Numlock News: May 8, 2024 • Sunscreen, Warhammer, Red vs. Blue

By Walt Hickey

I’m going on my honeymoon at the end of the month and we’ll be having guest writers during the actual anniversary of the newsletter, so we’re starting the annual promo early this year.

Price-wise, owing to the continued impacts of inflation, we’ve had to make some hard decisions over here, and will this year be increasi— nah, just kidding, we’re still $5 after six years, and still just $50 for an annual subscription. But this week in fact you also get a bunch off your first year, so now’s the time to become a paid subscriber and support the newsletter:

Sunscreen

The United States is decades behind other countries when it comes to sunscreen, with nearly all European and Asian sunscreens containing the basic ingredient bemotrizinol. It’s one of the most vetted and safest sunscreens on the market, but it’s not FDA approved for over-the-counter use in the U.S. owing to a 1938 law that classifies sunscreens as drugs and requires them to be tested on animals, rather than the cosmetics they’re treated as in most of the rest of the world. Despite 1 in 5 Americans developing skin cancer by age 70, there is not a whole lot of haste from the feds on the issue, and that’s prompted bipartisan action in Congress to urge the approval. DSM-Firmenich is a Swiss company that makes sunscreen chemicals, and has spent the past 20 years trying to get bemotrizinol approved, spending $18 million in the process. The latest efforts have brought many hope, and the FDA could approve it as soon as 2025.

Michael Scaturro, KFF Health News

Deepfakes

In Chinese homes, it’s common to put up a portrait of a deceased loved one for several years after their death, and a number of companies are attempting to bring deepfake technology to this tradition. For instance, Super Brain will make a digital replica of a deceased relative and install it to an Android tablet in the shape of a photo frame, a service that runs for $700 to $1,400, offering a moving image that speaks words drawn from a database. The company also offers a service where an employee or a contract therapist will video call a customer pretending to be a relative that has died.

Zeyi Yang, MIT Technology Review

Royal Warrants

In September 2022, England’s Queen Elizabeth II died, which means that the two-year grace period for possessors of royal warrants ends this coming September and the new guy gets to list his favorite stuff as produced under the auspices of the royal warrant, allowed to feature the coat of arms and claim production is made by appointment. Under Elizabeth, some 800 products and services claimed the royal warrant. Because this is the aristocracy we’re talking about, currently 39 different brands of drinks — including fully eight producers of Champagne — hold warrants and would indeed like to keep them.

Evan Rail, Vinepair

Red vs. Blue

Tuesday saw the release of Red vs. Blue: Restoration, the final edition of the now-folded Rooster Teeth’s 21-year-long machinima saga filmed within the Halo franchise called Red vs. Blue. It was in many ways the forefront of a format that failed to materialize as well as a trend that has defined an entire era of video content. Touted originally as “machinima,” a portmanteau alluding to the creation of cinema through the use of game engines, Red vs. Blue was genuinely groundbreaking in an era of the internet where animation tools were only just entering the hands of normal people. While the term “machinima” has become anachronistic, it lives on in the Twitch streams of tens of thousands who create entertainment, and in emergent storytelling in social spaces using games like Roblox or Fortnite.

Chris Baker, Wired

Oakland

The Oakland A’s are right in the middle of backstabbing the city of Oakland, having announced their departure for Vegas but phoning it in with a tepid lineup at their Oakland joint until the lease runs out. This mediocre on-field product as well as the vehement contempt for management has sent the A’s attendance to pathetic levels, with the team averaging a measly 6,410 fans per game, the lowest home attendance figure for any MLB team in 45 years. These are truly futile numbers; a Sportico analysis found 553 pro and college teams in the United States that have averaged more fans in home games than the A’s, including every one of the five major men’s leagues, 13 minor league baseball teams, 11 American Hockey League teams, about 200 college football teams (six of them Division II, two of them Division III), three Indoor Football League teams, two college wrestling teams, and even the Triple-A minor league affiliate team of, yes, the Oakland A’s.

Lev Akabas and Eben Novy-Williams, Sportico

Trillion Trees

There are lots of complex, sophisticated ways to meaningfully address the complicated issue of global climate change, and then there are the sure, sounds great, that seems way easier angles that attract the attention and the money despite a somewhat flimsier grounding in reality. Take the effort to plant 1 trillion trees in 10 years for example, which sounds clever on paper: starting in 2020, grow, restore or conserve a trillion trees that otherwise wouldn’t exist in 2030, fueled by a billionaire and the World Economic Forum. Well, it’s not going great; the total number of trees pledged four years in is less than 15 percent of the 1 trillion headline number, there’s very little accountability, and by the partial count only 2.6 billion trees have been actually accounted for, 997 billion short of target, meaning 0.3 percent progress has been made about a third of the way in. The sole paper that provoked the crusade went viral in 2019, but has since received substantial pushback from other scientists.

Sophie Alexander, Bloomberg

Games Workshop

One of the more compelling sectors of the game business is Games Workshop, the company behind the incredibly popular and remarkably profitable Warhammer line of miniatures. Recently the community has been rattled by an announcement that the company plans to hike prices 3 percent to 5 percent across the board, also indicating that prices in Sweden and Norway will be rising 8 percent to 14 percent. Their financial reports are fascinating reading; they made £247.7 million in the most recent half-year, and January’s report indicated that their gross margin on making and selling miniatures is 69.4 percent. After accounting for business operations, they’re working with a truly eye-watering profit margin of 35.4 percent. It’s a hard economy when the same daily 1,000 psykers don’t go as far sustaining the God-Emperor of Mankind as they used to.

Timothy Linward, Wargamer

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