One of the things that makes the PLA Conference special is the flexibility built into the program. At PLA 2026 (April 1–3, 2026, Minneapolis), you can design a learning experience that fits your schedule, energy level, and preferred engagement style.
Looking for quick inspiration? Hot Takes(Tuesday, March 31, 1:00–3:00 p.m.) deliver bold ideas in five minutes or less. These fast-paced sessions are designed to spark conversation and introduce fresh perspectives you will keep thinking about long after the session ends. New to the PLA Conference? Be sure to attend Conference 101, held immediately following Hot Takes (Tuesday, March 31, 3:00–5:00 p.m.).
Want something practical and immediately useful? The How-To Stage, located in the Exhibits Hall, features 20-minute sessions focused on hands-on skills, tools, and real-world solutions you can take straight back to your library. These sessions run continuously during Exhibits Hall hours (Wednesday, 3:00–6:00 p.m.; Thursday, 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.; and Friday, 9:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m.).
For deeper exploration, PLA 2026 introduces longer Deep Dive sessions, giving presenters and attendees extended time to dig into complex topics, share strategies, and engage in thoughtful discussion (Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, 10:15 a.m.–12:15 p.m.). The conference will also offer standard one-hour educational programs throughout the event.
Whether you have a short window between meetings or want to spend a couple of hours immersed in a single topic, PLA 2026 offers learning opportunities at every pace. Mix and match formats, follow your curiosity, and build a conference schedule that works for you.
As is tradition, Geoff Keighley kicked off last week’s Game Awards with a speech. Defying the show’s established norms, he took things in a personal direction, informing the audience that in 2025 his house burned down in the LA fires, and his father passed away. He found solace, however, in games: “Games have this incredible ability to hold us when we’re hurting, to lift us up when we feel small, to give us somewhere to go when the real world feels unsteady,” he said. “That’s why we’re all connected in this moment: We’re here to celebrate the artists, technicians, and storytellers who help this medium soar to new heights.” But outside the show’s gilded walls, many felt ignored rather than celebrated.
Last month, Game Developer broke the news that the Game Awards’ Future Class – a program meant to honor and facilitate annual cohorts of industry professionals who “represent the bright, bold, and inclusive future of video games” – has effectively been put on ice. This followed a prolonged period of silence from the organization after Future Class members began demanding more from Keighley and those running it: travel, resources, funding, and networking opportunities more in line with the way the program had been presented over the years, as well as public statements acknowledging ills those in the world of games and beyond could no longer afford to ignore, like layoffs and the genocide in Palestine.
Outside the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on Thursday, anger around the Future Class’ dissolution – as well as the callousness with which many companies handed shimmering trophies at The Game Awards continue to cast aside thousands of workers – coalesced into a protest organized by United Videogame Workers, the union anyone, even laid-off workers, can join announced by Communications Workers of America (CWA) at GDC earlier this year.
"The moment we actually tried to ask for something better – or for them to put their money where their mouth is – they just quietly killed the program.”
The theme of the protest was “The Industry Is Dead,” and many of the 50 or so developers who showed up took that to heart. A handful dressed in grim reaper outfits, while others carried signs shaped like tombstones. One read “RIP Future Class, Died Of Performative Allyship.” The UVW chair who made it, freelance writer and narrative designer Anna C Webster, was a former Future Class member.
“You’d think that we as the Future Class would at least know what the future of our program looks like,” she told Aftermath. “But they basically did not communicate that at all until we got together and said ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ To say that we’re disappointed is probably an understatement. It’s very disappointing that someone with the platform Geoff has is not using it for good. The moment we actually tried to ask for something better – or for them to put their money where their mouth is – they just quietly killed the program.”
Younès Rabii, a former Future Class member who organized an open letter urging Keighley and co to acknowledge Israel’s inhuman treatment of Palestinians, expressed a similar sentiment.
"The way that Future Class members were treated by The Game Awards, it feels like we outlived our usefulness of diverse faces smiling for the camera,” Rabii, who did not attend this year’s Game Awards, told Aftermath. “Once we tried to ask the structure to put money where its mouth was, the facade crumbled. I vividly remember that during the only meeting we had after the 2023 show, when I asked Geoff Keighley why he ignored our open letter, he angrily replied ‘This is my show, and nobody gets to tell me how I should use my platform.’ What else is there to say?"
around 40 game developers affiliated with @videogameworkers.bsky.social have gathered outside the peacock theater, where the game awards will take place in a few hours, for a “the industry is dead” demonstration
Despite the outcry that followed the initial headlines last month, Webster said that she and other Future Class members haven’t heard a peep from Keighley or program organizers since: “Nope. Nothing.”
The protest outside The Game Awards focused on far more than just the Future Class, with pro-union and anti-CEO chants filling the air. “Our industry is dead, lay off CEOs instead,” protesters shouted at various points. “No more layoffs, no more lies, no more playing with our lives.” A pamphlet handed out by UVW members summed up the grim truth of the day: “In 2025 alone, upwards of 3,500 video game workers have lost their jobs, healthcare, and security. That number skyrockets to more than 40,000 workers when you include all tech and game workers laid off in the past three years.”
Kaitlin “KB” Bonfiglio, a writer and designer who also serves as UVW's local secretary, pointed to recent reporting that suggests a Game Awards trailer spot can cost between $450,000 and over $1 million.
"There's a lot of pomp and circumstance around it," she told Aftermath, "so we wanted to make sure that we were here representing game workers – the people who make these games – raking in millions for these executives."
This was not an entirely hassle-free process. Security attempted to prevent protesters from claiming a spot outside the theater. "We had to produce our own statutes regarding this particular terrace, which is part of LA Live," said Webster. "We also have legal council, and we had them prep the information we'd need to say 'Hey, we're allowed to be here.' Eventually, they let us in, but they were trying to turn us away."
There is a history of protests outside The Game Awards, with SAG-AFTRA leading two in 2023 and 2024 as part of the since-concluded voice actor strike. Members of SAG, though not representing the guild at large, were among those who attended Thursday’s protest. Sherveen Uduwana, a freelance game developer and treasurer with UVW, said others’ past efforts served as inspiration for this year’s protest.
"This is an escalation. People have shown up in previous years to push these issues forward,” Uduwana told Aftermath. “We want to make it clear to the bosses that this is not a problem they can just wait out. We're gonna be prepared to speak to these issues: mass layoffs, taking away healthcare, generative AI. And make sure we win on those issues and workers have protections."
Midway through the protest, a procession of developers gave speeches into a megaphone.
"We are the ones who poured our blood, sweat, tears, sanity, and health into these games,” shouted one who paid tribute to a friend who’d just passed, who he said loved video games and hated corporate exploitation. “The ones who made the games are outside. [Bosses and executives] are inside patting themselves on the back. ... And what was our reward? Many of us were cast aside as soon as the products were created because we weren't needed anymore. And those who were lucky enough to stay [now] find themselves debugging ChatGPT code."
Some present had direct personal experience with the video game industry’s current layoff-centric strategy. Earlier this year, Timothy Staton-Davis, who attended the protest dressed in a grim reaper cloak and holding a plastic scythe, was part of a small round of layoffs at Brass Lion Entertainment, which is currently working on Wu-Tang: Rise Of The Deceiver.
“There were a few of us they had to let go of because of monetary issues,” Staton-Davis told Aftermath. “It’s their first game. They’re trying to pull through. They’ve been negatively affected by the current industry situation in a lot of ways because of mismanagement of money. It’s not the studio’s fault, but from our partners and all that kind of stuff.”
“My first studio gig was at Monolith,” he continued. “Now they’re gone. Unfairly so. All these studios I’ve been connected to have been negatively affected in some way, shape, or form by people not doing the right things with their money and taking advantage of folks.”
Colton "Anarche99" Childrey / UVW-CWA
Others were there to show solidarity.
“I’ve had so many friends affected [by layoffs],” said a developer doing organizing work with UVW named Audrey, who declined to provide their last name or place of employment, but who noted that they’ve yet to be laid off despite four years working in games. “I’m out here for the industry. I’m afraid that if I lost my job, I’m not gonna be able to find another one. The amount of power that gives our employers is just insane. I’ve had to work three crunches so far. The last one sent me to the hospital. I was in some of the most excruciating pain of my life. I thought my appendix had burst. Turns out, it was just stress.”
There are silver linings, though. Webster views UVW as a more authentic attempt at paving the way for a better games industry than Future Class ever was.
“We are disappointed in Geoff,” she said. “We are building the future of the games industry with or without his branding, and if he wants to join us, he can anytime.”
“UVW as an organization, a lot of the stuff that benefits Future Class members – whether it’s visibility or financial support or community – we have resources to also do all those things,” added Uduwana. “We’re looking to actually be able to make that kind of tangible change that The Game Awards and Geoff have shirked the responsibility of.”
“They decided that’s too hard,” said Webster, “so we’ve gotta do it ourselves.”
Webster and Uduwana also noted that as of now, UVW boasts 560 members.
"I’m afraid that if I lost my job, I’m not gonna be able to find another one. The amount of power that gives our employers is just insane."
"The main thing [UVW] has done for me so far is build connections – and not in a controlled forum, where we can actually be honest and have real conversations about the industry," said Aubrey. "Especially as a queer person, companies will have affinity groups and stuff like that, but HR is always there. If you say something too out there, you never know. You can't be too honest in those spaces."
Emma Kidwell, one of the Future Class members who ultimately forced an answer about the program’s fate out of The Game Awards, likes what she’s seen so far of UVW.
"I think UVW-CWA and the solidarity they've shown the [Future Class] alumni has been really great," Kidwell told Aftermath. "They're doing good, important work and using their platform to make the industry a better place."
In addition to supporting UVW, Staton-Davis is taking matters into his own hands. This year he opened a worker-owned studio called Melanated Game Kitchen.
“I’m also trying to contribute to the work of a more sustainable, equitable industry by starting a co-op studio myself,” he said. “We focus on fun gameplay, obviously, but narratives as well that tell cultural stories. It’s BIPOC-led, and we’re trying to bring that to the forefront. We don’t see enough of those stories in the industry, so we want to do more of that – and collaborate with everyone else who’s also trying to do that same thing.”
For months after Tiny Bookshop was released on Nintendo Switch in August, the indie game remained on the platform's bestseller list, hovering around the likes of Hades 2 and Hollow Knight: Silksong. But in late November, Tiny Bookshop dropped off the list—and off the Nintendo Switch eShop entirely—due to a discrepancy between its digital age and content rating and the rating tied to its upcoming physical version. Tiny Bookshop originally had an "E" rating—for everyone—but was upgraded to a "T for teens" rating.
The reason for the ratings upgrade? One word: "Arsehole," said Neoludic Games.
Tiny Bookshop remained off the Nintendo Switch store in all regions for nearly two weeks, cutting into sales on what Neoludic Games says is its most prolific platform. "The impact was immediate and severe," Neoludic co-CEO and creative director David Zapfe-Wildemann told Aftermath.
"We noticed [the game wasn’t on the store] when people started reaching out via DM asking what was going on," he said. "Because there is a small delay between the Switch backend and the public web version, we didn't understand what was happening at first."
Neoludic Games wasn't notified that Tiny Bookshop was removed from the eShop until after it was taken down. "The process was completely opaque," Skystone Games (which published Tiny Bookshop) publishing head Dmitry Muratov said.
Tiny Bookshop is a management simulator set in a mobile bookshop by a beach. Acting as the bookseller, players design the little shop and then sell books to customers; the puzzles are in finding the right real-world and fictional books to recommend. Neoludic Games describes Tiny Bookshop as "cozy," and it certainly is. The quaint bookshop is the epitome of the word, and the low-stakes gameplay makes the game very chilled out.
Muratov called the ratings process that caused the eShop removal a "black box" that the studio and publisher got caught up in. Most games have a rating, but games that are sold physically have a more "official" rating than those that are only sold digitally. The digital ratings system is handled through an automated system with the International Age Rating Coalition (IARC), which works with the different ratings agencies, like the ESRB. Developers fill out a survey through the IARC system to self-evaluate their game, which spits out an automated rating based on the answers. Developers then provide a certification of that rating to storefronts to be able to sell digitally.
