group has recorded an unaudited profit of over $25M during the 2021 financial year.

CW: This article covers topics of drug abuse, mental illness, abuse, and suicide. HBO’s Euphoria is popping off at the moment. Covering abuse, drug addiction, mental illness and a whole heck more, it definitely leans on the morbid side. Even the cast agree the show can be hard to watch. Euphoria dares to tell the stories many shows would never touch. The line between romanticisation and representation is one that Euphoria walks like a tight rope.

After almost seven years of drag, the iconic Drag King Hugo Grrrl is semi-retiring to find his love for the arts again. George Fowler, known as Wellington’s Drag King Hugo Grrrl, announced to his 14.9k followers on Instagram that he would be leaving drag for the foreseeable future, instead working at South Pacific Pride in Auckland, crafting, playing with pets, and just being ‘boring’.

“What did everyone do during all these lockdowns around the world? They listened to music, they watched movies or TV shows, they read books. All these things to fill up everyone else’s time was an art form which has now been left in the dust.” - Roxy Leppan. These feelings were reflected in the conversation I had with Carlos McQuillan,

So, you just left high school, moved into a flat or halls in a new city and now you gotta deal with Omicron getting in the way of everything? Maybe you’re like me, a third year who’s trying to navigate an ever-changing landscape of alert levels, while still wanting to have an absolute banger of a time with their mates that ultimately ends in 3AM trauma bonding, or just someone wearing a Jim Beam box on their head.

Prison abolition is a subject that is generally considered utopian or idealistic – something out of reach and unachievable. For this reason, it is usually overlooked and dismissed with a sweep of the hand that implies without prisons, our society would be reduced to anarchy. This is actually far from the truth, and it is becoming ever more essential that Aotearoa divorces itself from its reliance on the prison system.

Most of us are familiar with sitting down to watch a couple of TikToks and blinking forward a couple of hours; or putting off an assignment we were excited to write until the thought of touching a laptop makes you want to drop out and pursue a career in stripping. These experiences are all to do with dopamine, a chemical most of us haven’t heard of, but have spent our lives chasing.

I’m sure everyone is familiar with the discourse about what schools should really be teaching us. There was probably a smart-ass in math who interrogated the teacher about when they’d actually need algebra in real life. It’s a good point, a great point even. Unless you’re actually studying something mathematics-related as a career, I doubt you need to understand calculus or algebra to be successful in the working world.

6: Listen to your lecture recordings as you go to sleep. If nothing else, maybe you’ll finally get a good night's sleep! There’s nothing like the sound of your lecturer's voice to make you sleepy as fuck.

My complete apathy towards religion started transitioning into, quite honestly, an open dislike for it when I realised I was gay.

With one door closing, another fucking door opens, it's that time of the year where a full-time job starts becoming the sad reality.

From stationery floating in jelly to classic gladwrap gags, pranks sustain us through the misery years of university. But, where have they all gone?

It’s the beginning of October, so a global pandemic and growing inequity is a fitting and kinda scary way to start off the spooky season.