Ian Foster

Political hack (for hire), rookie screenwriter, Team USA beach handball defender. Just a simple man trying to make my way in the universe. Views my own

[Ian Foster @ianhfoster]

Hey that’s me!

Honored to be part of this amazing class of writers and beyond excited to get to work.

[Book Pipeline @BookPipeline]

*winners listed first

COMIC BOOKS / GRAPHIC NOVELS

Tall Tales: Americana
by Ian Foster

Journey to the Enchanted Inkwell
by LD Green

GENERAL FICTION

Our Elsewhere
by T. Rutherford

A Conspiracy of Fate
by Hoiland Ames

[one dozen rats at a keyboard @PanasonicDX4500]

Zohran has been mayor for six months and the Overton Window has already shifted to Donald Trump talking about the nuances between Socialism and Communism.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Hayes: Endorsing against incumbents really is kind of the unwritten rule in this. Tish James, who was a very vocal backer of yours when you were running for mayor—and even a backer of yours when I think it was pretty politically controversial to be so—had this to say. She said she and other political leaders she’s spoken to are disappointed in Zohran Mamdani. “All of us are a little frustrated with the Democratic Party, but you don’t blow it up. That’s what MAGA has done.” What do you say to that?

Mamdani: I think, what is the Democratic Party if not its voters? And what we saw yesterday evening were Democrats across the city turning out and voting for a new kind of politics.

And I’ve been clear time and time again that I believe the only majority in our country is that of the working class. And what we saw is that a focus on the working class.

And I have a deep amount of respect for my friend, Attorney General James. And I also believe that these are the kinds of candidates that we need to see in Congress, as well as the five state legislative candidates that I endorsed that also won yesterday evening.

I made a promise to New Yorkers that I would use every tool at my disposal to actually transform this city into one that they could afford.

And one of those tools is using your political capital to ensure that the people who will fight hardest for that same agenda are going to be there, whether it’s in Albany or whether it’s in D.C.

[one dozen rats at a keyboard @PanasonicDX4500]

I don’t think the party as a whole has really come to terms with how much anger there is towards the Biden years among the Democrats base.

No one was initially that excited about Joe, but the promise was that he’d win and the Trump era would end for good, and they whiffed on it.

[Curt Mills @CurtMills]

Mamdani is the most popular Democrat in the country

Ineligible for the presidency,

He is going to have a nigh unprecedented kingmaker role for 2028

If he wants it

Seems like he might

[Krystal Ball @krystalball]

In retrospect, their opponents never stood a chance.

[New town every hour (ret.) @TownsUsa]

world cup announcer just said "the English have struggled historically here in Massachusetts" lol

[Ian Foster @ianhfoster]

Mamdani going 3/3 off the bat on Congressional endorsements after plastering Cuomo TWICE means it’s his party now. Time for Dems to get on board or get out of the way

[ettingermentum @ettingermentum]

Prior to this point, moderates could still say that the so-called Democratic Tea Party had actually taken out an incumbent. It just happened, and it was the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. As huge as anything the OG Tea Party ever accomplished.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The Social Network got made because Sony owed Mark Zuckerberg nothing. No studio can say that about Sam Altman anymore.

That gap explains why a finished Guadagnino film, Andrew Garfield playing Altman, can't find a buyer. The script makes Altman a pathological liar and Ilya Sutskever the idealist his board tried to protect. Strong material. The reason no one will touch it sits off the screen: the subject is now the biggest customer in the building.

Amazon developed the film, then walked months after wiring $50B to OpenAI for AWS compute. A24 passed, and A24 sits behind Thrive Capital, which holds an OpenAI board seat. Netflix, Focus, and Warner's Clockwork all carry AI bets of their own. The buyer pool maps cleanly onto OpenAI's cap table, and no one can premiere a hit piece on the company underwriting their cloud roadmap.

Here's the part worth sitting with. Vertical integration promised control: own the studio, own the pipe, own the model. The bill arrives now. A film industry fused to its own infrastructure partners cannot finance criticism of them. The merger logic became the censor.

