Keith Friedlander

I was told these gentlemen were very passionate about protecting women’s sports.

😍

The basic advert for DIE: Loaded - a big ol' bear witha. woman crawling out of its mouth, with a fox at her feet. Out November 12th.

DIE: Loaded has just been announced, where @stephaniehans.bsky.social and myself are back at @imagecomics.com and doing our goth jumanji thing to its fullest effect.

Out November 12th.

Lots more info over at Rascal: www.rascal.news/exclusive-di...

Consumer facing "A.i." is about triggering the excretion of a mediocre product. It's a rejection of PROCESS. Life itself is process, not fucking product. Push "A.i." on kids and you rob them of the joyful experience of life itself. I am not exaggerating.

In 2014, @zephoria.bsky.social (danah boyd) published *It’s Complicated,* an ethnographic study of why teens spend so much time on social media. Her key finding: Adults limited their free time and ability to hang out.

It’s a famous book by a major scholar. Infuriating to see her work ignored here.

I know a lot of you have already heard or read about BDS Movement's call against Microsoft, and felt weird and bad about it all, but decided to move forward as normal because of some degree of ambiguity.

"What service is Microsoft providing?"

Here it is, clear as day. A direct line to death.

Against Polling It's 90% Bullshit

I've had it with data.—
www.unpopularfront.news/p/against-po...

The cover of Silver Surfer: Parable #1, drawn by Mœbius, featuring Galactus and the Silver Surfer.

“Silver Surfer: Parable” (1988), by Stan Lee & celebrated French creator Mœbius, imagines #Galactus returning to Earth, where he’s opposed by the Surfer. Mœbius’ visualization of these iconic characters both extends & reinterprets themes from previous stories. 1/14 #FantasticFour

Today, IGN Entertainment announced that it would be laying off eight members of the IGN Creators Guild. This is 12% of our bargaining unit, and comes just days after our sister union, the Ziff Davis Creators Guild, underwent similar layoffs impacting 15% of their members. It also comes just months after our multibillion-dollar parent company, Ziff Davis, instituted a company-wide buyout that shrunk our unit numbers, with the express intent of avoiding future layoffs. And it comes just a little over one year after three of our members were laid off almost immediately after our union went public. The company has told us that the reason for this layoff stems from a Ziff Davis-mandate to cut costs despite several quarters in a row of year-over-year revenue increases, to which IGN Entertainment responded by coming for our members' jobs. This is perplexing to us, as we are told again and again that IGN Entertainment has had a tremendously successful year thus far thanks to their hard work. In just the last few months, our members have been absolutely essential to major events and livestreams, including San Diego ComicCon, Summer of Gaming, and IGN Live. Every single person impacted today was involved in and critical to the success of those events. Meanwhile, IGN Entertainment continues to spend money on costly acquisitions, only to turn around and gut those companies in the same way it is cutting away at IGN itself. For instance, last year, it acquired Gamer Network, and almost immediately laid off a number of staff critical to making those sites successful. The company has not responded to the union's questions about whether its budget for future acquisitions is being reconsidered as a cost-saving measure alongside these other apparently necessary personnel cuts. At a time when it is more necessary than ever to support its creators, IGN Entertainment is choosing to eliminate the individuals who ensure IGN remains competitive as generative AI

threatens our reach. We have been told that expert opinion pieces, original interviews, and work that leverages our staff's deep knowledge of gaming, tech, and entertainment are all essential to combating AI summarization and regurgitation of our work. Management has responded by cutting several individuals who do that exact work, as well as others whose job it is to ensure that these written and video pieces are published in a speedy manner — another component of combating AI we're told is critical. This continued cycle of repeated, aggressive cuts to our staff and being asked to do more with less, only for management to continue to spend on new business it isn't interested in sustaining cannot continue. We will enforce our interim agreement that guarantees better severance and other protections to laid off members, as well as demand additional support for those impacted. We will continue to bargain over our first contract with the aim of enshrining even better protections against further layoffs, working conditions continuously degraded by understaffing, and the encroachment of generative AI. And we won't stop fighting to ensure IGN remains the best destination for trustworthy, original, exciting, and creative work covering video games, entertainment, and tech. While IGN Entertainment management may not value us, we value one another and the incredible work we can do together. Behind the articles, videos, social posts, playlists, and maps of IGN are human beings, not just numbers on a spreadsheet to be pushed around when some number at the top isn't big enough. Without us, there is no IGN.

