#media industry layoffs

[iww-gnv]

The company — which was once valued at $5.7 billion in its go-go years — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last year and in July 2023 closed a $350 million sale to a group of its former lenders, Fortress Investment Group, Soros Fund Management and Monroe Capital. Last fall, Vice made another round of layoffs after several Vice News shows failed to get renewed, and consolidated its five operating divisions down to two. After those cuts, Vice Media had over 900 employees worldwide; at one point, it had about 3,000.

[jcmarchi]

Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora Cover Story And Talos Principle 2 | GI Show

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/avatar-frontiers-of-pandora-cover-story-and-talos-principle-2-gi-show/

Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora Cover Story And Talos Principle 2 | GI Show

In this week’s episode of The Game Informer Show, Alex and Marcus break down our latest cover story featuring Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and chat about their multiple play sessions thus far. However, prior to our cover story discussion, we call out this week’s layoffs at Ubisoft, during which the company laid off over a hundred employees. Later in the show, we chat with Charles about his positive Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 review before diving into a new puzzle game, The Talos Principle 2, and Fortnite OG, the popular battle royale’s latest season that’s smashing records.

Watch Or Listen To The Game Informer Show:

[embedded content]

Follow us on social media: Alex Van Aken (@itsVanAken), Marcus Stewart (@MarcusStewart7), Charles Harte (@ChuckDuck365)

The Game Informer Show is a weekly gaming podcast covering the latest video game news, industry topics, exclusive reveals, and reviews. Join host Alex Van Aken every Thursday to chat about your favorite games – past and present – with Game Informer staff, developers, and special guests from around the industry. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Matt Storm, the freelance audio editor for The Game Informer Show, edited this episode. Matt is an experienced podcast host and producer who’s been speaking into a microphone for over a decade. You should listen to Matt’s shows like the “Fun” And Games Podcast and Reignite, a BioWare-focused podcast. 

The Game Informer Show – Podcast Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Intro

00:03:10 – Ubisoft Layoffs

00:06:12 – Cover Story: Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora

00:43:23 – Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 Review

01:00:30 – The Talos Principle 2

01:21:18 – Fortnite OG

01:31:16 – Housekeeping and Listener Questions

[toshootforthestars]

ALT Text:

Every few months another cultural institution gets trashed by some conglomerate for short term profit and loads of talented, hard working people lose their jobs. We mourn it and we move on, but this world is getting remade by those with no interest in art, culture, or people.

It's incredible that, when I graduated high school and looked at college, journalism was still a thriving career choice. Now just over 20 years later it's as devalued as ice delivery after the refrigerator was invented. But crucially, it's not being replaced by anything better.

(third panel is a troll claiming journalists are themselves responsible for being unemployed, allegedly for choosing not to create any value)

(source)

[kdinjenzen]

People on social media posting that we’re experiencing a “VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY CRASH” are all fundamentally wrong.

A market crash, for any industry, is caused by a sudden and significant decline in overall market value.

The last several years, including this one, has seen a surge in not only video game popularity but also revenue and value rising basically across the board.

Literally there are more people playing and buying games now than EVER BEFORE.

So it is NOT a crash in the slightest. The games industry as a whole is making TONS of money.

The problem is that, since 2020, the amount of actual players in the game of BUSINESS for gaming has shrunk with Sony, Microsoft, Embracer, etc all buying up countless other studios then laying people off and/or closing those studios all together.

Developers of all kinds in the AAA market now have less people on their teams, less time to make games, less money paid to them, and have not been able to recover from any burnout of crunch which has only gotten worse since all these closures and layoffs.

It’s not a market crash. It’s market manipulation on the part of major corporations who don’t (and likely never) even valued the art of game development in the first place.

