It’s as predictable as your uncle saying something off-colour during Christmas lunch: the annual slew of scare stories about the risk of gaining a few kilos over the festive season. Let’s make a pact to ignore them all, suggests Kristin Hall.

One of the last things I remember my mum saying to me before she died was “are you really having another bowl of dessert?”

It was Christmas day, and despite my less than aspirational skills in the kitchen I had spent the best part of 42 hours making an Annabel Langbein-worthy feast for my family of six that, thanks to an aggressive bout of cancer, was soon to be five. So the short answer was yes, I did need more fucking dessert.

My mum was a kind person. She was selfless, a wonderful listener and a better Christian than I had ever attempted to be. I am sure she said some nice things to me before she died a few days later, but I don’t remember them, because that comment stuck in my head, and has done ever since.

Perhaps that’s because the sentiment in the sentence I heard that day has been repeated to me, in multiple forms, via multiple mediums every Christmas, New Year, Easter, winter, and any other time of the year when a woman might commit the grievous sin of putting on some weight.

If you follow enough news websites, a simple scroll through Facebook during the entirety of the New Zealand summer is pretty much like standing in front of an unnecessarily condescending personal trainer who is a Twitter egg in his spare time.

‘The season of overindulgence is upon us!’ the Herald helpfully informs along with a stock image of a slim woman pinching some skin.

The opening line is an absolute abomination which suggests not only that possessing a muffin top and going to the beach are mutually exclusive circumstances, but that attempting to do both would throw us all muffin-first into the deepest chasms of hell.

Then there are the less catastrophic, but nonetheless annoying examples brought to you from the ‘No Shit Sherlock’ Department of the exercise industry.

“Christmas is approaching fast, and many people not only tend to ruin their usual diets, but they also gain a few extra pounds. Based on studies, most people tend to gain additional weight during the holiday season helped by lack of physical activity and exercise.” (source)

Ask a fat person what causes weight gain, ask a skinny person. Everyone knows the answer, but we just don’t want to hear the answer when it’s nearly the end of the year everyone said was going to be better than last year but wasn’t, and we all just want to be muffin deep in trifle for a few goddamn days.

And remember, this is pre Christmas, which means post Christmas there’ll be so many panicky headlines you’ll be chanting ASHY BINES BIKINI BODY while attempting to laugh and eat salad in your sleep.

Here’s a sneak peak of what you’ve got to look forward to:

I spoke to some friends and internet strangers about how the summer season made them feel about their bodies. The resounding answer was ‘not very good’, and given the sheer volume of chia infused fitspo bullshit you’ve got to wade through each Christmas and New Year, that’s hardly surprising.

There was a time I dreaded the first day back at work after the summer holidays, not because of the harsh realities of tuna scented microwaves, missing forks and workplace farts but because of the inevitable onslaught of weight related chat.

Female colleague 1: “Omg I ate so much I look gross”

Female colleague 2 (sometimes me): “No babe you look amazing, I look gross”

Female colleague 3: “You’re both so skinny and I am definitely the grossest.”

And so the circle jerk of self flagellation in exchange for compliments continued until we all hated ourselves a fraction less and could continue with our work until Easter.

None of this happens by itself. It happens mostly because of shitty articles and shitty advertising but if we can’t convince news outlets to stop republishing trash from the Daily Mail, we could start being nicer to each other and to ourselves. If you are in a position of influence in someone’s life, give them the gift of heavenly silence this festive season and don’t comment on what they eat, if they’ve gained or lost weight, or how many calories you think three plates of cheese platter has in it. Sally knows it’s a big slice of pav because she cut it herself and put it on a dinner plate instead of a saucer because the saucer was too small. If Sally later feels guilty about the pav, remind her that Jesus died so she could eat that pav (or something like that) and that you love her.

Christmas should be a time of irreverent fun and abandon for everyone, and yet, for many, it’s a time that signifies guilt and self hatred that has been internalised for so long we barely blink an eye when it’s still two weeks away from Christmas and we’ve got articles, friends and family members telling us how to get rid of that dastardly centimetre of stomach fat that may or may not accumulate from a unmercifully short period of having a good bloody time.

Your dad didn’t win three hams in three separate Christmas raffles for no reason, that’s the world telling you it’s your civic duty to eat the ham because you deserve it.

Have a Merry Muffin Christmas.

Super-wealthy internet tycoon, Trump-booster and ordinary Kiwi geezer Peter Thiel was spotted this week at an exhibition in Auckland based largely on his ideas. Who better to review the show than Peter Thiel*?

