A minute of hand-drawn animation takes something like a thousand drawings. The senior artist draws the keyframes, the start and end of every motion, and then somebody has to draw all the frames in between, which is called in-betweening, and which is the animation equivalent of stoop labor. Nobody wins an award for tweens. The whole history of the global animation industry since about 1965 is the history of where the tweens go, and the tweens go where the labor is cheap, and for about forty years one of the places the tweens went was Pyongyang.
The studio is SEK. Founded September 1957 as the April 26 Children's Film Studio, which tells you what it was for: it was the state organ that made cartoons to teach North Korean children to be North Korean. Squirrel and Hedgehog, the one where the squirrels are Korea and the wolves and weasels are the Americans and Japanese, that's SEK. Domestic ideological product, fully subsidized, a line item in the propaganda budget like the opera and the mass games.
And if that were all it was, it would be boring. A propaganda studio in a propaganda state, sure.
But around 1985 SEK starts taking subcontract work for European television. French, Italian, Spanish shows. And in 1997, the year the famine is bottoming out, the studio registers itself under the name "SEK," Scientific Educational Korea, specifically so it can show up at an animation festival in France and take meetings. Think about what that is. The hermit kingdom's cartoon ministry printed business cards.
The reason is the usual reason, which is hard currency. North Korea's export basket in the 1990s is a sad little list: minerals, seafood, mushrooms to Japan, missiles to anyone, and labor. Loggers in Siberia, construction crews in the Gulf, waitresses in Beijing. And it turns out the country had accidentally built one of the world's larger pools of trained cel animators, because Kim Jong-il was a film obsessive who wrote a whole treatise on cinema and kept the studios fed through everything, and because the state art education system cranked out draftsmen the way it cranked out accordion players. Fine-arts training is one of the things command economies really do overproduce.
So you had maybe 1,500 people in a building in central Pyongyang who could draw on-model, in volume, on deadline. That is a factory. The product just happens to be Simba.
And I mean that literally, or close to it. The Italian client was Mondo TV, the Rome outfit whose business model in the 90s was making knockoffs of whatever Disney had out that year, and SEK drew Mondo's "Simba the King Lion" and Mondo's "Pocahontas."
Which is how you get the legend, repeated by SEK's own director and half the wire services since, that North Korea animated The Lion King and Pocahontas. You can tell this differently, and people do. The claim floats between "drew the Disney films through subcontract chains" and "drew the Italian mockbusters of the Disney films," and honestly the second version is better.
The juche state's animators, drawing a lawsuit-adjacent Italian lion, for lire, to fund the state that told them cartoons exist to teach children to hate America.
The best primary document we have on the shop floor is Guy Delisle's Pyongyang, from 2003. Delisle was a Quebecois animator sent over in 2001 for two months as the liaison for Protécréa, a French production company that had farmed the in-betweens for a Corto Maltese feature to SEK.
Paris drew the keyframes; Pyongyang drew the tweens.
Delisle sat in the Yanggakdo hotel on its island in the Taedong, got walked to the studio by his minders, and spent his days doing retakes, sending drawings back, trying to explain French gestures to animators who had never seen a French person shrug.
(There's a bit in the book where the French pipeline had already routed through Seoul first, and Paris redid everything Seoul sent, and then, out of money, finished the picture in Pyongyang. Which is its own little parable: the tweens had already migrated once. Seoul was the cheap animation town in 1985 and by 2001 it had gotten expensive enough that the work rolled downhill again, across the DMZ, to the one place on earth with Seoul's training and none of Seoul's wages.)
Because that's the actual product SEK was selling, and the linework was reportedly fine, but the linework was never the sell. The product was a wage floor with no floor. The animators are state employees; the state takes the contract fee in euros and pays the animators in Pyongyang living standards; the spread is the export. It's the Siberian logging camp model applied to cel animation. The UN got around to naming this in 2017, when the Security Council ordered member states to send all North Korean laborers home, on the theory, correct, that the wages were being harvested for the weapons program. An animator drawing a cartoon lion is, fiscally, the same worker as the logger. Same remittance channel, same end user.
Okay, and the Sunshine Policy era, because it's the strangest chapter. Kim Dae-jung comes in down south in 1998 preaching engagement, and suddenly inter-Korean animation is a thing you can do. Nelson Shin, the Korean-American animator whose Seoul studio AKOM had been drawing The Simpsons since 1989, spends seven years and eighteen trips north co-producing Empress Chung with SEK, using as many as 500 of their animators, released 2005, the first cartoon feature made by both Koreas.
The man who drew Springfield was running a production line in Pyongyang. That happened.
Then Lee Myung-bak wins in 2007, sunshine ends, and the southern channel closes on schedule, because the channel was never cultural, it was a policy instrument with an election-shaped off switch.
