Numlock News: October 13, 2025 • Tron, Buldak, Humpy

Oct 13, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Do You Believe In Miracles?

On the opening day of the 2024 Major League Baseball season, the Seattle Mariners had an inter-inning spectacle inside the stadium featuring four salmon mascots running around the ballpark. The Salmon Run competition, featuring competitors King, Silver, Sockeye and Humpy, came back to entertain fans. Over the 162 runnings of the Salmon Run, only Humpy had yet to secure a single victory. A perennial loser. The sole salmon without a win. The Washington Generals of the Salmon Run. On Friday night, in Game 5 of the ALDS at home, in front of a crowd of 47,025 fans, the impossible happened: when they ran the race in the 15th inning, Humpy won. The fans went insane. It completely changed the vibe of the ballpark. The crowd went nuts. Immediately after, Seattle won the game, and advanced to the American League Championship Series for the first time in 24 years.

Tyler Lauletta, Sports Illustrated

Anniversary

Two years ago, museums around the world emptied their archives for the 150th anniversary of Picasso’s birth, an event pushed in no small part by the cultural ministries of France and Spain. Both have benefited from long-term interest in the Picasso business. The anniversary programming strategy is popular because it works — you get to put up big artists people know, and the best part is you get two years to work with, their birth and death. Practically any year can be arbitrarily special (just ask Disney) thanks to some convenient elapsing of multiples of five or ten years since the parturition or expiration of a suitable subject. However, that tedium grates on some in the art world. This year, the big anniversary is Robert Rauschenberg. He is celebrating his 100th, with nearly as many organizations displaying his work and over 30 of them developing dedicated exhibitions. The silver lining, even to anniversary haters, is that events do tend to shake up the stock. They require museums to borrow a bunch of works from other museums, and can facilitate the kind of curatorial horse trading that makes interesting exhibitions possible. For instance, the Met in New York pulled off a nifty Caspar David Friedrich show this year in part because museums in Germany couldn’t get the stuff off the walls fast enough following the conclusion of their Friedrich 250th birthday celebrations last year.

Julia Halperin, The Art Newspaper

TRON

Hollywood has heard your feedback, America, and knows that movies about video games are hot right now. Clearly, that means you wanted another Tron. You’d come out for that, right? Especially if they put fan favorite Jared Leto in it, right? And undermine the very sacrifices that made the original and sequel? Oh no. Anyway, Disney’s Tron: Ares made $33.5 million this weekend, carrying on the tradition of Tron of not doing great at the box office. The film is about a far-fetched plot where the government makes common cause with technology companies to deploy the technological enforcement apparatus of empire on domestic soil. For comparison, the Nine Inch Nails music video made another $27 million abroad, for an opening weekend of $60 million. I mean, how much could Tron: Ares have possibly cos— I’m sorry, it cost $180 million?

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Buldak

South Korean ramen brand Buldak is riding a wave of social media buzz to a solid piece of market share in the United States. Parent company Samyang Foods has seen its revenue double since 2022 to $1.5 billion this year, thanks in no small part to a viral fire noodle challenge as well as the overall Korean wave in entertainment and culture. U.S. sales hit $185 million in the first half of 2025, with the country responsible for 30 percent of overseas revenue, prompting the firm to open up a fourth ramen factory in June capable of producing 100 million units per year.

Ian Frisch, Bloomberg

Horror

The horror book category is enjoying the early days of a renaissance, not too different from the one that the romance category has been riding for the past several years. Horror books saw sales jump up seven percent year over year in the first nine months of 2025. Not only are some book stores scaling up their offerings and offering more shelf space to the spooky stuff, but others are following the Ripped Bodice playbook and doing horror entirely, including Midslumber Media in Portland, Dreadful Bookshop in Casper and Haunted Burrow Books in Seattle.

Claire Kirch, Publishers Weekly

VOD

New data underscores how crucial movies have become to the strategies of streaming services, despite a larger degree of interest in loading those video on demand services up with hours and hours of original television programming. According to data from Parrot Analytics, the percentage of streaming revenue attributable to movies has increased from 27 percent in 2022 all the way up to 48 percent by 2024. The service most dependent on movies for its appeal is Disney+ at 74 percent of revenue, which makes sense given that pretty much every parent I know treats the service primarily as if it were called Moana&Frozen+.

Alejandro Rojas, The Hollywood Reporter

Carbon Credits

The airline industry is about to face a potentially massive financial headache due to a shortage of eligible carbon credits. As it stands, only one country, Guyana, is selling carbon offsets approved by the United Nations CORISA framework. The credits are now trading at $27 per tonne and are forecast to hit $35 per tonne in part because of scarcity: Guyana only has 16 million tonnes worth of credits to sell, while airlines need 236 million tonnes to cover the years 2024-2026. This is quite an issue because airlines that fail to offset emissions are on the hook for fines of up to $100 per tonne in some countries, which could cost the industry an additional $17.5 billion.

Darin Graham, Skift

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