Latest news with #UK-born
The Herald Scotland
4 days ago
- Business
- The Herald Scotland
Scottish Engineering boss Paul Sheerin warns on immigration
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said on May 12 that the UK risked becoming an 'island of strangers' as he unveiled what he described as a 'strategy' to 'finally take back control of our borders'. Sir Keir declared then: 'I believe we need to reduce immigration significantly.' Mr Sheerin, who has led industry body Scottish Engineering since 2018, said in his latest quarterly chief executive's review published yesterday of Sir Keir's May 12 statement: 'Much has been said about the tone and language of the announcement, and you will have your own view of that. 'In consideration of the impact on business, companies have reminded me that for skills, like any other commodity in demand, the holder of the asset has choices, and therefore we - Scotland and the wider UK - are in competition with countries around the globe. So, when we make statements that feel less than welcoming, we detrimentally impact the ability for our companies to compete to attract those skills and so support our goal to grow our economy.' Addressing the detail of Labour's immigration proposals, Mr Sheerin declared that raising minimum qualification levels from Higher equivalents to degree level would 'leave out the skilled trades and crafts roles where we are already in shortest supply: welders, fabricators, electricians, pipefitters, CNC (computer numerical control) machinists to name a few'. He added: 'The shortening of the graduate visa scheme reducing the right to work from two years to 18 months after graduating will not only hit our education sector but also reduce the attractiveness of the scheme for companies who will have a shorter timeline to decide whether to invest in the process to extend the visa of the employee.' Mr Sheerin declared: 'Whilst I recognise that this [immigration] is a contentious political issue across the UK for a whole range of reasons, in engineering and manufacturing in Scotland the reality is that immigration is a vital source of skills and experience that cannot be replaced overnight. These skills levels take years to build - and we should be building them - but closing off the supply before putting in place the actions to do that is another example of an action that will challenge the stated ambition of growing our economy.' Read more He declared that a frustration for him in Labour's immigration pronouncements was that 'whereas there is considerable detail on how we plan to restrict and close this supply of skills, on the laudable stated aim that we will replace the loss with trained or upskilled UK-born workers, the detail is missing on how that will be achieved'. Mr Sheerin added: 'And there is no detail that recognises that engineering skills take between four and six years to get to a starting level of competency. It does not seem an unreasonable request for the get-well plan to carry at least the same level of detail as the take-it-away plan.' Sir Keir declared on May 12: 'We do have to ask why parts of our economy seem almost addicted to importing cheap labour rather than investing in the skills of people who are here and want a good job in their community. Sectors like engineering, where visas have rocketed while apprenticeships have plummeted. Is that fair to Britain?' Mr Sheerin said in his latest quarterly review: 'Surely now…we need that oft-quoted 'laser focus' to return to the promise to grow the economy? Without that growth all other political objectives, social and economic, are in jeopardy. 'Against that wish, and from an economic point of view, I found the UK Government's latest pronouncements on immigration disappointing.' The Scottish Engineering chief executive has in recent years on numerous occasions highlighted skills shortages as a crucial issue for the sector. He has previously flagged Brexit as a key factor which has exacerbated this problem. He observed in November 2021: 'Brexit still lingers like a bad smell…In the crucial skills area, one-quarter of members have been impacted by the loss of EU nationals.'