After 2008 the work reroutes through China, which is where this stops being history and starts being a compliance problem. The animators physically move too: SEK runs teams out of Chinese border cities, working through Chinese studios, invoiced through Chinese trading companies. When the US Treasury finally designates SEK in December 2021, the first new North Korea sanctions of the Biden administration, the language is about "unreasonably low-cost labor" and front companies. The follow-on designations in 2022 are the interesting part, because they name the plumbing: a Paris-based SEK representative collecting the European payments, an animation company in Yancheng, trading companies in Quanzhou and Fujian, a Hong Kong holding shell. That's the org chart of a labor export business, drawn by OFAC.
And the client list did not get the memo, or didn't want it. In 2024 a researcher named Nick Roy found a misconfigured server on North Korea's own internet, and on it were working files: animation cells and retake notes for an unreleased season of Invincible, the Amazon superhero show, for Iyanu on Max, for a Japanese isekai anime. Nobody thinks Amazon knowingly sent work to Pyongyang. The work got there the way the tweens have always gotten everywhere, subcontracted down a chain until the last link is whoever quoted lowest, and the lowest quote on earth is a state that pays its animators in rations.
The same year, OFAC fined Mondo TV, the Simba people, $538,000 for wiring SEK roughly $537,939 between 2019 and 2021, including monthly payments that kept going after the designation.
Thirty years a client. The fine was about the size of the invoices.
The thing I want you to notice is how boring the mechanism is. A procurement story, start to finish.
Every studio in Los Angeles and Paris and Tokyo faces the same math: a minute of animation is a thousand drawings, drawings are labor, labor has a price, and the price gradient runs downhill until it hits a wall. Japan hit the wall and sent tweens to Korea. Korea got rich and sent them to China and the Philippines. China's wages rose. And at the bottom of the gradient, below every market wage, sits the one producer whose labor cost is set by decree, whose workers can't quit, can't emigrate, can't bid up their own price. A sanctions regime is basically an attempt to build a dam at the bottom of that gradient, and water is patient.
The studio that drew the wolves eating the squirrels drew the mockbuster lion drew the Simpsons guy's opera drew Amazon's superheroes. Same desks. Same pencils, probably.
guy who thinks the goal of an argument is to humiliate the other person:
-evil
-pragmatist
-regrettably correct
guy who thinks the goal of an argument is to facilitate reasoned discussion with an interlocutor:
-doomed
-hopelessly naïve
-will be found dead in a back alley with two gunshot wounds to the back of the head but will depart straight to heaven on priority orders from the big man himself
guy who thinks the goal of an argument is to tally up your opponent's infractions in accordance with a book of empty rules you elected to bind yourself under:
-a loathsome creature
-never gonna make it
-somehow even more doomed than the second guy
it's just, well. people don't like the way i navigate my gender, so i hid it for a while, but that was painful, so i stopped. and people don't like the way i navigate sexuality, so i hid it for a while, but that was painful, so i stopped. and people don't like the way i navigate my plurality, so i hid it for a while, but that was painful, so i stopped. and people don't like the way i navigate my identity in general, so i hid it for a while, but that was painful, so i stopped.
with this in mind, can you tell how i feel about hiding the fact that nowadays, i use ai in every single one of my creative projects?
and it's like. well is being an ai artist that important to you? as important as your plurality, your gender, your identity? and the answer is yes! because my life was radically changed by engaging with ai and the communities surrounding it.
i never would have considered myself capable of making games before ai, and now i have what, 3-4? especially an rpgmaker game, which has been a dream of mine since i was a kid. code has always scared me shitless, and so did the art workload, but it's manageable now.
i've learned a lot more about political theory too, and i attribute that to ai, because i wouldn't have surrounded myself with people who engage with it, were it not for wanting to find ai-friendly spaces. it refined how i argue and how i speak to people! i feel as though i've matured as a person as a result. i have friends that i never would have met otherwise.
and it's changed my art to a fundamental degree. even outside of refining ai art, i've been able to execute ideas that were daunting for me before, because i just cannot grasp anatomy and space like other people can. i felt stunted and like i'd never truly be happy with my art, and now, i feel so much freer! it can be fun again, because it doesn't involve me agonizing over shit that i've spent years of my life unable to understand! i like accessibility tools!
but it's already been shown to me that i have to be very meticulous and cautious about the way i share that with people. so, if anything, i guess i'd make another neocities site and hope the right people find it. because i'm tired of being scared, but i'm also tired of being hurt.
tw for covid pandemic talk ahead. I know I'm probably approaching this from a sort of unique perspective and it might come across as a little bit blackpilled. And sorry in advance for the rambling here. But in 2020 when the covid pandemic was starting it (rightfully so) became a political talking point among the center-left and left in my country that not bothering to prevent its spread was a Pretty Bad Thing. And they were right! People were dying -- thousands each day. Then almost AS SOON as we got the first vaccines -- and it no longer was an immediate concern for the healthiest of us -- most of them dropped all pretense of caring about it. Within a month or two people stopped wearing masks almost at all, social distancing, washing their hands (if they ever did that) and soon after started turning on those who still wore masks. Now it's seen as alien to them to try and not get sick, like they never lived through it in the first place.
