Numlock News: July 25, 2025 • Air Bud, Vidiots, Green Bay Packers
By Walt Hickey
Have a great weekend!
Merger
The tabletop and board game industry is fueled largely by crowdfunding, which allows designers to bank preorders while simultaneously banking the capital needed to actually produce the game. There are three major players in this crowdfunding world: general interest crowdfunding platform (and the biggest company of the three) Kickstarter, along with Gamefound (which raised $165 million in 2024 and runs the fundraising for the lion’s share of the biggest games in the business) and finally Indiegogo (which has skewed more tech, and which has raised $3 billion since its founding in 2008). Gamefound has announced it is buying Indiegogo, which is certainly a shot across the bow of Kickstarter in terms of building a large and diverse base of customers outside of games.
Air Bud
It’s finally happened. They’re doing one of those legacy sequels for the 1997 film Air Bud, a franchise built upon the flimsy legal conceit that if there’s nothing in the rule book explicitly forbidding a dog from playing a sport, that dog may legally participate in any sporting activity it desires. The upcoming film will indeed be the 15th movie in the surprisingly extensive Air Bud franchise. The initial movie (which saw a dog that can play basketball) was followed up with Air Bud: Golden Receiver, Air Bud: World Pup, Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch, Air Bud: Spikes Back and several terrible direct-to-video spinoffs about the eponymous Bud’s puppies. Apparently, the new movie is just them playing basketball again, which sucks. I’ve been sitting on a spec script called Air Bud: 24 Hours of Le Man’s Best Friend for years now, and there’s nothing in the rule book that says a dog can’t drive a racecar.
Books
A new analysis conducted by the National Council of Teachers of English found that six of the top 10 most commonly assigned books by English teachers at public middle and high schools today are the same as those assigned in 1989, demonstrating just how sticky the canon can be. There are lots of reasons for this — hey, if the district owns a couple hundred copies of The Great Gatsby, it can’t hurt to keep the party going — not to mention the levels of scrutiny and approval that ensues when trying to add something to a curriculum. The books that dropped off the top ten list include Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Julius Caesar, The Scarlet Letter and Lord of the Flies. The books that joined it include Frankenstein, Fahrenheit 451, Night and The Crucible.
Sara Randazzo, The Wall Street Journal
Superman
The new Superman movie is making way less of its money overseas than previous films in the franchise, perhaps a sign that the longtime branding of Supes as standing for “truth, justice and the American way” ain’t exactly selling tickets these days. In 2006, Superman Returns made 49 percent of its money overseas, Man of Steel made 57 percent of its cash abroad and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice made 62 percent of its cume internationally. Meanwhile, Superman made just 42 percent of its opening weekend box office outside of the domestic market.
Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter
Packers
The Green Bay Packers publishes their annual financial statements owing to their idiosyncratic ownership structure; the team is owned by 539,000 fan shareholders rather than by some billionaire who owns the team and doesn’t have to tell anyone how much money it makes him. This means that the Packers present a really interesting look into how an NFL team — and the league as a whole — is doing. In total, national revenue from the media rights, league sponsorships and more hit $432.6 million, up 7.5 percent year over year. This implies gross revenues of $13.8 billion for the league as a whole. What’s interesting about this report is that local revenue increased 13.7 percent to $286.4 million, which is attributed to the first season when the Packers had nine regular-season home games rather than eight.
Unrolled
Delicate scrolls from a Buddhist shrine have been unrolled virtually with 3D X-ray lithography, which allowed a team to create a digital copy of one of the scrolls. In the past, these texts would have been unwrapped and unrolled to read inscriptions, which ran the risk of damaging or destroying them. The high-resolution scans allowed researchers to see that there are about 50 windings in each scroll. Each strip measures over 80 centimeters long, even though the tightly-wound scroll ends up being just 3 to 5 centimeters long. Traces of ink were visible on the unrolled strips, too, because ink containing metal particles was used.
Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres
Vidiots
Vidiots was an alternative video store that opened in 1985 in Santa Monica; over the following three decades of operation, its collection of VHS tapes grew to be massive, containing rarities and unique one-of-a-kind videotapes. In 2012, the reality of the film rental business led Vidiots to become a 501(c)3 non-profit, which led to several high-profile donors and a decision to mothball and store the 50,000-title collection in 2017. Its new mission is digitization, to preserve the thousands of culturally significant VHS tapes in its archives that are otherwise inaccessible. Six weeks into the project, archivists have cataloged over 1,000 tapes, and the first 100 titles are scheduled for digitization in the next weeks.
Stephanie Prange, Media Play News
This past week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Moira Donovan who wrote Teeny Tiny Trackers Take to the Water for bioGraphic. I loved this story, Numlock has always had a soft spot for coastal stories and ever since bioGraphic took on the mantle from Hakai Magazine writers like Donovan have been able to continue covering some really exciting advances in coastal science and technology. Donovan can be found on Bluesky.
Numlock Sunday: Moira Donovan on the breakthrough in animal tracking tech
When scientists want to understand the movement of an animal species, they tag a few subjects with electronic tracking devices that can beam back the location and other vitals to the researchers. This strategy works on all kinds of creatures, but it gets considerably more difficult for smaller animals.
If you subscribe, you get a Sunday edition! It’s fun, and supporters keep this thing ad-free. This is the best way to support a thing you like to read:
Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.
Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.
Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.
Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Dark Roofs · Geothermal · Stitch · Year of the Ring · Person Do Thing · Fun Factor · Low Culture · Romeo vs. Juliet · Traffic Cam Photobooth · Money in Politics ·
Sax Solo · Terra Nova · Didion · Me, But Better · Flow · Four Nations · Tabletop · Fortnite · Sleep · Climate Insurance ·
Work/Life Balance · Self-Driving · Geoglyphs · Nvidia · McDonald’s · No Such Thing · Nationalized Sports ·
Sunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018
I read Huck Finn as a HS sophomore and again as an adult. My conclusion was that it’s a masterpiece that is totally wasted on teenagers. Good call dropping it!
Here’s my weird take on requires reading books: I think that they should add “The Martian”, by Andy Weir, to the list. It is extremely well-written, has a solid plot and offers a very optimistic outlook about humanity.