By Walt Hickey

Team 0%

The original Super Mario Maker game on the Wii U allowed players to create their own levels of a Mario-style platformer game. On March 31, 2021, the game was discontinued on Wii U and no additional levels could be uploaded to the Wii U servers. On April 8, 2024, those servers will shut down forever, taking down every one of the levels. However, a loose coalition of speedrunners found that, as of March 2021, there were still 47,864 levels uploaded to the Wii U servers that had not yet been beaten by a player, and that did not sit right with the completionists of our world, legion that they are. Since then, players have chipped away at the mountain of incompletion, and as of a week ago they were down to just 178 remaining levels, or a 99.62 percent completion rate. With less than a month to go, we are now in the endgame: As of midnight Eastern Time last night, there remained a mere 15 levels left to clear, and it’s entirely possible that these rogue runners might finally finish the challenge sometime very soon.

Team 0% and Dustin Bailey, GamesRadar

Wood

Paris is hosting the Olympic Games this summer, and the city has taken the unique step of not squandering a fortune on a bunch of buildings that will never be used again and will languish into rust for decades following the Games. Indeed, 95 percent of the venues either already exist or are being built specifically so they can be dismantled for reuse after the event. The rest they’re building with wood, which is more sustainable than concrete or steel. The wood construction market in France is up 14 percent since 2020, and the number of new nonresidential buildings that have been built with wood is up to 18.3 percent. One issue is that France has 17 million hectares of wood, three-quarters of which is on private land and broken up into small parcels, and France is harvesting just 60 percent of the wood it’s able to harvest sustainably.

Feargus O’Sullivan and Jenny Che, Bloomberg

Panamax

The Panama Canal governs the very size of the ships that can traverse it, with the Panamax ship referring to the maximum size capable of passing through the original 1914 locks, now giving way to the Neopanamax ship following the new $5.25 billion locks made in 2016. That, plus new fees, has sent the revenues of the canal up from $569.7 million in 2006 to $4.97 billion in 2023. Now that we’re in a drought, the Neopanamax locks are 2.4 times larger, consuming 7 percent less water with each traversal thanks to basins along the side of the canal. At issue is that the Neopanamax locks add considerably more salt to freshwater Lake Gatún, which, given that the lake also supplies pretty much the entire water supply of Panama, is not great and does still restrain the number of traversals.

Hillary Predko, Scope of Work

Phones

A new survey of teenagers found that 38 percent said they spend too much of their time on their smartphone, compared to 51 percent who said they used it the right amount and 5 percent who said too little. All told, 74 percent of teens reported feeling “happy” when they do not have their smartphone with them, 72 percent said they feel peaceful, while 44 percent said anxious, 40 percent said upset and 39 percent said lonely. While phones do have some uses — teens said smartphones made it easier to pursue hobbies and to be creative — more said that smartphones make it harder to learn good social skills than easier.

Monica Anderson, Michelle Faverio and Eugenie Park, Pew Research Center

Canned Water

Liquid Death, the canned water company, has raised $67 million which values the company at $1.4 billion in the pursuit of growing their distribution nationally. In 2023, the company logged $263 million in retail sales, making it the fastest-growing water or tea manufacturer of the year. The $1.4 billion valuation is double the $700 million valuation following their previous funding round in 2022. This is thrilling to me, because it’s a serious contender in the “what’s the stupidest-named product that is worth a billion dollars?” fight and I think we’re in a real position to take down Google.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Drones

Drone delivery has hit over 1 million deliveries around the world as of last year, of which an estimated 157,511 were completed in North America according to McKinsey. That’s up from 87,497 drone deliveries in 2022 and 23,780 in 2020. A federal green light has given several retailers the go-ahead to experiment with drone delivery in certain markets. This includes Wing, owned by Alphabet, as well as Zipline, Walmart and Amazon. Walmart will begin offering drone delivery to 75 percent of the population in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area this year.

Liz Young, The Wall Street Journal

Anime

Japan’s anime and related products market has increased to 2.9 trillion yen, double what it was a decade ago, and half of that comes from overseas. The Japanese Business Federation is targeting 20 trillion yen’s worth of exports in the pop culture space by 2033, which would be four times the level seen in 2021 and on par with the 2022 value of all Japanese automobile exports. At slight issue is that lots of the revenues from anime exports don’t actually make it back to creators in Japan, as while it’s become one of the most popular mediums worldwide and demand has skyrocketed the world over, creators get a fraction of the profits and animators have been worked to the point of exhaustion, leading neighboring countries to compete in the medium.

Hitomi Ishinabe, Nikkei Asia

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