Ry-angry Simpson

Twitter char limit is not very useful for this kind of post but: Last night I proposed to @SophiePetrovic and she said YES! I love her very much and it’s been a long time coming. She’s perfect and I am happy. Short and sweet

Sure, your eyes aren’t tricking you. That clip looks better than the new trailer, and the reason has nothing to do with talent. The VFX supervisor on Amazing Spider-Man 2 in 2014? Jerome Chen. The VFX supervisor on Brand New Day? Also Jerome Chen. Same person. Completely different system around him. In 2014, Chen had 50 effects artists at Sony Imageworks, the largest VFX crew the studio had ever put on a single project. They handled about 1,000 of the film’s 1,600 VFX shots on a $255 million budget. The crew shot on real film (not digital), on location in actual New York City, scanned Times Square with 36,000 photographs of over 100 billboards, and built physical lighting rigs on set so the CGI would match the real world. Now look at how Marvel makes Spider-Man movies. No Way Home had 2,500 VFX shots spread across 12 studios and about 3,000 artists. The budget was $200 million, $55 million less than TASM2 despite having 56% more VFX shots. Digital Domain, one of the VFX vendors, was delivering final shots days before the December 17, 2021, release. They kept reworking shots into mid-January, after the movie was already in theaters. Zoom out, and the math gets worse. Marvel released 6 films between 2008 and 2012. From 2023 to 2025, they pushed out 7 films and 7 TV shows. The Hollywood union representing VFX workers reported that Marvel pays artists about 20% below industry average and staffs one person where other studios hire three. Artists described 64-hour weeks and breakdowns on the job. Then, in February 2025, Technicolor, the parent company of MPC (three-time Oscar winner for Life of Pi, The Jungle Book, and 1917), collapsed almost overnight. 4,500 jobs gone globally. The studio had been actively working on Disney and Paramount films when the lights went out. Brand New Day has four months before release, and trailers routinely show unfinished shots. But the gap between a 2014 Spider-Man and a 2026 Spider-Man has nothing to do with technology going backwards. The industry has been asked to do three times the work for less money per shot while its biggest studios are going under.

Rive has evolved into a full experience engine. One of the biggest misconceptions is that we're just an animation tool. We have 3 Fortune 500 automakers using Rive as their engine, and challenges like this are how we: 🏆 Grow the talent pool for these companies to hire 🚀 Show what Rive is capable of as we approach v1 ❤️ Give back to the community that helped us get here Motion designers, this is your opportunity to use your skills to build real products. Full of quality, life, and detail that only animation can bring. Vehicle HMIs, triple-A game UIs, interactive apps, full-blown games, all running natively across platforms. This opens your skills up to a world of new job opportunities.

@d_linkski That's hilarious 😂

@TheCodeTroll Not yet, it's in the middle of a Windows install.

We found a 30-year-old PC in the office, and the "we should get Dmitri to run Warframe on it" jokes have already started.

@TheCartelDel I think I read something like 2006 is as far away from 2026 as 1986 was when we were living our lives in 2006 and I turned to dust. Nostalgia hits so hard because everything feels not so long ago, but also so far away at the same time and it throws you back to periods of comfort.

This is more like late 90s but either way. Why is nostalgia SO aggressive, as an emotion? Why does it feel like I'm getting suplexed when I watch this?

@HUN2R He's absolutely 100% right

Jeff Kaplan's advice to people who complain about video games they've never played "Shut the f*ck up"

This is wild. 143 million people thought they were catching Pokémon. They were actually building one of the largest real-world visual datasets in AI history. Niantic just disclosed that photos and AR scans collected through Pokémon Go have produced a dataset of over 30 billion real-world images. The company is now using that data to power visual navigation AI for delivery robots. Players didn't just walk around with their phones. They scanned landmarks, storefronts, parks, and sidewalks from every angle, at every time of day, in lighting and weather conditions that staged photography would never capture. They documented the physical world at a scale no mapping company with a fleet of vehicles could have replicated on the same timeline or budget. Niantic collected this systematically, data point by data point, across eight years, while users thought the only thing at stake was catching a rare Charizard. The most valuable AI training datasets in the world aren't being assembled in data centers. They're being built by people who have no idea they're building them.

Meta spent a record 26.3 million dollars lobbying in 2025 and quietly funded a group called the Digital Childhood Alliance to push age-verification laws. The real target appears to be the App Store Accountability Act and similar bills. These laws would require Apple and Google to verify ages before anyone can download any app from their stores. That means every game, banking app, fitness tracker, and productivity tool would face new checks and costs. Social media apps from Meta would be exempt. The result is a huge compliance burden shifted onto the app stores while Meta avoids the same rules. Public records show heavy lobbying, fast-created advocacy groups, and funding ties that raise questions about who is really behind the "child safety" push. Full open-source investigation with 47 documented findings from lobbying disclosures, tax filings, hearing transcripts, and more is now available.

The Linux community has been digging into who’s pushing these ID verification laws

Fun fact for everyone: Kharg Island was a popular multiplayer map in the game Battlefield 3. Some members of our military know more about the layout of this Island than you could even imagine.

The same week that we launched our game Piece by Piece on Steam Another studio also launched a game called Piece by Piece on Steam so I told my lawyers to get ready, and we created a Steam bundle that contains both games at a discounted price

The creep of fascism has been obvious for a long time in the UK. Most refuse to believe it and are accepting authoritarianism without a murmur. People are so indoctrinated that they agree anti-war protesters and journalists should be arrested. It's reminiscent of 1930s Germany.

newgrounds used to get 3,000 flash animations a year, most are forgotten so i made a site that shuffles through them

Death Stranding 2's 3D UI Voxel map: from early game design → open world data capture → voxel rendering. Kojima Productions shares it all in Room 2001, West Hall. 30 Minutes. #GDC2026 schedule.gdconf.com/session/death-…

@FrederikDrabert It's not been a good week at all. I feel you man.

This week was so emotionally draining and stressful... I can't wait for it to end. Earlier in my career I was in a big company that had massive layoffs and it was a very traumatic experience that still follows me till this day. This week felt similiar.

@TheCodeTroll But the shareholders and Saudi’s need their value

✨ Record breaking ✨

The gaming industry is the most successful entertainment industry in the history of our species and it is being continually run into the ground by the greediest humans in the history of our species.

once again …

this is so fucking depressing.