Walter Hickey

3 days ago | numlock.com | Walter Hickey

By Walt HickeyWelcome back!Despite being generally dismissed by both so-called prestigious comedies and modern documentary-style sitcoms, as well as being a point of derision for fans of television comedy, laugh tracks are doing just fine. Canned laughter on sitcoms remains a very popular way of producing these shows, with more laugh-track multi-cam comedies airing on broadcast television (7 sitcoms) than non-laugh-tracked single-cam comedies (just five).

4 days ago | numlock.com | Walter Hickey

By Walt HickeyThis week, I spoke to my friend Uri Bram. He’s currently the writer of the newsletter Atoms vs. Bits,and he’s the publisher of the newsletter The Browser. Uri’s been working on a really fun project lately expanding out a party puzzle game he designed several years ago into — Person Do Thing — into full-fledged physical game that he’s been getting made, shipped, packaged and sold to launch this Fall.

6 days ago | numlock.com | Walter Hickey

By Walt HickeyHave a great weekend!A funny thing is happening in the Japanese gold market: trade disruptions caused by the United States have prompted a sale on the metal that revealed rampant smuggling in the country. Essentially, the world is buying up lots of gold these days, and Japan is down to sell, doing so at a monthly rate that’s about five times higher than a decade ago.

1 week ago | numlock.com | Walter Hickey

By Walt HickeyResearchers, wanting to see just how high up into the stratosphere fungal spores can climb, hitched a sampling device to five weather balloon flights that took off from Switzerland, and were able to find a bounty of mycology in the upper atmosphere. Based on DNA sequencing analysis, spores from 235 genera were found dozens of kilometers up in the atmosphere.

1 week ago | numlock.com | Walter Hickey

By Walt HickeyOn Friday, the market value for all digital accessories in the video game Counter-Strike 2 passed $4.3 billion, the highest level ever recorded. Last June, a single Counter-Strike 2 gun skin u sold for $1 million, indicating that the digital assets boom has shifted away from ape and ape-adjacent enterprises, firmly remaining in the sphere of gaming.