Image: Neoludic Games/Skystone Games
Zapfe-Wildemann said the digital certification through the IARC required very little detail and had "a lack of clear guidelines." Other developers who spoke to Aftermath about the IARC said the system can feel subjective—something that's especially relevant following the ratings debacle regarding Santa Ragione's Horses. Horses has been in the spotlight over the past several weeks after it was removed from the Epic Games Store for its rating; using the IARC process, Santa Ragione received a Mature rating. Epic Games filed its own IARC questionnaire and found the game to be ranked as Adults Only, therefore not publishable on its storefront. (Several developers and industry experts told Aftermath that they'd never heard of a platform filing for its own IARC rating.)
The IARC rating allows for games to display, for instance, an ESRB on a digital storefront. Crucially, it's a free-to-use tool that allows developers to get their games rated without much friction—and keeps rating bodies from being overwhelmed by having to have humans go through the hundreds of games released each month. IARC spits out a rating that's adaptable for the different regions a game is released in. One video game industry expert told Aftermath that rating bodies, like ESRB and PEGI, do run checks on IARC ratings to ensure accuracy, be it popular games or ones that get complaints.
Physical editions require a more detailed rating to be sold in stores, however, which made the ESRB and other countries' ratings processes necessary for Tiny Bookshop. That process is more robust and requires developers to submit footage, builds, and marketing materials, the expert said. The result is a formal rating from a thorough assessment of a game by a human.
"We started working together with a UK-based publisher for a physical release of Tiny Bookshop," Zapfe-Wildemann said. "That process mandated getting a detailed review by each target region's rating agency. In that re-review, the ESRB flagged the word 'Arsehole' in one of the 300+ book descriptions as severe enough to warrant a 'T' rating."
Neoludic Games only learned of the upgraded rating after Nintendo delisted the game and the process was completed. "It would have been five minutes of work to replace the word had we been informed, or had we had a way to track which swear word is considered severe in the IARC system," Zapfe-Wildemann said.
"A single word in more than 100,000 words of localization was caught and scrutinized without a chance for us to fix it pre-release," Muratov said. "It’s frustrating when you see massive AAA games with much more mature themes, while a cozy bookshop game gets pulled over a single instance of text."
The upgraded T rating triggered a "mandatory update to the digital store," Zapfe-Wildemann said, which resulted in the "immediate delisting" of Tiny Bookshop. On Oct. 17, which is the last date the best-sellers page was recorded by the Wayback Machine, Tiny Bookshop was in the ninth row of the U.S. bestsellers. (In September, it was listed 12th on the page, and in August, it was the second game. In the first month alone, Neoludic Games sold more than 300,000 copies of Tiny Bookshop. By December, that number surpassed 500,000.) Being removed from the Nintendo Switch eShop dropped Tiny Bookshop from the list, Neoludic Games said. Now, after being re-added in early December, it's much further down the page in the U.S. region. Neoludic Games estimated that it lost 10,000 sales due to the removal from the eShop and its subsequent absence from the bestsellers list.
"On Switch, the bestseller list is one of the most critical discoverability tools the platform has," Zapfe-Wildemann said. "Our release momentum was still carrying us in the charts of some regions when the incident happened. It is incredibly difficult to re-enter those charts once that momentum is broken."
Muratov said that getting back into the bestsellers list is "very hard or impossible," but that the studio managed to get back into the top 30 recently. "That couldn't have happened without an amazing worldwide community rallying behind us," he said.
I’m in a fight with my landlord over getting a dog, if “fight” means I texted him about it a couple times and he never answered and now I just drive myself nuts wondering if he’s purposefully not answering so that he doesn’t have to say “no” or if he just regular isn’t answering and I should harangue him. I am a person who should have a dog, and in the absence of one, I get my fix wherever I can: friends’ dogs, convincing dogs on the street to notice me and then pretending to be surprised, and video games that have dogs in them, like Dogpile.
Dogpileis a collaboration between two Australian studios, Studio Folly and Toot Games. You have a deck of dog cards, which you play to drop dogs into a yard. If two dogs of the same type touch, they merge to form a bigger dog. Those bigger dogs merge to form even bigger dogs, and you keep merging dogs until you either win by getting the biggest dog, or your dogs spill out of your yard and you have to start over. There’s also the smaller goal of earning an increasing amount of “bones” in a certain number of hands, with penalties coming into play if you don’t make the requirement.
I appreciate a game that understands that the best dog is a big dog (a problem for my own desire to have a dog, since I have a very small apartment). The game’s dogs are very charming, from tiny angry chihuahuas to greyhounds that look like they’ve been up too late doomscrolling to golden retrievers that just look happy to be included.
Size isn’t the only quality of a dog you have to pay attention to. Dogs can have traits: friendly dogs will be drawn toward dogs of their type, while timid dogs will move away from other dogs. This can be really useful for space management, helping jostle dogs around to get them to touch. Some dogs can be unusually big or small, and dogs can also get fleas that make their traits not work. My least favorite trait is “crated,” which prevents a dog from merging for several turns. You can change dogs’ traits in an interface stylized like a dog wash, removing bad ones or adding good ones.
In the game’s pet shop, you can buy new dog cards or “tags” that modify your game, such as by making all the dogs super bouncy (I thought this would be great, but it backfired on me). The tags add a metagame over the whole thing that I’m sure will appeal to strategy nerds, but honestly I most like just dropping the dogs into the yard, watching them tumble and then pop into another kind of dog, and seeing all of them pile up in an awkward, jostling crush.
The whole thing is bright, cute, and chill, and it ate up most of my Friday night as I said things like “get over there, butt dog” and “aah, no more puffballs” at my computer. Dogpile is out now on Steam.
A little while back, conservatives discovered the existence of cartoons, but only their existence. What they do not know, and perhaps can’t know, is that for a brief moment cartoons got really good, and really gay, and now they are dying.
Now, I’ll be using the term ‘cartoons’ here, but when I do I’ll be referring to animated content released commercially for children and early teenagers in English-speaking countries. The term definitely excludes many things that are obviously cartoons: The Simpsons, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Arcane,Scavengers Reign, even Bluey since its core audience is too young. It’s cartoons as in ‘Saturday morning cartoon’: thirty minutes long if you count commercials, narrative-based, usually with other concerns like a toy line, with an audience who are older than toddlers but younger than teenagers.
On September 29th of 2025, the X account LibsofTikTok, run by former real estate agent Chaya Raichik, discovered the Netflix show Dead End Paranormal Park, which had been cancelled in 2023 after two seasons. In a short clip, the show’s lead character Barney talks about how working at a haunted amusement park allows him to be himself rather than just the one trans kid at his school. Having seen the show, Barney’s gender is mentioned at most a handful of times, the word ‘trans’ might only appear in the clip that Raichik excerpted.
A day later, Raichik posted a video sourced from Instagram in which a man with a British accent films his TV playing the Netflix show Jurassic Park: Camp Cretaceous, a teen-centric sidequel to the film Jurassic World in which a group of teenagers try to survive on Isla Nublar while Chris Pratt is riding motorcycles and the like. In the clip, the character Yasmina confesses that she’s fallen for the character Sammy—they are both female. The adult watching the cartoon whines ‘lord have mercy.’ The final season of this show aired in 2022.
Elon Musk encouraged his followers to ‘Cancel Netflix for the health of your kids’ shortly after Raichik shared the clips above. Culture war content isn’t exactly uncommon on Musk’s account, though it is often submerged by his genuinely side-splitting comedy and cutting-edge memes, but what are rare are references to children, childcare or fatherhood. Musk is the world’s foremost pronatalist: he believes that the world is dangerously underpopulated and that we should be ‘teach(ing) fear of childlessness’, and yet it doesn’t seem to interest him.
You already know what he is doing personally to solve this problem, but something he never does is talk about his own experiences as a father. As Joyce Carol Oates has pointed out, despite posting on average 68 times per day, he never talks about anything remotely human: ‘pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports; acclaim for a favorite team; references to history’. More important than any of that: somebody with an estimated fourteen children never talks about them. Obviously security and privacy concerns mean that he can’t share everything, but he never posts a picture one of his children drew or a celebration of good grades.
The fact that he was surprised by the content of years-old Netflix cartoons points to something else: he doesn’t have much interest in what his own children are interested in, and it appears that few conservatives do. In this case, it means that his calls to #cancelnetflix fail to take into account the sweeping changes that have changed the cartoon industry into something unrecognisable.
Dogs in Space/Netflix
You can separate kids cartoons into rough phases. The first was the Golden Age of Saturday Morning cartoons: Transformers, G.I Joe, She-Ra and Thundercats. These were almost always tied to a toy line—they were functionally commercials, with plots dictated largely by what stock needed to be moved in a given quarter. That didn’t stop them from being incredibly popular: although viewing figures are difficult to come by because of the nature of how they were syndicated, we can see their impact through toy sales: Hasbro made $950 million from the Transformers franchise alone in the 1980s.
The second stage I don’t want to call the Silver Age, because that implies a level of value that it didn’t have. Throughout the nineties and into the early 2000s cartoons tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to replicate the success of the eighties shows. Remember Exo Force, Pirates of Dark Water, Biker Mice from Mars or SWAT Cats? With this model exhausted, new creators who wanted to make cartoons first and move product second entered the scene thanks to newly established networks like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, producing cult hits like Ren and Stimpy and breakout successes like Spongebob Squarepants.
Avatar: The Last Airbender was an anomaly during this time. Though it was Nickelodeon shows like Rugrats and Fairly Odd Parents, it was tonally different from almost everything else out there. You could even call it a continuation of the failed experiments of animation’s not-quite silver age: long-form stories with a large cast, a more adult approach to morality, complex worldbuilding, as well as a very clear attempt to bring anime sensibilities into western animation. It was successful, not only critically but with audiences: 5.6 million people watched its finale, it launched one bad live action adaptation, one okay live action adaptation and will soon become a trilogy when Avatar: Seven Havens debuts. It helped that Avatar’s release in 2005 came at the high point of the Young Adult fiction wave, so it didn’t seem that kids who were, say, thirteen to sixteen, had to choose between genuine children’s content and adult shows. It blazed a trail that nobody would follow for a long time—for almost a decade it remained the only show that tried to hit that sweet spot of children’s animation that teenagers and even adults could enjoy.
In a short time it became uncommon to have long-form narrative animation without at least one queer character.
If Avatar showed that kid’s shows could be blockbusters then 2006’s Adventure Time showed that they could be arthouse. Pendleton Ward’s ten minute long trips were deeply idiosyncratic, down to the strange cadence of the dialogue and the leisurely unfolding of what turned out to be one of the most complex and unique fantasy stories of the 21st century, one that is still going two decades later. I can’t say that the show has directly influenced anything else -except for Chainsaw Man- but it has instead functioned as a talent incubator for a new generation of animators (storyboard artist Rebecca Sugar created Stephen Universe, for example) and a general call to the industry to raise its game. Also, while it was not the first ever cartoon to feature a queer couple (as far as I can tell that was Hey Arnold in 1998), the centuries-long on-again-off-again thing between Princess Bubblegum and Marceline was the first involving main characters and not presented as a Very Special Episode.
In 2012, the Disney Channel released Alex Hirsch’s Gravity Falls. It’s rare that a single show can cause a paradigm shift in the industry—usually they come about from market over-saturation of the creation of new networks. Gravity Falls was different: it looked like a kids cartoon, but, speaking as an adult, it’s genuinely smart and funny. Kids could watch it, but teenagers would get it and adults would appreciate it. It wasn’t purely a cult phenomenon: the series finale, ‘Weirdmageddon’, Disney reported, was ‘a dominant #1 in its time period across all cable TV among Total Viewers, Kids 6-11, Boys 6-11 and Boys 2-11 demographics’.