To this day I still wear a mask because I don't want to get sicker than I am, and I don't want to spread illnesses (covid or anything else) between people. It takes no effort. But people give me looks like "what's going on ??? ?" when they see me.
Those people, whose ideals are so fickle that even their own self preservation doesn't matter in the end if it's not the talking point of the day, are the kind of people I think of when I hear the current anti-AI discourse. Especially because I know that a lot of these same anti-AI people are knowingly using AI. I just had an argument the other day with two people about whether AI was acceptable, both of which had admitted in the past to using LLM's (one to code, the other for… idk some random shit)
And I'm not super old, I'm 30 or 40 years old, but I still feel too old to care about how people, who will immediately turn on their ideals when it first seems inconvenient to have them, look at me. It's still sad that so many of the loudest people parrot (or should I say stochastic parrot? get it?? he he.) the least informed talking points and it's maddening that they are aggressive to my friends and acquaintences who just want to better themselves and enjoy their lives and make others' lives better. But I take it as a red flag when I see people treat each other this way, and am just glad to not have gotten close to them, because I feel that even if I hide that I use AI it won't matter because in the end they don't really care about that. They just want someone they can punch down on in front of their peers.
It limits who I can make friends with on some communities, but it's like, I don't really want to befriend rotestant-brained hateful people, and it just means that the connections I do make can be stronger and more meaningful, you know?
the thing about Nu Atheism is that i pinky promise swear up and down that whatever religion you follow because you believe humans have an innate need for spirituality has a long standing conservative arm to it that has almost certainly done more harm and existed far longer than New Atheism, and yes that includes neopaganism and Vague Spirituality.
and like, that doesnt mean youre not allowed to be pagan or jewish or so on, it just means that youre a massive fucking hypocrite if you think every atheist needs to self flagellate for the existance of redditors.
It is. There is nothing wrong with watching people have sex. The morality of it depends on the context (buying porn from sex workers to watch is good, revenge porn is bad, for example), but watching people fuck? That's morally neutral. It's just watching some activities.
Almost all porn is abuse, you know that right? Most women in porn are drugged and then raped.
Even if she were paid, it would still be coercive, similarly to prostitution. You cannot buy women, or their consent. That immediately creates a coercive force that makes the consent invalid.
Ok so first of all you're lying. That is not how most porn works at all.
Regarding economic coercion, that's called having a job. But also I promise you there is a world of difference between trying to buy a person (for the love of fuck will you people ever aknowledge its not only women in porn and work conditions are a concern for EVERYONE involved) and someone making a career in porn.
Also re read what I said because you have said nothing that argues against what im saying AT ALL.
The way these people talk about sex workers genuinely makes me sick. Sex workers are not being bought, they are not owned by people paying them. They are compensated for their services or performance, like every other worker. They own themselves no matter what. They deserve dignity and respect and their work not being described in such horrible fucking ways.
And it's genuinely fucked up to tell people what they can and cannot consent to tbh? You don't get to choose that for others and then try to say you genuinely care about consent. You just want to control people.
Absolutely right. We are people, we own ourselves, we decide what we do and don't want to do. Honestly if I attach the criteria of pay and a camera to my consent, denying me that is no less fucked up than forcing that on me.
Puritanical christians/radfems and rapists/traffickers are two sides of the same coin and all ultimately working towards the goal of ruining people's lives for their own benefit.
Also, it needs to be repeated again that stigmatization of sex work leaves trafficking victims trapped. They are now in an even more socioeconomically disadvantaged position than before because no one will want to help an "icky porn star" who is being exploited.
To help trafficked and coerced sex workers we necessarily must end the demonization of sex work or else you are giving traffickers the literal tools to force unwilling people into it!
One of my family members was sex trafficked. Her case became a part of state legal precedent because her trafficker's conviction resulted in an expanded definition of one of the terms used to define trafficking (kept vague for the sake of my family's anonymity.) You know what one of the biggest barriers was to her getting help?
The fact that everyone she reached out to saw her as a stupid meth head "whore" and not a person who was fucking afraid for her life.
If society had shown sex workers some basic amount of decency, she might have had the social standing to get help sooner.
I got to see a change in the criminal law, in real time, that shifted the window on how sex workers are treated in my state. Agencies that tended to treat them as perpetrators, even when they were victims, had their behavior changed the most. But even the more progressive police departments, and of course any number of labor- and benefit-related agencies, also got a few notches more understanding and accepting.