The Age
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Succession creator skewers Silicon Valley with dark tech satire
We are not long in the company of billionaires Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), Randy (Steve Carell), Jeff (Ramy Youssef) and Ven (Cory Michael Smith) before we realise their poker weekend – a 'tech bro' getaway at Hugo's multimillion-dollar winter estate – is a metaphorical game of chance on which the fate of the world might pivot. It could be a nod to the scene in Ingmar Bergman's 1957 masterpiece, The Seventh Seal, in which a knight returns from the Crusades and challenges Death to a game of chess. Or it could simply be ripped from recent headlines, and the wrecking ball of global geopolitics and its goal-kickers Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel. Take your pick. What is certain is that we are on the set of Mountainhead, the feature film directorial debut of Succession writer/director Jesse Armstrong, and that much in the same way Succession picked the bones of the world's media dynasties, Mountainhead cuts deep into both the intersection of power, politics and Silicon Valley, and the globe-shaking personalities who populate it. Unlike Succession, where the fictional world of the Roy family played out at what felt like an excruciatingly glacial place, Mountainhead aspires to plug into a fast-moving story, not just in terms of how quickly AI is changing the world around us, but also in terms of how unexpectedly and brutally big tech is intersecting with politics. When Armstrong sat down to write Mountainhead, billionaire Tesla owner Elon Musk was only just taking his first steps leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). As the film launches, barely half-a-year later, Musk's foray into political budget-keeping has put Telsa to the torch, and the 53-year-old billionaire has returned to the company, wounded, to refocus on his shareholders. 'To some degree these tech people will be rich forever, but the way in which Musk was kicked off the board of PayPal early in his career by Thiel, the way [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman was kicked off his board and then over a weekend was then reinstated, the way the Tesla share price rocketed and dropped with [Musk's] involvement with DOGE... the roller coaster is moving very rapidly,' Armstrong says. 'That is true both in terms of share price, and also in terms of [the manner in which] personal reputations get made and destroyed so quickly,' adds the 54-year-old UK-born screenwriter-turned-director. 'There's a real incredibly fast metabolism to the reputations that are being made and destroyed in the tech world right now.' Loading There is also something uncomfortably predictive about the story of Mountainhead. This is, plainly, a satire. Much more so than Succession. And yet, it lives in the shadow of real-world headlines about big tech nudging into government, and oligarchy superseding democracy. Like Succession, it's funny, but only until it's in deadly earnest. Without giving away too much of the story, Hugo (Schwartzman) plays host to three of his tech bros – Randy (Carell), who is a deal-maker but is grappling with some personal news; Ven (Smith), who owns a ubiquitous social media platform; and Jeff (Youssef), who owns a potentially transformative AI – on a weekend, as the enmeshing of their business dealings and global geopolitics takes an unexpected turn. 'I don't have a crystal ball, but I think if you read a bunch of stuff in an area, and there's inferred or stated 100 things that happen in this movie, and you're throwing darts, you're going to end up hitting it a bunch of times,' Armstrong explains, during our visit to the show's set in Utah's ski country. 'You do have that weird slightly, oh, f---, yeah, that was in the show. It does have this weird resonance. But I think it's just because if you're doing good research, and you suppose 100 things, 10 of them might happen in the next 12 months.' Armstrong's magnum opus, Succession, always had a prevailing sense that it was the Murdoch family rendered in hand-carved soap, but in truth it was just as much about Rupert, Lachlan and Elisabeth as it was about the personalities and pivots of other media dynasties, such as the Redstones, the Sulzbergers and even the Hearsts. Loading Mountainhead, too, can play hide and seek in the shadows to a point, but it's also not difficult to sense echoes of real-life big tech players in Randy, Hugo, Ven and Jeff. Exactly who, and how much, is the penumbra in which Armstrong clearly likes to play. 'The thing that appealed to me was an attitude and a tone of voice, which is shared by many tech people,' says Armstrong. 'Then the specifics are shared out among them ... a bit of history, a tone of voice [but ultimately] a group of people who are fictional. 'It can be fun to play those games, and I did a ton of research. So there are fragments in there where you're like, oh, yeah, that's that [or] did he get that story from that? 'In Succession as well, I would openly steal good story shapes,' Armstrong says. 'But the fun thing about stealing is then you can change them as you want. You don't have to respect the reality of what specifically happened. It's a fun game, but in the end, it won't lead you to anything any deeper if you want to play that game with this, I don't think.' For Armstrong, both as a writer and director, everything pivots on a tone of voice. 'If I don't have that, I can't do it,' he says. 'All the research in the world wouldn't let me write somebody if I didn't know how they would order in a restaurant or talk privately to a romantic partner. 