The tech billionaire class wants us to believe that humanoid robots will be pouring our flat whites by next week, while sceptics claim they will never survive the Australian landscape. The truth is far more exciting: they are absolutely coming, but they will have to learn how to live like locals first.

Reddit is not exactly community, and maybe that is the point. It is more like the internet’s worst-lit waiting room: depressing, useful, strangely addictive, and full of people saying the quiet part before anyone has had a chance to make it brand-safe.

Aucklanders love complaining about public transport, partly because complaining is one of the city’s last affordable hobbies. But somewhere between fare caps, better buses, ferries that feel like cheating, and the City Rail Link about to change the whole map, the system has become far more usable than we like admitting.

Startup culture has become one of New Zealand’s strangest performances: part ambition, part theatre, part group project with better shoes. The interesting bit is not that founders are pitching bigger, but that they now have to build the company and the mythology at the same time.

The end of Splore is not just another festival collapsing under costs. It points to a quieter problem in New Zealand culture: the spaces between tiny venues and big tours, where local artists, odd crowds and half-formed scenes used to find each other.