The growing trend of fantasy dates
There's a surprising trend gaining popularity in China, young women are hiring female cosplayers to play dream men. Cosplay is short for costume play - where people dress up in costumes and take on the persona of a fictional character. Jesse asks RNZ's digital journalist Yiting Lin why so many women are turning to "fantasy dates".
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Scoop
7 hours ago
- Scoop
Brett Graham Speaks About The Loss Of His Dad - The Artist Fred Graham
The winter season of Matariki is a time to remember those who passed away over the past year and one of those was the artist, Fred Graham, who died last month at the age of 96. Just a week before, he had attended the unveiling of his sculpture Te Manu Rangimaarie, at Taupiri in the Waikato and his exhibition Toi Whakaata / Reflections, opened at Christchurch Art Gallery on 31 May. Matua Fred was also just days away from receiving the New Zealand Order of Merit after being named in the 2025 New Year's Honours list and he'd been chosen as one of Aotearoa's artists at this year's Venice Biennale international exhibition. His son Brett Graham is a prominent artist in his own right whose sculpture 'Wastelands' featured at last year's Venice Biennale. Speaking to RNZ's Matariki programme Brett said one of the sub themes of the Biennale was family relationships, so the head curator wanted Brett and his father's work to be shown. Fred Graham never actually made it to the Biennale that year but Brett said it was fantastic to see his father's work on display. "The works in that show we had grown up with as children. Whiti te Rā, it's quite a joyous piece, a celebration of the haka, and the colours that he used as a child always fascinated me. "Actually I got in trouble with the curator because I talked about these works being massive, like 2 or 3 metres big, because that's my childhood memory of them and then of course when we unpacked them, they were a metre." Brett said people often talk about living up to the legacy of his parents, but rather than try to break away from the previous generation and create something new as is the nature of western art, for Māori artists it's about absorbing the past and moving forward. "We had such a great relationship, there was never any tension there or pressure at all. "I never sort of struggled with that legacy it was always just a natural path and dad was very generous." In fact, he said it was his mother who encouraged both him and his and his sister into the arts. "Dad loved to tell the story about he'd made a work so high, he called it Growth it's in his exhibition in Christchurch, and he always used to love to tell the story about how I was so brainwashed I'd drag it round the house as a Teddy Bear until he had his first exhibition and he had no qualms selling the thing." Brett said when his father saw that he told his mother 'I hate to break to you but I think your son is going to be an artist.' "I never wanted to be anything else but an artist, or probably not capable of being anything else," Brett said. He said growing up he was surrounded by Māori artists like Selwyn Muru and Kāterina Mataira so art came very naturally. Brett said his father's generation of artists were so interesting especially the carvers, because they loved the work of British sculptors. "When I started to use whakairo patterns, pākati and haehae and so on, he'd say to me 'nice carving, what do you want to do all that old stuff for?' That's the irony of Maoridom the arts scene now, the core group of Waikato carvers for example they're all in their 20s and then the so called 'contemporary artists' people like dad were in their 90s and 80s."
The Spinoff
2 days ago
- The Spinoff
‘I'm aware I sound nuts': How tarot helped Stacy Gregg land her biggest book deal yet
When author Stacy Gregg turned to tarot cards to decide the fate of her new book the result was a six-figure deal with Simon & Schuster. But if the cards have delivered for your once, can they be relied upon again? When I tell you that my latest book deal was predicated entirely on a tarot card reading, I'm aware I sound nuts. And yeah, fully cognisant that it's not exactly best practice to rely on mysticism for your most important financial and career decisions. I get it because I too am a sceptic about all things spiritual. Apart from once putting Jedi on my census forms I have never been interested in belonging to a religion or believing in a god – and I roll my eyes if anyone so much as tries to pick up the paper and read me my star sign. And yet, for me there has always been something deeply compelling about tarot. When I was a kid, fortune tellers were always on TV shows, as ubiquitous as quicksand and sasquatch. There they were clattering their bangles and gazing into crystal balls on every show from The Love Boat to Hogan's Heroes (J'adore Lebeau in a gypsy turban!). Then out would come the tarot deck and they'd turn the cards and gasp in mock shock before solemnly interpreting their confounding symbolism to the dupe opposite them. Tarot held a nostalgic, kitsch fascination for me – but until last year I had never really had the urge to have my cards read. And then my house flooded. Not just a little bit, not a leak in the carport. I mean proper natural disaster. And so, after loading all my worldly possessions into eight jumbo skips I found myself shacked up in some rented dumpster fire of a house, endlessly filling out insurance paperwork and meanwhile the TV series I