[reportwire]

Report: Elon Musk plans to cut 75% of Twitter workforce

Report: Elon Musk plans to cut 75% of Twitter workforce

SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk plans to lay off most of Twitter’s workforce if and when he becomes owner of the social media company, according to a report Thursday by The Washington Post. Musk has told prospective investors in his Twitter purchase that he plans to cut nearly 75% of Twitter’s employee base of 7,500 workers, leaving the company with a skeleton crew, according to the report. The…

[tangibletechnomancy]

The reason I took interest in AI as an art medium is that I've always been interested in experimenting with novel and unconventional art media - I started incorporating power tools into a lot of my physical processes younger than most people were even allowed to breathe near them, and I took to digital art like a duck to water when it was the big, relatively new, controversial thing too, so really this just seems like the logical next step. More than that, it's exciting - it's not every day that we just invent an entirely new never-before-seen art medium! I have always been one to go fucking wild for that shit.

Which is, ironically, a huge part of why I almost reflexively recoil at how it's used in the corporate world: because the world of business, particularly the entertainment industry, has what often seems like less than zero interest in appreciating it as a novel medium.

And I often wonder how much less that would be the case - and, by extension, how much less vitriolic the discussion around it would be, and how many fewer well-meaning people would be falling for reactionary mythologies about where exactly the problems lie - if it hadn't reached the point of...at least an illusion of commercial viability, at exactly the moment it did.

See, the groundwork was laid in 2020, back during covid lockdowns, when we saw a massive spike in people relying on TV, games, books, movies, etc. to compensate for the lack of outdoor, physical, social entertainment. This was, seemingly, wonderful for the whole industry - but under late-stage capitalism, it was as much of a curse as it was a gift. When industries are run by people whose sole brain process is "line-go-up", tiny factors like "we're not going to be in lockdown forever" don't matter. CEOs got dollar signs in their eyes. Shareholders demanded not only perpetual growth, but perpetual growth at this rate or better. Even though everyone with an ounce of common sense was screaming "this is an aberration, this is not sustainable" - it didn't matter. The business bros refused to believe it. This was their new normal, they were determined to prove -

And they, predictably, failed to prove it.

So now the business bros are in a pickle. They're beholden to the shareholders to do everything within their power to maintain the infinite growth they promised, in a world with finite resources. In fact, by precedent, they're beholden to this by law. Fiduciary duty has been interpreted in court to mean that, given the choice between offering a better product and ensuring maximum returns for shareholders, the latter MUST be a higher priority; reinvesting too much in the business instead of trying to make the share value increase as much as possible, as fast as possible, can result in a lawsuit - that a board member or CEO can lose, and have lost before - because it's not acting in the best interest of shareholders. If that unsustainable explosive growth was promised forever, all the more so.

And now, 2-3-4 years on, that impossibility hangs like a sword of Damocles over the heads of these media company CEOs. The market is fully saturated; the number of new potential customers left to onboard is negligible. Some companies began trying to "solve" this "problem" by violating consumer privacy and charging per household member, which (also predictably) backfired because those of us who live in reality and not statsland were not exactly thrilled about the concept of being told we couldn't watch TV with our own families. Shareholders are getting antsy, because their (however predictably impossible) infinite lockdown-level profits...aren't coming, and someone's gotta make up for that, right? So they had already started enshittifying, making excuses for layoffs, for cutting employee pay, for duty creep, for increasing crunch, for lean-staffing, for tightening turnarounds-

And that was when we got the first iterations of AI image generation that were actually somewhat useful for things like rapid first drafts, moodboards, and conceptualizing.

Lo! A savior! It might as well have been the digital messiah to the business bros, and their eyes turned back into dollar signs. More than that, they were being promised that this...both was, and wasn't art at the same time. It was good enough for their final product, or if not it would be within a year or two, but it required no skill whatsoever to make! Soon, you could fire ALL your creatives and just have Susan from accounting write your scripts and make your concept art with all the effort that it takes to get lunch from a Star Trek replicator!

This is every bit as much bullshit as the promise of infinite lockdown-level growth, of course, but with shareholders clamoring for the money they were recklessly promised, executives are looking for anything, even the slightest glimmer of a new possibility, that just might work as a life raft from this sinking ship.

