autumn wright 🍂

Andrea Long Chu on Thomas Chatterton Williams is as good as you'd expect

Zero Tolerance Five years after the George Floyd protests, many liberals blame ‘wokeness’ for sowing intolerance and suppressing open debate, Andrea Long Chu writes. So why can’t they handle being disagreed with?

Five years after the George Floyd protests, many liberals blame ‘wokeness’ for sowing intolerance and suppressing open debate, Andrea Long Chu writes. So why can’t they handle being disagreed with?

looking at the animation director who did key animation on clannad like oh yeah careers and stable employment exist for a reason

City The Animation Episode 5....remember this man's name

gonna tell people i was the 69th subscriber of Unwinnable Monthly, the best monthly magazine on the internet.

The Tea App Markets Itself As a Safe Whisper Network. It's Just More Digital Surveillance The biggest red flag is that the Tea app seems to be an attempt to quick-fix on an individual level what is a structural problem — that is, misogyny — via surveillance culture.

checked in on heterosexuality. an app trying to be a global public "whisper network" for cishet women's dating experiences subject to right-wing hacks, it turns out, can't work. on heteropessimism, the politics of gossip, Love Island, the Coldplay kiss cam, and surveillance culture @teenvogue.com

Haley MacLean won't be attending the MinnMax community meetup this Saturday because US Customs wouldn't let her into the country from Canada because she might appear in a video...

Yes, we're also furious at the US government. Send some love to @haleyfax.bsky.social!

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:

David Hogg got a lil too unwieldy but luckily Dems can make up a person who didn’t survive a school shooting to rally voters for tepid gun reform.

From @theguardian.com: The Israeli government knows how much food is needed in Gaza. It has been calibrating hunger levels for decades, initially calculating shipments to exert pressure while avoiding starvation.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

and then half of the answers are just hagiography and personal history

(really though i do hope they figure out how to implement more flora and fauna in a way that makes the environments feel more dynamic/lively, it's all very weightless in 123, but like i'm not gonna got dictate what world that should exist in like most of this video is concerned with)

YouTube video by SparksOpus What Content Creators Want From Xenoblade 4 (ft. 16 Youtubers)

no one asked me what I want from xenoblade 4 but if I was making requests it would probably have more to do with what the buttons your pressing or joystick your moving for 80 hours feels like than most of these answers

One must imagine the game critic happy

I was on another podcast! Talked about the BDS boycott of Microsoft and shared some of my own experience learning to act with solidarity to anti-Zionist causes.

Microsoft and Xbox aren’t just destroying the video game industry. They’re destroying the world. An entity that profits from the eradication of one group will eventually come for us. We need to stand in solidarity and unite against our common enemy. Boycott Xbox.

are games art? idk but here's my essay about disco elysium some have called "the best one except Emily's other essay about disco elysium"

there's like whole fields of study about this but you'd have to read books to know

I didn’t take any pics but several (games) critics agree it was good guacamole

I’m bringing guacamole to the discourse and getting an ice cream sandwich after

No but really I know we are all in this for the love of the game cus we certainly aren’t for the pay but “you’d need to pay me to argue about this” is all I got left in this job

*is judging you for discoursing about an RPG after they got back from a picnic in the park that was mostly everyone talking about their favorite maligned RPG voice* disco discourse sunday

If you work at Microsoft and are participating in No Azure for Apartheid, I'd love to interview you as an anonymous source. My email is in my bio: www.rockpapershotgun.com/authors/edwin-evans-thirlwell

I read Hiroshima this year. The bombings were worse than anything I’d ever been taught. The malice, though, looks very familiar:

Jane Mayer on John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” His monumental report changed history, journalism, and me.

Link: www.newyorker.com/magazine/tak...

logo for the podcast Select and Start

A NEW episode of Select and Start is out NOW!

Microsoft aiding the genocide in Gaza. The BDS movement has called for a boycott of Xbox.

@theautumnwright.bsky.social joins me to talk about what a boycott means and why we need solidarity.

Listen now:
select-and-start.pinecast.co/episode/f457...

That’s my comptroller!

Found the swagger Eric Adams kept talking about

They brought out Brad Lander before Gogol Bordello to talk about being punk rock…