was meant to be writing hadn't yet been green-lit so I had no paid employment to speak of. Plus, after nearly two decades of being bound to a big UK publishing house I now found myself cut loose with no contract and no agent since Nancy, my rock since forever, had just announced her retirement. It is at times like this that a girl thinks to herself 'I might get my tarot cards done.' Luckily I knew a tarot reader who was in the same state of flux that I was. Sarah Nathan and I are old friends and when she told me she was giving up her lucrative day job to do tarot reading … OK, I might have made that 'huh' sound that Jesse Mulligan makes when he's interviewing someone on RNZ. But I knew Sarah. She was neither a flake nor a slouch – she was taking her career move to tarot seriously. She already had a website – ' – and she delivered her readings via zoom or as a pre-record and then uploaded them to a unique YouTube channel just for you so that you could watch your cards unfold in privacy at your leisure. Also, yeah, yeah, obviously I'm fully aware of the ways that mystics, like tarot readers, can use techniques to trick their marks into thinking they have powers – things like 'cold reading' in which the tarot card reader pumps you for information you aren't even aware you're giving them to create the illusion of psychic ability. Absolutely Sarah had the advantage of knowing loads about me – it would be easy to extrapolate and make stuff up. But she was legit in her beliefs. And I wasn't asking if there was a tall, dark and handsome stranger in my future. I only had one question for Sarah and her cards: What the hell should I do about my manuscript? Despite my newfound, full-time, unwanted job handling insurance claims for my flooded house, I had somehow managed to write a book that year. It was a cat dystopia. When people asked me to explain the plot I would say: 'It's like a cross between Watership Down and Logan's Run – but with cats.' Since I had no agent and no publisher, the only person who had seen it to date was my friend, author Nicky Pellegrino. Knowing the pickle I was in, Nicky had valiantly offered to read The Last Journey. So I gave her the 60,000 word text and braced myself. 'I think it's special,' she told me as we walked our dogs on Kakamatua beach. 'I think you should take it wide.' In publishing parlance, taking a book wide means sending it out universally to find the highest bidder. It's a ballsy move – even when you do have an agent. I didn't have one so I would be effectively agenting myself. 'I just can't,' I said. 'Publishing in the UK is so agent-dependent. Plus I'm too defeated by life right now.' She protested but I gave her a hard no on the matter. I mean why rely on the voice of a number one best-selling international author like Nicky? But a tarot reading? Now you're talking sense! On the Zoom, Sarah smiled at me. She has the most uplifting smile, a halo of chic blonde hair, designer glasses, several decks of tarot lined up in front of her. 'I like to pull cards from different decks,' she explained. Some of the decks were classical, elegant with medieval style imagery, others were new-agey, while still others were homemade and used words and pictures normally associated with the building and construction industry like drills and chisels and diggers – all of which would be given a metaphorical twist in Sarah's interpretation. Multiple decks and many many cards were drawn but according to Sarah they all said the same thing and it was basically the same thing Nicky had said, only this time I was listening. 'This book is a treasure,' Sarah insisted. 'The cards are telling you to break the wheel. You need to show it to multiple publishers.' I finished our call elated. My book was a treasure! And then a more sane thought: I was a mental. I couldn't just act out a batshit career move because the cards told me to do it. 'Nah,' I said to my boyfriend, 'I've decided to be normal. I'm just going to send it to one publisher, the old one I used to be with back in the day. Maybe they'll take it. I will cross my fingers and hope for the best.' Except that night I lay in bed unable to sleep. Nicky thought the book was good. Sarah said that cards were telling me to go for it. Really, at the end of the day what was the very worst that could happen? I get rejected by multiple houses in a long, drawn-out fiasco? That sounded like a typical publishing scenario to me. And so, the next day, with a cute covering letter, I sent the manuscript out. I didn't technically take it 'wide' – only to the four publishing houses in London that I had meaningful relationships with. Of the four, the one I was most excited about was Simon & Schuster. My old editor was now the head of the children's publishing division there, and her second-in-command and I had also enjoyed a long and happy working relationship when they had both been at HarperCollins. Since they'd been at Simon & Schuster the company had grown so exponentially they were looking for new offices. They were so hot right now. Having the book with them would be the dream scenario. When I sent the emails off I truly had no expectation of a swift reply. Publishing is the slowest business in the world. It's typical for a house to take three months to get back to you, especially on an unsolicited manuscript. I settled in and prepared myself for a long, long wait. Twelve hours later I had an email back from Rachel and Michelle at Simon & Schuster. 