So where are we now? Well, we're exiting the "fucking around" phase and entering "finding out". According to anecdotes I've read, companies are, allegedly, already hiring prompt engineers (or "prompters" - can't give them a job title that implies there's skill or thought involved, now can we, that just might imply they deserve enough money to survive!)...and most of them not only lack the skill to manually post-process their works, but don't even know how (or perhaps aren't given access) to fully use the software they specialize in, being blissfully unaware of (or perhaps not able/allowed to use) features such as inpainting or img2img. It has been observed many times that LLMs are being used to flood once-reputable information outlets with hallucinated garbage. I can verify - as can nearly everyone who was online in the aftermath of the Glasgow Willy Wonka Dashcon Experience - that the results are often outright comically bad.

To anyone who was paying attention to anything other than please-line-go-up-faster-please-line-go-please (or buying so heavily into reactionary mythologies about why AI can be dangerous in industry that they bought the tech companies' false promises too and just thought it was a bad thing), this was entirely predictable. Unfortunately for everyone in the blast radius, common sense has never been an executive's strong suit when so much money is on the line.

Much like CGI before it, what we have here is a whole new medium that is seldom being treated as a new medium with its own unique strengths, but more often being used as a replacement for more expensive labor, no matter how bad the result may be - nor, for that matter, how unjust it may be that the labor is so much cheaper.

And it's all because of timing. It's all because it came about in the perfect moment to look like a life raft in a moment of late-stage capitalist panic. Any port in a storm, after all - even if that port is a non-Euclidean labyrinth of soggy, rotten botshit garbage.

Any port in a storm, right? ...right?

All images generated using Simple Stable, under the Code of Ethics of Are We Art Yet?

[cheritzteam]

[Cheritz] Answering Customer Questions regarding the use of A.I. in <The Ssum> Season 2 and More

Hello, this is Cheritz.

Some of the photos of our newest Ssumone, June, have not been polished enough to the game standard, and we will be updating them as soon as possible. We apologize for the disappointment caused by this issue.

On that note, we would like to clarify the topic on the use of A.I. in art in June’s photos.

First of all, we express our sympathies to the fan base who have been worried about the recent issue over the use of A.I. in games and movies, as it has been linked to copyright issues, job security, and more.

As you may have already been aware, <The Ssum> had to showcase an unparalleled amount of text and images to create a long-term romantic experience for you, and in Season 1, we used real-world images and free stock images to achieve the goal. While keeping the subscription price as low as possible in relation to production costs, our team have been working on the game with a limited number of staff to make <The Ssum> viable in the gaming market on its own.

In Season 2, we decided to apply the 2D art style to meet the feedback received by the fan base, we used retouched images sourced by A.I. which got data exclusively from a commercially available sources of packs to avoid any conflict with copyright issues for the art work that do not involve characters’ faces.

It was never the case for our team to replace the art staff with machines, but rather because most illustrators in the game industry have preferences on drawing main character illustrations over backgrounds or objects. For that reason, the art team was more focused on drawing 2023 commemorative artwork for <Mystic Messenger> and SD images on social media. Also, because Cheritz has been running four-day work weeks since the start of 2023, there was an internal consensus to tap into A.I. to balance work and life for staff. There were no cuts or layoffs of art staff for Season 2 projects.

The team feel terrible about unpleasant surprises some of you may have gone through by us not announcing this before the release.

Additionally, we have learned that some of the users feel disappointed that the new character in <The Ssum> has a connection to one of the main characters of <Mystic Messenger>.

The team has been constantly getting requests for 2D-art style images and involvements of <Mystic Messenger> characters, and more text content to <The Ssum> since its release. Our team is aware of the users’ support for <The Ssum>, however, we did not expect the new change would sadden some of our loyal fan base.

We will do our best to make it obvious that the launch of June is not an extension of <Mystic Messenger>, but rather as an extension of the launch of <The Ssum>, where the games from the same company share a universe but are on their own game systems and charms.

In addition to the currently released June, we have a new character currently under development, and we plan to release the rest of Season 1 in 2024 with some of the improvements applied.

