Numlock News: March 25, 2024 • Puppets, Lasers, Dragon Ball

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Haunted

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire made $45.2 million in North America, a decent showing that was on the upper end of projections but only slightly ahead of the 2021 film Ghostbusters: Afterlife. The film centers on a business concerned with those who linger long past their time, but enough about the original cast of Ghostbusters. Other movies that dropped this weekend include the religious horror movie Immaculate, which made $5.3 million, and Late Night With the Devil, a satanic horror movie that made $2.8 million and which the distributor is claiming made $666,666 on Sunday alone, which, come on man.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Montreal

Montreal Olympic Stadium is an iconic structure, but is nevertheless a multigenerational fiscal boondoggle that continues to be a municipal money pit. Its roof is shot, made out of fiberglass and teflon but with 20,000 tears in it, and concerts are skipping Montreal on tours because of the inconsistency of the venue. The stadium has been empty since the Expos left in 2004, and it can’t operate if there are more than 3 centimeters of snow. It’s too expensive to demolish — it’s above a metro station and would cost C$2 billion to rip it out — so Quebec is paying C$870 million (US$642 million) to replace the roof over the course of four years.

Teresa Xie, Bloomberg

Trimming The Herbs

They’ve done it: In a somewhat anticlimactic finish, the crew of completionists striving to beat every single winnable level made in Super Mario Maker before the servers are killed on April 8 has succeeded in their quest, following the revelation last week that the sole holdout level — called “Trimming the Herbs,” and which was the subject of 280,000 attempts to beat it — was not in fact beatable by humans. Earlier evidence that it could be beaten was completed by a computer and not a person, thus rendering the level ineligible and not necessary to complete the challenge. That means that a once-quixotic quest to beat the entire game has succeeded, with weeks left to go. Some players are nevertheless committed to beating the level before the game goes down on April 8.

Dustin Bailey, GamesRadar

Puppets

The Los Angeles Puppetry Guild represents a diverse bunch, from amateurs to industry professionals, and judging by member rolls puppetry is having a real moment right now. The L.A. guild is up to 200 members, and the Puppeteers of America now recognizes it as the largest such regional body in the country, compared to 150 members in the National Capital Puppetry Guild and 120 in the Puppetry Guild of Greater New York. The surge is mostly people in their 20s and 30s who are joining the scene, despite the historical fact that the guild generally skewed older. One theory is that CGI becoming firmly mainstream when it comes to film effects has provoked some yearning for the more tactile medium of puppets.

Deborah Netburn, The Los Angeles Times

Lasers

The Federal Aviation Administration’s database of laser strikes against planes — when a person shines a laser at a plane to mess with it — is showing that such strikes are up, and by a lot. In 2023, pilots were hit with 13,304 laser strikes in the U.S., the worst year on record, and nearly double the 6,852 laser strikes in 2020. In the post-pandemic years there has been an increase in the strikes, with 9,723 in 2021 and 9,457 in 2022, but at current rates this year could be the worst yet. February saw 1,297 reports of laser strikes, averaging 44.7 per day, well on pace for over 16,000 by the end of the year.

Matt Novak, Gizmodo

Cotton

With the closure of eight cotton mills in the United States in the last five months of 2023, the United States is down to around 100 cotton mills, down from 900 cotton mills in the late 1800s. The U.S. still grows a whole lot of cotton, but it exports the raw stuff for processing abroad as the domestic textile business essentially evaporates. In 2024, 75.2 percent of U.S. cotton is exported, compared to 63 percent in 2014 and just 33 percent in 1994. Mills in the United States will process the least amount of cotton in 139 years. Amid increased competition from synthetic fibers and Brazil’s cotton, even U.S. exports are down, from 16.4 million 480-pound bales of cotton in 2021 to just 12.3 million bales in 2024.

Ilena Peng, Bloomberg

This Isn't Even My Final Form

Saudi Arabia has cut a deal with Toei Animation to create the first theme park based on the Dragon Ball franchise. The park will be in Qiddiya, which is an entertainment city 40 minutes away from the capital in Riyadh. The plan is for it to be 500,000 square meters in size, feature a 70-meter-high roller coaster centered on the dragon Shenron, and contain 30 attractions. Anime is very popular in Saudi Arabia, with 40 percent of the population seeing Dragon Ball at some point. Listen, I’m gonna be straightforward here: Saudi Arabia needs to cool it. They already have Mecca; why do they need a second location that billions of people will need to make a pilgrimage to at some point in their lives?

Miki Funabashi, Nikkei Asia

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