Numlock News: November 2, 2026 • Antarctica, Wicker, ACOTAR

Numlock NewsNov 2, 2026

Numlock News: November 2, 2026 • Antarctica, Wicker, ACOTAR

Nov 2

By Walt Hickey

Spooky

Studios didn’t release any major new movies this past weekend because they got spooked by Halloween falling on a Saturday and outcompeting a new release. The surprise winner of the weekend was You Can See Everything, which has hit No. 1 at the box office for the first time in its third week, a relatively rare feat, making $10.6 million, narrowly beating Clayface with $10.4 million. The stop-motion fantasy film Wildwood from Laika made $7.5 million, dropping only a respectable 39 percent. In fourth place was Wicker, which made $4.1 million.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Magnetic Tape

Fujifilm is the world’s largest producer of magnetic tape, and is investing 10 billion yen (US$63 million) to scale up its production capacity of a data storage medium that became popular in the 1950s. Despite the significantly more advanced computer systems these days, magnetic tape remains a crucial storage backup medium for companies that have large data storage needs. Fujifilm’s LTO Ultrium 10 tape uses fine hybrid magnetic particles that combine barium ferrite with strontium ferrite, selling to large cloud computing companies that want to back up their data at low costs and for long-term storage.

Nick Indge, Ars Technica

ACOTAR

A Court of Splintered Harmony, the sixth installment of the smash-hit A Court of Thorns and Roses romantasy series, has sold 1.7 million copies on its Tuesday release date last week. That is a 600 percent increase on day-of-release sales compared to the previous installment. The number included preordered and day-one sales worldwide for the English-language print edition; it doesn’t even include the audiobook sales or translated editions of the book. When all is said and done, A Court of Spintered Harmony is tracking to be the largest book release of the year.

Jennifer Maas, Variety

Dog

A new investigation published in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology has identified the name of a dog that appears in a painting found in the tomb of a noble who died 3,500 years ago. We only know about 100 dog names from ancient Egypt, and so artisans painting three dogs with collars and inscribed names over the heads of the animals was a great opportunity to figure out new names for the pharaoh’s phidos. Two of the dogs’ names had already been translated: Kenii, which means “Strong One,” and Maaty, which means “Trusty.” The third’s inscription was faint, but has been determined to be a name previously unknown to Egyptologists in the world of canine names: Duaty, which is often an epithet of Anubis, and means “He-of-the-Underworld.”

Garry Shaw, The Art Newspaper

Laughing Cow

Bel Group is a French cheese company that produces the Baby Bel and Laughing Cow brands of snacks, and it’s trying to scale up sales in the United States. As it stands, the company doubled its market share in the past five years and has products in 7.5 percent of households. In France, a Laughing Cow is an iconic after-school snack, but the United States has lots of cheese-based snack competition. As a result, household share pales in comparison to the popularity of the snacks in its home markets, where it reaches 30 percent of French households and 90 percent of Moroccan households.

Jillian Deutsch, Bloomberg

Pumpkin Ale

After a spike in national popularity, pumpkin beer remains a regional staple in New England, where the drink has roots in Colonial America and a society that was down to ferment pretty much anything, including cheap gourds. It made a significant comeback in the 1990s when Shipyard Brewing launched Pumpkinhead Ale in ’96, and the brand remains the market leader though there’s a slew of new competition. Sales are different state by state, according to the Barrel One Collective of 15 New England brands, with sales of UFO Pumpkin up 18 percent in Rhode Island, Harpoon Pumpkin Cider up 9.3 percent in Connecticut, and Clown Shoes Pumpkin Sombrero up 28 percent in New Hampshire.

Joshua Bernstein, VinePair

Antarctica

Tourism to Antarctica has been booming and is expected to grow significantly in coming years. In the early 1990s, only around 8,000 tourists a year were visiting Antarctica, but by the 2023-24 season, that rose to 122,000 tourists, according to the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators — an organization whose very existence so shocked a revived Ernest Shackleton that he would presumably die instantly of yet another heart attack. It’s a tough industry to forecast — Antarctica doesn’t exactly have a government that wants to boost tourism — but one forecast puts 450,000 tourists a year down there by the 2033-34 season. Operators are getting ready; Viking currently has two expedition ships suitable for polar regions, with another two on order.

Tasmin Lockwood, Skift

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at [email protected]. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at [email protected]. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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