We understand this clarification would not satisfy everyone, and we feel awful that these changes made some of you feel disappointed. We will pay close attention to the negative impact that the A.I. has brought to the gaming industry, and we would like to find a viable way to reach out to you through our games.

The team would like to thank you for your continued support of <The Ssum> and other Cheritz games, and we truly appreciate our fans’ feedback.

We hope this announcement has made your heart a little lighter and given you clarity.

 *To clarify rumors about the author of <Mystic Messenger>, please let us address it as well here. The main writer of <Mystic Messenger> is Ms. Ri, the founder of Cheritz, as revealed in the Otakon video. Ms. Ri is also the writer of <Dandelion>, <Nameless>, and is the main writer of <The Ssum> Season 2.

Thank you.

-Cheritz Team

[dailyadventureprompts]

Expanded universes really are the final frontier of franchise based storytelling aren't they? The ultimate sign that the brand managers have finally squeezed out the artists and twisted things into a state of maximum profitability.

Crossovers and callbacks can be fun, continuous crossovers and callbacks make the story into a slurry. Canon and what if's and reboots all ground up and served in a trough for the undiscerning consumer to mire in. It's bland, it's exhausting, it's pointless.

Big companies and studios are risk averse, and the profit seeking wisdom steers them away from niche works of art and towards wide appeal content. Why risk money on a movie/game that only a fraction of people will love when you can spread that engagement out across a dozen different products that are just good enough to keep people invested in your extended universe, whether from genuine fandom or just cultural fomo?

Marvel feels ubiquitous as Kleenex doesn't it? It's always there in the movie theatre/store, slightly cheaper offbrands right beside it. While individual works within the marvel universe might be genuinely good in their own right their quality is secondary to their purpose in perpetuating the brand and keeping it relevant.

People like familiarity, and if it's a safe bet for you as a consumer to have a pretty okay time in exchange for your hardearned dollars then it's a safe bet for the investors to receive their quarterly returns. It's no mistake that Disney, the company that owns Marvel does most of its business in theme parks: entertainment on an industrial scale. Just like their movies the rides are made to give you and everyone else who bought a ticket a scientifically optimized amount of fun and then move you along so that that the next batch of riders can have an identical experience.

It's value production as efficient as an assembly line or slaughter house, completely atomized and divested of any trace of the individual for the sake of maximum profitability. The figured out a way to sell you your own fandoms like they sell you happymeals, endless iterations of a product just this side of bad but convenient enough that you never need to go without.

I don't blame anyone for liking things, just like I don't blame people for wanting a quick burger in the middle of a long day. Our minds need entertainment just like our body needs calories, and profit seeking conglomerates exploit that need as they always have. What irks me is the fact that even outside of the commercials I feel like I am being sold something, like the movies and games I actually enjoy are being supplanted by feature length billboards that only serve to advertise the next instalment. The desire to find out what happens next is a powerful thing in media, and that desire is being exploited by expanded universes the same way it's exploited by DLC that contains the "true ending".

You can tell it isn't sustainable.. McDonald's is so inflated in price it's competing with actual restaurants, the gaming Industry guts itself with layoffs every quarter, and Disney's competitors are producing entire movies and tv shows only to destroy them for tax befits. The cracks have been showing for a while but I have no idea what shape the landscape is going to take after the dam gives.

[mckitterick]

The End Is Near: "News" organizations using AI to create content, firing human writers

source: X

source: X

source: X

an example "story" now comes with this warning:

A new byline showed up Wednesday on io9: “Gizmodo Bot.” The site’s editorial staff had no input or advance notice of the new AI-generator, snuck in by parent company G/O Media.

G/O Media’s AI-generated articles are riddled with errors and outdated information, and block reader comments.

“As you may have seen today, an AI-generated article appeared on io9,” James Whitbrook, deputy editor at io9 and Gizmodo, tweeted. “I was informed approximately 10 minutes beforehand, and no one at io9 played a part in its editing or publication.”