'Once you've got their voice and that voice plays out in private, public, business, romantic, intellectual, therapy, once you've got the voice, I can go anywhere. 'My knowledge still about this world is not going to be comparable with somebody who works in tech or even a really good tech journalist,' he adds. 'But once you're confident in the tone of voice or the facts, the stories that you want to tell become graspable.' 'The form of this is very similar to Succession, but also completely different.' Jesse Armstrong One of the challenges in Armstrong's writing is just how close to the flame he likes to make the satire fly. Succession turned into a compelling example of a kind of uncertainty principle: that it was, in theory, satirical, and certainly made its audience laugh at times, but that it was equally dark and dramatic, at times devastatingly so. Mountainhead dances that dance, too, though it delivers its funny moments with a more conventionally humorous punch. 'I don't think too much about in some ways how the audience will receive it,' he explains. 'Although obviously, in general, that's constantly what you're thinking about when you're writing and directing. [In terms of] how they'll navigate the space between the real and the fictional, once I've done my work setting up the world, that's [for] them to think about.' Armstrong did consider setting Mountainhead in the Succession universe by including a scene in which ATN, the fictional news network owed by the Roy family, would be seen in the background on a screen. 'And then, as it developed, I thought that it was really subtly tonally different,' Armstrong says. 'And maybe that is the answer to the question in terms of the relationship ... one's relationship to the real world is interesting. And this obviously relates to the real world and so did Succession. It's just finding a comfortable distance.' What is critical, perhaps, is to remember that Armstrong's creative DNA is naturally comedic. He was a writer on some of Britain's most significant political comedies, such as the television series, The Thick of It, and its spin-off film, In the Loop. 'It's often my way into something to find the bit which feels mad and ridiculous,' Armstrong says. 'In a certain way, I think the subject matter chooses the form, and then you write the form. And the form of this is very similar to Succession, but also completely different. 'You can try and formulate the rules for that, but essentially, they just come out as you write that these people speak like this and their logic can take them to this place. So, [certain] things are allowed, and they're not allowed in another piece. And it's both very technical but also beyond your control once you've set up the maths of the situation.' Important too, perhaps, is that despite the gravity of the piece overall – or, at least, the gravity of its implications – Armstrong is, essentially, still an optimist. In one scene, Jeff offers this depressing prediction for us: 'Earth is like an all-you-can-eat buffet; no one's going to stop until we clear all the hot plates.' It does not have to be so, says Armstrong. Loading 'I do feel I am personally optimistic,' he says. 'And that line that Ramy has, I do feel a bit like that. I feel certain pity for us in that we can't really help ourselves, that the stuff that's there, we take and we use, and our ability to take and use stuff, maybe our only hope is that we can keep mitigating that at a fast enough rate that our destructive tendencies can be tempered. And I also worry that we won't be able to do that, but I can only hope we do. I'm a bit like the guys in the film, I'm a techno-optimist.'
Sydney Morning Herald
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Four tech bros are carving up a world in chaos. This time, it's fiction
We are not long in the company of billionaires Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), Randy (Steve Carell), Jeff (Ramy Youssef) and Ven (Cory Michael Smith) before we realise their poker weekend – a 'tech bro' getaway at Hugo's multimillion-dollar winter estate – is a metaphorical game of chance on which the fate of the world might pivot. It could be a nod to the scene in Ingmar Bergman's 1957 masterpiece, The Seventh Seal, in which a knight returns from the Crusades and challenges Death to a game of chess. Or it could simply be ripped from recent headlines, and the wrecking ball of global geopolitics and its goal-kickers Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel. Take your pick. What is certain is that we are on the set of Mountainhead, the feature film directorial debut of Succession writer/director Jesse Armstrong, and that much in the same way Succession picked the bones of the world's media dynasties, Mountainhead cuts deep into both the intersection of power, politics and Silicon Valley, and the globe-shaking personalities who populate it. Unlike Succession, where the fictional world of the Roy family played out at what felt like an excruciatingly glacial place, Mountainhead aspires to plug into a fast-moving story, not just in terms of how quickly AI is changing the world around us, but also in terms of how unexpectedly and brutally big tech is intersecting with politics. When Armstrong sat down to write Mountainhead, billionaire Tesla owner Elon Musk was only just taking his first steps leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). As the film launches, barely half-a-year later, Musk's foray into political budget-keeping has put Telsa to the torch, and the 53-year-old billionaire has returned to the company, wounded, to refocus on his shareholders. 