Numlock News: February 10, 2025 • Languages, TouchTones, Australia

Feb 10, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Dog Man

Dog Man, the movie based on the single most successful ongoing literary franchise on the planet, has won the box office for a second week in a row. This brings its domestic total to $54.1 million against a $40 million budget. It’s quiet out there, with few films angling to release against the Super Bowl, but this weekend did see the release of Becoming Led Zeppelin, a documentary detailing the rise of the rock band. The movie is looking to ride the wave of successful music tie-in movies like the rerelease of Stop Making Sense and The Eras Tour and pulled in a fairly impressive $2.6 million on just 369 Imax screens.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Games

Following last week’s release of Kickstarter data on fundraising for tabletop games, a field where crowdsourcing is the name of the game, the two other major companies in the space also dropped their annual reports. Gamefound, which emerged three years ago in an attempt to directly compete with Kickstarter, saw $85 million pledged to successful tabletop campaigns, which is up 52 percent year over year. It is already a substantial competitor to Kickstarter, which brought in $220 million. Backerkit, the other major player, reported a three-fold increase in its games business in its second year of operation but declined to offer a hard year-end total. Either way, it points to a pretty exciting picture for the industry. While Kickstarter’s revenues for tabletop might be down since peaks in the pandemic, taken as a whole, the industry is well above the $270 million pledged at its peak in 2021. Given that crowdfunding essentially constitutes the majority of the R&D budget for games, that’s a pretty vibrant ecosystem to look forward to.

Charlie Hall, Polygon and Charlie Hall, Polygon

What’s New, Pussycat?

TouchTones operates digital jukebox systems in 65,000 bars, restaurants and venues. Last year, the company rolled out a new app that allows people to throw a song on the playlist from anywhere. This has naturally led to some particularly clever trolling during college football season, where fans of rival schools covertly rout their team’s fight songs onto opposing teams’ home jukeboxes from the safety of hundreds of miles away. The app itself has loads of fans, with a song going for two credits. Just $7 gets users 12 credits and $5 allows them the option to jump the line and get to the top of the queue.

Ann-Marie Alcántara, The Wall Street Journal

Australia

A snake catcher in Australia has successfully exorcised 102 snakes from a pile of mulch in a backyard in Sydney, with Reptile Relocation Sydney evicting 5 adults and 97 offspring. Given that this happened in Australia, the snakes (known as red-bellied black snakes) are remarkably venomous. It was likely a group that recently gave birth. These snakes have litters — not eggs! Litters! — of between 4 and 35 snakes. They’re a protected species, so the animal control company is still holding on to them until there’s an opportunity to drop them off in the middle of nowhere, which Australia also has an ample amount of.

Rod McGuirk, The Associated Press

Love

A new survey asked Americans what they felt about various aphorisms related to love. Things like “actions speak louder than words” came out with top marks at 92 percent, followed by “when people show you who they are, believe them” (84 percent) and “true love stands the test of time” or “never go the bed angry” (each 80 percent). Some came in somewhat controversial, such as “love is blind” (61 percent), “love conquers all” (53 percent) and “you should never date someone who’s still friends with their ex” (51 percent). There are a few controversial notions, the worst of which is “love means never having to say you’re sorry” (13 percent), followed by “half your age plus seven is the youngest you should date” (25 percent) and “you marry someone like your parents” (27 percent).

Taylor Orth, YouGov

Super Bowl commercials were stacked with celebrities; since the pandemic, the number of spots with a celebrity in it averaged above 70 percent, far more than the one-third of commercials back in 2010. For celebrities, this is a decent payday, with A-listers getting between $3 million and $5 million to appear in a spot. Given the $8 million it costs to just get the ad time, the couple million for a recognizable face in the spot and the price of production, this year’s Super Bowl ads are looking at costing $10 million to $12 million minimum. These ads can cost up to $20 million or more for high-end productions, a remarkable amount to pay for thirty seconds of American attention.

Alex Weprin, The Hollywood Reporter

Indo-European

A new genetic analysis sought to find out the origins of the Indo-European languages, which are spoken by half the world from Europe to the Indian subcontinent. The new data suggests that pretty much everywhere that speaks an Indo-European language shares genes with a small group of people known as the Yamnaya. The Yamnaya were sheepherders who lived on the steppes of Ukraine and Russia 5,300 years ago. They started using wheels and wagons around 3300 BCE and eventually started appearing all around Eurasia, their language riding the wheels of trade. The analysis suggests that the language family probably emerged 6,400 years ago, between 4400 and 4000 BCE.

Andrew Curry, Science

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