While this was happening, a parallel development in young adult fiction would have ramifications for the cartoon industry: adults were starting to read books written for teenagers, which meant that books were being written for adults who wanted to read books for teenagers. The fandom for these books skewed female and queer, and the publishing industry responded by buying up books that appealed to this audience. That seems to have made solid business sense: Young Adult fiction is still on an upward trajectory, even without blockbusters like the Harry Potter franchise, thanks in part to the cross-pollination between YA and Romantasy and its promotion through BookTok.
Gravity Falls and Avatar: The Last Airbender didn’t have any overt queer representation (Disney cut it out from the former and it was only present in the sequel to the latter), but their tone and style pointed the way for shows like Cartoon Network’s Steven Universe and Netflix’s She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which caught on like wildfire in the larger ‘fandom’ community. Pretty soon most significant cartoons married the deep storytelling of Gravity Falls and Avatar: the Last Airbender with themes, such as queer representation, reflecting the adult-YA community: The Owl House, Centaurworld, Dogs in Space, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Voltron: Legendary Defender, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Amphibia, The Dragon Prince, Battle Kitty, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, Hilda, and the aforementioned Dead End Paranormal Park and Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous. In a short time it became uncommon to have long-form narrative animation without at least one queer character. Sometimes the representation was subtle, as in Hilda where they were background characters. Several shows, like She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and The Owl House had queer main characters and their love stories were key plot points.
Jeremiah Cortez was showrunner on Netflix’s Dogs in Space during this period. He grew up loving animation, took every class he could take on it in college, and drew free-form stories about a Corgi named Garbage’s adventures in space while working at a factory job (he had no emotional connection to dogs and didn’t like sci-fi so it felt like something he could do for fun, with no emotional connection). His co-workers liked it, which led to him producing a rough short, and a chance meeting led to the opportunity to pitch Netflix.
Dogs in Space/Netflix
“So I went to Netflix,” he told me, “pitched in person, and then left, and I just thought, like, yeah, they're not interested. It was nice that I got to go to the Netflix building and see inside, but I just took it as a nice opportunity, a nice experience. And I left, went back to my job. And then, yeah, about two weeks later, they called me again and said, hey, we want to buy the show.”
There was a good vibe at Netflix at the time: “Netflix was a great studio to work with when I was there. When I got there, that was the dream studio I wanted to go with. They really believed in what they were selling—Netflix was the place where the shows that other networks wouldn’t get picked up got picked up. They were the place where all the overlooked ideas can come and be a show.”
The studio was perfectly willing to take a chance on a first-time showrunner, and were collaborators with him rather than the cliche of out-of-touch studio executives handing down notes. The only major change they pushed for was casting Haley-Joel Osmet as Captain Garbage—Jeremiah would have preferred somebody with an older-sounding voice like Will Forte. When Osmet auditioned he nailed it and Jeremiah remains extremely happy with the performance.
Cuphead and Centaurworld were both being made in the same Burbank studio, and both shared Dogs’ adults-can-enjoy-it-too vibe. As Jeremiah tells it, this came from Netflix’s genuine desire to make the best shows possible, but there’s business logic there: children are a very small and very fickle demographic, but bringing in what would be traditionally regarded as more adult elements opens animated shows up to a larger audience that includes adults. We still see this today: Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss, both by Vivienne ‘VivziePop’ Medrano are definitely for adults in terms of swearing and sex references, but have the vibe of children’s cartoons in a way that other adult cartoons like Scavengers Reign and King of the Hill don’t. They seem made for the generation that was just the right age when Gravity Falls, Adventure Time and Avatar: The Last Airbender were at their peak and are now in their twenties and thirties.
These shows were being made during a major shift in the way that children consumed entertainment.
The second this golden age of animation became unprofitable it stopped. You can practically pin a date down to the very week this happened: on November 15th of 2024, ten days after Donald Trump’s second election, Disney removed an episode of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur that dealt with trans athletes. It wasn’t the first show that a network had censored —Cartoon Network even fired somebody over the ‘Bubbleine’ romance—but this time felt different. Disney wasn’t just giving notes to writers to keep things PG, they were actively removing a show that dealt with a very specific topic that conservatives are particularly focused on. That felt like the permissive, progressive attitude that had defined the late 2010s to early 2020s was officially over.
At nearly exactly the same time, the entire age of peak animation collapsed. There were 86 new children’s animated series orders on streaming platforms in 2022 and 113 overall. In 2025, that number dropped to 24 on streaming and 35 overall. The only major new animated show for middle-childhood and teen viewers that debuted on streaming platforms in 2025 was Netflix’s The Wolf King. My own son was growing up when these shows were airing, so I watched them with him. They were all genuinely good. The second Golden Age of animation was brief, but intense—Over the Garden Wall is, in my estimation, a classic; Dogs in Space and Centaurworld needed much bigger audiences than they got.
And that was the problem. These shows were being made during a major shift in the way that children consumed entertainment. A good portion of these shows were produced by Netflix, and the world’s largest streaming media company is notoriously bad at promoting its content. Why should it bother when, being a subscription service, it doesn’t need anyone to actually watch its shows, just keep up their monthly payments?
This goes double for children’s shows: it is very difficult to actually promote children’s content. In times past you could rely on children being around on Saturday mornings and after school, watching whatever was on. Saturday morning cartoons ended on October 4th of 2014, when the CW ended Vortexx, which had been holding out long after other networks had cancelled their Saturday morning shows, due largely to FCC regulations that mandated three hours of education programming a day on broadcast TV. Later, when viewers had to actively seek out shows on Netflix, and later Disney+, these companies didn’t have a marketing strategy beyond giving them prime spots on their own platforms and uploading trailers to YouTube. There was no place where you could put an advertisement for a relatively high-budget show like Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts that would establish ‘this is important’.
Centaurworld/Netflix
Obviously, some children’s content does break through. K-Pop Demon Hunters is a phenomenon, but Netflix’s efforts had little to do with that—marketing analysts might say that it ‘activated fandoms at scale’, but viral clips like Jay from ENHYPHEN dancing to ‘Soda Pop’ came after the film had become successful, not before. What really happened was that enthusiasm spread virally because the film was always going to ‘activate’ the kind of people who are going to spread things virally—K-pop stans, TikTokkers, cosplayers and so on. Importantly, that level of viral success just doesn’t seem to happen for serialised shows: Netflix’s Jentry Chau vs. The Underworld, which also features K-pop and the hunting of demons, isn’t anywhere near as successful.
Jeremiah explained that “We're still in this flux. In 2024 people would say: survive ‘til ‘25, when there's going to be all these new shows getting green lit, and everyone's going to be back. We’re already at the tail end of 2025 and it's stayed pretty flat. But Netflix has K-Pop Demon Hunters, and I think this will be the catalyst for a change.”
The difficulty of (reliably) marketing to young people today has meant that an entire section of the media has functionally disappeared in a very short time. Every one of the shows above is still on their respective streaming services (save for the deeply queerBattle Kitty, which was removed when Netflix stopped supporting interactive content), but new shows simply aren’t being commissioned. Of the shows mentioned above, only Jentry Chau has any possibility of getting another season as of time of writing.
The reasons are pretty obvious: Roblox is adding millions of players each year, Fortnite is a major force in popular culture and the first generation of ‘iPad kids’ are entering their mid teens. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba - The Movie: Mugen Train became the highest grossing Japanese film of all time, with $512.7 million in ticket sales on a budget of $15.7 million while Wish, a film that Disney promoted as the celebration of a century of filmmaking, made $237.9 million on an estimated $200 million budget. Anime and manga are handily beating western cultural products among young people: when the French government gave children €350 each to spend on culture they didn’t spend it on Proust and Balzac, but manga, starting a ‘manga rush’. The country’s most popular animated show is a magical girl anime. Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+ have little reason to chase an audience that shows little interest in western animation, so they have dramatically cut their output and bought up shows like Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaizen to fill the gaps (though a good portion of Netflix’s anime isn’t suitable for pre-teen kids). Within three years the entire format of long-form English-language children’s animation functionally disappeared.
Now that animators can no longer rely on networks and streaming platforms for employment, many are turning to independent animation.
Or evolved. If the second Golden Age is over on streaming platforms then it continues on YouTube. Prompted by the success of ViziePop’s shows, studios like Australia’s Glitch Productions were born online and are continuing the style of peak children’s animation in shows like Murder Drones, The Amazing Digital Circus, The Gaslight Districtand Knights of Guinevere(the latter two being more adult-orientated, but still fine for older kids if you don’t mind them hearing a couple of PG-13 swears). Success is no longer getting your show picked up by one of the major streaming platforms but building an entirely digital fanbase.
Knights of Guinevere is significant because it is being helmed by Dana Terrence, the showrunner of Disney’s The Owl House, and is a very clear indictment of Disney. Terrace is an interesting figure here as the only creator who has worked across the old and new children’s media. Beginning her career as a storyboard artist on Adventure Time, she became a director on Disney’s Ducktales reboot, then got to helm her own self-created show, The Owl House. There was, it seems, a falling out between her and Disney, hence the move to Glitch.
She explains in an interview that “I was pissed off one day and this became a cathartic release… I worked with big mainstream studios for about ten years and now I don’t and I’m enjoying myself quite a lot.” The experience of working with Disney left her quite willing to burn bridges: when the company started to use generative AI in their shows, she tweeted ‘Unsubscribe from Disney+. Pirate Owl House. I don’t care. Fuck gen AI.’
Collectively, these shows are chalking up hundreds of millions of views—The Amazing Digital Circus’s pilot has 398 million views as of time of writing, and though some will be repeats (about eight are mine) that’s an incredible viewership for a show with zero marketing budget beyond the Glitch brand name. These shows are also interesting for their business model. YouTube alone wouldn’t fund the large, professional operation that is currently producing three high-quality shows, so they supplement their funds with merchandising.
Glitch Productions’s output and other web series like Lackadaisy are syntheses of the two golden ages of animation: relatively sophisticated Young-Adult orientated stories supported by business models heavily reliant on merchandising (though unlike eighties Saturday morning cartoons, the stories far and away come first). Despite their success, they are a niche within the larger online world and, although some are now available on streaming services, are hamstrung by releasing episodes every few months and the fickle nature of virality. Now that animators can no longer rely on networks and streaming platforms for employment, many are turning to independent animation, and unfortunately few are breaking a million views.
Centaurworld/Netflix
The Amazing Digital Circus racks up hundreds of millions of views per episode, while The Gaslight District’s pilot has just broken twenty million views after six months. Non-Glitch indie animations exist, but none have broken through like Digital Circus, which has been snapped up by Netflix.) Independent animation can be successful on its own terms, but there are no points for indie cred in children’s animation, especially when you have something to say. This isn’t like the indie music boom of the 1980s, where the This Band Could Be Your Life generation were creating sounds that nobody could hear on commercial radio and MTV. Music would still exist if Steve Albini never sat behind a mixing deck–if these shows don’t fill the void left by major studios, then there will be no animated narrative fiction for children.
That matters. I can see what these shows meant for my son and how they benefited him. He is more emotionally intelligent than I was at his age and better able to understand complex narratives, and that isn’t just going to make him better at understanding fiction, but better at understanding people. Part of that is not having parents who were lead-poisoned in a decaying mining village then hammered into the rough shape of adults by the military like I did, but part of that is that he grew up watching stories about people with feelings instead of extended toy adverts. Kids younger than him are going to grow up watching other kids play videogames or whoever replaces Mr. Beast after his inevitable cancellation and/or arrest. That type of ‘content’ (because it is content, not art) is fine in moderation, but people need stories.
More than that, while children’s cartoons can’t undo centuries of systemic racism and sexism, representation does still matter. Fiction is inherently destabilising because it cannot help but force viewers to see things outside of their perspective. If a creator feels that a character should be black or queer, or if an artist draws a character wearing a hijab because that’s where their inspiration takes them, then that’s what viewers get. Because long-form narratives can put in the work to develop diverse characters,viewers can learn the most important lesson that stories can teach us: we are somehow both radically similar to and radically different from each other. There needs to be more than one production company making these shows or a whole way to communicate to kids is going to disappear.
