This is like saying: “Anyone can walk up to a chalkboard and solve for 2 + 2. Not everyone can walk up to a mic and control their timbre, breath intake, and delivery to convincingly reproduce a huge range of vocal textures and emotional states.”

I know what you’re trying to say, but if the current gig destroys your vocal chords, and you don’t get the most out of it, isn’t that a better example of shooting yourself in the foot?
And if you think giving up on a gig is something that can be easily done, then please read what Harada had to say in the defense of…

Re: everyone being able to read lines. This made me think back to school and where everyone in the class would have to read parts out of a book or textbook. Most of the time, it was boring or painful to listen to and only rarely would someone be able to read and actually make it engaging. The rest of the time, it was…

“Artists should suffer” is such outdated thinking

They should all be union, for the same reason that Arnheim had to explain why they are valuable *at all*. If they don’t collectively fight for compensation, they all collectively get to see the value of their work decimated. It’s why all low-level drones should be unionized - they are just numbers on a spreadsheet to…

Differential equations aren’t that tough. It’s literally just following the right steps in the right order. It requires zero judgment or creative thinking. A computer can solve differential equations. A computer cannot act worth a damn.

The “half the hours” thing is halving session times for work that can potentially damage voices. Meaning, say, the same pay for two 3-hour sessions as opposed to one 6-hour session.

This.

As in so many things, someone else’s job appears easy, until you have to do it yourself.

Any time someone tells me they could do a voice actor’s job, I had them a book with 400 or more pages and go, “You have 10 hours to read this out loud into a mic, record it fully. You aren’t allowed any breaks and you have to retake any mistake you make after, you get an hour’s rest before the retakes.”

Sadly, I’m…

Ah, I can see that you are not an actor.

Respectfully, fans, as a rule, don’t make mortgage payments for you, or pay for your kids’ college, or keep your retirement fund flush for when you decide you don’t want to do your job anymore. Better pay does. Residuals do.

I disagree, based upon the following examples:

In gaming:

David Hayter as Snake.
Sure, Sutherland did a passable job, but he barely had a speaking role compared to earlier MGS titles, and it still didn’t sound right (to my ear, anyway; others are free to disagree).

Haley Joel Osment as Sora:

I was, admittedly, a little old…

I never said that engineers, artists, and the like didn’t deserve residuals.

That’s another argument, for another collective bargaining agreement.

Here’s a frame of reference: I write. I primarily teach (compositional rhetoric and literature), but I occasionally pen pieces that I sell on to others.

If my work generates…

As someone who auditions actors both union and non-union, I can tell you that you are 1,000,000% wrong about this. The quality level of a SAG audition blows a non-union audition out of the water, and the non-union project 99 times out of 100 suffers for it. Obviously, actors all have to start somewhere so in that…

Over both the short and the long term, this is true—and I am saddened to admit that.

But that doesn’t mean the battle isn’t worth fighting; accepting the status quo creates a sort of servitude to the same. Some battles are worth fighting, and some aren’t, but when it comes to being compensated for work that might well…

Speaking as a southerner (who grew up in Germany, so my accent’s a little off), this is patently untrue.

There are variations on the twang and patois of “southerners,” just as there are variations on midwestern, northeastern, western and coastal accents.

What passes for “southern” in Kentucky isn’t at all comparable to…

To me it says the money is more important than the fans who fell in love with you for your work

Maybe we consumers need to take a stand and boycott products made by scabs.

Shooting yourself in the foot is continuing to work a job that isn’t providing the pay/benefits you need.

Didn’t even know the strike was still going on.