Numlock News: November 14, 2025 • Seagulls, Backyard Sports, Soccer
By Walt Hickey
Have a great weekend!
Botox
Sales of AbbVie’s Botox Cosmetic neurotoxin fell 8.1 percent in the first half of 2025 compared to the same half of 2024, producing $2.7 billion in net revenue. It’s not that people are being scared off of Botox, but rather, other pharmaceutical companies are muscling into the space. Lots of people who ask for the more generic phrase “Botox” actually get Dysport. It is a neurotoxin that’s manufactured by a Botox rival, Galderma, which saw its sales increase 13.7 percent from H1 of 2024 to H1 2025. Similar market share transfers were seen in AbbVie’s Juvederm fillers (revenue dropped 23 percent) compared to Galderma’s filler products (up 3.1 percent).
Birds
Confirming what many of us have known all along: scientists have proven that you can just yell at seagulls to make them go away. The study compared three different recordings — one of European robins, one of a British guy shouting the phrase “No! Stay away! That’s my food, that’s my pasty!” and another recording of those same men merely saying in a neutral voice, “No. Stay away. That’s my food, that’s my pasty.” The researchers sought to see what would happen if they played those sounds from a speaker in a Cornish coastal town with infamous thieving seagulls. They found that the gulls that were shouted at were far more likely to fly away, while those spoken to merely walked away. However, if you find yelling at seagulls to be beneath you, fear not; the same researchers found that merely staring at herring gulls will also get them to give in.
Neeltje Boogert, The Conversation
Backyard Sports
Playground Productions has rolled out all new versions of the six classic “Backyard Sports” video games (Backyard Baseball ’97, Backyard Baseball ’01, Backyard Football ’99, Backyard Soccer ’98, Backyard Basketball ’01 and Backyard Hockey ’02) on Steam. The whole bundle goes for $36. This nostalgia-driven retro sports gaming moment is a serious test for the long-term viability of a new strategy: selling stuff to millennials now that they have money to squander. A 2D animated special called “Sticky Situation” will debut in January, and later next year, the first wholly new game will be released in the franchise. Presumably, the first mission will be asking team captain Pablo Sanchez to gather the locker room together and inform the team about the events of 9/11 and the subsequent geopolitical events that have happened in the decades since the game’s relevance.
Chobani
Retail sales of Chobani were up 28.3 percent year over year, which is remarkable for a 20-year-old brand in the food space. Not only is yogut demand in the U.S. for Chobani up, but it has also snagged a lot of market share in creamers — a $5 billion industry. Right now, Chobani has 11.5 percent of the American creamer business, up from 5.5 percent just a year ago.
Christopher Doering, Food Dive
MLS
The Major League Soccer has made the surprising decision to reorient its seasonal calendar to start in mid-July and run through April of the following year, with playoffs in May. The current MLS season runs from late February to October, with the playoffs and championship ending in November. The league made that change because those new seasons are when it is pleasant to play soccer in North America. However, this has placed the American league out of step with global soccer, meaning teams have trouble buying and selling players on the global market. It also means that the playoffs are up against the other football — the one that everybody in North America watches. While it is a big shift, the advocates argue that the proposal doesn’t change the calendar too much, and 91 percent of the games in the new format already fall within the current blueprint of the Major League Soccer schedule.
Chatbot
A new analysis of 328,744 publicly shared messages from ChatGPT found that 70 percent of responses contained at least one emoji, with over 30 percent featuring the checkmark and more than 25 percent featuring the brain emoji. ChatGPT uses the checkmark emoji 11 times more often than humans do, so keep that in mind if you find yourself on the business end of a Turing test. The chatbot did favor the em dash (—), and about 80 percent of the messages contained at least one. That said, I also love the em dash and use it constantly — it’s a real all-around versatile utility player in the toolbox of grammar — so I can hardly begrudge the fondness of a bot that’s just imitating the manner of expression of people who type a lot on the internet, which is indeed my profession.
Jeremy B. Merrill, Szu Yu Chen and Emma Kumer, The Washington Post
Cancellations
Hotels have only recently become hawkish on their cancellation policies. As recently as just a few years ago, it was possible to cancel a stay without incident the day of the reservation — just an element of the hospitality business. The inflection point happened around 2018, when third-party travel booking sites coded that amenity into their booking algorithms and produced a strategy known internally as “cancel-rebook.” Sites would book a room at the best price, then spend the next few weeks monitoring the hotel itself for a rate dip. When that dip happens, they’d cancel the initial booking, rebook under the new rate and pocket the difference. The actual guest was none the wiser, the hotel got screwed and the site made money. So, hotels responded by making it hard to cancel, and now we all get to live in a diminished society as a result.
Some excellent Numlock Sunday editions lately! Last week was a really great conversation with Derek V. Song, who writes the WEBTOON adaptation of Dimension 20’s Fantasy High arc:
Numlock Sunday: Derek V. Song talks Fantasy High
Originally a web series from Dropout, Derek is adapting the John Hughes-meets-Dungeons & Dragons tabletop RPG series into the scrolling comic style on Webtoon. I find this super fascinating; both “a TTRPG webvideo series” and “a scrolling Webtoon comic” didn’t exist in the US as recently as ten years ago, and the intersection is a deeply interesting and rather popular one. I also, cards on the table, just really dig this comic.
We spoke about how one adapts a beloved Dropout series in the first place, why this kind of project was a bit of a grail for Song, and the nitty gritty of adaptation.
And just the week prior, a fascinating author interview about the history of ghost hunting:
Numlock Sunday: Alice Vernon on the history of ghost hunting
I really enjoyed her book, Ghosted: A History of Ghost Hunting, and Why We Keep Looking; I love the deep dive into the history of ghost hunting, the opportunity to learn about the old knock-style of communication, and I found fascinating the conceit that a mass grief event might produce serious and prodigious ghost-seeking events.
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Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Dark Roofs · Geothermal · Stitch · Year of the Ring · Person Do Thing · Fun Factor · Low Culture · Romeo vs. Juliet · Traffic Cam Photobooth · Money in Politics
Pretty sure my son is responsible for a not-insignificant portion of that Chobani success
Trying to time reservations for the destination city where my family is from is maddening. Rooms at the nicer casinos start at nearly $200/night, then drop to just over half that before returning to nearly $200/night the week before….
I often end up staying at a chain hotel that’s nearest my most-common destination….and those are pretty flat. Just book there. And they’ve got waffles for breakfast.