It turned out that capitalism won the battle before reactionaries even knew that they were fighting.
Which brings us back to LibsofTikTok. Because of the way that conservative parents relate, or rather don’t relate to their children they will have little interest in what they are consuming. The number of conservative families who will genuinely raise their children fully outside of the mainstream is going to be very small. Living a trad lifestyle takes money that only a tiny percentage of people will have. Most conservative households are going to parent for the most part like more liberal households, by doing the best they can with limited resources, and part of that is allowing kids to have time in front of a TV or iPad.
The difference will be emotional coldness, indifference to suffering and a greater incidence of abuse. Starting after Brown vs. Board of Education, the Christian far-right in particular has developed a parallel theory of child-rearing as disciplines like attachment theory and critical pedagogy made most childhoods kinder and freer (with support from shows like Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood). Talia Lavin’s book Wild Faithdetails how this mirror-world came into being: home-schooling, religious schools and camps, and parenting manuals like James Dobson’s 1970 book Dare to Discipline. This instructed parents to ‘bring some pain to the child when it is necessary for his eventual good.’ One person who grew up in a conservative Christian household told Lavin that “almost every spanking I’ve ever received was a result of asking ‘why?’”. This is not a lesson that is compatible with the worldviews of the kind of people who want to make children happy by making fun shows for them. The long-term effects of this type of parenting are very well documented.
Not every conservative is Christian (Raichik is Jewish, Musk atheist), but every part of the authoritarian ecosystem puts their own spin on these ideas. For most it’s nothing as systematic as the dictates of a parenting manual—more likely its arbitrary punishment, inconsistent discipline and general disinterest in the emotional life of children. Plenty more are more like Finn from Adventure Time’s parents: kind of, sort of okay people, but so wrapped up in their own problems and so laden with their own baggage that they can’t really ‘parent’ as such. Nowhere in authoritarian (or simply shitty) parenting is there space to sit down with your kid and watch shows together.
We can see that in one of the largest and most successful authoritarian parents’ campaigns in recent years, Moms for Liberty: their target was books. Only one in three children enjoys reading and one in five actually reads every day, while they spend seven and a half hours each day in front of screens. However, parents can pick up books, flick through them and see horrors like the mouse penis in Maus, while they have to actually sit down and concentrate to find out that the protagonist of Dead End Paranormal Park isn’t just trans, they’re trying to save demons from an angel. Their lack of concern for their children as human beings meant that they never noticed the second golden age of cartoons, which let dozens of shows grow and a generation of artisans hone their craft.
So it turned out that capitalism won the battle before reactionaries even knew that they were fighting. If they were more invested in the lives of their children as children then they would have seen that animation has so fundamentally changed in the past two years that there is no need to #cancelnetflix. Netflix cancelled itself, or its animation arm at least, and with it an entire medium for communicating with children, one that I believe they benefitted from. Perhaps in 2028 LibsofTikTok will notice that Zooble from The Amazing Digital Circus is an allegory for trans experience and get all worked up about that, but until then the rest of us, and our children, are going to have to live in a media environment that is increasingly less human.
When Verizon refused to unlock an iPhone purchased by Kansas resident Patrick Roach, he had no intention of giving up without a fight. Roach sued the wireless carrier in small claims court and won.
Roach bought a discounted iPhone 16e from Verizon’s Straight Talk brand on February 28, 2025, as a gift for his wife’s birthday. He intended to pay for one month of service, cancel, and then switch the phone to the US Mobile service plan that the couple uses. Under federal rules that apply to Verizon and a Verizon unlocking policy that was in place when Roach bought the phone, this strategy should have worked.
“The best deals tend to be buying it from one of these MVNOs [Mobile Virtual Network Operators] and then activating it until it unlocks and then switching it to whatever you are planning to use it with. It usually saves you about half the value of the phone,” Roach said in a phone interview.
Fannish communities feel a sense of ownership over their media, but this feeling does not make them powerful in a sense.
Like the poachers of old, fans operate from a position of cultural marginality and social weakness. Like other popular readers, fans lack direct access to the means of commercial cultural production and have only the most limited resources with which to influence entertainment industry’s decisions. (…) Within the cultural economy, fans are peasants, not propreitors, a recognition which must contextualize our celebration of strategies of popular resistance.
Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. This cultural marginality appears in the definition of fandoms and in the past few posts, I was looking at fandoms through the lens of ‘save our show’ campaigns with Savage (2014).
First, we discussed how viewing communities and a sense of ownership develops which enables these campaigns. This affection also appeared in what viewers wrote in their letter campaigns but was far from the only or even most effective tool they used. Savage (2014) describe a variety methods. One way was to prove to be valuable as an auidance despite the Nielsen ratings which is possible through highlighting certain characteristics of the community: their demographic attributes or their loyalty.
Niche marketing (for example, gay programming) or strategic diversity values demographic attributes, particularly attributes that – in advertisers’ eyes – are connected to purchasing power or potential interest in certain particular products. Sender, Katherine. 2007. “Dualcasting: Bravo’s Gay Programming and the Quest for Women Audiences.” In Cable Visions: Television beyond Broadcasting, edited by Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris, and Anthony Freitas, 302–18. New York: New York University Press. Patterson, Eleanor. 2018. “ABC’s #TGIT and the Cultural Work of Programming Social Television.” In “Social TV Fandom and the Media Industries,” edited by Myles McNutt, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 26. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2018.1147.
Audience loyalty is an emotional investment that can translate to longterm planning and, also, purchasing power. Abbott, S. 2010. The Cult TV book: From Star Trek to Dexter, New Approaches to TV Outside the Box. Soft Skull Press. In other cases, audiences looked for sponsors and advertisers themselves or the already existing viewing community advertised the show to potential new viewers or educated each other in how to watch the show the right way (through broadcast, cable, streaming etc.), the right way here being the ones that generates the best data. Data fandom is something we have discussed before in this post. Just like then, no matter if we see these cases as the producers guiding the behaviour of fandom or fandom behaving in a way that makes it so that the producers will find beneficial to make certain decisions, at the end of the day, it is the logic of the market that is behind these behaviours. We would have to say: everything is for sale, including… Savage, Christina. 2014 “Chuck versus the Ratings: Savvy Fans and ‘Save Our Show’ Campaigns.” In “Fandom and/as Labor,” edited by Mel Stanfill and Megand Condis, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 15. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0497
This week, Gita, Riley, and Chris talk about many games that came out recently that will never win a Game Award, and what our attitudes about the event are. First, the enigmatic Ys-alike Angeline Era, a beautiful game with thoughtfuldesign. Second, the toe tapping Rhythm Doctor which feels like it takes cues from Rhythm Tengoku and iNIS games like Ouendan.
Then we discuss Skate Story, Faustian Tony Hawk with an incredible soundtrack that reminds us of Arctic Eggs. We give a shoutout to Demonschool, which has surprisingly good combat. Finally we discuss Shadow Labyrinth, the Dark Pac-Man game (announced at The Game Awards) that came out over the summer and has shockingly deep roots in UGSF lore.
Lastly, we shout out Nightreign as one of our favorite games of the year and talk about its freaky new characters. We also answer your questions about peppermint treats, the NY game dev scene, AI and more!
Today the overwhelming majority of workers at Doom studio id Software – 165 of around 185 total employees – announced that they’re forming a wall-to-wall union in conjunction with Communications Workers of America (CWA), the union that’s aided thousands of game workers across Microsoft in organizing.
"id Software is historically important – one of the more famous American studios that survived a length of time that few others have,” id Software producer Andrew Willis, who was part of the organizing effort from the jump and filed the initial paperwork to CWA, told Aftermath. “So it feels really awesome to get this done for something with such historical and cultural importance."
"With Bethesda unionizing, it was a push for people [at id] to start talking, and that's when it started,” id Software lead services programmer Chris Hays told Aftermath. “But then the big push that got it rolling was the closure of Tango [Gameworks] and layoffs within Microsoft at Arkane Austin. It was a wakeup call for a lot of people. People decided that it was time that we took our future into our own hands."
"The big push that got it rolling was the closure of Tango [Gameworks] and layoffs within Microsoft at Arkane Austin. It was a wakeup call for a lot of people."
id itself, Hays said, has suffered “a few” layoffs “here and there” in recent years, but nothing comparable to the scale of Zenimax Online Studios, which lost hundreds of employees earlier this year amid Microsoft’s latest round of mass layoffs and project cancellations. Now, he believes, is the time to secure workers’ rights – before the scythe swings, as opposed to after.
"Not that we're not scared that [layoffs] will one day come," said Hays. "In fact, avoiding each of the previous rounds has made us more anxious about if the next round will be us. And the most recent round of layoffs happened after several [studios] had already organized. People [at id] can see what it was that they got. We got to see them negotiating where they didn't actually lose their jobs [for a couple months]. They were still on payroll. They still had their health insurance. ... They had the extra time to make sure they could get their lives [in order], and many have actually gotten their jobs back through negotiations on where they could place people in the company."
CWA has been able to successfully unionize so many studios within Microsoft and Activision Blizzard in large part due to a legally binding neutrality agreement it struck with the company in 2022 when it was facing regulatory scrutiny over its $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard. That deal lapsed earlier this year, but according to Hays, only on the Activision Blizzard side of things.
"For us under Zenimax, there's actually a separate neutrality agreement, and that one is still valid until May [2026]," said Hays. "But that was definitely on our minds when we were looking at when we wanted to think that we had enough support [to unionize]. … We knew that it was really special for us to have the neutrality agreement, to have the freedom to be able to talk to each other more openly and not face the kind of pushback you would have in other unionization campaigns. We wanted to make sure that we took advantage of the benefit while we had it."
While the union plans to conduct a bargaining survey before members go to the table with Microsoft to hammer out a contract, preliminary discussions have focused on a few pillars: benefits, remote work, and AI.
"There's a lot of blind spots in our benefits, and a lot of us don't know what we have and what we don't and where things are lacking,” said Hays. “When talking with a lot of people, some would say 'Oh, I think we're lacking this particular kind of benefit, or something around child care.' Personally, I'm really motivated to get protections around remote work and responsible use of AI."
"There's definitely a directive from Microsoft to use [AI] more.”
Remote work has been a sticking pointat multiple Microsoft studios, with many issuing return-to-office mandates despite teams’ demonstrable success collaborating from across the country – and even the globe – in 2020 and 2021.
"We actually launched Doom Eternal during covid,” said Hays. “The month of [the launch], we started our work from home. ... We did a launch event, the whole internet fell apart, and we had to learn how to do all of that remote. And then starting a project [Doom: The Dark Ages] from the beginning, all remote, we learned a lot of lessons. On my team, we learned to change how we work, to be more remote friendly. We ended up becoming more productive as a result. So we've done this before. We've learned lessons, and I think we can continue to use that. We shouldn't just throw away all the great wins we got with remote work."
As for AI, Willis was cagey about precisely how it’s being used within id, noting that going into specifics would involve divulging secrets about proprietary tech. But he said that in his view, some of the current applications are “good,” while others are… less so.
"There's definitely a directive from Microsoft to use [AI] more,” Willis said. “In what ways and how careful they're being about implementing it within the studio to actually benefit the creation of a better game or a more efficient process, I personally don't think that's being done in a careful enough way to have it be beneficial.”
Last year, the Zenimax QA union secured AI protections that commit the company to uses of AI that "augment human ingenuity and capacities ... without causing workers harm" and require that Zenimax provides notice to the union in cases where "AI implementation may impact the work of union members and to bargain those impacts upon request." Willis and Hays hope the new union can make something similar happen under id’s roof.
"We are going to be in a fortunate position in that we have a lot of other people who've gone through this,” said Hays, “so we can look at what they have bargained for, especially around AI, and take that as a starting place, which hopefully means that it's going to be easier for us than anyone before."
"It would be difficult to say [if we’ll make Israel a core bargaining issue] without seeing what the bargaining surveys comment on, but I can say for myself personally that, yeah, I want no part in [Israel's] usage of Microsoft tools and the deals between Israel and Microsoft," said Willis.