Whitbrook sent a statement to G/O Media along with “a lengthy list of corrections.” In part, his statement said, “The article published on io9 today rejects the very standards this team holds itself to on a daily basis as critics and as reporters. It is shoddily written, it is riddled with basic errors; in closing the comments section off, it denies our readers, the lifeblood of this network, the chance to publicly hold us accountable, and to call this work exactly what it is: embarrassing, unpublishable, disrespectful of both the audience and the people who work here, and a blow to our authority and integrity.”

He continued, “It is shameful that this work has been put to our audience and to our peers in the industry as a window to G/O’s future, and it is shameful that we as a team have had to spend an egregious amount of time away from our actual work to make it clear to you the unacceptable errors made in publishing this piece.”

According to the Gizmodo Media Group Union, affiliated with WGA East, the AI effort has “been pushed by” G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller, recently hired editorial director Merrill Brown, and deputy editorial director Lea Goldman.

In 2019, Spanfeller and private-equity firm Great Hill Partners acquired Gizmodo Media Group (previously Gawker Media) and The Onion.

The Writers Guild of America issued a blistering condemnation of G/O Media’s use of artificial intelligence to generate content.

“These AI-generated posts are only the beginning. Such articles represent an existential threat to journalism. Our members are professionally harmed by G/O Media’s supposed ‘test’ of AI-generated articles.”

WGA added, “But this fight is not only about members in online media. This is the same fight happening in broadcast newsrooms throughout our union. This is the same fight our film, television, and streaming colleagues are waging against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) in their strike.”

The union, in its statement, said it “demands an immediate end of AI-generated articles on G/O Media sites,” which include The A.V. Club, Deadspin, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Jezebel, Kotaku, The Onion, Quartz, The Root, and The Takeout.

but wait, there's more:

Just weeks after news broke that tech site CNET was secretly using artificial intelligence to produce articles, the company is doing extensive layoffs that include several longtime employees, according to multiple people with knowledge of the situation. The layoffs total 10 percent of the public masthead.

*

Greedy corporate sleazeballs using artificial intelligence are replacing humans with cost-free machines to barf out garbage content.

This is what end-stage capitalism looks like: An ouroborus of machines feeding machines in a downward spiral, with no room for humans between the teeth of their hungry gears.

Anyone who cares about human life, let alone wants to be a writer, should be getting out the EMP tools and burning down capitalist infrastructure right now before it's too late.

[piinfeathers]

trying so hard to maintain my online silly little goose persona during the massive amounts of layoffs in my industry while every social media site actively loots me and my peers

[iww-gnv]

It’s not just the technology and healthcare sectors getting hit by layoffs to start 2024. The media industry is continuing to see the kind of down-sizing that hit the sector hard last year. News companies in particular are being pared down, once again raising concerns about the future of journalism. The US media sector shed about 840 jobs in January. While that’s not a lot in the grand scheme of the American economy, it’s about 11% higher than the number of layoffs over the same period last year. The news sub-sector of the media industry — which includes digital, broadcast and print journalism — has been hit especially hard. Job cuts at news companies in January surged a staggering 1,660% from December 2023, and they made up the majority of all layoffs in the media world.

[jcmarchi]

Lightforge Games Suffers Significant Layoffs, D&D Inspired Project ORCS Development Paused

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/lightforge-games-suffers-significant-layoffs-dd-inspired-project-orcs-development-paused/

Lightforge Games Suffers Significant Layoffs, D&D Inspired Project ORCS Development Paused

Lightforge Games is indefinitely pausing work on its upcoming RPG Project O.R.C.S. The team has been reduced to a skeleton crew as the few remaining staff members look to determine their next course of action.

In a message posted to the game’s website and social media channels yesterday, Lightforge cites a lack of publisher funding as the reason it no longer has the means to continue work on Project O.R.C.S. To minimize any prolonged struggle, the team decided to immediately pull the plug. 

“We’re making this call now so that we can provide support to our wonderful team of devs: providing them with time to stabilize, working together to help folks as they re-enter the job market, and finding new positions to continue our passion for making games,” says Lightforge in the statement. 

