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Netflix slumps as Elon Musk ramps up calls for boycotts on the streaming giant

Netflix shares slumped Thursday, down for the third straight day, as Elon Musk continued to push for users to cancel their subscriptions to the streaming giant.

The backlash centers mostly on Netflixs animated series Dead End: Paranormal Park, though Musk has also referenced The Baby-Sitters Club, shows that touch on transgender themes. On Tuesday, he replied “Same” to a user who said they’d canceled Netflix, confirming he had too. Early Wednesday he urged, “Cancel Netflix for the health of your kids.”

Musk continued to back a boycott on Thursday, resharing to his 227 million X followers several posts of users canceling their accounts and highlighting cultural criticisms around the show.

Netflix stock has performed well this year, rising about 30%.

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OpenAI set to air a minute-long Super Bowl ad for a second consecutive year, per WSJ

OpenAI is expected to broadcast a lengthy commercial at Super Bowl LX, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Having aired its first-ever paid ad at last year’s Big Game, the ChatGPT maker is set to take another 60-second ad slot during NBC’s broadcast on February 8, according to people familiar with the matter.

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Tamagotchis are making a comeback, 3 decades after first becoming a global toy craze

If you were a ’90s kid, you might remember the craze around little egg-shaped toys with an 8-bit digital screen, displaying an ambiguous pet-thing that demanded food and attention.

Now, on the brand’s 30th anniversary, the Tamagotchi the Japanese pocket-sized virtual pet that launched a thousand cute and needy tech companions, from Nintendogs to fluffy AI robots — is making a minor comeback.

Tamagotchi Google Search Trends
Sherwood News

Looking at Google Trends data, searches for “tamagotchi” spiked in December in the US, up around 80% from just six months prior, with the most search volume in almost two decades.

While the toys are popular Christmas gifts, with interest volumes often seen ticking up in December each year, the sudden interest might also have something to do with the birthday celebrations that creator and manufacturer Bandai Namco are putting on, including a Tokyo exhibition that opened on Wednesday.

Game, set, hatch

More broadly, modern consumers appear to have a growing obsession with collectibles (see: Labubu mania), as well as a taste for nostalgia (see: the iPod revival, among many other trends).

But, having finally hit 100 million sales in September last year, the brand itself is probably just glad to exist, giving a whole new generation the chance to experience the profound grief of an unexpected Tamagotchi death.

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