Cultrface

A blog dedicated to culture
and how it enriches our lives

My friend Keidra Chaney has a new podcast called Rough Draft with her friend Liz. It’s a semi-processed podcast about how they process culture and I can’t wait to listen.

This Cool Link was published 1 hour ago. (#)

Àrokò Cooperative: building culture through media and design

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the Àrokò Cooperative logo with a rounded 5-star symbol at the top

Àrokò Cooperative is a worker-owned collective of creatives that aim to break from harmful systems and foster collective liberation through various media and design.

One key component is ÀROKÒ.WORLD, a hub for critical analysis and reflection on Blackness and design and how they all intersect. Those are wide realms so it’s important that those intersections are examined from a multi-disciplinary perspective and everything from film to video games to fashion, animation, poetry, politics is discussed on the site.

But beyond those connections, Àrokò Cooperative question why things are the way they are and express those ideas through various pieces written by its creatives and that’s what keeps me coming back.

I’ve enjoyed looking through their site and their Are.na boards for inspiration and education and if any of that blurb interests you, it might help you on your creative journey too.

An AI Overview for the term "bootylicious" athat says "Bootylicious is an informal adjective meaning having attractive buttocks"
I don’t disagree with this AI Overview but I thought it sounded funny in these terms.

Heaven's Gate (the cult, not the movie)

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Marshall Herff Applewhite (aka “Do”), the co-founder of Heaven’s Gate alongside Bonnie Nettles (aka “Ti”)

Heaven’s Gate was an American religious cult founded in 1974 by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. The group had hundreds of followers and combined Christianity with New Age beliefs and ufology to spread the believe that members could achieve immortality and become extraterrestrials by rejecting their humanity and ascending to heaven or “The Next Level”.

Heaven’s Gate is most known for its 39 active members committing a coordinated mass suicide to coincide with Comet Hale–Bopp’s closest approach. This took place in stages in March 1997, with police finding 39 bodies in a house in San Diego County.

It’s worth noting that two former members—Marc and Sarah King—are believed to be alive and continue maintaining the Heaven’s Gate website and another, Rio DiAngelo, did an ABC interview in 2022 about being a designated survivor. In fact, I’m writing this because I found this Reddit conversation via Bluesky:

Heavens Gate was a pseudo Christian ufo cult that committed mass suicide in 1996 during the passing of the Hale-Bopp comet in order to ascend with the comet. It was really bonkers.

I found out about 15 years later that their old html website was still up and running and had a contact button. So I messaged to see if anyone was still operating the site or if it was just a relic that had been paid in advance or something. Turns out there’s still someone from the cult running it that didn’t die with the others. We email back and forth every now and then. I don’t know if it’s only one person or several. All I know is that I check in on them about once or twice a year since to see if they’re still hanging in there and how they’re doing. Gotta be lonely seeing your cult family fly off into the next realm leaving you here to twiddle your thumbs till its next passing in a bit over 4000 years.

I personally preferred Poochie’s method of ascension but I guess all roads lead to Rome!

5th November and other revolutionary acts

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Today (5th November) is known as Guy Fawkes Day or Bonfire Night in the UK. It commemorates the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605 where a group of men, including Guy Fawkes, planned to blow up the Houses of Parliament. But there have been other acts of revolution on this date and I thought I’d cover a couple of those too.

The Negros Revolution of 1898

The Philippines has its own Fifth of November or “Negros Day” which commemorates the Negros Revolution of 1898 where Negrese nationalists took control of Negros Island from the Spanish and created their own republican government.

Sadly, the new “Negros Republic” only lasted about three months until US forces came in and ended it (tale as old as time) and in 1901, the population was annexed to the Philippine Islands.

Read more: Cinco de Noviembre and the Negros Republic

1811 Independence Movement of El Salvador

On this day in 1811, a Salvadoran priest named José Matías Delgado called for an insurrection by ringing a church bell:

[…] According to tradition, the rebels waited for a signal from the bell tower of the Church of La Merced, but this did not occur at the scheduled time. The rebels later assembled on the town square outside the church where Manuel José Arce proclaimed in front of the public: “There is no King, nor Intendant, nor Captain General. We only must obey our alcaldes,” meaning that since Ferdinand VII had been deposed, all other officials appointed by him no longer legitimately held power. A tumult in the square grew so that the intendant, Gutiérrez y Ulloa, asked the gathered appoint someone to deliver their demands formally. Manuel José Arce was chosen as the leader by the crowd. Despite this, the insurrectionists took arms and proclaimed the total independence of San Salvador from the Spanish crown but were later subdued.

Not every city council was on board for the revolution and the rebels had to collaborate with a group from Guatemala City which resulted in armed troops coming in and reclaiming San Salvador before being defeated and ending the movement.

Read more: José Matías Delgado y el movimiento insurgente de 1811

Forbes on Uniqlo's intuitive self-checkout

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For Forbes, Jon Picoult examined Uniqlo’s self-checkout system and why it works better than others:

Behind this magical self-checkout experience lies a decidedly low-tech solution – radio frequency identification chips (RFID) that are embedded in every Uniqlo price tag. The self-checkout machine is equipped with an RFID reader that can – with remarkable accuracy – detect and record the price of all the goods tossed into the checkout bin. Compared to item-by-item scanning, this is an effortless experience

Seventy percent of Uniqlo’s customers (and up to 90% in some markets) choose to use the store’s self-checkout terminals. And rather than grouse about them, these customers love them. Indeed, these self-checkout machines have become a signature element of the Uniqlo store experience – finally fulfilling the decades-old promise of self-checkout by offering not just a better customer experience, but delivering it at a lower cost.

Jon also discusses the difference between shifting effort and reducing effort, which I resonated with me a lot. The whole point of self-checkout should be making the checkout experience so smooth that it doesn’t feel like you’re replacing the role of a service worker—you just want to scan your items, pay, and leave. But often the experience is full of friction and you have to call for assistance anyway.

Labor is not being reduced, it is merely being repositioned (from the employee to the customer). Customer experience “improvements” that just shift a burden from staff to patrons aren’t improvements at all.

If only they were all as good as this one.

Banned kids show episodes

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Banned Kids Show Episodes Iceberg Explained

I watched this with my son and had no idea about some of them. It’s a list of “banned” kids show episodes told via the iceberg format and it starts with The Teletubbies and that lion on wheels with the googly eyes. Apparently that scared loads of kids (I just thought it was silly at the time) and got taken down.

But as he goes down the iceberg, things get darker and more adult and honestly I had no idea about most of them besides the Porygon seizure episode of the Pokémon anime. It was also funny seeing the reasons why some of the episodes got banned, knowing other cartoons had similar themes.

More Perfect Union on Sysco, the wholesale restaurant food distributor ruining eating out

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I Tracked Down The Company Ruining Restaurants

For More Perfect Union, Alex Opperman posed the question: “are restaurants starting to taste the same?” and immediately answered with “yes” and the reason why—Sysco, a multi-billion dollar American restaurant food distributor that seemingly sells mass-produced food to a large number of restaurants.

However, with mass-production comes unfettered acquisition of smaller distributors, continuous labour disputes and strike action, and poor work conditions and Alex dug into this by talking to restaurateurs, journalists, and business experts to find out how it all became a deep-fried mess.