Past Meets Pixel @ Substack

English textbook targets a skills gap in Japan’s growing anime industry

By Matt Schley (for the Japan Times)

Oct 3

1

September 2025

Videogame translation and localization

Eric Margolis (for the Japan Times)

Sep 12

2

August 2025

The Warring States Era in Gaming: History, Myth and Representation

Screenshot 1: The Nobunaga’s Ambition franchise was launched in the early 1980s and has since seen dozens of installments across successive generations…

Aug 31 • 

Leroy King

4

2

Simulating Consensus: What Hamburg’s AI Housing Experiment Can Teach Game Designers and Historians

Earlier this week, Harvard Business Review ran a piece by Mathis Bitton and Elizabeth Haas on Hamburg’s unlikely turn from zoning deadlock to…

Aug 15 • 

Christopher Gerteis

2

1

July 2025

Empire of AI

REVIEW OF Karen Hao's 'Empire of AI'

Jul 25 • 

Christopher Gerteis

1

June 2025

Ghost of Tsushima: Visual Historiography and Cultural Mythmaking

Ghost of Tsushima (2020) is more than a stylish samurai adventure – it is a case study in how video games construct and circulate a vision of Japanese…

Jun 21 • 

Leroy King

5

Japanese studios scramble to hire anime creatives

Read the full story at: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Media-Entertainment/Wanted-30-000-animators.-Japan-s-anime-future-at-risk

Jun 15

1

US Food & Drug Agency bungled AI rollout

Read the full article at: https://tinyurl.com/38mhs7y8

Jun 6

1

May 2025

The AI jobs apocalypse?

Brian Merchant on AI

May 31

Why the Island Is Silent

Reframing the Prototype as a Node in a Distributed System of Refusal

May 29 • 

Christopher Gerteis

 and 

Bill Mihalopoulos

2

Silicon Valley is selling human augmentation

But it is buying human replacement

May 23 • 

Christopher Gerteis

1

The Persistence of 'Stochastic Parrots': LLMs and the False Promise of Universality

When Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major, and Shmitchell published their critique of large language models in 2021, it was received as a timely intervention.

May 17 • 

Christopher Gerteis

1