Numlock News: March 19, 2026 • Zeus, Sharks, Golden

Mar 19, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Webtoon

Webtoon Entertainment, which operates the largest webcomic repository and engagement site online, revealed (for the first time as a public company) just how much money its creators have made. From 2021 to 2025, webtoon and webnovel creators across Naver made 4.15 trillion won (US$2.78 billion) in revenue share. That’s up from the last time Webtoon Entertainment tipped its hand regarding what creators were making. In 2023, ahead of going public with a listing on Nasdaq, the company indicated that it had paid creators US$1.8 billion from 2017 to 2022.

Baek Byung-yeul, The Korea Times and Richardson Handjaja, Animenomics

Après moi, le déluge

French Bulldogs remained top dog according to the annual American Kennel Club registry, with the AKC adding 54,000 Frenchies last year. The French Bulldog has been the most popular dog on the listing since 2023, but its reign may be faltering as that additional 54,000 registrations is about half the level of 2023. Dog breed popularity shifts in trends; 25 years ago, the Frenchy was all the way down at No. 64 in the ranking. Of the 1920s top 10 breeds, just three (German shepherds, beagles and bulldogs) remain in the top 10 today. One up-and-comer to look out for is the cane corso, which has shot up the ranks to become the 11th most prevalent breed. Other breeds on the move include the coton de tulear, which rose sharply from 94th in 2024 all the way up to 79th place last year.

Jennifer Peltz, The Associated Press

Team Can’t Stop

A group of dogs — among them athletes such as Zeus and Polar — on Team Can’t Stop won the 2026 Iditarod Trail Sled Race, completing the trek in just nine days, seven hours and 32 minutes, about a day faster than the race finish last year. Jessie Holmes, the guy being dragged behind the consummate canine athletes, was also the first to be dragged across the finish line last year. With this win, he becomes the sixth musher to win a repeat. There were 34 competitive mushers, of whom four dropped out. Legions of fans greeted the victorious hounds in Nome. Honestly, these days it’s just nice to see this kind of support and interest for an event commemorating the successful distribution of a shot designed to eliminate preventable childhood diseases. You would think that such a sentiment would still be pretty popular, but man, after the past couple of years, I just don’t know.

Ava White and Casey Grove, Alaska Public Media

I Lied To You

The soundtracks to Sinners and KPop Demon Hunters got big boosts from the Academy Awards presentation that featured musical performances from the films, and each took home some hardware. The Sinners compilation soundtrack’s streams increased 150 percent to 756,000 U.S. streams. Of that number, 154,000 were for “I Lied to You,” the film’s nominee for Best Original Song. The big winner, though, was the soundtrack to KPop Demon Hunters, which saw 5.1 million streams the day after the Oscars and a 282 percent jump in sales. “Golden,” the big hit from the film, notched 1.68 million streams following the telecast. The movie — which won an Oscar for a song that was performed at the awards show — indeed contains a fairly significant subplot about performing a song at an awards show, specifically the song that won at the actual awards show. However, in the film, the song performed at the fictional award show actually goes rather badly.

Kyle Denis and Andrew Unterberger, Billboard

Easter Eggs

A new study looked at the phenomenon of “easter eggs” in media, which traditionally are small references to the real world or entities from other media that the creators left in as a small in-joke. It’s normally a nod to colleagues, or just a way of making fans feel in-the-know or seen, like the Pizza Planet trucks hidden in Pixar movies or the assorted comic book ephemera snuck (sometimes carelessly jammed) into Marvel movies or those jokes snuck into a newsletter or into an animated MoviePass the censors for the longtime fans. The study, published in PLOS One, found that 41 percent of respondents could recall finding an Easter Egg in the past year. Among those who had, respondents who scored high on the parasocial relationship scale or who were part of fan communities reported experiencing a higher level of reward and enjoyment upon spotting those subtle clues.

Mike Krings, University of Kansas and Judy Watts and Hannah Wing, PLOS One

Compute

The seeds of teams in March Madness are determined by the shadowy Selection Committee, and there’s evidence that the committee is relying more and more on hard data like the KenPom ratings than mere gut instinct. Essentially, the number of games in the Round of 64 featuring “mis-seeded” teams (which are matchups where the higher-seeded team has a lower KenPom rating) has been declining over the years, as (presumably) the committee has begun factoring in those ratings. This was once a clever way for the nerds to catch an edge in their brackets. For instance, in 2010, there were six games in the Round of 64 where the lower-seeded team had a better KenPom rating. In four of those games, the lower-ranked team indeed managed an upset. But those days are on the outs; the correlation between the KenPom rankings and the official seeds came in at 0.86 this year, compared to 0.77 two decades ago. Correspondingly, the 10-year rolling average has brought the number of “mis-seeded” upset specials down from 4.0 as of 2017 to just 2.8 matchups this year.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

S. rigrinum Doesn’t Want to be Fed. He Wants to Hunt.

Las Vegas, a monument to the hubris of mankind, is home to a number of sharks in the middle of the desert, specifically sharks within a 1.3 million-gallon tank in the Shark Reef Aquarium at the Mandalay Bay Resort. There are 15 species of shark, and they must be fed three times per week. The joke is that the sharks actually tend to eat better than the tourists: their diets consist of a mix of mackerel, herring, blue runner and sardines, many of which are wild caught. In fact, the aquarium goes through over 300 pounds of fish every week.

Jessica Hill, The Associated Press

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