Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director • Hacker News Board

Re: Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director

#41

Post by weeksie » Sat, May 03, 2025, 12:07 PM UTC

phinnaeus wrote: post #18

JohnScolaro wrote: post #17

What a fantastic write-up. As a Brisbane native and software developer I often feel similarly to the author about Brisbane's software dev scene. Brisbane so often feels like a backwater, with the big dogs down in Melbourne and Sydney, and the 'peak of industry' in the US. I'd love to move to Seattle and work for Amazon or something to get 'relevant industry experience' but what I'd really love to do is make a go of i…

I lived and worked as a dev in Seattle for 8 years before moving to Sydney. I want nothing more than for Australia to have a thriving tech scene but I haven’t seen much progress in that area since I moved here 5 years ago. I still love it and have no plans to go back. I just wish there was more opportunity here and not so much constant pressure to move back to the US for increased salary and challenge.

Funny. I lived in Seattle for 5 years before I moved to Sydney, where I lived for 5 years. That was a different era though, tech wasn't the industry it is now and the internet still felt new. I moved down in 2003 and my American accent helped me land a job I wasn't qualified for (having self taught myself some php and java in Seattle, mostly working as a bartender though). In 2005 I started a small software shop with some friends. Back then (2003) the Ruby user's group was too small to get a reservation at a pub so we'd have to partner up with the Smalltalk guys. Rails came out a year or so later and that changed.

I got back into web stuff when I moved to the states and have been up and down the stack many times since, but I have a ton of nostalgia for the stuff we did back then. Web 2 was an annoying new buzzword and we were still mostly writing software for kiosks, device drivers in C, bridging that with Lua, and using Flash for the interface b/c everybody else in the space was using shitty C++ Motif interfaces. . . . memory lane.

Imagine that Newtown and the Inner West are a lot different than when I lived there, but I do miss that time.

Re: Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director

#42

Post by suddenlybananas » Sat, May 03, 2025, 1:07 PM UTC

namdnay wrote: post #24

polotics wrote: post #23

Wow the money shot of this I think is the quote: "...Or at least have a bit more financial security to show for it. My designs have generated roughly 2 billion dollars for the people lucky enough to be cashing in on it. Not bad surplus value for someone on an 88k salary.""" 88k AUD is less than 60'000 USD, and as this art director worked one year on this, the raw ratio of wage earned to this is 0.00003, so 0.003 perc…

But if Bluey (like most shows people will work on) hadn’t been a huge success, he would still have kept his 88k That’s the inherent trade off in a salaried position - you are trading potential wealth for guaranteed security

It's not like she was offered equity and chose a meagre salary. Don't paint exploitation as a trade-off.

Re: Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director

#43

Post by suddenlybananas » Sat, May 03, 2025, 1:08 PM UTC

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #31

andrepd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A certain 19th century German thinker wrote abundantly on that issue :-) It's not just creative endeavours. The fact that access to capital is not evenly distributed means that those who don't have it have to surrender their surplus value to those that have it.

[flagged]

Or maybe the people who actually build that wealth deserve to keep it.

Re: Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director

#44

Post by tomhow » Sat, May 03, 2025, 1:37 PM UTC

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #31

andrepd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A certain 19th century German thinker wrote abundantly on that issue :-) It's not just creative endeavours. The fact that access to capital is not evenly distributed means that those who don't have it have to surrender their surplus value to those that have it.

[flagged]

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director

#45

Post by bobxmax » Sat, May 03, 2025, 1:39 PM UTC

suddenlybananas wrote: post #42

namdnay wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if Bluey (like most shows people will work on) hadn’t been a huge success, he would still have kept his 88k That’s the inherent trade off in a salaried position - you are trading potential wealth for guaranteed security

It's not like she was offered equity and chose a meagre salary. Don't paint exploitation as a trade-off.

Exploitation? Thousands of people are getting paid $90k to paint pointless characters nobody will ever see. It's not exploitation because one of them succeeds.

Re: Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director

#46

Post by bobxmax » Sat, May 03, 2025, 1:40 PM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #28

polotics wrote: post #23

Wow the money shot of this I think is the quote: "...Or at least have a bit more financial security to show for it. My designs have generated roughly 2 billion dollars for the people lucky enough to be cashing in on it. Not bad surplus value for someone on an 88k salary.""" 88k AUD is less than 60'000 USD, and as this art director worked one year on this, the raw ratio of wage earned to this is 0.00003, so 0.003 perc…

A certain 19th century German thinker wrote abundantly on that issue :-) It's not just creative endeavours. The fact that access to capital is not evenly distributed means that those who don't have it have to surrender their surplus value to those that have it.

How does that remotely apply here? If she has the value, why didn't she distribute it herself?

Re: Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director

#47

Post by treyd » Sat, May 03, 2025, 1:50 PM UTC

namdnay wrote: post #24

polotics wrote: post #23

Wow the money shot of this I think is the quote: "...Or at least have a bit more financial security to show for it. My designs have generated roughly 2 billion dollars for the people lucky enough to be cashing in on it. Not bad surplus value for someone on an 88k salary.""" 88k AUD is less than 60'000 USD, and as this art director worked one year on this, the raw ratio of wage earned to this is 0.00003, so 0.003 perc…

But if Bluey (like most shows people will work on) hadn’t been a huge success, he would still have kept his 88k That’s the inherent trade off in a salaried position - you are trading potential wealth for guaranteed security

That's a great point. I'm glad to know that this is the only possible option and that the world can't be any better than it is.

Re: Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director

#48

Post by Tade0 » Sat, May 03, 2025, 1:53 PM UTC

ksynwa wrote: post #33

namdnay wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if Bluey (like most shows people will work on) hadn’t been a huge success, he would still have kept his 88k That’s the inherent trade off in a salaried position - you are trading potential wealth for guaranteed security

Would be cool if there was a middle ground between risking destitution by claiming a share of the income made and giving up your fair share of the billions made in return of a modest salary.

There's the option of being a freelancer and establishing a co-op with your freelancer friends.

Easier said than done, but some people I knew from college actually managed to pull this off.

Re: Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director

#49

Post by suddenlybananas » Sat, May 03, 2025, 1:54 PM UTC

bobxmax wrote: post #45

suddenlybananas wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like she was offered equity and chose a meagre salary. Don't paint exploitation as a trade-off.

Exploitation? Thousands of people are getting paid $90k to paint pointless characters nobody will ever see. It's not exploitation because one of them succeeds.

It's a technical term. She produced immense value and she didn't receive it, someone else took it. That's exploitation in Marxism.

I also don't get where you get these idea that there's this huge glut of artists producing work that's unpopular and getting paid for it. If you're at the point you're getting paid 90k a year, you're working in studios that almost certainly turn a profit.

Re: Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director

#50

Post by dahart » Sat, May 03, 2025, 2:21 PM UTC

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #31

andrepd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A certain 19th century German thinker wrote abundantly on that issue :-) It's not just creative endeavours. The fact that access to capital is not evenly distributed means that those who don't have it have to surrender their surplus value to those that have it.

[flagged]

How do you think wealth works? Regardless of your political stance or economic beliefs, that doesn’t seem like a very informed or thoughtful summary of Marx, who I assume is who the parent comment was referring to, and was one of the more influential economists of all time. Have you read Marx? He might have thought and written about wealth more than both you and me. FWIW he didn’t argue that wealth somehow exists, he argued that for business owners, wealth stems from the discrepancy between what laborers are paid and what their employers collect. He went much further than that, but that much is technically true, right?