FULL BLEED: SHOOT SPEED KILL LIGHT

My office in the studio, 1999. See if you can identify all the kipple.

I quit the last job I loved twenty-five years ago. I also graduated college thirty-five years ago and high school a staggering forty years ago. I'm old, but not quite as old as you think since I entered kindergarten a year early and consequently was the youngest kid in my class every goddamn year. Add to that the fact that I was always slight of build (okay, not always as I've a... substantial midsection and not 'cause it's ripped.) So this is a weird-ish time of year for me, particularly as I'm going to be flying across the states to see my daughter graduate over in DC. Yes, that's going to be interesting and not because someone seems hell-bent on burning the whole place down. They've had 101 days, so I'm figuring they won't get the job done in another twenty or so. Oops, politics. If this bothers you, piss off.

So the high school was in suburban south Orange County. I've no interest in saying exactly where because I'm sure you can find it if you moderately apply yourself to the task. Nothing get forgotten these days, at least not unless link rot sets in. Suffice it to say that you don't know what it was like. You can guess at it, but it wasn't that. The college, likewise, was in Orange County, UCI, which I think I've talked up a couple times. Loved it so much I got myself two majors (ask me how valuable those degrees are today, go ahead.) Social Sciences (undifferentiated, focusing on sociology) and English Literature. Now, how much would you pay for those pieces of paper? The education was invaluable, and insanely cheap compared to what it costs nowadays, but it wasn't, ah, lucrative. A better path would have been to have a time machine and buy into giant tech conglomerates when they were tiny little tech operations. But then I'd be a VC dude and that's a fate that seems hellish, at least if you value intelligence and anything that comes with it. Sure, there's probably smart VC dudes out there, but there's an awful lot of them who are making me thinking that traumatic brain injury came free with the first company they successfully funded. Hell, I know that, seeing one of these Very Special Geniuses talk about how only their field would be safe from the onslaught of Large Language Model Text Suggestion Machines, only the most special and genius intuition men get to be VCs. Right. Intelligence.

Okay, snap back. Focus. I was talking about the job I quit twenty-five years ago. It was at a not-huge and not-famous animation studio in Los Angeles. Okay, North Hollywood. The Valley. Yes, yes. Nuke the Valley. Actually I like the Valley. I can't afford it now, but back then I could short-term rent a studio place a whole mile from where I was working for I think $650, which was less than I made in a week. Yes, I was living away from my wife for several days at a time, but then there weren't a lot of animation jobs in San Diego. There were a few more once I'd quit (notably the studio that was responsible for EverQuest, which nevermind was probably running for awhile before I'd even been paid to animate stuff. Fun aside, I got to meet Ray Harryhausen at SDCC maybe a couple years before his death. I'd been a fan of his work for a long time. Hell, his work on Valley of Gwangi, a Saturday Afternoon B-movie of no great note, is filled with more character and a more affecting performance than just about any animation performance in any blockbuster you care to name including Gollum yeah I said it. Anyways, I told him I was a huge fan of his work and an animator and had to confess it was CG and that took a little air out of things. But still I got to meet him, yeah.

So back to the job. I loved and hated that job. The place was incredibly poorly-managed. It handled success as poorly as it handled hard times. The clients were a nightmare and the management let them be that way. But then, that's what management is supposed to do, I guess. Even if it means they drive the place right into the ground. Which they did. There was a fun day, after one of the two shows the studio had been animating were taken away because of grotesque mismanagement, so the demoralized crew that was left (including yours truly) were treated to one payday where the checks were drawn off the company bank account with hand-written checks and not from a payroll company as had been the standard for every single pay period before that. Yeah, good times. Waiting in line to get your hand-written check from the boss who you never got to see because he was the boss and you were a cog. Me? I walked straight down Lankershim from the office with that check in hand and marched into the Bank of America that's no longer there and said "You must deposit this immediately if not faster." The teller nodded knowingly. Yes, it cleared.

But it wasn't long after that that I'd left. Mostly because I was expecting my son to arrive as in be born some months after. And I didn't figure that the studio would hold on that long and I was right. Besides, I'd half-lived in LA for long enough. My wife needed help and I was there to give it. A little more important than squeezing out another episode of Max Steel (oops, that was the show that was taken away by the clients) or Dan Dare (which was... not good, and I think all our episodes got re-done by a competing studio up in Valencia, which is not LA at all.) No comparison.

