Cultrface – a blog dedicated to culture and how it enriches our lives.

A grocery store but it's made out of plastic

Robin Frohardt, The Plastic Bag Store in downtown Los Angeles (credit: Renée Reizman)

If you worry about all the plastic packaging you get from your weekly shop, count yourself lucky you don’t shop at The Plastic Bag Store:

The store is the creation of artist, playwright, and puppet designer Robin Frohardt, who has teamed up with the Center for the Art of Performance (CAP) UCLA to transport the The Plastic Bag Store from New York’s Times Square to Los Angeles. In Frohardt’s immersive installation, the cereal rattles like it’s filled with bottle caps, the water bottles are filled with a dirty, cloudy liquid, and advertisements for faraway dollar stores are printed on the banana peels. Frohardt has collected thousands of plastic objects, like salad containers, floss sticks, and lighters, and transformed them into uncanny replicas of common grocery store foods, like tomatoes, rotisserie chicken, and pre-packaged sushi.

A visual and oddly political history of the Wingdings font

Mariana Vargas explored the origins of the Wingdings font for UX Collective:

Wingdings, the iconic font composed by… well, icons; became widely popular for being included in many Microsoft Word versions in the ’90s is quite intriguing. It has even been the subject of some conspiracy theories.

Why do we need a font exclusively composed of symbols, such as the Celtic cross, the Zodiac signs, and the star of David? Who came up with that idea? Do people really use it?

And those ‘conspiracy theories’? WIRED published a post about them 11 days after 9/11:

In the last 12 days, conspiracy-related websites and mailing lists have centered considerable attention on an eerie string of graphics that come up when users type the capital letters NYC into a font on Word called Wingdings.

The resultant collection of images — which includes symbols for a skull and crossbones, a Star of David and a thumbs-up sign — has led some to conjecture that the program contains a deliberate anti-Semitic message.

But Microsoft — which investigated the same complaints about the font shortly after it was introduced in 1992 — is once again maintaining that a correlation between the letters and images is merely coincidental.

“To Microsoft’s mind, it’s very unfortunate that people are bringing this up again in light of the tragedy,” said Kimberly Kuresman, a Microsoft spokeswoman.

Kuresman said the company investigated the complaints in conjunction with the Anti-Defamation League nine years ago, but found “no evidence of malicious intent.”

What is it with Microsoft fonts and controversy?

Russia and the McDonald's exodus

I found a couple of links related to McDonald’s pulling out of Russia.

The first was from The Guardian and the departure being about “a lot more than burgers”:

McDonald’s’ departure, like its arrival, is about a lot more than burgers. The golden arches of history, that once seemed to be bounding forward, now appear to be turning full circle and threatening to take Russia back in time.

An urban consumer culture built around Visa and Mastercard, Ikea, Nike, Apple, Zara and Netflix has evaporated in a few days.

[…]

When the first McDonald’s opened in Russia, the Soviet Union still existed. “We didn’t know what fast food was,” wrote Mitya Kushelevich, a photographer, in a recollection in the Guardian. “We thought it probably tasted like freedom and we wanted to sample it.”

To many people, it tasted like the end of the cold war, if not the end of history. But while Russians wanted to consume capitalism, they were careful from the start not to be consumed by it.

And some people resorted to drastic measures, such as a Russian person who had stockpiled McDonald’s burgers. Via Metro:

The CEO of McDonald’s said closing the stores is the right thing to do due to the ‘needless human suffering in Ukraine’.

There were huge queues on Tuesday as people flocked to get a final bite of their favourite meals from a McDonald’s in Moscow.

And now, it has emerged one Russian diner has bought in bulk.

A picture shared to Reddit shows a jam-packed fridge with burgers crammed onto every shelf.

The caption read ‘McDonald’s is permanently closing in Russia, here is my friend’s stash’. 

One person commented: ‘Behold… the hoarder pounder.’

Another added: ‘If it’s not for personal consumption, it sure is a good business opportunity to sell stale burgers at a jacked price.’

I don’t see how taking mediocre burgers away from Russians, regardless of their stance on the Ukraine war, will affect anyone on either side but you do you, McDonald’s!

An out of context look at Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (spoilers I guess?)

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 But Context is Completely Gone

I’m gonna add a spoiler alert here as it reveals a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 that hasn’t been in trailers including parts of the end. But if you have seen it, you might enjoy this out of context retrospective. Man, I love this film.

More on Sonic: a quick trailer for Sonic Prime, Knuckles and the blockchain, and, if you still haven’t seen it, enjoy this Sonic the Hedgehog 2 trailer.

An interview with Jamar Ramos

Another day, another interview, this time with Jamar Ramos of Crunchy Links.

What is your favourite city in the world?

Out of all the places I’ve visited, I’ve enjoyed Austin, Texas the best

What’s the most unusual item you take everywhere you go?

