THIS WEEK ONLINE – Yummy Wooly Mammoth Meatball

You’re reading This Week Online, VICE Australia’s runsheet of shit you probably missed, or should have seen, this week. Subscribe here to get it straight in your inbox, every week.

"Ari" here, welcoming you back to This Week Online. 

The final day of March. Three months in to this here year 2023. What have you learned? What have WE learned? I hope it has been... something.

The Twelve Apostles Are Back In Aboriginal Hands

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Scientists: Stonehenge Is Not a Calendar, It's Something More Mysterious

Look at This Yummy Woolly Mammoth Meatball Scientists Made For Us

• Here’s what it’s actually like when you become homeless in Australia
• [Big exposé on carbon dioxide stunning of pigs before slaughter in Australia]
• Genesis Owusu: when the outsider wins
• “The lost art of being stuck with an album”
• Swarm and the unbearable shitness of open endings
• i am no longer into written tweets. visual jokes only

When researching for her article on how the Australian government was going to quietly gut $65 million out of homeless services smack bang in the middle of a housing crisis, VICE Australia’s Aleks Bliszczyk came across Melbourne resident Jodie Letts, who was homeless from 2015-2017. For the most part, Letts didn’t even realise she was homeless – she had suffered a work injury and, while on unpaid leave, her landlords decided to sell the property she was renting. What ensued was a spiral of circumstances, a ripple effect that rapidly worsened.

Imagine trying to get accommodation services: it’s first in first served, if you’re late, there’s a line, you wait all day, and by the time they get to you, there’s no allocations left. Then you’ve wasted all day, you go to leave, and you’ve gotten a parking ticket. Can you imagine?? 

This homelessness snowball could happen to anyone. Except for maybe those in government, with their trust funds and cute little six digit salaries to back them up. And maybe that’s why they just don’t care.

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And you’re shocked?? Shocked??? I don’t really eat meat but not even that moral superiority is strong enough to prevent me from preferring to die rather than watch the video contained in this article. 

In Australia, the industry standard process is gassing pigs with carbon dioxide before slaughter, which is apparently the best thing we could come up with. Yes, apparently lowering groups of pigs into big gas chambers where they flail and panic and scream in distress for painstaking minutes as their breathing is gradually restricted before they eventually succumb to slumber, then slaughter, was the best we could come up with. 

Our meat industries are barbaric, and the truth is Australians have been brainwashed to a frothy pulp by the big billions of Big Pork and Big Lamb and Big Chicken and Big Milk and their billions of advertising dollars. Ever wondered how Big Dairy, supposedly struggling against the recent cultural move towards oat milk, somehow can still afford to tell the world it’s struggling, in big banner ads across every Coles, Woolies and free to air network in the country?

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A mammoth interview/ feature/ review extravaganza from VICE AU’s Julie Fenwick. Tracing the Genesis of Kofi Owusu–Ansah: from his relocation from Ghana to Australia’s whitest city, Canberra, which, in its lack of inspiration, motivated his creativity, from dabbling in film, Photoshop, t-shirt design and, finally, music, to his first endeavour in the rap group Ansah Brothers with his sibling, musician Citizen Kay (Kojo)... And then to now. Julie followed him to rehearsal, and then to the Sydney Opera House, where he performed accompanied by the Sydney Orchestra. 

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I had this but with VCRs. When I was a kid we had four VCRs in our possession, and for some unknown reason they were all sequels. Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc 2, Scooby Doo 2, and the Lion King 2. I’m not shitting you. For this reason I know all of the sequels of these childhood greats off by heart and know nothing of the original films. Because of these conditions I’ve conflated my familiarity with these films with their individual merit, and wholeheartedly believe they are tens of thousands of billions of times better than the originals. 

Maybe they are better, maybe they aren’t, I wouldn’t know. Because all I know is that they are the best. And I kinda feel like I’m right. Am I right? I think I’m right. The author’s circumstance was a little different because they were a pre-teen when getting stuck with albums and so there was a bit more thought and commitment and consideration in the loving process. 

Nonetheless: it’s getting harder and harder to imagine a time when you were stuck with anything. The endless expansion of our media universe, supported by instant access at a tap of a button or a $6 monthly subscription service, means we are no longer faced with the Stockholm syndrome of being stuck with any one choice. But at what cost?

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Warning, this article contains spoilers. Although if you hadn’t seen it, the title has already spoiled the fact that it has an open ending. Which is all I’m talking about. So you may as well read on….

I haven’t seen Swarm, but VICE AU’s Julie Fenwick has. And she was NOT PLEASED. The show itself, she writes, is a masterpiece, but the open ending just fucks everything up. I’d have to chime in here and agree, especially with the part where she says an open ending is akin to the kind of ending when you find out it was a dream all along. BOO! TOMATOES. Tomatoes, tomatoes! Overplayed. And we are to applaud?? The mystery???

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