Cultrface

A blog dedicated to culture
and how it enriches our lives

New Clayface movie trailer just dropped

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Clayface | Official Trailer

I saw the new Clayface movie trailer this morning and it looks interesting. Sadly, I don’t think I’ll be able to watch it as body horror really messes with me and it looks like they’re going all in judging by the trailer. That’s a me thing and I think it’s an obvious direction to go in given the material. I’m sure people are going to draw parallels with The Substance and make it a gender thing but I think that would do both films a disservice.

For those who don’t know Clayface’s story, Matt Hagen (played by Tom Rhys Harries) is a burgeoning young actor who sleeps with a gangster’s girlfriend and has his face mutilated. To try and get himself back to “normal”, he trials an experiment procedure, conducted by Dr. Caitlin Corr (played by Naomi Ackie) but it turns him into living clay, activated when he gets angry (he doesn’t turn green or red though).

It’s rated R and for good reason. I’ll wait to see what the reviews say once it comes out but check out the trailer and judge for yourself.

LOMO: List of missing out

  • AOMO – Art of missing out
  • BOMO – Beauty of missing out
  • COMO – Chagrin of missing out
  • DOMO – Delight of missing out
  • EOMO – Ecstasy of missing out
  • FOMO – Fear of missing out
  • GOMO – Guilt of missing out
  • HOMO – Happiness of missing out
  • IOMO – Indignation of missing out
  • JOMO – Joy of missing out
  • KOMO – Knack of missing out
  • LOMO – Love of missing out
  • MOMO – Meal of missing out (South Asian dumpling)
  • NOMO – Need of missing out
  • OOMO – Obligation of missing out
  • POMO – Pride of missing out
  • QOMO – Quality of missing out
  • ROMO – Ridiculousness of missing out
  • SOMO – Sacrifice of missing out
  • TOMO – Tribulation of missing out
  • UOMO – Unity of missing out
  • VOMO – Vilification of missing out
  • WOMO – Wonderment of missing out
  • XOMO – Xenogenesis of missing out
  • YOMO – You only miss once
  • ZOMO – Zeal of missing out
  • Kari Lake: former TV news anchor and United States Ambassador to Jamaica
  • Lake Kari: a freshwater lake in Armenia
This Cool Link was published 2 weeks ago. (#)

Amanda Mull on “friendly fraud” and increased credit card chargebacks

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I read an interesting article by Amanda Mull about “friendly fraud” and increased credit card chargebacks:

According to Juniper Research, American consumers filed 158 million transaction disputes in 2025, an increase of 29% from 2021, significantly outpacing general growth in card transactions. Worldwide, thanks to a pandemic-induced wave of greater card usage in countries that had long stuck to cash for everyday spending, the spike has been even sharper, with 46% more disputes in the same period. The volume of disputes has become so cumbersome that more retailers are farming out the whole process of investigating and defending against fraud claims to third-party vendors that specialize in helping them hold on to more of consumers’ money.

Naturally, TikTok is involved as younger people have taken to the platform to give tutorials on how to commit friendly fraud in the way of chargebacks for smaller purchases that they claim are small enough not to enact disputes against the disputes by vendors. But chargebacks come at a literal cost and repeat offenders could see themselves banned as well.

Transactions aren’t what they used to be but this isn’t the way to go in a credit-fuelled world.

There’s a new pygmy hippo at Zoo Berlin and her name is Brötchen. She was named after the German word for a bread roll by German TV personality Enie van de Meiklokjes, who is Brötchen’s “honorary sponsor” apparently. I wish I could get a job like that :( (via)

This Cool Link was published 3 weeks ago. (#)

Sara Herman on chess in popular media

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Playlist: Chess in Media

I stumbled upon Sara Herman, a US Chess Federation (USCF) expert and chess YouTuber, who started making videos about chess in popular media. She’s covered shows including House, Frasier, Malcolm in the Middle, and Monk and it’s been interesting hearing how accurate or inaccurate the portrayals have been.

Mara Cavallaro on The Digital Occupation of Palestine

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For Syntax, Mara Cavallaro wrote an insightful essay on the digital occupation of Palestine and what digital resistance really means. This section refers to censoring of terms to avoid posts and comments from getting erased:

Across social media, even original videos, stories, reels, posts, and captions about Gaza are distorted. In fact, this is the norm. Pro-Palestine becomes “pro-[watermelon emoji],” Israel becomes “Isr@el,” Gaza is referred to as “Watermelon City,” Palestine is censored with asterisks between its letters, genocide is “g-cide,” and so on. Creators begin videos and tweets with celebrity gossip only to launch into critiques of US complicity in genocide. Some pro-Palestine Instagram accounts, Wired reported late last year, have taken to posting with the hashtag #IStandWithIsrael. Others use selfies to break up their Palestine content, posting smiling, dolled-up photos with captions requesting eSIM donations or petition signatures. On my own feeds and For You pages, I have seen all of the above and more—from friends, writers, influencers, scholars, strangers, teenagers, mothers. Dystopia pervades each of our platforms, and its villains—the “algo,” the “al gore,” the “algo rhythm”—are hinted at extensively in code. We read something that means something else; we respond. The result is a new, secret language: one understood only within the context of palpable, systematic social media censorship of Palestine and the amateur efforts to evade it.

