Numlock News: January 14, 2025 • Æthelberht, Herculaneum, Bird’s Foot

Jan 14, 2025

Comics

The comic book industry is bracing for potentially catastrophic fallout from new tariffs, given that the domestic printing business doesn’t really work in colored pages anymore, and the business for floppies (mostly printed in Canada) and graphic novels (mostly produced in Asia) is staring down serious business challenges. For instance, at the current tariff rate of 7.5 percent, a publisher who paid $328.50 in import taxes for 3,000 copies printed in China (at $1.46 per book) would see their import tax alone skyrocket to $4,380.00 under the proposed 100% tariff rate, which would seriously imperil the entire graphic novel business given that U.S. printers overwhelmingly specialize in printing black-and-white prose books and lack the local expertise and capacity to print in full color.

Gina Gagliano, The Comics Journal

Arm and a Leg

A new study compared the historical value of appendages and found remarkable consistency over the eras. For instance, the Law of Æthelberht published in 600 CE set the wergild price of compensating an injured person at 30 shillings for the loss of an arm and 50 shillings for the loss of a foot, while the Guta Lag published in Gotland, Sweden, in 1220 set the costs at 24 marks for a hand, 24 for a foot, and 48 for both feet. The researchers compared this to modern workers’ compensation rates in Indiana, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as conducted a survey of 614 respondents, and found that generally speaking the prices tended to hold in terms of scale across the eons.

Yunsuh Nike Wee, Daniel Sznycer and Jaimie Arona Krems, The Conversation

Localization

Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the largest productions in the history of gaming, and one fact about its production that’s somewhat revealing about the true future of the gaming industry is that out of 5,381 people listed in the game’s credits, about half of them were responsible for one increasingly crucial element of building a blockbuster game: localizing it for a global audience. The open-world game had 1.1 million words translated into 19 languages and 82,000 lines of dialogue translated into 11 languages. All told, 2,456 people worked on localization, 45 percent of the total people who worked on the game, including 117 translators, editors and proofreaders, and 1,966 voice-over actors.

Matt Leone, Polygon

“Jobs”

According to Greenhouse, somewhere between 18 percent and 22 percent of jobs advertised in 2024 were never actually filled, the ghost job phenomenon that has drawn no shortage of ire from job seekers who must yeet lots and lots of resumes into an abyss in order to find a place to earn a crust. Companies might cite lots of reasons for the phantom postings, including that they want to spread a perception they’re growing when they’re not, or just trying to find a real diamond in the rough.

Lynn Cook, The Wall Street Journal

Remote

A new survey from Pew Research found that among adults who have a job that can be done from home, 75 percent work remote at least some of the time. Of this group, 46 percent said that if their employer no longer allowed them to do so, they would be unlikely to remain at their current job, with 26 percent saying they would be very unlikely. This included 50 percent of workers under the age of 50.

Kim Parker, Pew Research Center

Delta

The Mississippi River enters the Gulf of Mexico at the Bird’s Foot, the very end of the delta and one of the most imperiled places of real estate on earth. Since 2008, the underwater boundaries of the Bird’s Foot have retreated as much as 20 meters per year in some places, which is a pretty big issue. One issue is the opening of Neptune Pass, which widened substantially and now diverts about 16 percent of the flow of the Mississippi over into Quarantine Bay, threatening the supply of silt that sustains the delta.

Warren Cornwall, Science

Herculaneum

For four short months, the archaeological park in Herculaneum — the town adjacent to Pompeii that got significantly more annihilated by Vesuvius — is reopening a house (domus) believed to belong to the family (familia) of the proconsul (proconsul) that measures about 1,800 square meters, good for the second-largest home in Herculaneum. A bit of a fixer-upper (error pretiosa), it’s known for an outstanding floor mosaic and remarkably intact frescoes. Discovered in 1934, it was opened once in 2022 for a four-month trial and has been opened and closed since in order to cut back on wear and tear (stultus convivae).

James Imam, The Art Newspaper

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