Austin Kelmore
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austinkelmore.com
Austin Kelmore
@austinkelmore.com
4.5K followers 170 following 4.9K posts
Unionizing the games industry one person at a time. Cofounder of @gameworkers.co.uk, @gameworkersolidarity.com, and @nogamesforgenocide.com.

Game worker, rock climber, cat hugger based in Glasgow, Scotland.

https://www.austinkelmore.com
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I miss my friend.
Tigger, the orange and white cat, sitting on a couch cushion in front of some radical books.
January 12, 2026 at 9:42 PM
austinkelmore.com
A picture of the book No More Police. A case for abolition by Mariame Kaba and Adrea J. Ritchie with a forward by Black Visions.
January 9, 2026 at 9:15 PM
austinkelmore.com
Testing 2.
A picture of the previous conversation in this thread.
January 9, 2026 at 12:37 PM
austinkelmore.com
Testing.
Highland cows in a park.
January 9, 2026 at 12:32 PM
austinkelmore.com
1st book read of 2026.

An Autobiography - Angela Y. Davis
A yellow book cover with a picture of Angela Davis when she was young with a large afro. The text on the book says: ANGELA Y. DAVIS AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY 'An Activist. An Author. A scolar. An Abolitionist. A legend' IBRAM X. KENDI
January 7, 2026 at 5:13 PM
austinkelmore.com
Sunday (and every day) is lazy cat day.
Jameson, the orange cat, curled up into a ball with his front paws sticking out in front of him. He's on a blue and white patterned blanket next to an orange couch.
December 28, 2025 at 1:05 PM
austinkelmore.com
I'm in my happy place and I'm smiling even if you can't see it..
Me wearing a large face mask with black glasses and a black shirt in front of a rock climbing wall.
December 27, 2025 at 5:57 PM
austinkelmore.com
I'm excited about all three gifts I got for Christmas.

Especially excited to make some of the food as it looks incredible.
Three books on a bedspread. Boustany: A celebration of vegetables from my Palestine by Sami Tamimi The Little Book of Glasgow by Geoff Holder Stoner by John Williams
December 25, 2025 at 9:08 PM
austinkelmore.com
Goodbye Tigger, 14 years of our lives together was such a treat. You are loved and will be dearly missed.
Tigger the orange and white cat and me looking into closely into the camera.
December 17, 2025 at 4:56 PM
austinkelmore.com
Gave a talk tonight and I love showing this slide so much to show a small portion of what's possible when we push for change.

What would you like at your workplace?
Me giving a presentation with a slide in the background saying: What Does Victory Look Like? Increase Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Salary Transparency Better treatment of support staff Profit sharing Better treatment of outsourced workers Remove non-compete clauses Living Wage for all workers Remove non-disparagement clauses Own your own side-projects Publicise Diversity & Inclusion statistics Paid overtime Ban overtime Limit/ban zero-hour contracts No firing without cause Better disability support Better neurodiversity support Better LGBTQ+ support Better mental health support Required increase in pay every year Additional Training Worker ownership of the company Permanent optional remote working 4 day work week 6 hour work days Or whatever you want!
December 4, 2025 at 10:14 PM
austinkelmore.com
A preview for my talk tonight.
You can't stop those in power from being cruel. But you can build enough power so they fear your collective action more than they want to be cruel. IWGB Game Workers
December 4, 2025 at 2:22 PM
austinkelmore.com
Went walking outside with a friend today, Scotland really is a gorgeous place when the weather is good.
A big lake and rolling hills with a stunningly blue sky and some leafless trees framing the picture.
November 30, 2025 at 5:16 PM
austinkelmore.com
This bodes well for myself as this is currently hanging in my kitchen.
A white poster with black lettering that says IN THIS HOUSE WE FUCKING SWEAR.
November 24, 2025 at 8:21 PM
austinkelmore.com
This is going to mean very little to folks outside the probably 10 people who follow me who know Trackmania, but this is the first time I've gotten all AT's in a season and I'm incredibly proud of this.
A screenshot of Trackmania showing the Fall 2025 campaign where all 25 tracks have the author time. United Kingdom - 411st place World - 4997th place
November 22, 2025 at 11:19 AM
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I spoke on the Notes From Below podcast this week about unions and the choices @gameworkers.co.uk made to be an organizing union instead of a service based one.

I also spoke about the Rockstar situation and the games industry at large! Have a listen if you fancy.

pocketcasts.com/podcast/work...
November 21, 2025 at 4:36 PM
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It's out! My chat with Callum Cant for the Notes From Below podcast was a lot of fun.

We talked through why we need to organize and unionize the video games industry, what that looks like in practice, and started by talking about the Rockstar situation.

pocketcasts.com/podcast/work...
November 19, 2025 at 8:39 AM
austinkelmore.com
A picture of Nemik from Star Wars: Andor saying: "And then remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance, will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try."
November 10, 2025 at 7:02 PM
austinkelmore.com
I really do think this is true.

