Numlock News: November 22, 2023 • Deorbit, Mesopelagic, Comics

By Walt Hickey

Have a great holiday and great weekend! Numlock is off on Thursday and Friday and will return next Monday. I’m very thankful for all the support the readers of this newsletter have given me over the past year, particularly around the book launch. Enjoy the holiday.

Some of the videos from the book tour are coming out! You can now watch my debate with Taylor Lorenz, the writer of the excellent book Extremely Online, about pop culture vs. digital culture.

Mesopelagic

There’s an entire type of fish that migrates vertically in the ocean day by day, spending their lives in the twilight area between 200 and 1,000 meters deep and then spending the other part in the depths far below, where no light can hit. These fish are not well understood, and the mesopelagic organisms are thought to be an utterly important element of the ocean’s carbon sequestration system, transporting nutrients downward with them after eating in the twilight zones of the seas. They’re also now understood to be most of the actual fish biomass in the ocean; most estimates had once pegged mesopelagic fish at 1 billion tonnes of total biomass the world over, an estimate more recently updated to 10 billion tonnes or more, which would make them 90 percent of all fish biomass in the ocean.

Moira Donovan, Hakai Magazine

Box Office

As of this weekend, the domestic box office has totaled $873 million in the fourth quarter of 2023, down 30 percent compared to the same point in the quarter in 2019. Given what remains on the calendar, box office analysts have been lowering their expectations for this year, and analyst Eric Wold has dropped his projection for the 2023 global box office to $8.93 billion, down from $9.22 billion. That would bring 2023 to 79 percent of the box office of pre-pandemic levels. Based on what’s been punted to 2024 and 2025 and the reverberations of 2023’s labor actions, the analyst expects that after a 4 percent decline next year, by 2025 box office will be at 87 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

Georg Szalai, The Hollywood Reporter

Look At This Photograph

“Girls in the Windows,” a 1960 photograph made by commercial photographer Ormond Gigli, at this point can make a claim to be one of if not the highest-grossing photograph on the art market of all time. Last Tuesday, a copy sold at Phillips in London for £30,480 ($38,000), which was well over the high estimate. Prior to that, seven copies had been sold this year, and it’s a consistent performer on the auction circuit. About 600 signed and numbered copies have sold over the past 30 years, typically for a range of $15,000 to $30,000 apiece at art galleries around the world. In aggregate, the copies already sold have produced around $12 million in sales, which certainly would make it competitive with other high-grossing photographs like “The Flatiron” (Edward Steichen, sold for $11.8 million) and “Le Violon d’Ingres” (Man Ray, sold for $12.4 million). Plus, the party is far from over; the estate’s got 100 signed copies left.

David Segal, The New York Times

Scams

China has convinced neighboring Myanmar to round up and hand over 31,000 people suspected by Chinese law enforcement to have been behind a surge in telecom fraud in China, the result of a crackdown from both countries on the widespread scam. An estimated 100,000 people per day are engaging in telecom fraud at some 1,000 scam centers throughout Myanmar, dialing for dollars in the Chinese market. Among the suspects handed over include 63 alleged financiers and ringleaders of the crime syndicates behind the call centers.

Reuters

International Space Station

At some point, the International Space Station will be decommissioned. Given its sheer mass and size — it’s larger than a football field — it’ll be too expensive and risky to use rockets to push it out into a graveyard orbit. That means that, at some point, it’s going to come back down, and it’ll be the largest object to ever deorbit in the process. Its orbit carries it over 90 percent of Earth’s population as it currently stands, and ideally it’ll be dumped into the region around Point Nemo in the South Pacific. That said, it’ll be very tricky; the space station is traveling at 250 linear miles per minute, and the longer it spends in the atmosphere the wider the debris field is going to be. Given the stakes and the risk, it’ll be a must-watch astronomical event for pretty much the whole world.

Meghan Bartels, Scientific American

Comics

Among those who follow the space, there are serious concerns about the medium-term viability of the comic book direct market in the United States. Some parts of the business are rather sunny: Graphic novel sales in the comic book shop market were 4.6 times as large in 2022 as they were in 2010, while at the same time the sales of actual floppy single-issue comic books were lagging inflation over that period. Superhero-based graphic novels represented just 14 percent of all graphic novel sales in 2022, tied with creator-owned works, and well behind kids graphic novels (26 percent) and manga (45 percent of the market). Many things have been blamed for the slip in comic sales — down 7 percent through August 2023 this year — including overall superhero fatigue, a slip in quality of what the Big Two are cranking out, lower compensation for creative talent compared to historical levels, and a migration of some of the most in-demand creators away from the Big Two and to other publishers.

Milton Griepp, ICv2

Creators

Hollywood is trying to figure out what, if anything, can be done to adapt successful TikTok content or to make a creative investment into that space. At issue is the inconsistency between how the movie business makes money and how U.S. creators make money: 82 percent of creators in a 2023 survey said they made money from sponsored content, 56 percent cited affiliate revenue from the platforms and 25 percent cited creator fund payments. This makes it hard for the traditional media industry to figure out an angle with which to compete on the new platforms, as their historical ways of making money — ads and subscriptions — are used by only 33 percent and 16 percent of creators, respectively.

Tyler Aquilina, VIP+

You Are What You Watch is going to be part of the big holiday promotional push from the publisher. What that means for you is that if you want to buy it as a gift, it’s 25 percent off right now and shipping is free with the code CYBER23 on the Hachette website. That’s a really great deal and probably one of the best we’re going to see to score the book.

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