'To some degree these tech people will be rich forever, but the way in which Musk was kicked off the board of PayPal early in his career by Thiel, the way [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman was kicked off his board and then over a weekend was then reinstated, the way the Tesla share price rocketed and dropped with [Musk's] involvement with DOGE... the roller coaster is moving very rapidly,' Armstrong says. 'That is true both in terms of share price, and also in terms of [the manner in which] personal reputations get made and destroyed so quickly,' adds the 54-year-old UK-born screenwriter-turned-director. 'There's a real incredibly fast metabolism to the reputations that are being made and destroyed in the tech world right now.' Loading There is also something uncomfortably predictive about the story of Mountainhead. This is, plainly, a satire. Much more so than Succession. And yet, it lives in the shadow of real-world headlines about big tech nudging into government, and oligarchy superseding democracy. Like Succession, it's funny, but only until it's in deadly earnest. Without giving away too much of the story, Hugo (Schwartzman) plays host to three of his tech bros – Randy (Carell), who is a deal-maker but is grappling with some personal news; Ven (Smith), who owns a ubiquitous social media platform; and Jeff (Youssef), who owns a potentially transformative AI – on a weekend, as the enmeshing of their business dealings and global geopolitics takes an unexpected turn. 'I don't have a crystal ball, but I think if you read a bunch of stuff in an area, and there's inferred or stated 100 things that happen in this movie, and you're throwing darts, you're going to end up hitting it a bunch of times,' Armstrong explains, during our visit to the show's set in Utah's ski country. 'You do have that weird slightly, oh, f---, yeah, that was in the show. It does have this weird resonance. But I think it's just because if you're doing good research, and you suppose 100 things, 10 of them might happen in the next 12 months.' Armstrong's magnum opus, Succession, always had a prevailing sense that it was the Murdoch family rendered in hand-carved soap, but in truth it was just as much about Rupert, Lachlan and Elisabeth as it was about the personalities and pivots of other media dynasties, such as the Redstones, the Sulzbergers and even the Hearsts. Loading Mountainhead, too, can play hide and seek in the shadows to a point, but it's also not difficult to sense echoes of real-life big tech players in Randy, Hugo, Ven and Jeff. Exactly who, and how much, is the penumbra in which Armstrong clearly likes to play. 'The thing that appealed to me was an attitude and a tone of voice, which is shared by many tech people,' says Armstrong. 'Then the specifics are shared out among them ... a bit of history, a tone of voice [but ultimately] a group of people who are fictional. 'It can be fun to play those games, and I did a ton of research. So there are fragments in there where you're like, oh, yeah, that's that [or] did he get that story from that? 'In Succession as well, I would openly steal good story shapes,' Armstrong says. 'But the fun thing about stealing is then you can change them as you want. You don't have to respect the reality of what specifically happened. It's a fun game, but in the end, it won't lead you to anything any deeper if you want to play that game with this, I don't think.' For Armstrong, both as a writer and director, everything pivots on a tone of voice. 'If I don't have that, I can't do it,' he says. 'All the research in the world wouldn't let me write somebody if I didn't know how they would order in a restaurant or talk privately to a romantic partner. 'Once you've got their voice and that voice plays out in private, public, business, romantic, intellectual, therapy, once you've got the voice, I can go anywhere. 'My knowledge still about this world is not going to be comparable with somebody who works in tech or even a really good tech journalist,' he adds. 'But once you're confident in the tone of voice or the facts, the stories that you want to tell become graspable.' 'The form of this is very similar to Succession, but also completely different.' Jesse Armstrong One of the challenges in Armstrong's writing is just how close to the flame he likes to make the satire fly. Succession turned into a compelling example of a kind of uncertainty principle: that it was, in theory, satirical, and certainly made its audience laugh at times, but that it was equally dark and dramatic, at times devastatingly so. Mountainhead dances that dance, too, though it delivers its funny moments with a more conventionally humorous punch. 'I don't think too much about in some ways how the audience will receive it,' he explains. 'Although obviously, in general, that's constantly what you're thinking about when you're writing and directing. [In terms of] how they'll navigate the space between the real and the fictional, once I've done my work setting up the world, that's [for] them to think about.' Armstrong did consider setting Mountainhead in the Succession universe by including a scene in which ATN, the fictional news network owed by the Roy family, would be seen in the background on a screen. 'And then, as it developed, I thought that it was really subtly tonally different,' Armstrong says. 