TL;DR: sex workers are people, sex work is work, and the road to utopia is paved with extremely boring legislation and administrative decisions.
“A kiss may be grand, but it won’t pay the rental, on your humble flat, or help you at the automat.”
Like literally the most famous song about how much girls love jewellry is just explaining the importance of getting jewellry for when your partner leaves you penniless and alone.
The founder of Girl Scouting in the US, Juliette Gordon Low, funded her first troop by selling her pearl necklace, which was her only belonging after her husband died and left everything to his mistress.
She founded Girl Scouts to teach girls self-sufficiency so they wouldn’t have to go through what she went through when her husband died and she didn’t know how to take care of herself.
While we’re on the subject, let’s please also remember that historically disenfranchised communities who had to worry about frequently being run out of town often bought expensive jewelry with their limited funds not because they were greedy or tacky or classless, but rather because you can’t sew a real estate investment into the lining of your coat, and the powers that be can’t freeze a diamond necklace the way that they can freeze a bank account.
i fucking hate the “this is the good luck post.” Girl stop contributing to a superstitious environment with ur anecdotes there’s a million goddamn notes on it it’s statistically reasonable that a bunch of people remember the good things that happen after they reblog it
Okay so the number to hold onto here is what it costs a company to run one more interview round, which since 2020 is basically zero. Nobody books a conference room, nobody flies you out, nobody even walks down the hall. A recruiter drops a Zoom link on five calendars and the marginal cost of Round Four is a calendar invite. The cost just moved, onto you, the candidate, the one who preps, performs, and in your wife's case produces video content on spec, for free, off a fake brief.
And the reason companies can move the cost onto you is the other half of the mechanism: the application side collapsed. Posting a job used to cost something (classified ad, agency fee) and applying used to cost something (paper resume, cover letter, a stamp!). Now posting is free and applying is one click, so a mid-tier tech opening pulls a thousand applications, a chunk of them written by the same language models the company is using to screen them. The resume stopped carrying information. When the cheap signal dies, hiring reverts to expensive signals, and the expensive signal is your time. Five rounds and a 40-minute deck measures skill a little and mostly measures who will eat forty hours of unpaid labor for a shot at a one-year contract. It's a hazing filter, and hazing filters work, in the narrow sense that they filter.
There's a personnel story under this too. Tech companies built out enormous recruiting organizations in 2021 when money was free and every firm thought it was hiring 40% year over year. Then the market turned and headcount froze, but the recruiting apparatus didn't fully unwind, and an apparatus justifies itself with process. A recruiter running a two-round pipeline looks dispensable. A recruiter coordinating five rounds, a panel, a take-home, and a "culture conversation" looks like infrastructure. Some of what your wife is experiencing is the recruiting org demonstrating its own necessity to whoever survived the last layoff round.
(Canva specifically is a company that got marked at $40 billion in September 2021, which was the exact top, and has spent the years since managing employees and investors around what it's actually worth. Companies in that position get very elaborate about process, because process is what you have when you can't offer the thing you offered in 2021, which was the number going up.)
And the fake-brief-with-deliverables thing has a specific lineage, it's the ad agency spec-work model, where clients made agencies pitch full campaigns for free and the agencies ate it because winning the account paid for ten losing pitches. Applied to an individual applicant for a contract role the math is obscene, there's no account to win, there's a one-year gig, but the form migrated anyway because forms migrate downhill along power, and the slope changed. In 2021 candidates ghosted companies mid-pipeline and companies wrote LinkedIn posts about it. Now the gradient runs the other way and this is what it looks like from underneath.
The "is this normal now" framing in the tweet is the right question asked slightly wrong, because it was normal before, for other people. Adjuncts have done the campus-visit-plus-teaching-demo gauntlet for decades. Architects do design competitions for free. What's new is the gauntlet arriving for ordinary salaried tech and design work, which had a ten-year holiday from it because labor was scarce, and the holiday is what turned out to be abnormal.
It's so weird to me how people talk about advances in robotics as if we aren't in the "flying IEDs" era of warfare. Whether it's the dogs or the new sea urchin things, everyone says "they're gonna strap guns on these to kill you btw" as if militaries all over the world aren't building drones that can fly into a window and blow up a specific room in a building. Sorry but "gun droid" as a concept got leapfrogged a long time ago lol
The history of ice use by humans is a lesson on why the appeal to nature is garbage, aside from the fact that everything that is possible under natural laws is natural.
it sucks that Magic will always be this thing I am intimately familiar with and have an overwhelmingly amount of knowledge about, but has moved entirely to the margins of my life. I have other hobbies and purpose in my life. It's not the end of the world. It just hurts to lose something that's been so important to you for half of your life, not because you gradually grew apart from it, but because it became abruptly and irreversibly drowned in sludge.
yousharknotpass
tangentwithtanner
baratheonpilled
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
dailybridgerton