Cash. I know we can do EVERYTHING with a credit/debit card, but I like to have some cash on me, just in case

Why do you do what you do?

Money. I’ve been poor most of my life. Digital marketing was the best way for me to make ass-loads of money doing easy work

Where do you go to relax?

My girlfriend’s arms

69, 280, or 420?

420. As Nate Dogg said “hey hey hey, smoke weed everyday”

How do you say goodbye in your culture(s)?

“Peace out,” “Much love,” or “Stay up”

Corporate logos but make them look bootleg with image AI

I’ve found more bad use cases than good for image AI but this is an example. AI Weirdness tested DALL-E 2 with some corporate logos and the results are weird and akin to bootleg logos:

My favourite garbled names:

  • Bing Burger
  • Teico Ball
  • Pit Zizza
  • Waffle Hose
  • Waffle Woffee
  • Wafffee

And I, for one, welcome our new image AI logo overlords.

How to free yourself from media choice paralysis

Lewin Day wrote about The Joy Of Broadcast Media Vs. The Paradox Of Choice for Hackaday on 25th May:

With so many options on the table, many of us find it harder to choose. It’s an idea popularly known as the Paradox of Choice, a term popularized by US psychologist Barry Schwartz in 2004. When our options are limited to a select few, choice is easy. They can quickly be compared and ranked and an ideal option chosen.

Add thousands of choices to the pile, and the job escalates in complexity to the point of becoming overwhelming. With so many different choices to contrast and compare, finding the mythical right choice becomes practically impossible.

Anyone who’s ever jumped on a streaming service to hunt for something to watch  will be familiar with the paralyzing feeling. Rows of colored icons streaming past, barely-recognizable titles fluttering by. Each scroll seeking for a simple standout option, but only revealing yet more to choose from. The pressure builds with the knowledge that making a bad choice is surely inexcusable when virtually everything ever filmed is an option. Whether you’re looking for a movie to watch or you just want to catch an old episode of Cheers out of the hundreds that were madethe sheer volume of choices is overwhelming.

Lewin’s main suggestion for respite is relinquishing control and just watching whatever comes up or using random movie pickers. At least if you don’t like it, you can just turn it off and if you do like it, job done.

Learning about the meaning of part time work and temp jobs can help you decide whether to accept a temporary offer and discover your rights as a temporary employee.

For me, that doesn’t always work so well unless it’s something like The Simpsons where I know I can jump into anything from Season 2/3–10 and enjoy it. I pay for Prime Video and YouTube Premium but don’t watch the former that frequently. I have access to Netflix and Disney+ but rarely use them. That’s four streaming platforms which tens of thousands of shows between them and it’s honestly too much. But the kicker? When I decide I want to watch a movie… it’s not part of their libraries. I still have to pay for them and that cost starts to add up if I start getting a hankering for movies starring a certain actor, director, or from a specific genre. So I’m left with a whole lot of movies and series I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch and that’s before we even get into quality control (Netflix is notoriously bad for this; just look at how they’d rather fund transphobic stand up comedy than pay Black writers and keep their platforms going). No wonder people still pirate.

Queer Design Club: a hub of queer creativity

Rebecca Brooker spoke to It’s Nice That about Queer Design Club, “a community where LGBTQ+ designers can celebrate their contributions to the design industry, share their work, and connect with each other”:

For the longest time, I’ve been searching for queer people of colour who were interested in design, like me. Growing up in the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago, I didn’t know a lot of graphic designers or have many queer friends during my teens. When I moved to New York to study design at St. John’s University, I began wondering where I would find friends or colleagues that understood my perspective. I followed some queer designers on Instagram and Twitter, and knew a handful from school and my internship – but I didn’t feel like I really knew them or could connect with them personally.

Looking past my own bubble and into the creative industry, it felt and looked overwhelming white, cis, and straight. Thumbing through my canonical design history books, I often only saw white men’s names and faces being credited as the giants of graphic design. I wondered if design had a place for me, for others like me, for others not like me, and if I had fooled myself up to this point. I searched online for information, clubs, groups, or places I could meet other LGBTQIA+ designers, but it felt disconnected and like conversations were being had in silos. It wasn’t until I came across the Blacks Who Design website that I was first inspired to create a similar space.

Queer Design Club has a directory, a Slack channel, and a summit (this year’s summit is on 7th July so buy your tickets now!) and it seems like a great place for queer designers to collaborate and join together.

Related to creativity: Creativity is not a luxury

Toy Galaxy on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze

The Edge of Failure: The Story of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze

Another great retrospective by Toy Galaxy, this time about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, the sequel to 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It was a departure from the violence of the first film but cranking up the child/commercial-friendly dial lead to ultimate failure. But hey, we got some cool toys!

The etymology of 'villain' 

Where do villains come from? Or, rather, where does the word for them derive? Merriam-Webster wrote a quick explainer:

Upon being informed that villain is related to a Latin word meaning “inhabitant of a villa,” one might conjure up images of a mustache-twirling villain conniving evilly at his sprawling villa. The history of the word, though, is far more complicated than that.