Rockstar leadership deciding to fire 30+ union workers and the workers deciding to fight back is going to be something we look back on as a turning point for our unionization effort.
Now, as IWGB and fired workers go on the offensive against Rockstar, Kelmore believes the Game Workers Union is entering a new phase of its relatively young life. "Prior to this happening, we haven't ever really had people standing outside of companies with IWGB banners and organizing in a very visible way,” he said. “But this has changed that. When companies do something like this, you can't just slink away and hide anymore. It's a very public thing. It helps give people confidence that they can stay, because they have nothing to lose. They've already been fired. So they can be very public and organize and fight back. I think we are slowly starting to go over the curve of completely hidden to more public actions, and I anticipate more of these in the near future, too."
November 10, 2025 at 6:25 PM
austinkelmore.com
I've been reading the latest book by @mskellymhayes.bsky.social which seems very apt right now considering... *gestures around* everything going on.
A blue book with a person in a pond with lilypads in a calm forest. The book is titled Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis - Edited by Kelly Hayes.
November 4, 2025 at 8:52 AM
austinkelmore.com
If anyone is in or around Glasgow on Saturday and wants to hear me talk about my most recent essay on Video Game Worker Unions and Revolution, I'd love to see you there!

notesfrombelow.org/article/vide...

6pm at Broadside in Glasgow!
Broadside & Variant Notes from Below Pictures of the cover art for the Notes from Below issue called Dispassions: Class Struggle in Arts & Culture. Issue Launch & Discussion 25.10.25 6pm Boradside 123 Allison St Glasgow
October 23, 2025 at 7:29 PM
austinkelmore.com
I'm unsuccessfully trying to slim down the number books I'm thinking of taking on vacation next week.

Have any of you read some of these? Are any of these books a must-read?
13 books in a stack 1. Five Ways to Forgiveness - Ursula K Le Guin 2. Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist - Judith Heumann with Kristen Joiner 3. Angela Y. Davis: An Autobiography 4. Occupation: Organizer - Clement Petitjean 5. Inside Mercedes F1 - Matt Whyman 6. Living for Change: Boggs 7. Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin 8. Steering the Craft - Ursula K Le Guin 9. What It Takes To Heal - Prentis Hemphill 10. Overcoming Burnout - Nicole Rose 11. Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle For Housing - Kurwa 12: Rules To Win By - McAlevey & Lawlor 13: Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision - Barbara Ransby
September 27, 2025 at 3:48 PM
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I went to the anarchist book fair in London yesterday and only bought one book!

Was it restraint? Or was it that I already had many of the books I saw? Who can say.
An image of an illustrated skeletal rib cage with flowers and plants growing out of it. The book is titled OVERCOMING BURNOUT by NICOLE ROSE. OVERCOMING BURNOUT Organising with others for human, animal and earth liberation can be one of the most empowering experiences alive. Yet frontline resistance comes with risks to our physical and emotional health that can lead many people to burn out and abandon social movements altogether. This book is about overcoming burnout, linking the author's journey of recovery with wider systemic forces such as classism, sexism and power dynamics in groups, poverty, chronic illness and ableism, as well as grief and tauma from prison and state repression. It is a call for models of mutual aid and collective care. Simultaneously deeply personal and acutely political, for anyone involved in grassroots organising. It is a must read. "For communities resisting oppression, burnout is ever-present. Nicole's incredibly important writing calls on us to create a cultural shift, to do the work needed to understand burnout better and to show up for those in our communities most affected by oppression." - Kes Otter Lieffe
September 21, 2025 at 8:05 AM
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margaretkilljoy.substack.com/p/i-cant-tel...
I can’t tell you what’s coming and I can’t tell you that it’ll be okay but I also, really, really can’t tell you that “everything is fucked” or anything like that. I can only tell you that the future will be determined by our actions. One problem with the current electoral system in this country is that we grow up being told that the only way we can make our voice heard is by voting for representatives to various levels of government, but history isn’t written by voters. It’s written by people taking action. In particular, though not exclusively, history is written by people taking collective action.
September 18, 2025 at 7:14 AM
austinkelmore.com
This is one of the most beautiful, heartbreaking, and insightful books I have read in a long, long time.

It has transformed how I think of the world and I will be thinking about what I've learned for years to come.
The book Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd. Zionism is the leading cause of death in occupied palestine, through both direct, state-sanctioned violence and indirect, consequential violence, which trickles down through suffocating bureaucracies, inescapable psychological onslaughts, and impetuous intercommunal conflicts. Yet this man-made quietus is treated like any other leading cause of death - heart disease in the US, dementia in England - and is scarcely cause for concern, let alone condemnation. On the contrary, our death is sustenance for the world we live in, necessary to maintain things as they are. Our blood is the price of the colony's sense of "security." The empire cuts the lives of our loved ones short to prolong its reign. And our grief is negligible, our rage unwarranted. The more our loved ones are killed by Zionist colonialism, the less space we are offered to grieve them. We cannot narrate this colossal theft of life, let alone avenge it. Our enemies employ what Mourid Barghouti calls "a simple linguistic trick" to turn the world on its head: they fail to mention what came first and start their story from "secondly." "Start your story with 'secondly,'" Barghouti writes, "and the arrows of the Red Indians are the original criminals, and the guns of the white men are entirely the victim. It is enough to start with 'secondly' for the anger of the black man against the white to be barbarous" as opposed to justified or even admirable. The peril of this supposedly inconsequential language game is revealed in its ability to obscure reality. However, more importantly, language possesses a transformative potential to elucidate, demystify, repair, liberate, and rival; to infiltrate consciousnesses and permeate into collective action; to "support the weight of a civilization." Language, if we can dominate it, can turn our anonymous whispers back into thunderous declarations.
September 16, 2025 at 8:22 AM
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Maybe this'll cheer you up a bit.
An orange cat sitting in a cubby next to a stack of books with the top one being PEOPLE POWER CHANGE: Organizing for Democratic Renewal by Marshall Ganz.
September 16, 2025 at 7:40 AM