In the coming days, the team will shut down its Discord and social channels. After that, the remaining staff will “determine what a viable path may be for the project and studio.”

[embedded content]

Lightforge was formed in 2020 as a remote-only studio made up of former Blizzard and Epic (mainly Fortnite) developers. According to its LinkedIn page, it hired between 11 and 50 staff members with a goal to “change how the world plays RPGs.”

Project O.R.C.S. was Lightforge’s first project, first revealed only three months ago in February. The ambitious RPG aimed to combine world-building and collaborative storytelling of tabletop role-playing games with traditional co-op gameplay. Players crafted their fantasy world using a built-in game editor and then embarked on quests within it. It was more or less a “build-your-own Dungeons & Dragons”, dice rolls and all, hence why “O.R.C.S.” stood for “Online Roleplaying with Collaborative Storytelling”. With the game all but canceled, it’s unclear if Project O.R.C.S. will ever see the light of day. 

Unfortunately, Lightforge isn’t the only small studio to suffer from the drying well of video game investment funding. Deliver Us Mars developer Keoken Interactive was recently forced to lay off nearly its entire staff for the same reason. The industry has been a wounded state over the past year and a half, with Microsoft shuttering Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin earlier this week and over 10,000 layoffs occurring this year alone. 

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Unifor is outraged about today’s announcement from Bell Canada Enterprises Inc. (BCE Inc.) to cut 4,800 jobs – 9% of its workforce – affecting 800 of the union’s members, while deliberately putting shareholders ahead of workers with increased dividend payouts. “This is absolutely devastating news for thousands of workers and their families. Adding insult to injury, the company is conducting this mass layoff while increasing dividends to shareholders and buying back shares,” said Unifor National President Lana Payne.  “Executives and shareholders are doing just fine while our members are being thrown out of work, including once again in the media. Our union does not accept the use of government policy changes as a smokescreen to justify the company’s actions,” said Payne. Bell has been a beneficiary of the Government of Canada’s support for the domestic telecommunications and media industries, allowing the company to become a telecommunications giant in Canada.

Continue Reading

Tagging @politicsofcanada

[kdinjenzen]

On the whole SE thing, I have a question because I agree with you fully about the AI crap, but I have been full hyperfixation excited for Rebirth, which is saying a lot because life has been soul sucking shit and mustering enthusiasm for anything has been an uphill battle. Where is the line for supporting a cause you firmly believe in, and self indulgence that contradicts that for the sake of personal pleasure? It feels like I either stick to the fight and let something positive to me go or ignore it for myself, which just feels selfish and wrong. This has been eating at me since that news dropped and I don't know if there is a right answer or if any of this even makes sense outside of my own mad rambling. Any input?

13,000+ people were laid off just within the video game industry last year. All the big corps who did those layoffs said “no, Ai won’t replace anyone” and then announced heavy dealings with Ai generated writing, art, animation, etc.

Over 13,000 people… and that’s just in video games.

That’s not counting other branches of the entertainment industry which have also said “no, Ai won’t replace anyone” and then also announced they’d be dipping into Ai generated writing, art, animation, etc after doing massive layoffs.

And if you’re thinking “Ai isn’t that far along” - Disney used Ai generated content for the intro to one of its Marvel Disney+ series last year, SE already has Ai artwork in their games and in their promotional materials, and Valve now allows generative Ai (artwork, animations, assets, voices, etc) developed games on their platform.

The only thing businesses, corporations, CEOs/Owners, etc understand is money. If you talk big talk on social media and can’t back that talk up by not buying a thing, they’ll just use the money you gave them to prove you wrong.

The generative Ai companies have already shown their whole ass by having massive lists leaked of artists, animators, voice actors, musicians, etc that they’ve stolen from. You can’t even pretend “well maybe it’s actually ethical and they asked permission” when there are lawsuits from artists of all kinds, bug and small, trying to take these generative Ai companies down for outright stealing their work to train their Ai program.

