Alex Fitch

Tracey Laguerre didn’t plan on pitching 'I Love You, Jocelyn' to Cartoon Network. She had a great job at Google until the pandemic pushed her to revisit the student film and see whether it might fit Cartoon Cartoons’ revived shorts program. cartoonbrew.com/shorts/tracey-…

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it. Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying. Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence." Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter." Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter. They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created. One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility." Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies. That's the metered intelligence business model. And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

For about ten years, the DVD made Hollywood more money than the movie theater did. A film could flop in cinemas and still turn a tidy profit once it hit the shelf at Best Buy. In 2005, discs sold around $16 billion in the US. Theaters made about half that. That safety net changed the kind of films that got made. Since a strong disc run could cover a box-office miss, studios were willing to bet on smaller, odder movies. A scrappy comedy like Napoleon Dynamite or The Big Lebowski could rake in as much from disc sales as it ever made selling tickets, sometimes more. And the hours of behind-the-scenes extras Jackson misses got made for the same reason: the discs sold well enough to pay for them. Then streaming showed up, and the disc money fell off a cliff. Sales sank more than 80%. By 2018, DVDs were down to barely $2 billion. By 2023, a full half-year of disc sales added up to about $754 million, less than a tenth of the old peak. With the safety net gone, the risky bets stopped. The mid-size movie, the $20 to $60 million film that filled theaters for decades, mostly stopped getting made. Hollywood's big studios put out 204 movies in 2006. By 2010, that was down to 141. The digital version that replaced the disc comes with fine print. When you click "buy" on a movie, you're really just renting it. What you actually get is a license, a permission slip the store can take back. In late 2023, PlayStation warned customers it was about to wipe more than 1,300 shows they had already paid for. It backed off only after signing a fresh deal, and even that one expires in a couple of years. California now has a law, on the books since 2025, that makes stores admit the "buy" button is actually a rental. Jackson's old box sets still sit on a shelf and still play, extras and all. The digital copies most people traded them for can vanish the morning a licensing contract runs out.

Paramount claiming ownership of a Public Access show in Michigan is wild work. We re-shared Colbert’s public access show with our audience yesterday, made sure to point everyone back to Monroe Community Media — and CBS blocked the entire thing?! Insanity. @MaydayNetwork

Fantastic to see this @nerve_news investigation trending. The crypto millions fuelling Britain’s far-right turn (the exact same playbook as Trump) requires much, much more scrutiny.

“The reaction people are having against AI is the same reaction people had when the internet was introduced.” No, it wasn’t. The internet expanded access to information. AI is replacing human labor and creativity while consuming massive resources and harming the planet.

What the media aren’t covering… Net migration down 48% Immigration down 20% Emigration down 6% Asylum applications down 12% Returns and deportations up 7% Arrivals by small boat down 41% - 1st Jan - 20th May

Nobody has done more to undermine British values than Nigel Farage.

Teenagers have started calling AI art "boomer art" and consider it cringe, and YouTubers have stopped using AI-generated thumbnails because teenagers find them cringe and won't click on them. I honestly couldn't be happier.

🚨 do you understand what happened to Stephen Colbert.. 24 hours after his final Late Show, Colbert hijacked a tiny public access channel in Monroe, Michigan with Jack White, Eminem, Jeff Daniels and Steve Buscemi. Now Paramount - the company that just cancelled his show - is mass-blocking every reupload worldwide via Content ID. And the deeper you dig, the worse it looks: - The finale pulled 6.74M viewers - a weeknight record over 11 years - Eminem cameoed as "Marshall, the fire marshal" to greenlight torching the set - The same day Trump posted an AI video of throwing Colbert into a dumpster, Colbert aired footage of himself burning a real one - Mayday Network and verified journalist Matthew Keys both got blocked globally - for sharing a community access show Paramount cancelled his show to silence him. Instead they handed him a Streisand-effect comeback 10x bigger than the show ever was.

