Category: media

As Microsoft lays off 18,000 people, one of the departments slashed is the Xbox Entertainment Studio, launched in 2012 and with nearly 20 series in some phase of development.

” ‘It’s a pleasure to talk about him, but there will come a time very soon where I say, “I’ve done that, I am closing the door and moving on,” ‘ explained Mr. Suchet, 68, clad in a very un-Poirot-like blue dress shirt and jeans.”

“The easy tropes and practiced banter, the reliable fulfilling of a sitcom’s tasks, contributed to a sense of permanence. … Here was a world void of dread, danger, and anxiety, a place in which work and play were indistinguishable, in which jobs just meant different aesthetics attached to the same basic glee.” Exhibit A: Just Shoot Me.

“It’s only common sense that the devaluation creative industries face is having a sustained negative effect on the investment available for sustainable artistic careers. Through new groups like the Content Creators Coalition, artists have begun to advocate for themselves. But forging an internet that takes individual rights (including privacy), cultural diversity and sustainable progress seriously also requires that consumers get on board.”

“A Montreal filmmaker fears that she could lose the centrepiece of a federally subsidized art installation after Canadian customs officers intercepted her material and deemed that it contravened the country’s trade sanctions against Iran.”

The mega-conglomerate would certainly have been Hollywood’s heaviest hitter, but the risks of meshing the two studios would have been risky for everyone involved, including the entire Los Angeles area.

Nathan Rabin: “So I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to pop culture: I’m sorry for creating this unstoppable monster. Seven years after I typed that fateful phrase, … I would welcome its erasure from public discourse.”

“It’s as if, through sales figures, profits and other assorted fiscal headlines video games will be able to buy their way to legitimacy. How fitting that a medium which typically encourages its players to exert dominance over the competition would frame its worth as a battle, usually with cinema, as if this were a fight to be won, as if the winner would somehow usurp the loser, as if each venue for human expression didn’t have unique capacity for joy, wonder and meaning.”