The historical rhyme is almost too clean. United Artists was founded in 1919 by Chaplin and three fellow artists to escape exactly this kind of studio capture. That label now sits inside Amazon MGM, the company that just dropped the film to protect a tech deal. The release valve built a century ago got swallowed by the thing it was built to escape.

So Mubi and Neon are the only names left, and it has little to do with taste. They took none of OpenAI's money, which leaves them the only distributors free to tell the story of what that money does. A film about a mission captured by capital is being orphaned by capital capturing its distributors. The industry is re-enacting the plot it's too compromised to release.

[Ian Foster @ianhfoster]

Well look back at this speech in a decade or two as the start of a real political realignment

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

here is Mamdani's entire speech at the Knicks parade, which is easily the best speech I've ever heard at an event of this sort

[Matthew Zeitlin @MattZeitlin]

Most important quote about politics in the last 15 years

[Brendan Hodges @metaplexmovies]

just imagine if Orson Welles tried to stage his famous 1930s production of MACBETH today, with an all Black cast and was set in the Caribbean and replaced witchcraft with voodoo

[Ian Foster @ianhfoster]

A medical swiftboating attempt that would make Roger Stone blush

[Daniel Lippman @dlippman]

NEW: Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed for years has publicly said he’s a physician — but there’s overwhelming evidence that he’s had no experience as a licensed medical doctor. (W/ @adamwren) https://t.co/QZA7trhMH9

[Matt Dinan @second_sailing]

Big Tech’s “threaten everything beautiful, while immiserating you, ruining your opportunity to work, rendering you servile and dependent forever” campaign is for some reason not a huge hit with the young.

[Ian Foster @ianhfoster]

South Park has been able to go from a blank page to a finished episode in six days since 1997. You’re just a hack

[Emily Youcis @AlfredAlfer77]

Once again the AI-Animation debate rages on. "Just learn how to animate frame-by-frame and do it for real" casually uttered by people who have never attempted traditional animation, showing that most people have no concept of how long this process takes.

Here is the amount of labor that goes into a ~4 second hand-animated clip. This is about 9-10 hours of nonstop intense work, sped up ×1000. When people ask "why don't you animate TWSS by hand" I simply reply that the 1 hour of TWSS, animated in 5 months with AI, would have taken me 5-6 years traditionally.

As much as I love the process of animating 2D from scratch and I hope the already dying artform continues to live on, it would simply be impossible to animate a political show about current events this way. I have no resentment that AI makes this process exponentially faster and easier, as so many butthurt "artists" hold. Quite the opposite, lol. Infact as I always say, AI is the best thing that has ever happened to me as a seasoned animator, especially as one who has been barred from ever working within the industry.

I find it hard to believe that any animator who has put in the amount of time and effort that I have in my lifetime wouldn't feel the same way about such incredible technology. If you can't figure out a way to take advantage of what is essentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of subsidized money in order to improve your art and workflow, maybe you're just not much of an artist.

[Ian Foster @ianhfoster]

Craziest part about this song that came out in 2022 is that it doesn’t even mention COVID lmao

[BENZO-KAZOOIE @BENZOTOOIE]

Fall Out Boy has a cover of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” where they rhyme George Floyd with Metroid.

[Ian Foster @ianhfoster]

@CivGame Is there actually a continuous timeline now? Or are there still the weird fast forwards on the era change that totally reset your empire?

[Spum @spumdonor]

Cartoon Network being owned by a benevolent, eccentric, cartoon-loving hillbilly billionaire with a hands-off policy towards creatives up until about 2003 explains so much honestly

[Netflix UK & Ireland @NetflixUK]

100 years old and still the coolest person alive. Happy birthday, Sir David!

[Ian Foster @ianhfoster]

Leaving aside the obvious AI slop, how was a battle that took place two decades after the American Revolution going to lead to the US becoming a French territory?

[Alex Patrascu @maxescu]

I explored an alternate timeline where France defeated Britain at Trafalgar, and North America east of the Mississippi became permanent French territory.

Over time, the continent evolved into a French-speaking world.

Enjoy: