Numlock News: June 10, 2024 • Quidditch, Copper, Sintashta

Jun 10, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Bad Boys

Box office saviors often come in unsuspecting packages, and Bad Boys: Ride or Die’s better-than-expected $56 million domestic and $104.6 million global haul has got people out of their seats and rushing the stage with joy. Yes, the name on everyone’s mouth right now is Will Smith, who along with Martin Lawrence has produced a film in an aging franchise that nevertheless managed to get 44 percent of its audience between the ages of 18 and 34. The movie also significantly overperformed among Black moviegoers, who made up 44 percent of the audience.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

All Downhill From Here

A winter that was considerably warmer than anticipated — with 28 percent lower snowfall across western North American resorts — was punishing for Vail Resorts, which saw the quarter encompassing February through April with revenue missing expectations. Overall, Vail made $1.28 billion over the quarter, and while the Epic Pass product that allows their customers to pay a steep up-front cost to have a season pass at its North American resorts has generally had a stabilizing impact on revenue, things are not looking great on the slopes. The stock is down by half from a high of $360 in October 2021. While this was one of the hotter winters in the company’s history, the reality is that it may very well be one of the coldest winters of the company’s future.

Kurt Badenhausen, Sportico

Games

Unbroken Studios has, after years of delay, announced that this September it’s coming out with the first Quidditch video game since 2003. It’s going to cost $29.99, which to anyone who’s bought a $69.99 AAA console game lately, sure sends the message that this thing might not exactly be liquid luck. I like Quidditch video games for the same reason I like Fitzcarraldo: because they’re ambitious ordeals that are doomed at their very core to be expensive and exhausting creative products whose beleaguered creation is far more interesting than their actual execution. See, the market demands a Quidditch product, because (a) Harry Potter is one of the largest and most lucrative franchises in the world, (b) it contains a game called Quidditch, and (c) yeah, we should greenlight a Quidditch video game. However, and this is absolutely crucial, the moment that it’s actually up to game designers to design a game, the impossibility of success is realized as Quidditch is a terribly designed game. I do not intend this to be a criticism of the author, as Quidditch was very obviously a thinly veiled swing at soccer’s place in British society, and within the text existed predominantly as an event to be cancelled mid-season by school administrators because of the events of the main plot. It is impossible to design a fun Quidditch game for the same reason it is impossible to design a Ministry of Silly Walks — it’s funny, but there’s just nothing actually there to do. They wanted to embed Quidditch into the successful game Hogwarts: Legacy, but after years of development could not produce a version that did not suck. Soon, there will be this version. Anyway, if you want to hear a twenty-minute screed about how you could make a legitimately interesting game by making the Snitch worth negative fifty points, just get me drunk.

Jennifer Maas, Variety

Chess.com

Chess’s popularity is booming, and one app — Chess.com — has rolled up the competition and far outpaces its rivals. There were 12.5 billion games played on the platform last year, vastly more than the billion games at Lichess. One thing the platform has to police is cheating, which is especially difficult now that computers have vastly surpassed humans at the game; the best chess engine is able to rack up a 3,586 Elo rating, well higher than the 2,100 level for an expert and 2,882 human record. The company bans about 90,000 players a month for cheating.

David Crowther and Millie Giles, Sherwood News

Refs

NFL officiating has had its share of difficulties over the years, and it’s arguable that the refs are not set up for success in the game by an underfunded office operated by the league. That said, a string of officials retiring and an influx of new blood may be a cause for concern in the coming years, as experienced refs retire and new refs without years of experience in the NFL replace them. Of the 120 officials this year, a third will have five years or fewer on the job, and 27 of them will have three years or fewer. This comes on the heels of a wave of retirements, when 10 officials retired after 2021 and 12 retired after 2022.

Kalyn Kahler, The Athletic

Copper

The need for copper is projected to double by 2035, fueled by an increase in electrified infrastructure as well as new construction and data centers. Copper recycling has always been a lucrative venture, but mills are trying to use more and more of the recycled stuff. One Montreal mill, Nexans, is currently at 14 percent recycled metal in the mix, and is aiming for 20 percent. The industry has focused on quality materials sourcing ever since the Ea-nāṣir incident, and every ton of copper that’s recycled means 200 tons of rock that don’t need to be mined. About two-thirds of the copper produced in the last century is still in use, and when those products get taken offline, there will be new uses for them in another life.

Jennifer McDermott, The Associated Press

Horses

A new study published in Nature has established new clarity on the timeline of when humans invented domesticated horses. An analysis of the genomes of 475 ancient horses going back 50,000 years found that about 4,200 years ago, those genomes showed a significant change, when the lineage of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe emerged in the region that runs from modern Bulgaria through Ukraine and then began to take over the world. The researchers put this equine innovation on the Sintashta, a Bronze Age people that domesticated their local horse and then spread them around the world. The earliest evidence of horse riding goes back 5,000 years, but it seems like humanity really cracked the tech a few hundred years after those initial attempts, and soon began adjusting the creature to our preferred designs.

Christina Larson, Phys.org

In an interview now completely unlocked for all Numlock readers, I spoke to Michael Waters, author of the newly-released book The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports. We spoke about the 1936 Olympics and the trans athletes who made headlines that year, the inner workings of sports bureaucracy, and the invention and evolution of sex-testing policies in athletics. Waters can be found at his website and on Twitter, and you can get the book wherever books are sold.

Numlock Sunday: Michael Waters on the queer history of the Olympics

Susie Stark

June 2, 2024

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