Zaz (they/them)

United Videogame Workers-CWA Statement on Proposed Electronic Arts Buyout October 15, 2025 NATIONWIDE — The following statement is from United Videogame Workers-CWA Local 9433. The recently proposed acquisition of Electronic Arts (EA) by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia and private equity firms, including Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, will further concentrate power and wealth into the hands of a few gatekeepers while doing nothing to address the concerns of players and workers. EA is not a struggling company. With annual revenues reaching $7.5 billion and $1 billion in profit each year, EA is one of the largest video game developers and publishers in the world. EA’s success has been entirely driven by tens of thousands of EA workers whose creativity, skill, and innovation made EA worth buying in the first place. Yet we, the very people who will be jeopardized as a result of this deal, were not represented at all when this buyout was negotiated or discussed. We are particularly worried about the future of our studios that are arbitrarily deemed ‘less profitable’ but whose contributions to the video game industry define EA’s reputation. Since 2022, an estimated 40,000 video game workers have already lost their jobs due to mass layoffs at AAA and indie studios alike. As reported in Game Developer, this deal will result in EA having to finance nearly $20 billion in debt—who will be spared, which corners will executives cut, and what studios will be sacrificed in order for that to happen? If jobs are lost or studios are closed due to this deal, that would be a choice, not a necessity, made to pad investors’ pockets—not to strengthen the company. Every time private equity or billionaire investors take a studio private, workers lose visibility, transparency, and power. Decisions that shape our jobs, our art, and our futures are made behind closed doors by executives who have never written a line of code, built worlds, or supported live services. We are…

Please read our statement regarding the proposed Electronic Arts buyout. We refuse to let corporate greed decide the future of our industry.

cwa-union.org/news/release...

If you are in the PNW and freaking about all the recent announcements and feeling like there is nothing you can do?

Donate to local legal resources for immigrants. The legal defense needs to move quickly in these cases before the defendants are moved. No Actblue!

@nwirp.bsky.social

www.nwirp.org

The last 48 hours have shown why people have stopped relying on legacy journalism and have migrated to independent journalists in droves.

The benefit of legacy journalism is supposed to be “editors” and “factchecking” and they can’t even get that right in a rush to blame trans people.

Humble Book Bundle: Martha Wells' Murderbot and More by TOR Fall in love with Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries series—the engine behind the hit AppleTV adaptation—and help support World Central Kitchen.

This Murderbot + Witch King and more Humble Bundle from @torbooks.bsky.social has raised nearly $80,000 for @wck.org World Central Kitchen -- Can we get that up higher before time runs out? #booksky

www.humblebundle.com/books/martha...

Basically we need UBI but we more urgently need to stop these AI guys from creating the dystopia they envision.

Sleuth'em ups?

Time to learn Godot again and ah yes I remember now.

Yeah, it's very cool but also Not for Me. I love my markdown too much. Sometimes I think I'll just make my own mkdocs build, but that's really got all the functionality wrapped up in publishing, which is just not my goal.

YouTube video by Veronica Explains VimWiki: I write my notes in the terminal, like a monster

Oh, then perhaps you would ... youtu.be/RmEtH5FQs28?...

Yeah, I'll be stuck with closed-source-ass obsidian till the day I die.

Background paintings by Sue Mondt for Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends (2004–2009), created by Craig McCracken, Cartoon Network Studios

Yeah, I was straight up about to purchase my first comic book in a decade, because I saw like one screen of Lower Decks comic and was like please friends, come back.

Please tell me that's the actual image in the article tho

"i asked grok" "i asked chatgpt" yeah well i asked carl sagan and he said the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge 🧪

Yeah unless we are shaming vibe code or, like, DOGE, I cannot imagine a reason that this kind content would ever be interesting.

I really thought this kind of obsessive parasocial mob stuff was going out of style. But I watched one (1) video about the Stop Killing Games petition and now YouTube is shoving videos of random devs I've never heard of analyzing his code for fraudulence???

Jesus, the trouble I used to get in saying the Obama admin needed to prosecute absolutely everybody for Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. "Think of the election." "Be practical." "Play the long game." What fucking ever. All those people belong in the prisons they build for others.

Literally me.

man aiming gun while crying

when the nice indie software begins telling you to "supercharge your productivity" and a sparkle icon appears

I like this as the basis for an author's note in law review publications. I might add "I have given preference to sources which also certify they have not used AI."

Yet another @annacwebs.bsky.social banger!

Highly recommend giving this a watch, especially if you're a dev outside the US and want to make sense of the the uh... *gestures at Games Industry*

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE.

This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined.

It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

Stickers by Antony Ho.
linktr.ee/antonyho
#JapanExpo2025

obligatory "read persepolis" skeet. or at least watch the movie. it's going to grab your heart and never let go

There is just so much propaganda to overcome to even start the discussion. Like I hear there's a Stars Wars to point to and everything?

But honestly, if I couldn't convince people that the Hunger Games was about the US, then I don't know how to make fiction work as an explainer.

amtrak’s marketing team gets it

If I could convince myself that it wasn't just bad math, I would be *sure* this was parody.

I'm not even sure you're allowed to use the "we are not the same" construction unironically anymore.

The owner of Twitter sends out 100 right wing propaganda tweets every single day and the algorithm is set up so that every single person on Twitter has to see every single one of these tweets. Now here’s another piece about Blue Sky’s ideological diversity problem.

God, I've never seen this thing we've all experienced to some degree articulated so perfectly.