"The folks that are in charge of a lot of these decision-making processes, it's a lot of Ivy League MBAs, a lot of folks with zero game experience."
More broadly, Willis believes the union will allow for more input from developers, as opposed to execs who have never shipped a game and, indeed, might not play them at all.
"We see the direction the industry is headed,” said Willis. “The folks that are in charge of a lot of these decision-making processes, it's a lot of Ivy League MBAs, a lot of folks with zero game experience – not just from the management standpoint, but zero experience in actually making games. ... I find little evidence of them really enjoying games or playing games personally."
“I think the more video game studios that unionize, and the greater percentage of video game employees that are in a union, it's not just better for them as individuals or folks that are raising families or have mortgages; it keeps talent from shedding,” he added. “You get to keep people in the industry who have experience and the amount of game credits that allow them to do things and create games that a contract-only or much more volatile workforce simply couldn't.”
In response, we created this non-smart TV guide that includes much more than dumb TVs. Since non-smart TVs are so rare, this guide also breaks down additional ways to watch TV and movies online and locally without dealing with smart TVs’ evolution toward software-centric features and snooping. We’ll discuss a range of options suitable for various budgets, different experience levels, and different rooms in your home.
If you’re prone to scrolling for a frankly unhealthy number of hours per day, you might have recently seen a couple names pop up with borderline-bizarre frequency: Polymarket and Kalshi. These sites bill themselves as “prediction markets,” but the activity they center around is, on no uncertain terms, gambling. Polymarket and Kalshi shroud this in marketspeak, allowing people to buy up yes/no “contracts” on real-world events and adopting a peer-to-peer approach instead of heralding down edicts about house odds, with prices instead set by trades a la financial markets. But the sites still take a cut of transactions, and people are still, in aggregate, betting millions.
Polymarket and Kalshi let users place cash or crypto wagers on just about anything. For example, as of this writing, Polymarket’s trending tab included Time’s 2025 person of the year, a bunch of different sports matches, Netflix’s proposed acquisition of WB, Elon Musk’s tweets, Trump’s release of the Epstein files, and most grimly of all, whether or not the US will sink another oil ship associated with Venezuela.
Polymarket – which was banned in the US back in 2022 after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found it was offering betting contracts without the agency’s approval, only for the agency to drop its investigation this year and give the site a regulatory thumbs up – even allowed users to bet on whether it would go live in the US this year. Odds prior to its rollout this month were at 99 percent, according to Fortune. Kalshi, meanwhile, has managed to circumvent states’ laws against sports betting due to its financial market status, though Nevada recently closed that loophole, and Massachusetts may soon follow suit.
While obvious offshoots of the sports gambling craze that has swept the nation in recent years – promising impoverished citizens a last-ditch means of getting out of debt while actually just miring them in more – Polymarket and Kalshi have recognized that their fortunes are tied to news. The two have approached this in different ways. Kalshi recently struck deals with both CNN and CNBC to integrate its prediction data across the networks’ programming. In a press release, Kalshi cited the fact that it "recently called the NYC Mayoral election eight minutes after polls closed, hours before the media" as evidence that this is good for news and society, actually, and not yet another rotten seed that will eventually sprout an ill-gotten money tree. Also, the system is easily gamed, as Slate recently pointed out:
If a Republican political firm wanted to buy $50,000 in contracts on the GOP to win the House, that purchase alone could move the price — and thus the implied odds — significantly. If a Republican political consultant wanted to buy $100,000 worth of contracts on the GOP to hold the House, they could materially move the price and thus the implied odds. With CNN providing free media coverage of the party’s improving chances, wouldn’t that be a compelling alternative to simply buying some commercial time? Are you starting to see the problem with a major news channel using an opaque tool of financial speculation to sum up conventional wisdom about an election?
Polymarket, on the other hand, has favored a more digital-first approach, striking a deal with Twitter to become the platform’s official prediction partner and going all-in on news aggregation with both its official account (which has over 800,000 followers) and offshoots, including NewsWire US, a separate aggregator it recently purchased. Both Polymarket and Kalshi have also partnered with various influencers, some laughably disreputable.
All this in mind, you will not be surprised to learn that Polymarket and Kalshi both have pages for multiple video game award shows, most prominent among them last weekend’s Streamer Awards and today’s Game Awards. Gamers represent an especially tantalizing prospect for gambling companies, with gacha mechanics and casino-funded streamers getting them started early so they can eventually graduate into full-blown betting.
Polymarket’s Streamer Awards streamer of the year category commanded a total trading volume of $24,169 – an impressive sum until you consider The Game Awards’ game of the year category, on which users have wagered nearly $40 million. Kalshi users, meanwhile, have wagered $218,771 and $3 million, respectively, on the same award categories. Both sites feature additional pages for other award categories, as well as things hosts might say.
When The Streamer Awards’ host, popular Twitch streamer QTCinderella, caught wind of her event’s Polymarket pages, she was furious.
“I would like to make this very clear: I am in no way associated with that website, and I am in no way condoning that website,” she said during a stream earlier this month in response to a viewer who accused her of supposed “insider trading.” “I have no association with them. I do not. In fact, my lawyers are talking to their lawyers because I am not happy about that.”
She added that her IP was being used without her consent and that her lawyers sent the site a cease and desist letter. As of this writing, however, Polymarket’s Streamer Awards pages remain accessible – as do Kalshi’s – even though the event has since concluded.
Aftermath reached out to QTCinderella and Polymarket for more information but did not receive a reply.
The Game Awards’ stance on prediction markets is unclear. Aftermath reached out to the organization to ask if Polymarket and/or Kalshi have received Geoff Keighley’s world exclusive seal of approval, but did not receive a reply.
Kalshi does not even consider The Game Awards to be that big of a deal, in the grand scheme of things.
“That is a… decent number,” Kalshi rep Jack Such told Polygon about The Game Awards’ market. “It’s OK. But some markets have hundreds of millions.”
While Such claimed that individual pages are tended to by a dedicated market team because “every market you see on Kalshi requires a pretty extensive legal contract,” it’s hard to imagine that any specific page registers as more than a temporary blip on Kalshi or Polymarket’s radar. After all, they make their money in aggregate. That’s why it behooves both companies to, as Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour recently said, “financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.”
Somehow, what that actually entails is even more sinister than it sounds.
"It's part of a larger trend in Silicon Valley to insert themselves into the cracks of modern society,” Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day said in a recent video. “Everything that's bad about the world, they don't want to fix it. What they want to do is figure out a way to become a middle man in that system to offer a crappier version of what we already used to do."
Quitting Spotify might have almost beaten Luke, but I’ve fared a little better thanks to my brand new digital audio player
Before there was the iPod, there was the cheap MP3 player. I remember these devices from my teenagerhood. Small and with barely a UI to speak of, they had robust storage and could hold hundreds upon hundreds of songs. Of course, the design improvements of the iPod would put all these also-rans out of business—it turns out that being able to access any song on your device within three clicks of that scroll wheel was an incredible boon for those of us with huge music libraries. From there the chain of history is easy to link together. The iPod leads to the iPhone leading to no one ever needing to have a standalone music playing device because they’re all subscribing to services like Spotify.
Because I have a lot of friends who are working musicians, I have absolutely no love for Spotify. They pay artists peanuts and they also make the music sound like shit due all the compression necessary for streaming audio to your device over the internet. I listen to tons of music, and have especially been interested in the dungeon synth scene, a very small scene of very small artists. While almost all the music I want is available streaming, I’d rather buy the music on Bandcamp, knowing that a higher percentage of my money goes to the artist—especially from artists who I know won’t make much money from streaming.
Up until I bought a Digital Audio Player, those Bandcamp purchases were largely theoretical. Sure, I’d bought the album, but I never downloaded the audio files, instead opting to listen to my music either on the Bandcamp app or on Tidal. Because Tidal also offers its listeners basically all music ever recorded in human history, that meant I wasn’t listening to the music I bought. A digital audio player forces my hand—and I’ve found that I genuinely enjoy this experience of listening to music a lot more.
While there is a fascinating world of people buying and refurbishing old iPods, when I looked at the broad price range and options for the wide variety of DAPs, I wanted to try something new. While I don’t think any device on the market holds a candle to the classic iPod, design-wise, I am extremely happy with my Snowsky Fiio Echo Mini.
What attracted me to the Echo Mini was that it doesn’t have any features I didn’t want and also that it is adorable. If you’re looking into the world of DAPs, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by choice. There are extremely expensive DAPs from companies like Sony that can also access the internet and download apps like the iPod Touch of yesteryear. But I don’t want any of that shit. I don’t even want Bluetooth. I want an object that plays MP3s that I listen to with my new wired in-ear monitors.
The Echo Mini is shaped like a tape deck and is even smaller than I expected when I grabbed it. For under a hundred dollars, this device can hold more music that I can reasonably listen to, even on my five hour Thanksgiving flight to Los Angeles. Because the Echo Mini has both onboard storage and a slot for a micro SD card, I have 256GB of storage and I’ve barely scratched the surface. The battery life is also remarkable, especially compared to my phone, which was previously my main music listening device. I haven’t had to charge it once since I bought it about a month ago.
Although the user experience leaves something to be desired—you’re forced to scroll through nested menus with multiple tiny buttons, reminding me of playing a Japanese RPG on the Playstation, complete menu hell—I love using this device. It slips right in my pocket and it frees me from the yoke of always looking for my phone when I’m out and about. Its clunky UI actually forces me to pick an album and stick with it, where having access to the entirety of all recorded music in history often gave me choice paralysis. It’s also revealed that if I make sure I have a couple of my comfort albums—how i’m feeling now, The Downward Spiral, a handful of Talking Heads albums—I don’t actually need to have access to every album ever. I appreciate the albums I have already bought so much more when I don’t have a choice but to listen to them.
But most of all—the music sounds amazing. I haven’t even dived into the alternate file formats like FLAC, and I’m already hearing new details in songs I’ve listened to over and over. Rosalia’s most recent album LUX sounds fantastic, surrounding me with the lushness of the orchestral compositions. Even pop music sounds a lot fuller. I was listening to the Dev Lemons album Surface Tension, and you can hear intonations from her deep in the mix that I simply cannot hear on streaming services.
After a month of using a DAP I can envision a future where I totally ditch streaming. Listening to albums purposefully, instead of just through the convenience of having literally everything available at all times, has allowed me to fall back in love with the music I have. I think there should be a little more friction in life, in general, but the friction of needing to actually buy an album was something I didn’t even realize I missed.
The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) Board of Directors is saddened to announce that Erica Frank and Kathryn Soderholm have resigned from their roles as Board Directors for personal reasons. Their resignations are effective as of December 11, 2025.
Erica was elected to her seat in 2024, and her term was set to end in 2027; her seat will be filled in the upcoming election as a one-year term. Kathryn was elected to her seat in 2023, and was already scheduled to be replaced in the upcoming election. In the meantime, both of their seats will remain vacant.
We would like to thank Erica and Kathryn for their service as members of the Board and for their years as OTW volunteers. We wish them all the best in their future endeavors.
Lessons on laying out the 404 Media zine using a relatively weird setup—on Linux, using Affinity, with the help of the Windows translation layer WINE.
I write a lot these days, but my path into journalism, going way back to J-School, was through layout.
For years, I was a graphic designer at a number of newspapers—some fairly small, some quite large. I was a card-carrying member of the Society for News Design. It was one of my biggest passions, and I fully expected to have a long career in newspaper design. But newspapers as a medium haven’t really panned out, so I eventually fell into writing.
But I still adore laying out a big project, conceptualizing it, and trying to use it to visually add to the story that the words are trying to convey. It’s not quite a lost art, but I do think that print layout is something that has been a bit back-burnered by society at large.
So when 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler, who spent years editing my writing for Motherboard, reached out about doing a zine, I was absolutely in. The goal of the zine—to shine a spotlight on the intersection of ICE and surveillance tech—was important. Plus, I like working with Jason, and it was an opportunity to get into print design again after quite a few years away.