I do miss the people at the job. We all knew we were in hell. It was a series of crap jobs that had been overpromised to clients who didn't understand what the technology was good at and what it sucked at. Remember, this is 1999-2000, which means we were working on computers that look like caclulators now. I bet my iPhone can flip more operations than the Intel machine I worked with (and maybe even the SGI quad-processor Indigo workstations that they bought to also double as render farms and let me tell you, it was lots of fun to work with then-huge files while three of your processors were working on someone else's job because the setup got borked.) But we made the best of it. We joked. We stared into the black orb of nihilism and listened to Devo's "Beautiful World" after getting back from lunch every day because we could see the giant planetoid heading our way and still it came as a surprise even though it was right there and we knew it was coming. Maybe that's the secret, that we still don't want that thing to happen even as we say that we're positive it's happening as reverse-psyching the entire universe. It still sucks when you see your friends getting fired and you're only kept on because you're cheap, which I was by comparison.

There was a time that you'd just bounce from one studio to another and pick up gigs and that was just the way things went. Only it stopped being like that in those years. The dot.com kablooie that happened was a lagging indicator behind animation and VFX jobs. And while most of the studio went to the competitor who picked up the jobs that the studio I worked in had dropped, when those gigs were done, nothing replaced them. A few stayed on for the current Trek franchise show, but you don't need a gigantic team for those. That whole sector of jobs just woosh. Granted, kid-show-animation came back in a different form (and with better software and needed fewer hands on deck.) But not in LA, not like it was.

Weird, but now that I think about it a little, my animation career and writing career are kinda the same (only I stopped doing animation after the work ended, though I worked on demo reel stuff in futility for awhile after, and as a hobby). I got in, was there for not a hugely long time. Now it's my own gig. But it's not the same job, dig? And hasn't been the same for a long time.

So, yeah, marking time. Thinking about the last farewell from work lunch I'll ever go to, or at least be the central figure of. We went to that Italian place down Lankershim right near, oh geez, what's that horrible five-way intersection? Vineland? Sounds right. Lunch was great until the jagerbombs came out. So I got to sit at my desk and sober up until I could drive back to the apartment then go to E3 the following day. Yeah, that used to be a thing. Imperial Rome for videogames. The things I've seen, folks.

Been a long time. Hell, I bought XTRMNTR as a new album the week I left animation. Played it incessantly, the perfect soundtrack for the World That's Coming in the year 2000. Still pull it out from time to time. Still holds up. World's still ending. World's always ending. Sometimes something new is being built in the place of that which is ripped down in the name of creative destruction and someone else privatizing the profit that a bunch of other folks spent years to build up. That part sucks. That part always sucked.

Oh, the funniest joke? What ultimately killed the studio was a plan to hire a bunch of animators in Hungary to do the lion's share of the work and have supervisors over here with the frames and files being piped across the internet because that was a thing you could finally do reliably in 2000 with huge files halfway around the world. Needless to say, the three weeks that the supervisors (and sellouts as we called them, non-supervisors who went to train the Hungarians) couldn't actually get anyone to learn how to do production animation in three weeks. Can you imagine that? Unbelievable, right?

Well, that and I heard that the management was straight up embezzling funds, not paying insurance premiums and ultimately collapsing, taking down the whole works. Good riddance to bad management. Too bad it wrecked a bunch of livelihoods along the way. Just like when someone wanders by and buys an internet outlet focused around a niche interest and decides to turn it into an ad platform with slop content to prop it up. Most folks won't notice and they'll get those precious ad impressions at nearly no cost. Thing is, you can hate the VC dudes for making these zombie wasp larva incubators (look it up - wasps lay eggs in caterpillars and hijack the caterpillar brain to keep eating so the wasp larvae can keep eating the essence of the caterpillar until it dies and the baby wasps hatch - circle of life, little buddy). Someone has to say "Yes, I will sell this website that I own but has benefitted from the work of many others to make it what it is now, and I will sell it knowingly to this group that takes websites and turns them into content slop just to sell ad clicks and impressions. I am a smart guy." Someone has to agree to sell these things. Someone has to play.

So maybe nothing's really changed. Encouraging.