Numlock News: June 1, 2026 • Beyblades, Backrooms, Bibles

Jun 01, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Backrooms

Backrooms, a horror movie from A24 that dives into the internet-famous aesthetic, made $81 million at the North American box office, a huge hit that follows yet another small-budget outsider horror hit, Obsession, which crossed $100 million in its third week of release. Both movies were the product of funding filmmakers who cut their teeth on YouTube, and their success is being seen as a sign within the industry that audiences are interested in new approaches from new filmmakers.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Meanwhile, In Books

The publishing industry is coming to quite a different conclusion than the film industry, given that the data shows some of the biggest and most reliable I.P. in books these days is just straight up the Bible. In 2019, Circana began tracking Bibles, devotionals, and bible study guides as a single category, and over that period, print sales have increased from 16.6 million units moved in 2019 to 30.8 million sold in 2025. Sales of devotionals — books that feature daily Bible passages or meditations — increased from 5.1 million to 8.5 million over the period, and Bible study guides saw sales rise from 1.6 million to 3.2 million.

Cathy Lynn Grossman, Publishers Weekly

Beyblades

Beyblades, the battling tops that were introduced in 1999, have surged in popularity once again in Hong Kong, where a viral social media trend has catapulted them in popularity overnight. Beyblades were inspired by Japan’s beigoma tops, and manufacturer Tomy says that 560 million of them have been shipped to over 80 countries.

Anne Chan and Kensaku Ihara, Nikkei Asia

AL

The two leagues of Major League Baseball are in a historic state of imbalance, with the American League having just four teams with a winning record while the National League has 11 winning teams. That’s the biggest imbalance going back to 1997, which is when this current era of the MLB’s structure began. While there are some on-field reasons for this — an injury-plagued AL among them — much of this disparity is the result of changes made to scheduling after the 2023 season, which drastically increased the number of inter-league games per season from 20 games to 48 games (now accounting for 28 percent of the schedule) as well as a decrease in the number of division games from 76 to 52. This means that it’s significantly more likely that an entire division can be below .500, which is now the case in the AL West.

Lev Akabas, Sportico

Smoking

Preliminary findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the fraction of Americans who are smokers at 9.1 percent, a new all-time low. That’s down from close to 42 percent of U.S. adults smoking in the mid-1960s, and continues the gradual shift away from tobacco use. The use of electronic cigarettes has stayed flat year over year, according to the latest data release, at about seven percent.

Mike Stobbe, The Associated Press

World Cup

Most Americans are not interested in the 2026 World Cup, with a new poll finding just 13 percent of U.S. adult citizens are very interested in the FIFA World Cup, 16 percent are somewhat interested, 14 percent are not very interested and a majority 54 percent are not at all interested. Younger people tended to be more into soccer — 21 percent of adults under 45 are very interested in the cup, compared to seven percent of those over 45 — but World Cup fever has yet to hit the general population. For those Americans out of the loop, the 2026 FIFA World Cup is an international exhibition hosted in North America mainly themed around showing Europeans how disastrously little America invests in public transit infrastructure.

Jamie Ballard, YouGov

Bots

The Dutch National Cyber Security Center announced that it has dismantled a botnet that was made up of 17 million hijacked devices managed by 200 servers linked to the Russia-based company ASOCKS, which provides proxy services. The report didn’t indicate how those 17 million devices had been commandeered by the hackers; botnets can sometimes build up their armies through clever exploits and imaginative hacks. But sometimes, it’s literally in the terms of service of an app that the app is going to use your device for Other Purposes; proxy services and sketchy VPNs could very well fall into that latter bucket.

Dan Goodin, Ars Technica

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