Cultrface

A blog dedicated to culture
and how it enriches our lives

The trailer for upcoming Carrie series

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Carrie – Official Trailer | Prime Video

We have a(nother) trailer for the upcoming Prime series, Carrie. If you’re not familiar with the original novel or the movie, it’s about a girl—Carrie White—who has latent psychic powers and lives with an religiously oppressive mother. She tries to navigate high school and puberty but struggles amongst a lot of shitty people at home and school. This comes to a head when she is made Prom Queen but a group of kids play a horrible prank on her which has deadly consequences.

The new series modernises the story to fit into our high tech and social media-driven world and judging by the trailer, it looks like it does a good job. I watched the 1976 movie as a teen and it was very affecting to the point that it messed my head up for about 2 weeks. Fast forward two decades and the world is doing that every day so I don’t know if I have the capacity to watch a very dark and very poignant series like this. BUT it does look good so I will try and root for Carrie. And have an after-show to balance out the dark vibes.

Trailer related: New Clayface movie trailer just dropped

1 second from every Frasier episode

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One Second From Every Episode Of Frasier

I’ve been watching through every season of Frasier from the beginning over the last few weeks and it’s been great to see all the character development and watch the Niles & Daphne love story unfold (again). But what if you took one second from every episode and made one of those videos about it? Well it’s above and it’s ridiculously funny. That’s a sign of a good show—providing laughs, one second at a time.

Related: 1 second from every classic Simpsons episode and 1 second of every Malcolm in the Middle episode but it’s wilder than remember

The Lewes pound

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The Lewes pound was a local currency in the town of Lewes in East Sussex. It was introduced in 2008, but was discontinued in 2025 due to the growth of cashless payments and a general lack of interest. The Lewes Pound was fixed at £1 (GBP) and was usable in around 100 shops as of 2023. It was the last surviving local currency in the UK at the time of discontinuation.

Bank notes (above) featured a picture of the South Downs and Thomas Paine, one of the US’s “Founding Fathers”, on the front and a picture of Lewes Castle on the back.

More on the Lewes pound:

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 3 months 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 months 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.