Today, IGN laid off eight extremely valuable members of our union and workforce via directive from our parent company, Ziff Davis. This, after two incredibly successful live events IGN Live and SDCC, and yet another corporate acquisition.

Please take a moment to read and share our full statement:

This may actually be the dumbest comment I have seen on the Internet

A fun reminder that a loss of 60,000 jobs in and around academia is ~50% more than all coal mining jobs in the entire country.

Oh, that is 100% true. Some neighbourhoods can support smaller, local businesses, but the majority of the city is designed for “drive to the closest cluster of box stores”

That definitely makes sense. I probably have different interests, but the general sense that there aren’t enough people for certain scenes to hit critical mass here is a real thing

The biggest shift for me when I moved from Toronto to Calgary was getting used to the lack of density and foot traffic. Sidewalks felt kind of empty, not nearly as many walkable neighbourhoods. Took time to adjust

BOOM. Thanks @spicercolor.bsky.social !!!

My wife, a lovely person, happy watching a dog excitedly run down the beach towards the lake: “Hey, you know what Portuguese Water Dogs love?”

Me, an asshole: “Portugal?”

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

This is correct and touches on what I've been saying fills me with dread: that there is no winning move if the move is remotely tied to the online attention economy. But because that IS the economy, you have to make the move, which then sullies non-online spaces

This exact issue has me thinking a lot about how to approach teaching students information literacy (but also just teaching in general, and what a college experience means in the context of this information landscape)

To state the obvious, Western journalists, writers, and filmmakers need to talk more about our colleagues being murdered in Gaza and the West Bank. You can do it from pure self interest if you want: every journalist murdered with impunity is a precedent which is headed in your direction

Visa and Stripe, in particular, are now at the point where their support numbers will go 'is this about steam/itchio?...' when called. So, it's working. Keep going. And don't fall for the trap of 'well, it's kinks -I- don't like for now, so it's not so bad!'

A prime example of how all of this is just using porn as the tip of the spear to broadly censor media that addresses sex and gender outside of a conservative framework

As all feminists know, if you can't talk about it, it will never happen again.

Heidi said it beautifully: The Beat runs on diversity, not because of ideology but because it reflects the world around us.

Mastercard, Visa Under Fire As Petition To 'Not Police' Legal Content Blows Up The petition addressed that MasterCard and Visa must stop censoring legal fictional content that complies with the law and platform standards.

IBT coverage. I think stuff like this might get MasterCard & Visa to buckle:

www.ibtimes.co.uk/mastercard-v...

For our next @sequentialscholars.bsky.social series, we're getting our Fantastic Four on with a focus on The Galactus Trilogy (and its retellings)! #FantasticFour #Galactus #SilverSurfer #ComicsStudies

Thread nicely highlights exactly how Harvard will fold to Trump: administrators all to happy to put an end to academic freedom for “centralized” control

Well said by @ryanenos.bsky.social.

“It is honor that causes people to do the irrational things that are good—that separates the fighters from those who flee in the face of danger. Unfortunately, this sort of honor is not something on which we select for our institutional leaders.”

Ted's thread brings up so many tremendous points about the erosion of instructor agency as the LMS perniciously adopts a bunch of AI. The LMS is a fascinating piece of edtech. It's simultaneously so mediocre and yet so powerful for organizing instructional logic. Essential, but inadequate. (1/7)

Are Micro Lines Proving That Less Can Sometimes Be More? - SKTCHD Whether you're talking Energon, Ultimate, or Absolute, self-contained universes are hot right now. Let's talk about them.

Micro lines like Absolute DC, Ultimate Marvel, and Skybound's Energon Universe have dominated in comic shops for the past while. But what's leading to that success?

I talked with retailers about what's driving these lines to the top.

This feature from last year is open to non-subscribers.