'And maybe that is the answer to the question in terms of the relationship ... one's relationship to the real world is interesting. And this obviously relates to the real world and so did Succession. It's just finding a comfortable distance.' What is critical, perhaps, is to remember that Armstrong's creative DNA is naturally comedic. He was a writer on some of Britain's most significant political comedies, such as the television series, The Thick of It, and its spin-off film, In the Loop. 'It's often my way into something to find the bit which feels mad and ridiculous,' Armstrong says. 'In a certain way, I think the subject matter chooses the form, and then you write the form. And the form of this is very similar to Succession, but also completely different. 'You can try and formulate the rules for that, but essentially, they just come out as you write that these people speak like this and their logic can take them to this place. So, [certain] things are allowed, and they're not allowed in another piece. And it's both very technical but also beyond your control once you've set up the maths of the situation.' Important too, perhaps, is that despite the gravity of the piece overall – or, at least, the gravity of its implications – Armstrong is, essentially, still an optimist. In one scene, Jeff offers this depressing prediction for us: 'Earth is like an all-you-can-eat buffet; no one's going to stop until we clear all the hot plates.' It does not have to be so, says Armstrong. Loading 'I do feel I am personally optimistic,' he says. 'And that line that Ramy has, I do feel a bit like that. I feel certain pity for us in that we can't really help ourselves, that the stuff that's there, we take and we use, and our ability to take and use stuff, maybe our only hope is that we can keep mitigating that at a fast enough rate that our destructive tendencies can be tempered. And I also worry that we won't be able to do that, but I can only hope we do. I'm a bit like the guys in the film, I'm a techno-optimist.'
The Age
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Four tech bros are carving up a world in chaos. This time, it's fiction
We are not long in the company of billionaires Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), Randy (Steve Carell), Jeff (Ramy Youssef) and Ven (Cory Michael Smith) before we realise their poker weekend – a 'tech bro' getaway at Hugo's multimillion-dollar winter estate – is a metaphorical game of chance on which the fate of the world might pivot. It could be a nod to the scene in Ingmar Bergman's 1957 masterpiece, The Seventh Seal, in which a knight returns from the Crusades and challenges Death to a game of chess. Or it could simply be ripped from recent headlines, and the wrecking ball of global geopolitics and its goal-kickers Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel. Take your pick. What is certain is that we are on the set of Mountainhead, the feature film directorial debut of Succession writer/director Jesse Armstrong, and that much in the same way Succession picked the bones of the world's media dynasties, Mountainhead cuts deep into both the intersection of power, politics and Silicon Valley, and the globe-shaking personalities who populate it. Unlike Succession, where the fictional world of the Roy family played out at what felt like an excruciatingly glacial place, Mountainhead aspires to plug into a fast-moving story, not just in terms of how quickly AI is changing the world around us, but also in terms of how unexpectedly and brutally big tech is intersecting with politics. When Armstrong sat down to write Mountainhead, billionaire Tesla owner Elon Musk was only just taking his first steps leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). As the film launches, barely half-a-year later, Musk's foray into political budget-keeping has put Telsa to the torch, and the 53-year-old billionaire has returned to the company, wounded, to refocus on his shareholders. 'To some degree these tech people will be rich forever, but the way in which Musk was kicked off the board of PayPal early in his career by Thiel, the way [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman was kicked off his board and then over a weekend was then reinstated, the way the Tesla share price rocketed and dropped with [Musk's] involvement with DOGE... the roller coaster is moving very rapidly,' Armstrong says. 'That is true both in terms of share price, and also in terms of [the manner in which] personal reputations get made and destroyed so quickly,' adds the 54-year-old UK-born screenwriter-turned-director. 'There's a real incredibly fast metabolism to the reputations that are being made and destroyed in the tech world right now.' Loading There is also something uncomfortably predictive about the story of Mountainhead. This is, plainly, a satire. Much more so than Succession. And yet, it lives in the shadow of real-world headlines about big tech nudging into government, and oligarchy superseding democracy. Like Succession, it's funny, but only until it's in deadly earnest. Without giving away too much of the story, Hugo (Schwartzman) plays host to three of his tech bros – Randy (Carell), who is a deal-maker but is grappling with some personal news; Ven (Smith), who owns a ubiquitous social media platform; and Jeff (Youssef), who owns a potentially transformative AI – on a weekend, as the enmeshing of their business dealings and global geopolitics takes an unexpected turn. 'I don't have a crystal ball, but I think if you read a bunch of stuff in an area, and there's inferred or stated 100 things that happen in this movie, and you're throwing darts, you're going to end up hitting it a bunch of times,' Armstrong explains, during our visit to the show's set in Utah's ski country. 