There’s a whole world of games, movies, books, etc out there to enjoy that don’t steal people’s works and cut people’s jobs to make “quick and easy content for cheap” - find something different to enjoy.

But, quite frankly, anytime I speak my piece about ethical treatment of workers I’m either ignored or harassed so it honestly feels like it doesn’t matter what I say despite dealing with shit like this from multiple sides of the industry and from people for 17 years.

So you do what you wanna do, you’re a whole person yourself and can make your own choices and draw your own line in the sand.

However, not only was I one of those affected TWICE by layoffs because of this, but countless of my friends and colleagues were also let go in favor of building cheaper things with Ai.

[mysteryanimator]

Myst rambles about animation longer then they should + their love for Nocturne whoops

I keep thinking about the animation industry as of late again, all the layoffs, all the animators looking for jobs. So I might just be speaking to a void right now. I have not experienced any of the drought so I just may look doe-eyed trying to break into a disaster zone but I’m just here to offer that newbie perspective, as naive as it may seem. I’m gonna try and keep this short (whoops a lie) but if you can see where this is going, this is just going to be me talking about the impact Nocturne has on me, aka rewriting the abhorrent Twitter thread/Instagram post where I free-formed without checking my grammar. 

As someone who is pursuing animation, I have watched A LOT of animated shows growing up, I swear it was the only medium I did watch growing up. I made scuffed animatics and animations of the current show I was watching, not realizing they counted as love letters to the media. Yet, the animation industry scared me. It was so elusive and mysterious. The bar seemed too high, even when I decided to choose to study it at university. It seemed so out of reach.

Until Nocturne. 

Castlevania Nocturne practically humanized the industry to me. These people were fans of their own creations. They breathe life into them. All the character sheets that popped into my timeline, the rough cuts, all the silly memes. Something that seemed impossible became possible within an instant. My skills at the time were not what they are now by any means, hell even now I could be better, but, I looked at that show and went “I can do that. If they can do it, maybe there’s a chance I could do something like that.” I think it helps I am at a stage of my life where I can consciously consume content and have the ability to break it down.

Also, let's be so honest, it's combined with the fact that I fell in love with Mizrak and Olrox's plot... you get a very insane person. Passionate but insane. Who spends their entire day going frame by frame reanalysing 10 minutes of an episode? ME. Despite this, I have learned so much more than all my years at university have given me. I have become a genuinely better animator and a better artist. My understanding of animation finally clicked. I knew I was built for animation but didn’t know how I fit into it. I’m constantly on YouTube, absorbing information from YouTube channels like Dong Chang, wandering around Discord Sakuga servers/twitter, and taking notes. I'm still worried about bothering other people in the industry/more technically skilled than me but I think I'm getting slowly better and going "Hey I love your work! How did you achieve x/y/z? OH!? Can you explain what this means?" because again, these are just people like you and me.

So every single Mizrak and Olrox animation I’ve made has not only been a love letter to the show, and crew of people who put their heart and soul into making this, but these animations have been a testament to my skills. Take it like a capsule of how I’m improving every month. I will admit I sometimes get weirded out of the fan content I make, albeit a combination of low confidence, and imposter syndrome, and now my animation style has just become very synonymous with the nocturne style. These ‘cons’ however do get outweighed by the pros of it all. Finally finding a style that I find goes hand in hand with my illustration style (and I can't wait to see how I can evolve it into my own) and the bouts of self-doubt are vast and temporary. I am super grateful that I can look at my work in times of doubt and go “Literally anything is possible, let me put on a show that explores this certain animation principle/story beat in a particular way, and let me study it!"

It's super embarrassing to admit but Nocturne has genuinely changed the trajectory of my life. I am genuinely a whole new person with such a different outlook on animation because of this show. Yes, I am creative through and through, you cannot separate that from my blood, but Nocturne solidified that “You are exactly where you need to be”. The industry is in shambles, with people now reaching a year+ jobless, and contracts are ending, yet, if Nocturne genuinely wasn’t released at the end of September, I do not think any of this would've clicked.