Hello fellow New Zealanders. I mean, Kiwis. That’s what we call each other, right? I mean, I know we do, because I love it here, cobber. And not just for its distance from a potential nuclear stand-off and a certain nation filled to the brim with arms being torn apart by a culture war inflamed by a man I gave money to and campaigned for. I also love New Zealand’s flora and fauna. I’ve seen a lot of it in the dozen or so days I spent here before your government generously handed me citizenship over all those other much-poorer people who actually wanted to live there pre-apocalypse. (I haven’t had time to use my investment skills to help your our economy much yet, that will come, I promise, but thank you for using your tax to make my profitable investment in Xero essentially risk-free, I really appreciate that.) All of which is to say that the grass on the hill over my underground bunker/mansion in Wanaka (soon to be the subject of the first non-fiction book by your market-approved author Eleanor Catton) is lush and green.

Regrettably I couldn’t have my citizenship ceremony in your our country. But please know we had a nice time in Santa Monica drinking the blood of super fit 19 year-olds Pinot Noir. It was definitely Pinot Noir and not young blood. I was told our fellow freedom-loving countryman Samuel Neill made it. Thank you Samuel.

Anyway, I’m in town at the moment, and heard there was an exhibition in my honor by local artist Simon Denny, who had previously made artwork about Kim Dotcom (bad – the man, I mean), government surveillance (bad – governments, I mean), and my new New Zealand passport (good – why doesn’t everyone buy get one?).

So on Saturday I found myself in the subterranean vault of an old bank looking at a painting of me, ordinary Kiwi Peter Thiel, except I was called ‘Lord Tybalt’ and instead of a questing hero for liberty and immortality in the real world, I was a questing hero for liberty and immortality in a fictional tabletop role-playing game called Ascent: Above the Nation State.

It’s, uh, actually a work of phenomenal detail. I look good. Those oil painting factories in Xiamen do a great job. I can’t imagine why anyone would bother painting any more. These guys to a better job and for less than you’d pay for a couple of tubes of oil paint.

And I love that he’s based this whole thing on one of my favourite books, The Sovereign Individual, written by my good friends James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg who used to own a big tract of land here as well (which was very partially owned by some guy Roger Douglas who, I’m told, is a universally adored hero in this great nation of yours ours).

Obviously, freedom and democracy aren’t compatible (don’t get me started on the impact of giving women the vote), so obviously the only other options is that we all become Nietzschean supermen, sovereign individuals who aren’t beholden to thieving governments and pesky laws. If someone wants to become a slave on a man-made island island economy, who am I to stop them. Surely one only ever becomes a slave because one has made a rational economic decision to do so. I mean, why else?

Anyway, the game looks great. Better than that other Game of Life one that makes it look like a good idea to go to Stanford. Ridiculous! Don’t stay in school kids. Oh, and there’s another one about me and my friends moving to New Zealand before we can go seasteading and then move to the moon and then to Mars, leaving Earth and its pollution to all the poor people who were weren’t entrepreneurial enough to earn a ticket to Mars on one of the Rocket Lab launches in a couple of decades (forget Space X – Elon’s lost his way since he got off the Trump train). That one’s good too.

Don’t talk to me about the works on the ground floor though. Were they made by the same person? There’s a lot of text in those too, mostly, I’m told based on a book by Maximilian Harris, who is apparently not rich and has no plan for immortality. It’s all about love and politics and community and government and “helping people”. Give me a break. It’s not the government’s job to help people. Protect my property rights and then get out of the way of progress, Kiwis.

There’s a Jenga game and a version of Operation as a self-portrait of the artist (which is funny, I guess). And a pile of tools. There’s lots of references to decolonisation, which is presented in the positive, but I don’t think they’ve considered what I’m planning. As a wise man once said, “Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.” That’s what’s wrong with society these days. No one’s interested in individualism. I’m not out here in New Zealand with blankets and muskets, I’m trying to colonise the sea and Mars, to liberate, to advance. And what’s wrong with that?

* Editor’s note: This is not by Peter Thiel. As a digital media publication that is eager not to be bankrupted by a Peter Thiel funded lawsuit we would repeat: this is not Peter Thiel and nor is it Hulk Hogan. It’s made up. Invented. Parody. Spoof. It is cock and it is bull. A fabrication. Not true. Not Peter Thiel. Not by Peter Thiel.