'You do have that weird slightly, oh, f---, yeah, that was in the show. It does have this weird resonance. But I think it's just because if you're doing good research, and you suppose 100 things, 10 of them might happen in the next 12 months.' Armstrong's magnum opus, Succession, always had a prevailing sense that it was the Murdoch family rendered in hand-carved soap, but in truth it was just as much about Rupert, Lachlan and Elisabeth as it was about the personalities and pivots of other media dynasties, such as the Redstones, the Sulzbergers and even the Hearsts. Loading Mountainhead, too, can play hide and seek in the shadows to a point, but it's also not difficult to sense echoes of real-life big tech players in Randy, Hugo, Ven and Jeff. Exactly who, and how much, is the penumbra in which Armstrong clearly likes to play. 'The thing that appealed to me was an attitude and a tone of voice, which is shared by many tech people,' says Armstrong. 'Then the specifics are shared out among them ... a bit of history, a tone of voice [but ultimately] a group of people who are fictional. 'It can be fun to play those games, and I did a ton of research. So there are fragments in there where you're like, oh, yeah, that's that [or] did he get that story from that? 'In Succession as well, I would openly steal good story shapes,' Armstrong says. 'But the fun thing about stealing is then you can change them as you want. You don't have to respect the reality of what specifically happened. It's a fun game, but in the end, it won't lead you to anything any deeper if you want to play that game with this, I don't think.' For Armstrong, both as a writer and director, everything pivots on a tone of voice. 'If I don't have that, I can't do it,' he says. 'All the research in the world wouldn't let me write somebody if I didn't know how they would order in a restaurant or talk privately to a romantic partner. 'Once you've got their voice and that voice plays out in private, public, business, romantic, intellectual, therapy, once you've got the voice, I can go anywhere. 'My knowledge still about this world is not going to be comparable with somebody who works in tech or even a really good tech journalist,' he adds. 'But once you're confident in the tone of voice or the facts, the stories that you want to tell become graspable.' 'The form of this is very similar to Succession, but also completely different.' Jesse Armstrong One of the challenges in Armstrong's writing is just how close to the flame he likes to make the satire fly. Succession turned into a compelling example of a kind of uncertainty principle: that it was, in theory, satirical, and certainly made its audience laugh at times, but that it was equally dark and dramatic, at times devastatingly so. Mountainhead dances that dance, too, though it delivers its funny moments with a more conventionally humorous punch. 'I don't think too much about in some ways how the audience will receive it,' he explains. 'Although obviously, in general, that's constantly what you're thinking about when you're writing and directing. [In terms of] how they'll navigate the space between the real and the fictional, once I've done my work setting up the world, that's [for] them to think about.' Armstrong did consider setting Mountainhead in the Succession universe by including a scene in which ATN, the fictional news network owed by the Roy family, would be seen in the background on a screen. 'And then, as it developed, I thought that it was really subtly tonally different,' Armstrong says. 'And maybe that is the answer to the question in terms of the relationship ... one's relationship to the real world is interesting. And this obviously relates to the real world and so did Succession. It's just finding a comfortable distance.' What is critical, perhaps, is to remember that Armstrong's creative DNA is naturally comedic. He was a writer on some of Britain's most significant political comedies, such as the television series, The Thick of It, and its spin-off film, In the Loop. 'It's often my way into something to find the bit which feels mad and ridiculous,' Armstrong says. 'In a certain way, I think the subject matter chooses the form, and then you write the form. And the form of this is very similar to Succession, but also completely different. 'You can try and formulate the rules for that, but essentially, they just come out as you write that these people speak like this and their logic can take them to this place. So, [certain] things are allowed, and they're not allowed in another piece. And it's both very technical but also beyond your control once you've set up the maths of the situation.' Important too, perhaps, is that despite the gravity of the piece overall – or, at least, the gravity of its implications – Armstrong is, essentially, still an optimist. In one scene, Jeff offers this depressing prediction for us: 'Earth is like an all-you-can-eat buffet; no one's going to stop until we clear all the hot plates.' It does not have to be so, says Armstrong. Loading 'I do feel I am personally optimistic,' he says. 'And that line that Ramy has, I do feel a bit like that. I feel certain pity for us in that we can't really help ourselves, that the stuff that's there, we take and we use, and our ability to take and use stuff, maybe our only hope is that we can keep mitigating that at a fast enough rate that our destructive tendencies can be tempered. And I also worry that we won't be able to do that, but I can only hope we do. I'm a bit like the guys in the film, I'm a techno-optimist.'