Since 19th March - 67 votes in Parliament Farage has not voted in a single one £8216 per month before tax paid by the taxpayer 2 months of achieving net zero for those who voted him in to Clacton He is just laughing at the taxpayer

The new Reform Administration in St Helens just admitted they were too politically inexperienced to run the council and have created a post, paid for by the council, to help them. At a cost of 200k over 4 years. You actually cant make this up!

Didn't take long, did it? #Reform's Candidate in #Makerfield, Robert Kenyon, has his X account suspended for racist replies to a constituent, support of British Union of Fascists, and incitement to hatred & violence. He 'mothballed' his Facebook, I guess, for the same reasons.

It was his registered UK address when he was begging supporters for donations ahead of the “Unite the Kingdom” rally. Today, that company no longer exists. Thinking Independent Media Ltd, the entity behind Tommy Robinson’s fundraising operation, was officially dissolved on 19 May 2026. The final Gazette notice confirming the strike-off appeared just days after the rally. The company failed to file its first set of accounts, which had been due since November 2025. And this is not an isolated incident. It is a pattern. The Times previously reported that Robinson and associates were linked to a network of companies that generated more than £1.6 million in profits while leaving substantial tax liabilities unpaid. Hope & Pride Ltd reportedly owed HMRC an estimated £317,000 in corporation tax. Freestyle Freelance Ltd, which traded as Urban Scoop, reportedly owed a further £10,750. Companies disappeared. New ones appeared. Then came Thinking Independent Media Ltd. Set up in 2023. No accounts filed. Dissolved in 2026. Yet right up until the “Unite the Kingdom” rally, supporters were still receiving fundraising emails tied to that UK operation. Robinson claimed the event had become “one of the biggest patriotic gatherings Britain has ever seen.” In reality, the rally was nowhere near the scale supporters had promised for months. And far from “uniting the Kingdom”, much of the event descended into the usual anti-Muslim baiting, conspiracy rhetoric and culture war grievance politics that have become Robinson’s entire business model. Now the same operation appears to have shifted to Portugal under the Urban Scoop banner. Same faces. Same messaging. Same donation appeals. And this is the real Tommy Robinson. A man who screams about migrants “taking from Britain” while companies linked to his own operation repeatedly collapse under unpaid obligations and missing accounts. A man who wraps himself in the Union Jack while apparently doing everything possible to avoid properly contributing to the country he claims to love. He tells struggling working people to be patriotic, make sacrifices and defend Britain, while his own financial trail reads like a masterclass in disappearing companies, unpaid liabilities and donation grifting. Not a patriot. Just another professional outrage merchant flogging nationalism to his supporters while the taxman and the British public pick up the tab. Credit: Truth Against Hate

@MikeOwenCarroll @2000AD Is this being serialised only as graphic novels, or also in 2000AD or the Magazine?

New Adventures From The Trigan Empire: Book One is Out Now! 2000ad.com/news/new-adven… #TriganEmpire @2000AD

21 kicked out. 28 defected. 39 resigned. 5 suspended. 1 disqualified. 5 lost seats. That's approximately 99 Reform UK councillors and representatives who have left the party. 22 of them since the local elections just two weeks ago. The party claims "some of the strongest vetting in the country." Here's the full list 👇

These is a perfect clip to showcase the logical end point of fascism as it endlessly looks for more enemy groups

Looking forward to hosting this evening’s @cartooncounty event @BrightonWstones with @AveryHillPubl’s Olivia Sullivan & @selfmadehero’s Myfanwy @mockduck Tristram re: their latest graphic novels Oracles & Noisy Valley; 6.30pm, 18th May. Book £5 tix via cartooncounty.com/nextguest

Looking forward to hosting Monday’s @cartooncounty event @BrightonWstones with @AveryHillPubl’s Olivia Sullivan & @selfmadehero’s Myfanwy @mockduck Tristram re: their latest graphic novels Oracles & Noisy Valley; 6.30pm, 18th May. Book £5 tickets via cartooncounty.com/nextguest