The story does start with that Latin word. Actually, it’s a Medieval Latin word: villanus. The fact that it’s Medieval Latin matters because although the word villa in classical Latin referred to a large country dwelling, by the time of Late Latin—the 3rd to 6th centuries—the word could also refer more generally to any aggregation of rural dwellings, making it nearly equivalent in meaning to village. Medieval Latin came after Late Latin (Medieval Latin was in use from the 7th through the 15th centuries), making villanus, with its “inhabitant of a villa” meaning, basically a synonym of villager—which doesn’t exactly evoke that evilly conniving villa-abiding villain.

As not to copy and paste the whole thing, I suggest you read the rest to continue the etymological trail. But the root for ‘villain’ has links to some interesting words:

*weik-

Proto-Indo-European root meaning “clan, social unit above the household.”

It forms all or part of: antoecian; bailiwick; Brunswick; diocese; ecology; economy; ecumenical; metic; nasty; parish; parochial; vicinage; vicinity; viking; villa; village; villain; villanelle; -ville; villein; Warwickshire; wick “dairy farm.”

It is the hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence is provided by: Sanskrit visah “house,” vit “dwelling, house, settlement;” Avestan vis “house, village, clan;” Old Persian vitham “house, royal house;” Greek oikos “house;” Latin villa “country house, farm,” vicus “village, group of houses;” Lithuanian viešpats “master of the house;” Old Church Slavonic visi “village;” Gothic weihs “village.”

via Etymonline

Words are fascinating, aren’t they?

The Brits really didn't like German sausages in the 19th century

I stumbled upon this JSTOR essay named ‘”We Don’t Want Any German Sausages Here!” Food, Fear, and the German Nation in Victorian and Edwardian Britain‘ which explored the anti-German sentiment of Victorian and Edwardian Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In the opening weeks of the First World War, German immigrants in Britain faced a series of isolated attacks, mostly focused on German retailers. At the end of August 1914, a more serious disturbance broke out in Keighley, Yorkshire, which resulted in attacks on four German butcher shops. Throughout 1914 and 1915, German butchers in London, Crewe, and elsewhere became targets of anti-German violence. Attacks reached a peak in 1915, as the Germanophobic hysteria that broke out following the sinking of the Lusitania led to riots across Britain. In many cases, violence and property damage focused initially on German butchers because both German food manufacturers and German food offered a visible symbol of Germany and German influences on Britain. In the following year, the Daily Mail explained how certain restaurants had renamed various national dishes so that the “Vienna steak” became the “Belgian steak” and the “German sausage” the “English sausage,” and by 1917, German barrage balloons were being widely referred to as German sausage balloons. War with Germany provided a potent context for Germanophobia, but attacks on German butchers need to be placed within a longer chronology of popular anti German sentiments, representations of the German nation, and growing fears about the dangers contained within German meat products.

Wow. That’s all I have to say.

Sausage related: The Wobble Dog 9003i

'The year was 1981, and President Ronald Reagan had a cheese problem.'

Quite a remarkable piece from Gastro Obscura about the federal government’s 560 million pounds of cheese in the 80s:

The Washington Post reported that the interest and storage costs for all that dairy was costing around $1 million a day. “We’ve looked and looked at ways to deal with this, but the distribution problems are incredible,” a USDA official was quoted as saying. “Probably the cheapest and most practical thing would be to dump it in the ocean.”

Instead, they decided to jettison 30 million pounds of it into welfare programs and school lunches through the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program. “At a time when American families are under increasing financial pressure, their Government cannot sit by and watch millions of pounds of food turn into waste,” Reagan said in a written statement. The New York Times declared that the bill would “give poor Americans a slice of the cheese surplus.”

Needless to say Reagan had more than a cheese problem during his presidency.

More on cheese: Chiyo Shibata and her Japanese cheese, moose cheese, and pule cheese: the world’s most expensive cheese made from donkey milk

OmnesViae is a route planner for the Roman Empire

You know the phrase “all roads lead to Rome”? Well, with OmnesViae, you can see which roads they are. It’s a route planner that takes inspiration and directions from Tabula Peutingeriana (or the Peutinger Map), a proxy for a ‘road map’ of the Roman Empire. Big Think dug a little deeper into the concept:

Whatever its ultimate age, the shape of the Tabula — about a foot high and 22 feet long (33 cm by 6.75 m) — tells us that it cannot be topographically accurate. Instead, it focuses on presenting road corridors and connectors, with a few branches forking off through Persia all the way to India. By sacrificing topographic accuracy for network connectivity, the Peutinger Map is strangely reminiscent (or should that be “predictive”) of the London Tube map and other modern metro maps.

A tube-style map of the Roman Empire? It’s been done.