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
LINE FRIENDS Partners with UK IP 'Ketnipz' to Accelerate Global IP Expansion
Global character brand LINE FRIENDS partners with social media sensation Ketnipz to expand its footprint in North America and Asia LINE FRIENDS (corporately known as IPX) has officially partnered with Ketnipz, the popular character-driven brand with over 10 million fans across social media platforms. This highly-anticipated collaboration aims to grow the Ketnipz IP on a global scale, leveraging LINE FRIENDS' storytelling expertise, global infrastructure and creative vision. The partnership will focus on expanding Ketnipz's presence in key markets such as North America and Asia through licensing opportunities, brand collaborations and original content development. LOS ANGELES, May 20, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- With a strong fanbase in Europe and the U.S., Ketnipz brings a unique cultural resonance that, combined with LINE FRIENDS' global reach, is expected to strengthen both brands' influence in the international IP landscape. LINE FRIENDS (corporately known as IPX) is proud to announce its partnership with Ketnipz, the UK-born character IP that has captured the hearts of over 10 million fans worldwide, through its unique illustrations, relatable story-telling and always-uplifting messages. The partnership grants rights for Ketnipz in South Korea and China, with plans to scale IP activities across various countries and regions, including North America. Ketnipz, created by Welsh artist Harry Hambley in 2016, has gained viral popularity primarily in Europe and North America through its genuine, relatable content, with themes of self-love and positivity. The brand began with just one character "Bean" but has since expanded its universe with additional characters such as 'Nana Bean', 'Catto' and 'Doggo'. Ketnipz holds a strong online presence through social media platforms, including Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, with over 10 million global fans following. The brand has extended its IP global footprint through collaborations with major global companies like McDonald's, Instagram, Casetify and Samsung. LINE FRIENDS, with over a decade of expertise developing its globally loved original character IPs like LINE FRIENDS and BT21, is well positioned to partner with Ketnipz and expected to bring the unique identity of Ketnipz through Gen Z trends worldwide. The partnership will expand its business not only in Asia but in Europe and North America. LINE FRIENDS plans to leverage its IP business capabilities to expand Ketnipz's presence across Asia while solidifying its leadership in the global IP market. By utilizing its broad network of LINE FRIENDS flagship stores, partnerships with major global brands and diverse business models including licensing, collaborations and content development, LINE FRIENDS will be expanding Ketnipz's business in Asia and North America. LINE FRIENDS has previously led the successful expansion of South Korean IPs such as JOGUMAN, DINOTAENG and MONAMHEE, offering unique IP experiences to fans beyond the home country. The company expects partnering with Ketnipz will further strengthen its presence in the Western market. LINE FRIENDS representative stated, "Ketnipz IP has delivered joy and connection with their audience through its heartwarming messages and storytelling. As a leader in global IP business, we believe the company can bring great success with Ketnipz in Asia as well as global markets. Building on our successful global expansion with South Korean IPs, we expect to lead the UK-based IP Ketnipz into the Asian market and will continue to discover character IPs to bring new IP experiences for global fans." ABOUT LINE FRIENDS (corporately known as IPX) LINE FRIENDS is a global character brand that originally started from Original Characters including BROWN, CONY, SALLY created for use as stickers for the leading mobile messenger app, LINE, and its 200 million active users worldwide. LINE FRIENDS has been accelerating its strategy to expand its IP businesses by diversifying its IP portfolios targeting all ages and advancing its digital and retail business. With its diverse IP experiences, LINE FRIENDS is winning hearts of over 50 million Millennials and Generation Zs worldwide. IPX currently operates in 18 markets worldwide including Seoul, New York, LA, Tokyo, and Shanghai, and operates in 8 online sale platforms. For more information, please visit Media Contact:Emily FletcherPublic Haus Agencyemily@ View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE LINE FRIENDS
