By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend! If you’re in New York, grab a ticket to the Garbage Day live show at the Bell House in Brooklyn next week — I’m in it!

Anime

Companies that produce anime generated 339 billion yen ($2.26 billion) in revenue last year, the highest-ever amount of revenue for the category and up a jaw-dropping 22.9 percent compared to 2022 as the format explodes globally. This year is generally expected to be a bit of a hold. Japan’s content industry as a whole racks up 4.7 trillion yen in annual exports, and about 30 percent of that is specifically anime.

Mayuko Suzuki, Nikkei Asia

Browns

The Cleveland Browns announced plans to build a $2.4 billion domed stadium in the suburbs, abandoning prime lakefront for the first time in Cleveland sports history. For those unfamiliar with the situation, the “Cleveland Browns” are an ongoing, 80-year research study carried out by the nation’s finest scientists that in 1944, at the height of World War II, was intended to develop a psychic weapon, a “failure bomb,” that could inspire fear in rivals designed to demoralize and dispirit an enemy city. Following the success of the rival Manhattan Project and the cessation of hostilities, the government nevertheless continued to go ahead with the research project in an attempt to introduce a terrifying new weapon. In early designs, it would so overwhelm a Soviet city with the stench of failure that it could have changed the arc of the Cold War. The “Cleveland Browns” have by and large succeeded in causing hilarious failure, dizzying lows, and dashed hope for decades. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and diminished interest in such weaponry, from 1995 to 1998, funding for the “Cleveland Browns” was briefly suspended, as it looked like the so-called End of History would make a weaponized form of incompetence so exemplified by the Browns unnecessary in the coming global order. The project was renewed in 1999 and has since been a landmark in the emerging field of offensive futility. Recent optimizations — a 0-16 season in 2017, and the continued presence of Deshaun Watson — have demonstrated that theoretical degrees of sucking on a municipal level still have a great deal to go. By ceding their flagship stadium for an inert piece of junk in the ‘burbs — original plans called not for a “domed” stadium but rather a “doomed” one — the Cleveland Browns continue to advance the “Frontier of Ineptitude” first idealized by President Harry S.Truman upon the study’s inception. They are currently 1-5.

Jason Clinkscales, Sportico

Rails

Virginia and North Carolina have been making steady advances to improve the quality of transportation by rail within their states, which are just south of Amtrak’s high-speed Acela corridor. To that end, Virginia has bought up about 500 miles of railroad right of way along major interstates, and just last month bought up a rail line to suburban Manassas for commuter trains. In northern Virginia, the state has added tracks and improved platforms, and this week broke ground on a $2.3 billion project that will double the number of train tracks connecting Washington, D.C., and Virginia from two to four, eliminating a choke point along the Eastern Seaboard’s rail corridor. The current Long Bridge handles 80 trains a day, and at peak is operating at 98 percent capacity. By increasing the number of tracks, they’ll be able to get to 13 Amtrak round trips from D.C. to Richmond per day.

Daniel C. Vock, Route Fifty

Seasonality

A new study published in Science found that cyanobacteria have a sense of the seasons. This is pretty nuts, though cyanobacteria do produce energy from sunlight through photosynthesis, so it would make some sense that adjusting to seasons with more or less sunlight could have some survival advantages. However, what makes this pretty wild is that a cyanobacterium lives for only five hours before it divides, so it’s not exactly a lifespan that would even enjoy the overall shift in seasons, let alone a shift from morning to evening. Nevertheless, they turn on a set of seasonal genes as seasons change, adjusting the composition of their cell membranes — and thus, their pair of progeny’s cell membranes — to better survive the prevailing environment.

Elizabeth Landau, Quanta Magazine

Burnout

A new study of 1,545 teens surveyed by researchers found that many of them are working hard to dive into adult habits such as “completely burning yourself out” and “obsessing about your future at an unhealthy level.” Of those surveyed, 56 percent said they felt pressure to have a game plan for their future lives and 53 percent said they felt pressure to be impressive through their achievements. Overall, 27 percent of teens said they were actively struggling with burnout. It makes one wonder what on earth is wrong with our schools; it’s obscene that we’re leaving the other 73 percent of teens completely unprepared for adulthood by not showing them the grim, repetitive, and unfulfilling future that all too quickly will become their reality. Before you know it, American kids are gonna be falling behind the rest of a world that’s driving their kids to burn out well above our own numbers. Can you imagine the blow to our national prestige if god forbid we had higher numbers of well-adjusted teens not obsessed with status or money? What are we, Europe?

Anna North, Vox

Astroturf

Major labels are shelling out lots of money in TikTok creator marketing campaigns in an attempt to get influencers to use new songs in TikToks to get them momentum on the platform. One marketer at a major label pegged it at 75 percent of popular songs on the platform starting from a paid creator marketing campaign. At the low end you’re talking a budget of $5,000 for a campaign that might or might not work in putting a song over the top, but spending can comfortably get to $80,000 to give a song an extra push. Payments range from $25 for a microcreator with under 10,000 followers to $10,000 for a TikTok star to post a song.

Kristin Robinson, Billboard

Astrotwins

The first known brown dwarf star, Gliese 229B, was discovered in 1995 and has posed a mystery ever since. It weighs 70 times the mass of Jupiter, but it probably should be way brighter than it actually is if that is indeed its mass. A team of astronomers has gotten to the bottom of it, and now says that Gliese 229B is, in fact, two stars. One weighs 38 times the mass of Jupiter and the other weighs 34 times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting around each other every 12 days, a close binary that would explain the peculiar dimness. They’re very close — 16 times the distance from Earth to the moon — and orbit a much bigger star every 250 years.

California Institute of Technology

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to the talented Florina Sutanto, who worked on “Who Gets Shipped, And Why?” for The Pudding.

Numlock Sunday: Florina Sutanto on our obsession with fanfiction

Susie Stark · Oct 13

By Walt Hickey

Read full story

Numlock Sunday: Florina Sutanto on our obsession with fanfiction Susie Stark · Oct 13 Read full story

This story was super delightful; I literally texted the folks at The Pudding the minute I finished reading it to congratulate them on it. You really should head over and check it out if you haven’t yet already. It’s a whole team process, but I got a chance to talk to the brilliant Florina Sutanto about this story and why people spend so much time writing so many stories about characters we love. It’s also a fascinating data scraping and analysis journey. Sutanto can be found on Twitter or at her website.

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