(Backed up by the very fact I am/was directing a short and running a genuine studio when Nocturne came out. I was very unconfident at the time and doubted myself a lot in private since it was my first time doing any of this. This show helped me solidify a new perspective on how to run things! How to be a stronger animator!)

Now again, this is such a crazy thing to say now. I'm watching people from the show I love have their contracts ending/being laid off since last year. I swear every second tweet on my tl is of an animator desperately looking for a job or on the verge of giving up. Me, Mystery, is an animator with no skin in the game, so I don't truly know what the Western animation industry looks like from the inside besides what I get from social media. Let’s be honest, for all you know, I just animate two characters kissing constantly. That is merely the surface of its impact. HEY, I MAY DELETE THIS B4 ANYONE SEES BECAUSE THIS IS KINDA EMBARASSING, the industry sucks right now. People are losing their jobs, so what I’m saying may not matter, but also I think it does maybe? I think this is just a unique perspective to where people are losing faith and hope in the animation, I re-sparked my thanks to Nocturne. Who knows, I may lose this spark as I go further into trying to break into the industry once I'm out of uni, but I’ll take what I have now and ride this new bout of inspiration and creativity. I want to tell stories. I want to bring life to still images. I know it's possible because Nocturne exists. These are real people who exist, who put their love and care into this show. Passion like that is inspiring.

I also somehow can't escape these people reading this, so if you have made it this far- thank you for making this show the way you have! Thank you to all the people both still in it and to others who have had to part with Nocturne. I will admit I have gone through the credits and made sure I could try and learn from everyone's work despite how unique/different each role is.

I hope my grammar is better than last time HAHAH, the technicality of English isn't a strong suit of mine but fingers crossed that the ideas/content are still passable.

[ranidspace]

So, this is a scary headline so we're gonna read it closely.

TechCrunch managed to get an internal company memo that details a few "strategic corrections" for the myriad Mozilla products. Mozilla has a "mozilla.social" Mastodon instance that the memo says originally intended to "effectively shape the future of social media," but the company now says the social group will get a "much smaller team." Mozilla says it will also "reduce our investments" in Mozilla VPN, Firefox Relay, and something the memo calls "Online Footprint Scrubber" (that sounds like Mozilla Monitor?). It's also shutting down "Mozilla Hubs," which was a 3D virtual world it launched in 2018—that's right, there was also a metaverse project! The memo says that "demand has moved away from 3D virtual worlds" and that "this is impacting all industry players." The company is also cutting jobs at "MozProd," its infrastructure team.

This is specifically saying that they're just downsizing teams which are focused on things which are NOT the main firefox browser. quote "It now looks like Mozilla may refocus on Firefox once more". layoffs suck, yeah, but firefox doesnt seem to be affected. Mozilla's a small company and firefox is getting bigger, and it looks like this is just a move to shift focus away from the side projects

As for the AI thing, the AI company they bought about was simply one that used machine learning to detect fake product reviews. (what i would say is a good use of machine learning.). "Generative AI" is said thought, and that concerns me a bit, but there's one thing about Firefox that's makes me think it's gonna be fine:

no matter what it is, you can turn it off.

"Pocket" is the weird mozilla thing about saving news articles for later and it recommends you news. you can just turn that off. The home page has sponsored links. you can turn them off. nearly everything about firefox you can just turn it off and ignore forever. if it is some awful AI bullshit, an annoying feature, something whatever it is, you can turn it off. I think firefox would STILL be the best option even if it's worst case. for a private browser, the only other option really is Brave, which is LOADED with web3 and cryptocurrency features and we're at the same problem here, but you cant turn those off completely, you can only just ignore them.

Also it might not even be part of the browser itself, just rather a single website or an extra service that you'll forget exists and then like 2 months later you hear it shuts down. idk.

Let's wait until firefox makes an actual public statement about this shit before anything becuase we literally know nothing. it's likely they're already getting some awful feedback and this may not even make the light of day.

Mozilla is a non-profit organization. i highly doubt they're firing people to replace them with AI. but again. wait and see what they say publically because it's hard to tell