Numlock News: May 1, 2025 • Surfside, Botswana, Manga

May 01, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Microdrama

Microdramas are scripted series with episodes that run just a few minutes, and are specifically filmed for the aspect ratio of a phone. They have had an outstanding run in China, where the industry pulls in more money than their domestic box office, and have begun to grow globally as well. Revenue from microdrama apps in the App Store and Google Play was just $23 million as of January 2024, but rose to $122 million as of January 2025, a 446 percent increase, with March revenue hitting $126 million. Downloads of the apps that hawk them in the U.S. jumped from 42,000 in March 2023 to 4.6 million in March 2025.

Robert Steiner, VIP+

Surfside

The drink of the summer appears destined to be ready-to-drink vodka lemonade, and many major entities within the booze biz are preparing to flood the nation with it. Vodka-based non-carbonated lemonade concoctions in a can have been on a tear lately, with market leader Surfside launching the business in 2022 to 563 percent growth. In 2023, it saw case sales hit 1.2 million for the year, jumping to 4.9 million cases in 2024. Other contenders are getting in the mix: just this week, Spirit of Gallo (the liquor business of the winery) launched Lucky One, Anheuser-Busch launched Skimmers in April and Boston Beer launched Sun Cruiser right after. The drink is currently under the radar, but soon our nation’s finest scientists will be gathering at a remote secret facility in the desert of eastern Georgia at Arnold Palmer National Laboratories to attempt to enrich the vodka lemonade into a new, weaponized beverage.

Olivia White, Vine Pair

We’re No. 1!

A new study sought to compare the soil erosion rates of colossal, continent-spanning glaciers operating over the course of tens of thousands of years against the erosion rates of recent farmers. In observing river terraces at Trout Creek in the Upper Mississippi River Valley, researchers were able to estimate erosion rates based on beryllium-10 levels in the sediment. Natural erosion at Trout Creek peaked at 0.071 millimeters per year during the Laurentide Ice Sheet’s maximum extent, and eventually slowed to 0.05 millimeters per year when the tundra thawed — the operative word being “natural.” During the monoculture agriculture era, erosion rates have been hitting four millimeters per year, a 60-fold increase, but researchers settled on a conservative estimate of 0.6 millimeters per year, which is about eight to twelve times as eroding as an actual ice age.

Evan Howell, Science

Manga

During the pandemic, the government of France doled out hundreds of euros per teenager to spend on cultural activities, attempting to both assuage the youth during a difficult time and prop up the struggling entertainment and culture industries that France derives so much well-deserved national pride from. Anyway, the teens spent the money on manga for the most part, which led to a boom in demand for comics from Japan and all the stores that supply them. Unfortunately, the bubble appears to have popped, and manga sales in France have fallen by over 25 percent since peaking at 48 million units for €‎381 million in 2022; sales in the first quarter of 2025 are down 14.5 percent. This is an existential threat to the nation’s bookstores and comic industry, with bankruptcies emerging across the industry.

Richardson Handjaja, Animenomics and Amélie Ruhlmann, Le Figaro

Botswana

Compared to its neighbors, Botswana benefits from high incomes and general stability owing to its longtime arrangement with De Beers, a division of mining company Anglo American that specializes in diamonds, which are overwhelmingly mined in Botswana. The government of the country only owns 15 percent of De Beers, and as Anglo American weighs a sale of the division, the nation wants to make sure it has significant sway over choosing the eventual buyer. Botswana would go so far as to increase its stake in De Beers to as much as 50 percent.

Cecilia Jamasmie, Mining.com

Planet 9

There are some movements of objects within our solar system that are not entirely explained by the sun, the eight known planets that orbit it and the myriad asteroids and dwarf planets that surround it. These gravitational mysteries are exciting and have long invited speculation about a so-called “Planet X” or “Planet Nine,” which would be confusing if we still used Roman numerals, but conveniently, astronomers ensured that the Romans were all dead before engaging in such confusing nomenclature. Anyway, a new preprint from a team of researchers in Taiwan, Japan and Australia studied archival imagery of the night sky to look for possible candidates for the secret planet out past the orbit of Neptune. From an initial search of 2 million objects, they looked for pairs of dots made of light that could be moving with Planet Nine. They found 13 pairs, only one of which might actually work, though subsequent work found that the potential Planet Nine would have to have a very funky orbit to actually be a contender.

Hannah Richter, Science

Thunderstruck

Thunderbolts*, the new Marvel movie which will debut in theaters this weekend, is tracking toward $70 million to $75 million at the domestic box office, with a global target of $160 million to $175 million. That would be on the low end of Marvel movies as a whole, and substantially below the box office of Deadpool & Wolverine, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. The movie cost $180 million to produce and $100 million to market. As a comics entity, the Thunderbolts are a fascinating bit of history. In comics, they’re the kind of team made up of stock characters that has a novella-length wiki article but ultimately little bearing on the broader universe, the kind of team where Hawkeye is the most famous person to ever claim membership, the kind of team where you don’t really need to read their tie-in arc for the semi-annual event, you know, the kind of team that has “toyetic box office bonanza” written all over them.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

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