By Walt HickeyHave a great weekend!
HasbroHasbro reported earnings yesterday, revealing once again that the vaunted toymaker is indeed 3 wizards standing on one another’s shoulders inside a trenchcoat. While many know the company for its board games and more traditional toys, the Wizards of the Coast division — which produces Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons — is the real dynamo at the heart of the business. Alongside the digital products division, it was responsible for every cent of profit made by the company. The $887.1 million in revenue and $170.7 million in profit for the company as a whole can be, by and large, traced to the $462 million revenue and $230 million profit of the Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming segment, which operates on a 49.8 percent profit margin. The rest of the company actually posted a loss. Tabletop games alone were responsible for $343 million of that revenue. Nia Warfield, Sherwood News and Hasbro
RembrandtsThe Mauritshuis gallery in the Netherlands owns 7 works by the Dutch Old Master Rembrandt van Rijn, and another 7 works that were bought as Rembrandts but actually appear not to be his but rather potentially the works of his students. Of those 7 dubious Rembrandts, 3 in particular have been written off entirely, including Portrait of Rembrandt with a Gorget, a painting of his father called Tronie of an Old Man and a work that Rembrandt signs called Study of an Old Man, though it wasn’t uncommon for an artist to sign the work of a student back then apparently. In a fun nod to their dubious authenticity, the paintings are in an exhibition titled Rembrandt?, which runs through July. Gareth Harris, The Art Newspaper PROFor most of the 20th century, 3 organizations collected royalties for public performances of songs, doing the dirty work of billing bars, restaurants, public places and anywhere that plays incidental music on behalf of the musicians behind those songs. This meant that most of the time, those facilities were billed by 3 firms — ASCAP, SESAC and BMI — but starting in around 2013, the industry saw new competition, with GMR emerging and signing big songwriters. Two more PROs named AllTrack and PRO Music Rights have emerged since. Venues hate this since 3 bills have become 5 or 6, and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to have more PROs than there are major labels.
TreesMany companies that want to offset their corporate carbon emissions do so by funding large tree-planting operations around the world, with positive and negative effects. The positive is clear; for instance, planting vast tracts of eucalyptus trees, which are fast-growing and are about 47 percent carbon by weight, thus ruthlessly efficient at capturing the stuff. The negative of that scenario comes down to drastic losses in biodiversity, replacing dense forests with uniform fields of trees but no other life. It’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect when a quick and direct solution is applied to a multi-generational and complex problem. Gregory Barber, MIT Technology Review
Bones Bones BonesA new paper published in the journal Science describes a goth caterpillar, the larval form of a moth from the genus Hyposcoma, which are known as Hawaiian Fancy Case caterpillars. The neat thing about them is that they weave their own casings and add to them as they grow; there are over 600 species within the genus. The new species described in the paper is the bone collector caterpillar, which has been found to systematically incorporate the body parts of other insects and shed spider skins into their casing, meaning that while they’re more likely to survive, they do walk away looking like Hieronymus Moth-sch painting. The caterpillar species is at least 5 million years old, maybe even older than Oahu itself, and resides in a 15 square kilometer region of the mountains there. Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica YellowstoneThe most-watched scripted show on cable is Yellowstone, and the show has brought in an estimated $2.9 billion for Paramount. Of particular interest is that $450 million of revenue came from DVD sales and paid downloads, which are sales formats that have not exactly been thriving in the current streaming hegemony, but nevertheless are still delivering sales for the show. The 4 spinoff series are all hits, and there are another 3 in development. LyrebirdThe superb lyrebird of Australia has an eye-catching tail and is known for the elaborate songs and dances of its males. They’re also major engineers of their ecosystem, and they use their claws to dig up the rainforest ground to eat worms and invertebrates. Annually, they displace 5 dump trucks worth of dirt per hectare, or about 14 truckloads per bird per year. In doing so, they stir up the soil, stop dead leaves from getting out of hand and make the forest more resilient to fire. According to a new study, they actually making the soil more viable for their prey to live in down the line, ensuring the birds will catch a meal next year too. This past week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Anthony Del Col, who this week is out with the latest book in his Kill Shakespeare comic franchise, Romeo vs. Juliet: A Kill Shakespeare Adventure. Anthony and I go way back — we won a Pulitzer together, and I’ve always enjoyed his work — and when I learned he was coming out with a new book that I was thrilled to read it. This is a pretty fascinating time to try to release an independent comic book, and Anthony has always been candid about the state of the industry and the challenges it’s facing, so this was a fun conversation you should check out.
Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today. Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement. Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Traffic Cam Photobooth · Money in Politics · Sax Solo · Terra Nova · Didion · Me, But Better · Flow · Four Nations · Tabletop · Fortnite · Sleep · Climate Insurance · Work/Life Balance · Self-Driving · Geoglyphs · Nvidia · McDonald’s · No Such Thing · Nationalized Sports ·Pop and Politics · Horror Boom · MCU · Fanfiction · User Magazine · Reentry · Panda Dunks · Net Zero · Spiraled · On The Edge · Luggage · The Editors · Can’t Get Much Higher · SolitaireSunday Edition Archives: 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018
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