I just had two problems: One, I have decided that I no longer want to give Adobe money because of cost and ethical concerns about its business model. And two, I now use Linux pretty much exclusively (Bazzite DX, in case you’re wondering).
But the good news is that the open-source community has done a lot of work, and despite my own tech shifts, professional-grade print design on Linux is now a viable option.
What my Affinity interface looks like. It’s the Windows version, but it’s running on Linux.
Why page layout on Linux is fairly uncommon
The meme in the Linux community writes itself: “I would move over to Linux, but I need Photoshop and InDesign and [insert app here] too much.” In the past, this has been a real barrier for designers, especially those who rely on print layout, where open-source alternatives are very limited. (They’ve also been traditionally at the mercy of print shops that have no time for your weird non-standard app.)
Admittedly, the native tools have been getting better. I’m not really a fan myself, but I know GIMP is getting closer in parity to Photoshop. Inkscape is a totally viable vector drawing app. Video is very doable on Linux thanks to the FOSS Kendenlive and the commercial DaVinci Resolve. Blender is basically a de facto standard for 3D at this point. The web-based Penpot is a capable Figma alternative. And Krita, while promoted as a digital painting app, has become my tool of choice for making frame-based animated GIFs, which I do a lot for Tedium.
But for ink-stained print layout nerds, it has been tougher to make the shift (our apologies to Scribus). And Adobe locks down Creative Cloud pretty hard.
However, the recent Affinity release, while drawing some skepticism from the open-source community as a potential enshittification issue, is starting to open up a fresh lane. For those not aware, the new version of Affinity essentially combines the three traditional design apps—vector editor, raster editor, and page layout—into a single tool. It’s pretty good at all three. (Plus, for business reasons related to its owner Canva, it’s currently free to use.)
I’ve tested a few methods for making Affinity work on WINE, but the one I’ve found most flexible is by using the tool Lutris, which is meant to run games but I’m using to run design software.
While it doesn’t have a dedicated Linux version, it more or less runs very well using WINE, the technology that has enabled a Linux renaissance via the Steam Deck. (Some passionate community members, like the WINE hacker ElementalWarrior, have worked hard to make this a fully-fleshed out experience that can even be installed more or less painlessly.)
The desire for a native Linux version of a pro-level design app is such that the Canva subsidiary is thinking about doing it themselves.
But I’m not the kind of person who likes to wait, so I decided to try to build as much of the zine as I could with Affinity for page layout. For the few things I couldn’t do, I would remote into a Mac.
The RISO factor
Another consideration here is the fact that this zine is being built with Risograph printing, a multicolor printing approach distinct from the more traditional CMYK. The inky printing process, similar to screen printing, has a distinct, vibrant look, even if it avoids the traditional four-color approach (in our case, using layers of pink, black, and lime green).
Throughout the process, I spent a lot of time setting layers to multiply to ensure the results looked good, and adding effects like halftone and erase to help balance out the color effects. This mostly worked OK, though I did have some glitches.
At one point, a lime-green frog lost much of its detail when I tried to RISO-fy it, requiring me to double-check my color settings and ensure I was getting the right tone. And sometimes, PDF exports from Affinity added unsightly lines, which I had to go out of my way to remove. If I was designing for newspapers, I might have been forced to come up with a quick plan B for that layout. But fortunately, I had the luxury of not working on a daily deadline like I might have back in the day.
I think that this layout approach is genuinely fascinating—and I know Jason in particular is a huge fan of it. Could I see other publications in the 404 mold taking notes from this and doing the same thing? Heck yes.
A sneak peek at the inside layout of the 404 Media zine.
The ups and downs of print layout on Linux
So, the headline you can take away from this is pretty simple: Laying stuff out in Affinity over Linux is extremely doable, and if you’re doing it occasionally, you will find a quite capable tool.
Admittedly, if this was, like, my main gig, I might still feel the urge to go back to MacOS—especially near the end of the process. Here’s what I learned:
The good: Workflow-wise, it was pretty smooth. Image cutouts—a tightly honed skill of mine that AI has been trying to obsolete for years—were very doable. Affinity also has some great effects tools that in many ways beat equivalents in other apps, such as its glitch tool and its live filter layers. It didn’t feel like I was getting a second-class experience when all was said and done.
The bad: My muscle memory for InDesign shortcuts was completely ineffective for this, and there were occasional features of InDesign and Photoshop that I did not find direct equivalents for in Affinity. WINE’s file menus tend to look like old Windows, which might be a turn-off for UX purists, and required a bit of extra navigation to dig through folders. Also, one downside of WINE that I could not work past was that I couldn’t use my laptop’s Intel-based GPU for machine learning tasks, a known bug that I imagine slowed some things down on graphically intensive pages.
I checked, by the way; this was not a WINE thing, it did this in MacOS too. (Ernie Smith)
The ugly: I think one area Affinity will need to work on as it attempts to sell the idea that you can design in one interface are better strategies to help mash down content for export. At one point while I was trying to make a PDF, Affinity promised me that the file I would be exporting was going to be 17 exabytes in size, which my SSD was definitely not large enough for. That wasn’t true, but it does emphasize that the dream of doing everything in one interface gets complicated when you want to send things to the printer. Much of the work I did near the end of the process was rasterizing layers to ensure everything looked as intended.
When I did have to use a Mac app for something (mainly accessing Spectrolite, a prepress app for RISO designs), I accessed an old Hackintosh using NoMachine, a tool for connecting to computers remotely. So even for the stuff I actually needed MacOS for, I didn’t need to leave the comforts of my janky laptop.
Looking for a Big Tech escape hatch
Was it 100% perfect? No. Affinity crashed every once in a while, but InDesign did that all the time back in the day. And admittedly, an office full of people using Affinity on Linux isn’t going to work as well as one guy in a coffee shop working with a team of editors over chat and email.
But it’s my hope that experiences like mine convince other people to try it, and for companies to embrace it. Affinity isn’t open-source, and Canva is a giant company with plenty of critics, just like Adobe. But there are emerging projects like PixiEditor and Graphite that could eventually make print layout an extremely viable and even modern open-source endeavor.
But we have to take victories where we can find them, and the one I see is that Affinity is a lot less locked down than Creative Cloud, which is why it’s viable on Linux. And in general, this feels like an opportunity to get away from the DRM-driven past of creative software. (Hey Canva, it’s never too late to make Affinity open-source.)
Difficult reporting shouldn’t have to be tethered to the whims of Big Tech to exist. Especially when that tech—on Amazon’s cloud, using Adobe’s PDFs, through Google’s search, over Meta’s social network, with Apple’s phones, and on Microsoft’s operating system—too often causes uncomfortable tensions with the reporting. This is one step towards a better escape hatch.
Laid-Out Links
Speaking of useful image tools, I want to give a shout to Imagor Studio, a self-hosted image management app. It’s actually an extension of a tool Tedium uses for image rendering, Imagor.
The video creator David Hoffman has been pulling absolute gems from his archive over the years, but this one, in which telephone operators discuss their feelings on automation, really hits home.
And yeah, I did a Nieman Lab prediction this year. It’s about my recent hobbyhorse, Grokipedia.
Routine is a video game that has been a long time coming. I firstwrote about it in 2012! I wrote about itagain in 2022, when we learned that the original version of the game had basically been scrapped and the team had started over, hence the long wait. But even that was three years ago!
So seeing it on Steam last week sent me. Had it been out for years and I'd somehow missed it? No, it just took this long to come out. I'm very glad it did though, because in several key ways, Routine absolutely rules.
Set on an abandoned lunar space station, you play as a guy tasked with finding out what happened to everyone, and maybe learning a little about yourself in the process. Routine's opening minutes are spent waking you up and giving you your first taste of its grimy, retrofuture world, and they're also the game's finest.
This game looks amazing. The art style is as far inside my wheelhouse as it gets; this is a lived-in sci-fi space, with giant blast doors sitting alongside wooden tables from the 1970s. Outside, lunar tram stations are full of advertising imagery that looks like it's from 1987. Everything is dirty and heavy and broken, and looks like it's been used a lot. I could spend days just wandering around admiring the sense of place that permeates every corner of the station. Even the fluorescent lightbulbs found throughout the station have little bits of branding on them, a level of detail I don't ever remember seeing before.
The CAT is both a repair tool and a weapon. It is also, thanks to its buttons, immersive menu system and viewscreen, one of the coolest weapons in video game history
It also helps that you feel so part of the world. You're wearing a space helmet, which distorts the edges of your view ever so slightly, and your big heavy space boots make every step considered, as though you're a person moving through a space, not a floating camera attached to the end of a gun. Routine has a very strong desire to commit fully to the first-person perspective, so there are no breaks to access emails or the save menu. Even your gun and all its settings are accessed directly, by looking at it and touching its buttons. You aren't gliding through Routine's world, you are in it.
Which, like I've said, was amazing for the first ten minutes or so as I read some stuff, clomped around, opened some doors, dug through some people's stuff and just generally marvelled at the art design. But then, once you've got the basics of the world and how you move mastered, you meet your first bad guy. And my heart sank.
This isn't a general criticism of the game's design--the developers can make whatever they want, it's their game!--but man, I hate horror games. I just don't enjoy them, I receive no pleasure from their tension or scares whatsoever, and so in instances like this, where their accompanying world is so rich and ready to be explored, I hate them even more. I'd have happily paid to play Routine just to wander the station's corridors! Instead you spend quite a bit of time running and hiding from bad guys, which reduces much of this detailed world into a panicked blur.
Why are games like this and Alien Isolation, so noted for their intricate world-building and attention to detail, saddled with gameplay that stops you exploring and enjoying those same worlds in peace? Maybe the intention is precisely that contrast: to provide a world that immerses you, so that when you're threatened in it the whole thing feels extra scary. For me, though, it's just a frustration.
There isn't even a difficulty toggle here--again, not a general criticism, just something I as an individual like--to soften the blow, or the solace that if I can kill these guys they'll stay dead and I'll get that chance to explore in peace, because these killer robots are unkillable. The best you can do is briefly disable them.
A bummer, then, but I enjoyed my brief time with Routine's world and weapon so much that I'll hold out hope that some day there'll be an exploratory or story mode released. Or, at the very least, enough time will have passed that a trainer or some cheats will come out so that I, the scardiest man in video games, can finally explore its corridors in peace.
(Anyway, because I spent more time enjoying the view than I did solving puzzles or evading bad guys, please enjoy these screenshots I took of Routine's incredible space station.)
The PLA Conference returns in 2026, bringing thousands of public library workers together for several days of learning, inspiration, and community. Every PLA Conference builds on the strengths of the last, and Minneapolis will host a vibrant, idea-rich gathering that blends peer-driven programming, fresh perspectives, and a dynamic exhibits floor. With new opportunities launching and major deadlines approaching, now is the time to start shaping your plans for PLA 2026.
PLA 2026 introduces several fresh opportunities on the first day to help attendees connect, learn, and ease into the conference.
Hot Takes: New at PLA 2026 —Tuesday, March 31, 2026, 1:00–3:00 PM Central
What’s your take on the future of public libraries? Hot Takes is a new learning and networking event featuring quick, high-energy talks from passionate public library people. Selected presenters will share their take in a brief chat with an emcee (about 5 minutes), then stick around for discussion with attendees.
PLA strongly encourages submissions from marginalized groups, including women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, and people with disabilities. Hot Takes presenters are expected to be registered for the conference.
Conference 101 New to PLA or just want a strong start? Conference 101 on the first day will offer a friendly orientation to PLA 2026, including tips on navigating the schedule, making the most of the exhibits, planning your time, and building a realistic learning and networking plan.
Programs, Keynote, and What to Expect
PLA’s peer-driven approach ensures that the program lineup reflects the realities, challenges, and innovations shaping public libraries today. Attendees can expect robust sessions in areas such as community engagement, early literacy, digital equity, data-informed decision-making, leadership development, technology, teen and youth services, and workforce development.