I posted a few days ago about how we need to be more compassionate with people who feel that they have to censor words to avoid this kind of erasure (unalive instead of suicide, redacting letters in “murder” or “death”, etc.) This is a byproduct of tech totalitarianism and while its liberal proliferation makes me cringe no end, people are using it to avoid their words being obscured. I see it here and I welcome the scrutiny at this level because Palestine still isn’t free and Israel still keeps bombing countries they feel like. Maybe being overt at the risk of erasure is necessary.

JSTOR Daily on nutmeg's “violent” history

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I associate nutmeg with my Jamaican grandparents putting it in food and drinks. But JSTOR Daily published a piece detailing its colonial history:

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, Dutch cultivation of nutmeg and the related spice mace involved “one of very few historical situations where Asian slaves worked on European-owned farms or plantations,” according to anthropologist Phillip Winn.

The Banda Islands, once the world’s only source of nutmeg, were home to between 13,000 and 15,000 people until their conquest by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1621.

“Enslaved Bandanese were deliberately distributed about the islands to make use of their expertise in cultivation and spice production.”

The roughly 1,000 Bandanese who survived were enslaved alongside other laborers under the perkenier system, where hundreds of workers toiled on each plantation (in Dutch, perk).

Secret Galaxy on the rise and fall of Pogs

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The Incredible Rise & Fall of POG: A White Hot Brief Fad

Dan Larson gives the lowdown on Pogs and their humble beginnings which then got really capitalist and then crashed and burnt after market saturation, followed by a weird NFT promotion that aged as well as left out… POG (Passion Orange Guava).

I loved Pogs as a kid and played them with friends and then later collected Tazos. During the pandemic, I bought a couple of slammers for nostalgic reasons and I keep them in my bedside drawer because you never know when you might be challenged to a match.

Nicolas Cage gets interviewed and drawn at the same time

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I had a great talk with Nicolas Cage about Spider-Noir — all episodes are now streaming on Prime

After watching maybe two Spider-Noir trailers, YouTube decided to show me lots of Nicolas Cage promo videos in my feed and one of them was this cool interview with artist Devin Rodriguez. He manages to ask questions and draw a phenomenal pencil portrait (try saying that three times fast) which Nicolas Cage loved.

Good to see Cage doing okay too. I hope Spider-Noir is a success as it looks pretty cool.

A Welsh waste of a word

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After watching a couple of Welsh police dramas this weekend, I noticed the word heddlu on the back of police officers’ vests. Unsurprisingly, heddlu means police in Welsh but it’s the combination of two words:

From hedd (“peace”) +‎ llu (“host, force”)

Wiktionary

That feels like the opposite of what the police do.

Bumpy is a baby hippo that was rescued by the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya after they found him desperately nudging its dead mother by a lake. Stay strong, Bumpy! (via BBC News)

This Cool Link was published 2 months ago. (#)

Man, what happened to Frinkiac?

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I was scrolling through Bluesky one day when I saw a post about Frinkiac “modernising with AI”. Here’s the official part that was screenshotted:

Ten Years of Frinkiac: A Few Months of Modernization with AI

It’s been just over ten years (February 2, 2016) since we launched Frinkiac to the public. In those first few months after release we added GIF support, some new sites (hello Morbotron), and then we mostly stopped working on it. Everything worked well enough for us and the code sat unchanged on the same architecture we’d built in 2015.

In February 2026 it occurred to us that maybe we should point those AI coding tools we’ve been using at the Frinkiac codebase. The result of that work is live now and you can go see it on both Frinkiac and Morbotron, but we’ve also documented a subset of the experience in this post.

Now it looks noisier. I get that change is inevitable but also that’s the most banal and contextless phrase—now more than ever. This kind of change is very much evitable. The site was working fine enough from a user perspective so I don’t know why they felt the need to ruin 10 years of Frinkiac with AI coding tool outputs other than the fact that everyone else is doing it. This definitely feels like an experimental thing that they just went along with and there may be performance gains in the backend according to the announcement post but the UX shouldn’t suffer for that. The last paragraph about “Working with AI” doesn’t fill me with much hope. Fingers crossed it doesn’t end up like a Frinkian catastrophe.

I don’t liken this to “slop” and maybe someone shouldn’t get fired for this blunder but now I feel weird using the site. Change it back to the blissful boob it was!

From Salary.com on LinkedIn (of all places):

25 years ago we asked the real question: how many Big Macs is your salary worth? According to our Burg-o-meter, Ben Affleck’s answer was 4. 🍔

via LinkedIn

And happy National Burger Day!

TIL: Satsuma, the province in Japan that gives its name to a species of citrus fruits, produces sweet potatoes to the point that they’re known in Japan as Satsuma-Imo or Satsuma potato (薩摩芋). In fact, satsumas weren’t even native to the area until they were imported there in the Meiji era (1868–1912).

(via Wikipedia)

This Cool Link was published 3 months ago. (#)

1 second from every classic Simpsons episode

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1 Second From Every Classic Simpsons Episode

Yesterday, I wrote about a compilation video featuring 1 second from every episode of Malcolm in the Middle. Today, I have a video featuring 1 second from every classic Simpsons episode (by the same creator). It’s not as unhinged as the MITM one but still very silly and ridiculous as you would expect from classic Simpsons. Needless to say this wouldn’t work nearly as well with modern-day Simpsons episodes.