'Great pitch! Hold tight! We're reading…' I had another email back two days later. They'd read it. They loved it. Could they make a pre-emptive offer to take it off the table before the other houses swooped? Well duh, yup you can. And so, at two in the morning, on my phone in bed I negotiated a six-figure deal for The Last Journey. It was the biggest advance I had ever got for a book. I did it without an agent and in my jim-jams and whenever I pushed back and asked for more money I felt certain I was right. Because the tarot cards told me this book was a treasure. Looking back now, without the cards to back me up, things could have gone so differently. It was Sarah's faith, her cards, that weirdly gave me confidence in my own abilities. I can't explain it. All I know is that it worked. A few months later I consulted Sarah again. I had a question I just had to know the answer to. I was nominated for the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults for my novel Nine Girls. The thing was, I had been nominated for the same award eight times before and I had always lost. It is not much fun flying to Wellington eight times to sit in an auditorium and lose in front of everyone. This time, I had to know. What was my fate to be? Sarah shuffled the deck and asked the cards. 'Will Stacy win the book awards?' The card she drew from the deck depicted a grizzled old woman cowering in rags in the snow, being pelted by rotten fruit and shunned by the crowds. Pretty definitive. Sarah agreed. 'It's another no I'm afraid.' Good to know, I grieved and let it go and flew to Wellington anyway to tautoko the winners. This story explains why, when they called my name that night to say that Nine Girls had won the Margaret Mahy Award for the Book of the Year I sat slack-jawed and did not get out of my seat for quite some time. Sarah says my own negative energy from all those years of losing influenced the deck on the reading that day. I agree. The cards are all about your energy. And so, last week I booked a reading and asked her about my new book. The one that will come after The Last Journey. Apparently it's a corker. Now I just need to write it. The Last Journey
RNZ News
2 days ago
- RNZ News
Chinese documentaries expand presence at 2025 Doc Edge
Clockwise from top left: Ai Weiwei's Turandot; Made in Ethiopia; The Dating Game; Chinatown Cha-Cha Photo: Supplied Doc Edge co-founder Alex Lee says the Chinese titles in the line-up shine a light on growing diversity in the world as the festival celebrates its 20th anniversary. Lee, who is also the nonprofit festival's co-director, says he's proud his team has been able to create something that's "so special". "I'm also proud of the fact that I'm a migrant that has managed to do something special for the future and for the history of New Zealand," said Lee, who is Malaysian Chinese. Featuring documentaries from across the world covering a wide range of topics on politics, culture, history, art, the environment and more, the 2025 festival includes seven films related to China. Ai Weiwei's Turandot leads a strong line-up that also includes The Dating Game, Made in Ethiopia, Chinatown Cha-Cha, Correct Me if I'm Wrong, Little Potato and Two Travelling Aunties , with the latter three being short films. Alex Lee, co-founder and co-director of the Doc Edge Festival Photo: Supplied Lee acknowledges that some people might think documentaries are boring or irrelevant, but he believes they're important as a "slice of our life". The Dating Game , for example, depicts how Chinese men have needed to learn how to be more attractive as there are so many more men in China than women, he says. Meanwhile, Ai Weiwei's Turandot reminds people that conversation and dialogue are important even if two opposing sides disagree with each other, Lee says. "There's nothing worse than ... hearing your own voice," Lee says. "The only way that we can become a better world is if we are all able to listen to each other and we don't agree on the differences, but we learn to live with it." Lee says there has been an increase in the number of films submitted from China over the years. "There is a growth in the Chinese documentary sector, which includes not just the industry from PRC [People's Republic of China] but also from the Chinese diaspora - whether [it's] just filmmakers or content." Lee says the growth has been driven by a rise in industry upskilling and support from Chinese authorities and academic institutions. "This is often stimulated by the demand and interest about Chinese culture and issues," he says. "Additionally, with more cross-border travel, people have travelled to and worked with China," he says. "Therefore, there is also more awareness and sophistication with audience interest." Clockwise from top left: Correct Me if I'm Wrong; Little Potato; Two Travelling Aunties Photo: Supplied Lee says the festival organisers are keen to "encourage diversity in voices and content". With more people turning to social media, it is important to bring long-form content that can explore issues more deeply rather than offer snapshots that do not provide the detail and clarity required, Lee says. "Additionally, watching documentaries allows you to understand another person's point of view," he says. "It will help you to develop greater empathy for [others] and it may reshape the way you see them. "At the very least, we want the opportunity for audiences to say they have watched and listened to others. "They may not agree but they can agree to disagree - with empathy and kindness and not within an echo chamber."