Headlining the Opening Session is Bryan Stevenson, acclaimed lawyer, advocate, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, and bestselling author of Just Mercy. His keynote will set a powerful tone for the days ahead, offering inspiration and framing the work of public libraries within a larger national conversation about justice, equity, and community leadership. See program schedule here.
How-To Stage
The How-To Stage is back! This cooperative learning experience enables attendees to acquire hands-on, practical skills in brief, engaging sessions. Presenters propose a 20-minute “how-to” session, which can cover almost any topic — from crafts to new tech tools, workflows, or program formats. PLA thanks Ingram, a platinum-level sponsor of PLA 2026, for its exclusive support of the How-To Stage.
As with Hot Takes, PLA strongly encourages submissions from marginalized groups. Presenters are expected to register for the conference and bring any necessary materials for their session.
Making Your Case to Attend
PLA offers a detailed resource to help library workers frame the value of attending PLA 2026, including a sample budget worksheet, a sample supervisor email, and strategies for demonstrating how attendance benefits both you and your library.
With strong programming, new engagement opportunities like Hot Takes and the How-To Stage, a dynamic host city, and a keynote from Bryan Stevenson, PLA 2026 is shaping up to be a can’t-miss opportunity for public library professionals everywhere.
It’s once again that special time of year when we give you a chance to do well by doing good. That’s right—it’s the 2025 edition of our annual Charity Drive!
Every year since 2007, we’ve encouraged readers to give to Penny Arcade’s Child’s Play charity, which provides toys and games to kids being treated in hospitals around the world. In recent years, we’ve added the Electronic Frontier Foundation to our charity push, aiding in their efforts to defend Internet freedom. This year, as always, we’re providing some extra incentive for those donations by offering donors a chance to win pieces of our big pile of vendor-provided swag. We can’t keep it, and we don’t want it clogging up our offices, so it’s now yours to win.
This year’s swag pile is full of high-value geek goodies. We have over a dozen prizes valued at nearly $5,000 total, including gaming hardware and collectibles, apparel, and more. In 2023, Ars readers raised nearly $40,000 for charity, contributing to a total haul of more than $542,000 since 2007. We want to raise even more this year, and we can do it if readers dig deep.
What does it take to raise three gargantuan, perfect boys? And what kind of crazy mix-ups would those beautiful, gentle giants get into? This is the central theme of Joe Cappa’s Haha, You Clowns, possibly the strangest show in the last year and one of the strongest animated works that Adult Swim has produced since Smiling Friends. Isaiah Colbert and Chris Person sat down and talked about what it takes to raise such wonderful sons.
Chris: I think I became aware of this because Bakoon kept posting out of context clips of it. How did you end up finding out about this?
What a bunch of pranksters. Credit: Adult Swim
Isaiah: My first brush with it was a bit less happenstance. What with me being a cat in both worlds of gaming and animation, I wound up getting sent screeners of the show prior to its release in my emails. An occurrence that's usually random AF and results in me getting spammed with Prime Video shows no one's ever heard of and I will never watch, but I was taken aback by how its character designs all looked like palatable Wojack memes. But, turns out, it’s quite the opposite of that. It's pretty damn pleasant. Downright wholesome.
Chris: I love these boys so much.
The boys game. Credit: Adult Swim
Isaiah: The elevator pitch for it is pretty much what you said, so it’s almost hard to describe the show beyond that. But if I were to attempt to do so, I'd say the show is about a family who lifts strangers up as often as they do each other as they learn to live together following the loss of their mom. Granted, it's a surreal-looking show to experience watching, with its characters looking like they wandered out of an MS Paint draft, but its humor is starkly anti-cynical. I think that's the magic of the whole thing.
Chris: Yeah, it's a hard show to explain the premise of without just watching it. I tried showing my dad this show over Thanksgiving. “It’s about three giant boys and their father and looks really troubling. You keep expecting something very bad to happen but if it does it's immediately resolved. By the end of every episode, they all learn a lesson and grow closer.” We watched exactly one episode, my dad laughed, and he said “OK, enough of that.” In retrospect, I was just describing a sitcom.
Sometimes things get serious. Credit: Adult Swim
Isaiah: Basically, yet I think its look being so off-putting is what's kept it from really being an easy on-ramp show to get folks to watch. When I broach watching it with my friends after twisting their arm to rewatch specific Smiling Friends episodes at my request, they get turned off by the look of it. But after showing my partner the three episodes stretch from episodes 3-5, I think that's when its formula broke my partner down into liking it. In a weird way, the show having swole dudes who look like the friends of a friend you don't want to hang out with at a party acts as a way to deconstruct implicit biases. That even meatheads can be sweet boys. And seeing them make a mountain out of the smallest thing–searching for a lost jacket in a restaurant, comforting their dad on a rocky flight, teaching their younger brother to not be afraid of holding a baby–is almost an act of anti-comedy that comes back around as comedy when put against how intentionally weird looking the show is. It grows on you.
Oh my gawd. Credit: Adult Swim
Boo to all those people on Twitter that shat on the show for airing after Smiling Friends as if it were some Walmart double feature movie package deal that nobody wanted. I think they complement each other well, what with one being meaner despite its name and the other being wholesome despite how bowling shoe ugly its designs are.
Chris: Right, and the execution is the point. If you have to pinpoint what is "funny" about the show, it's often just how specific actions are animated or just tiny, uncomfortable turns of phrases. Tristan, Preston and Duncan are all voiced by Joe Cappa and have a diction somewhere between Schwarzenegger and Homestar Runner. I actually think it bizarrely shares a lot in common with the latter, as well as Brad Neely's work or maybe Achewood a little. There's an entire episode about Duncan being afraid of holding a baby that destroyed me just based on single, tiny shots of how strange babies look. Or even just the fact that their neighbor is professional pool player Jeanette "Black Widow" Lee, who is dating Sean Astin. It's just these specific beats in an otherwise wholesome show.
Isaiah: Biblically accurate Sean Astin had me rolling. They got his eye tilt so dead-on from all angles.
Chris: It's cool that both Lee and Astin signed on for this knowing what it looks like.
That's Sean Astin, he starred in Rudy. Credit: Adult Swim
Isaiah: I think another thing that probably Adult Swim should get more credit for is that many of its newer animated shows are from folks who just did animation on Newgrounds and YouTube for years as folks to take a chance on to give them these series. Cappa and Smiling Friends creators Michael Cusack and Zach Hadel are so terminally online have done this as a passion for so long that it really shows in their series. That uncanny ability to spotlight how drawing something like giving your dad a massage or naturalistic, rambling dialogue about something so innocuous and random like male-pattern balding and finding humor in how relatable that kind of banter is.
A secret thing I've been doing in the lag time of new episodes is going back to the creators' old stuff and discovering the genesis for what would be their first drafts of these jokes. For Hadel, a lot of it is random appearances on Oneyplays where his hypothetical inferences, vocal stims, and impersonations find new life in the show. The same can be said for Cappa, because the first drafts of Haha, You Clowns exist on his YouTube account. And honestly, the first one I saw I didn't like as much because it was a bit crass and mean spirited from the good boys I know and love. So witnessing that evolve into the wholesome show it is now has been a great thing to retroactively experience. It's kind of like how a mangaka will have the core premise of their landmark series in a one shot and seeing how relationships and designs carry over and are remixed for the better. Though, I did get a kick out of the YouTube series' running gag being that the mom was, in fact, a ghostly presence instead of being a knockoff Alexa.
Though I'll take their eyes turning red whenever they inevitably start crying and the after school-ass Yakuza substory piano music that starts playing over it any day of the week.
Chris: Yeah I think the final show works better because it firmly loves the boys. I remember someone a while back saying the difference between Family Guy and American Dad is that the family in American Dad seems to really like each other and that's why it's a better show. Like it really does grow on you. Cappa's entire account is wild though, his stuff involving really weird practical effects like “Meet The Boys” is great. It all has a menacing Aphex Twin “Windowlicker” tension that is never resolved.
Isaiah: When I read up on him before our chat, I came across his animated short “Ghost Dogs,” which has motion as a Sundance Festival Official Selection and the Satoshi Kon Award winner at Fantasia. Watching it was creepy as hell. But dude's definitely got artistic range. I tend to trust folks who can seamlessly weave their way from comedy to horror, and “Ghost Dogs” is definitely horror.
Chris: Yeah, like Smiling Friends does a lot with not being locked into a single medium and working with multiple (CG, claymation). I don't think I'd want that for this show, but it helps as an artist and animator to have the range.
Isaiah: I feel forever changed having learned that the animators for Haha, You Clowns draw the first initials of the boys to tell them apart because, despite not being triplets, they have the same fucking face.
While looking behind the scenes of Haha, You Clowns, I learned that storyboard artists keep track of the brothers by labeling their foreheads with their starting initial pic.twitter.com/CJWmzHI09b
With Haha, You Clowns being the first Adult Swim short to be picked up as a series, I hope it leads more shows of its ilk to get a rocket strapped to its pack and propelled into the mainstream. My kingdom for a full series-funded pick up for YouTube animated shows like Speedoru's Punch Punch Forever or MeatCanyon getting some sort of show.
Chris: I would very much love it if Adult Swim had free rein to do that. It exists as this strange unicorn when so much of animation is decimated, and it's worrying particularly since Williams Street is a subsidiary of Warner Brothers.
Isaiah: Lord knows, Warner Bros. under Netflix would all but assure nothing is getting past a second season. Good news for that “why bother?” Hogwarts show. Bad news for animation worth a damn.
Chris: I can't imagine that. I want these large lads to have a healthy life. I want to see their adventures for years. I wanna grow old with these beautiful boys.
Isaiah:Haha, You Clowns forever. A hundred years, Haha, You Clowns things, and stuff of that nature.
It's a short text adventure where you, a Silicon Valley Guy, have billions of dollars invested in generative AI. Which is putting you in regular contact with a cast of characters who, uh, just need to talk to you. Sometimes to warn you, other times to sign business deals that are totally cool and normal.
Whichever response you choose when prompted throughout these conversations, I'm sure everything is gonna turn out just fine.
How the shipping container, a dominant force in ocean shipping, came from a truck driver whose invention proved to be too good at its job.
Today in Tedium: It’s not often discussed, but one form of transportation can inspire another. Think about it. Before Orville and Wilbur Wright decided to test the skies, they (and other early fight enthusiasts) spent years learning the trade of bicycle repair. Robert Fulton developed the first practical submarine—and the first steamboat. Carriage makers attempted (and, honestly, failed) to translate their skill set from horses to railroads. But no example perhaps nails down this dynamic more perfectly than that of the container ship. On the surface, putting predetermined containers on giant freight ships seems like an obvious idea, but let’s be honest—it wasn’t. But systematizing the way we shipped complex goods was one of the smartest things the modern freight industry ever did—and it was a guy who had nothing to do with ships that came up with it. Today’s Tedium ponders the interesting, unusual story of the truck driver who saw a vision for ships that nobody else did—and the problems that ultimately created. — Ernie @ Tedium
Ships and trucks were Malcom McLean’s chocolate and peanut butter. (Wikimedia Commons)
Shipping containers: How software’s best metaphor evolved from shipping’s best idea
If you’re a developer or even modestly nerdy about technology, you probably are familiar with the concept of Docker and containerization. It’s the idea of being able to run a number of separate virtualized or abstracted computers inside a larger one.
Docker isn’t the first example of its approach—you have to look to FreeBSD’s “jails” concept for that one. But the decision to explicitly brand it around shipping containers, down to its logo, speaks to the conceptual brilliance of the shipping container.
Putting this in computer software terms: Traditionally, when you install an application, it sprays data around your computer. That can get terribly complicated to manage and can even degrade the performance of your operating system over time as multiple apps do the same thing. But by keeping that app together, it applies some operational consistency.
This explains why these sorts of organizing elements—be they Snaps, Pods, Flatpaks, or AppImages—have become so popular on Linux. While Docker (which is more focused on the server side of things than Snaps or Flatpaks are) works differently from most of those technically, it reflects a certain conceptual lineage.
Now apply this concept to physical cargo, and you can see the appeal. If you put 1,000 smartphones or 1,000 lawn chairs on a plane or ship, you don’t just leave them out loosey-goosey. That not only is harder to manage, it can also cost more, too, because there is more labor involved. And there’s always a risk that one shipment might get mixed up with another, causing serious problems.
Put simply, we needed a way to ensure that if a manufacturer had a product that they wanted to ship halfway across the world, it was left fully intact and untouched during the import process. That’s where the container comes into play.
And oddly enough, this idea came not from the world of ships, but the world of trucking—specifically from the owner of a trucking company who had spent his early career working around the limitations of his local market.
Malcom McLean—born Malcolm, but having removed the second L himself—essentially came to the trucking industry from nothing. He took interest in the delivery driver who dropped off oil to his Red Springs, North Carolina gas station, and made $5 for the task—not a small amount of money in 1933, the equivalent of $125 today. Eventually, he got access to a dump truck, which he then leased out—using the revenue from that to buy another truck. Within a few years, McLean had upgraded to shipping textiles, and within two decades, the firm had thousands of trucks to its name.
This may be the nicest profile I’ve ever seen of an individual. And he didn’t even get to the container ships part yet! (Journal and Sentinel/Newspapers.com)
In a fawning 1953 profile in his local newspaper, the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel, writer Chester S. Davis explained why starting a trucking company in North Carolina, specifically, was a solution to a problem:
For the first 350 years of its history North Carolina has been crippled by inadequate transportation. Our coast is the most treacherous on the eastern seaboard. We have no first-rate natural harbors. Only one of our rivers—the Cape Fear—empties into the ocean. The others drain into shallow coastal sounds or, like the Yadkin-Pee Dee, flow into other states.
Combine that with the mountain terrain on the western part of the state, and you have a complicated state of affairs for getting goods into the state. Often, goods delivered by ship would have to go into a nearby port—such as the natural one in Virginia’s Hampton Roads region—to get delivered elsewhere.
North Carolina’s trucking industry grew quickly in the 1940s as a result, especially thanks to firms like the McLean Trucking Company, a firm that had expanded to 12 states at the time of the 1953 piece. Many firms in the sector started not unlike McLean’s. “The industry has been built out by a bunch of horny-handed characters who started out as truck drivers,” Davis wrote, McLean included.
But Malcom, as the piece states, had a vision. That vision was so broad and unexpected that there’s no way Davis could have known that in a decade, Malcom would own one of the largest maritime shipping concerns in the world. Not trucking—maritime.
And it comes down to a perception that nobody else was really considering—an idea he filed a patent application for just a year after the 1953 piece.
1955
The year that the shipping company Wallenius Line developed the first purpose-built “ro-ro” shipping freighter. This shipping use case, referring to “roll-on/roll-off,” was a type of freighter specifically for finished vehicles. The concept played a significant role in the globalization of the auto industry by making it possible to cost-effectively import cars to other parts of the world. While the cars are built a little more piecemeal today, if you’ve ever driven a Toyota imported from Japan, you have a ro-ro to thank for making that market possible.
Malcom McLean thought it’d be a great idea to combine shipping and trucking, and it resulted in this patent. (Google Patents)
How shipping containers reshaped the global freight industry
Tankers were already quite common in the 1950s, but they had a significant problem: They weren’t really designed to carry lots of different kinds of things. If a tanker was moving oil between coasts, there wasn’t really room for anything other than oil.
This was inefficient for multiple reasons: For one thing, if you were delivering oil from one port to another, it’s not like the tanker was going to bring oil back with it—that’s not how oil works. That meant a return trip was a function of sheer location and was otherwise completely fruitless.
Compare this to trucking—when McLean’s crew delivered textiles up north, they often brought something back with them. What if you could apply this thinking to ships?
TFW when your Jenga blocks are supersized.
And so, that’s what McLean did with U.S. patent 2,853,968, “Apparatus for Shipping Freight.” The strategy was simple: Rather than having trucks deliver freight that could be placed on a ship to travel globally, you put the truck bed itself onto the ship. The tankers, many of which had been used in World War II, were large enough to hold dozens of them, and the scale meant the ships could carry literal tons of freight—per container.
Plus, containers are strong enough to make the transition in one piece, literally—and by treating them like building blocks, they become even stronger structurally. Per the patent filing:
The containers are of sturdy construction capable of withstanding the forces to be encountered on the open seas and are adapted to receive the freight to be trans ported. In a specific, and particularly advantageous, embodiment of my invention, hereafter more specifically described, each container may be of a construction adapted to receive a complete truck-trailer fully loaded with freight.
The construction is such that two rows of containers are formed. Preferably, the containers of one row are in side by side relation with each other and in end to end relation with the adjacent containers of the other row. Thus, the long sides of the containers are protected from direct impact from high seas by adjoining containers and in the case of the four end containers their outer sides are protected by the forecastle or poop deck structure as the case may be.
There are lots of other advantages, too: It didn’t require significant redesigns of existing ships, and by placing the containers atop the ship, it could suddenly make single-purpose ships multifunctional. Plus, it prevented containers from getting lost—like the items on a plate destined for a picky eater, everything’s kept separate.
Soon after filing this patent, McLean resigned from his position with McLean Trucking Company and founded a replacement company. Within a couple of years, McLean had launched a company, Sea-Land, and a ship of his own to test out the idea. He set up deliveries from New Jersey to Houston to prove to skeptical shipping firms that he wasn’t crazy. Not only did the idea work, but it worked swimmingly well.
When the SS Ideal-X launched, modified to allow more containers to sit on the top, little did McLean know that he was about to fundamentally change an industry. And not always for the better.
“I’d like to sink that sonofabitch.”
— Freddy Fields, an official with the International Longshoremen’s Association, responding to the departure of the SS Ideal-X out of Newark, New Jersey, on its initial voyage. Fields, perhaps earlier than most, realized that containers were going to threaten a lot of jobs, because containers don’t need their goods removed manually in most cases, and that was kind of what longshoremen did. It’s hard to argue in favor of a crew of people doing 20-plus hours of back-breaking work, when you can just Lincoln-Log it in a couple of minutes.
The problem with containerization is that we’re too good at it. (-tarat-/Flickr)
Containerization was a huge boon for shipping—but it came with real human costs
Fans of ruthless efficiency will find a lot to like about the story of shipping containers. They not only simplified a complex process, but they made shipping a much more cost-effective tool for product globalization.
There are likely many things in your home that spent time on a freighter before they landed in your hands, and it’s because shipping suddenly became cost-effective—pennies on the dollar compared to what it was previously.
But there’s a lot of complication that comes with the model, and much of it falls on longshoremen. As a 1978 Bureau of Labor Statistics report on the longshore industry put it:
The advent of container technology in the early 1950s and competitive pressures to cut costs and improve productivity led management to initiate innovative approaches in the use of cargo handling equipment and work processes.
It became a huge point of contention in many labor battles, as the added efficiency came at the cost of tens of thousands of jobs globally, along with a gradual decline in rights for the workers that remained. Numerous work stoppages followed.
And it’s not like things have gotten much better since. As a 2022 piece from The American Prospect noted, recent deregulations in the container industry have increased the sizes of ships while creating additional complexity at ports. In the example they shared, a crew of Filipino seafarers found themselves stuck at sea for more than a year—but also stuck at the Long Beach port for months, all because the port was too full.
An ad for Sea-Land after a longshoremen’s strike around Baltimore. The ad ran the same year Sea-Land sold to R.J. Reynolds.
There is some irony to this, as McLean had basically come up with the shipping container idea specifically to cut down on unnecessary delays. As Ian Graham wrote in his book Fifty Ships That Changed the Course of History:
During Thanksgiving Week in 1937, McLean accompanied a cargo of cotton to New York and watched it being loaded on board a ship bound for Istanbul, Turkey. As the days went by, he grew increasingly frustrated by the delays. Since shipping companies couldn’t predict how long the process would take and therefore exactly when a ship would leave one port and arrive at its next port, they had to deliver their cargo to port facilities days or even weeks before it was due to be loaded onto a ship, increasing the chance that some of it might be lost, damaged or stolen. Vast warehouses were needed to store goods at ports, and the process was so
labor-intensive that it was also very expensive.
Essentially, you might argue that McLean’s simple idea worked so well that it actually created a situation where those delays are happening during the drop-off process.
Compare the number of containers on McLean’s ship with the number of containers on the Ever Given, the ship that infamously got stuck in the Suez Canal a few years back.
Though to be completely fair to McLean’s great idea, it was somewhat sabotaged by deregulation, which arguably made it almost too popular. From Amir Khafagy’s American Prospect piece:
Prior to the 1980s, the Shipping Act of 1916 regulated the relatively modest ocean carrier industry like a public utility. Prices were transparent and there were no exclusive agreements for volume shippers; anyone wanting to ship cargo could access the same rates. The United States Shipping Board, later the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC), regulated prices and practices, and subsidies assisted domestic shipbuilding. The act enabled smaller companies to enter ocean shipping with stable prices to weather downturns.
But the Shipping Act of 1984, and later the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 1998, took down this architecture. It allowed shipping companies to consolidate, and eliminated price transparency, facilitating secret deals with importers and exporters. The FMC was defanged as a regulator. Almost immediately, containerization took off. The number of goods carried by containers skyrocketed from 102 million metric tons in 1980 to about 1.83 billion metric tons as of 2017.
This essentially created our modern economy of cheap stuff delivered cheaply from around the world. But it also created chaos in the form of bad labor conditions and a significant shift in terms of what the shipping industry needed from longshoremen and seafarers alike. Plus, the ships—and the ports!—had to keep changing to accommodate the puzzle pieces that Malcom McLean invented. They were LEGOs with consequences.
Putting this back in computer terms, because those are the open seas I’m familiar with: Docker is great for compartmentalizing self-hosted apps. But the truth of the matter is, every computer has a ceiling of how many containers it can manage. Some can handle one or two, others 20 or 30.
But eventually, there’s a limit, a point where things can topple over because there’s just too much stuff. But it’s a mushy limit, one that you will only find after testing the waters and finding that you’re starting to boil the ocean. Containerization is such a good idea, in a shipping context, because it turned an expensive, time-consuming shipping process into a cheap one.
But like the stuff on your computer, it’s not immune to enshittification. And eventually, the stuff wants to break out of the container.
Malcom McLean was obviously a brilliant guy whose brilliant invention has been used in less-than-brilliant ways. But I definitely would not go so far as a 2021 piece from a North Carolina news radio station did: “Did a North Carolinian Cause the Suez Canal Back-Up?”
Find something you love as much as Chester S. Davis loved writing massive features about Malcom McLean for the Winstom-Salem Journal and Sentinel. This one is from 1969. (Newspapers.com)
That’s a bit too butterfly-effecty even for me, the king of connecting disparate things together. (He’s dead now, but presuming there’s an afterlife, it probably grinds McLean’s gears that the Suez Canal incident shows just how far containerization strayed from his original idea.)
But I do think it highlights a deeper point: Innovation in the hands of an industry that sees unlimited upside means that there will always be unforeseen problems. This is an issue with industries big and small, but it’s especially acute in logistics, a field where the work never ends and there’s always a threat of burnout.
To get a little personal for a second, my dad worked in shipping logistics. He managed freight that went out of an airport, and I remember he always worked the most insane hours. Gone by 6, home by 10. It became clear at some point that burnout hit him hard, and the adjustment to a sense of normalcy after multiple years of 18 hour days really did a number on him.
He died young. I officially outlived him last year.
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about burnout lately, and how difficult it is to recharge the batteries. (I’m feeling some of it myself, but I’m trying.) I’ve never worked in logistics beyond organizing Docker containers, but I do think logistics are a great lens to look through the weaknesses of business culture and the labor movement at large.
There is potential to follow an idea too perfectly, too far, too much to its absolute extreme, and see the returns diminish over time. But fortunately, writing doesn’t really require a lot of extra deliveries.
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