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

There could be a major earthquake and volcanic eruption in Azores

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Hundreds of Sao Jorge residents have been leaving the Portuguese island as an earthquake and volcanic eruption appear to be imminent:

Seismologists fear the more than 12,700 tremors, which have had a magnitude of up to 3.3, could trigger a volcanic eruption or a powerful quake.

[…]

Dozens of other Sao Jorge residents also left early on Saturday, with the latest government figures showing about 1,250 people left the island on March 23 and March 24 alone.

The region’s CIVISA seismo-volcanic surveillance centre raised the volcanic alert to Level 4 on Wednesday, meaning there is a “real possibility” the volcano could erupt for the first time since 1808.

via Reuters, from 26th March

Some more links on the situation:

I’ll be updating this post as I get more news.

Check out this cool Milton Glaser-style birthday cake

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The above birthday cake was made for swissmiss’s friends’ son in the style of Milton Glaser’s iconic Dylan poster.

I will say if you read the original post, don’t read the comments. It’s just Unnecessary Male Opinions™️ and you never need those in your life, especially when they’re full of hot air and not much else.

Cake related: espresso-chocolate chunk cookie cake, Portillo’s famous cake shake, and Binging with Babish’s Ice Cream Cake

(via swissmiss)

Animal species saved from extinction

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For BBC Wildlife Magazine, Tamara Hinson reported on some of the species saved from the brink of extinction.

Whilst there are quite a few stories of animal, plant and fungi species heading at dangerous speeds toward being extinct in the wild (or worse, species that have already gone extinct), there are positive news stories to be inspired by too.

All around the world, there are species’ populations that have recovered to safer levels thanks to the intervention of hard-working and passionate conservationists. In some cases, these are relatively common species that have faced or suffered local extinctions (also known as extirpation), such as the red kite in the UK.

Some of my favourites:

  • Blue iguana
  • Northern pool frog
  • Echo parakeet

A Letterboxd recommender based on a user's previous ratings

Sam Learner is graphics journalist for the Financial Times and last year, he built a Letterboxd recommender that gathers movie ratings from any Letterboxd user and provide movie recommendations based on ratings data from thousands of other users.

A note on the methodology:

A user’s “star” ratings are scraped their Letterboxd profile and assigned numerical ratings from 1 to 10 (accounting for half stars). Their ratings are then combined with a sample of ratings from the top 4000 most active users on the site to create a collaborative filtering recommender model using singular value decomposition (SVD). All movies in the full dataset that the user has not rated are run through the model for predicted scores and the items with the top predicted scores are returned. Due to constraints in time and computing power, the maxiumum sample size that a user is allowed to select is 500,000 samples, though there are over five million ratings in the full dataset from the top 4000 Letterboxd users alone.

Like with any recommendation engine, the more data you have (in this case, Letterboxd ratings), the better recommendations you’ll get. You can also filter out well-known movies to give you more niche picks.

I tried it out with the sliders in the middle (so between faster and better results and all movies and less-reviewed movies) and my top 50 films were quite varied. Some I wouldn’t watch (Band of Brothers, Secrets & Lies, Steamboat Bill Jr.) and some I might (Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, Cowboy Bebop, and Hoop Dreams)

Letterboxd related: An Alternate Feminist Cinema list on Letterboxd

Friends, but Ross has no friends

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Friends ONLY Ross has no friends

Everyone knows Ross Geller sucked. But I’m not hear to talk about that—I’m here to offer a glimpse into a world where Ross has no friends. In the above video, you get to see Joey and Phoebe but the hostility is strong. It’d be sad if it wasn’t so funny and righteous.

Friends related: spend a night in Monica and Rachel’s apartment from Friends and a semi-alphabetical listing of Black actors with speaking roles on Friends

There's a new fish in the pond

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credit: Yi-Kai Tea/California Academy of Sciences

The Rose-Veiled Fairy Wrasse (Cirrhilabrus finifenmaa) was officially declared a newly discovered species thanks to the work of a Maldivian scientist this month. The species initially fell foul of mistaken identity as Elizabeth Gamillo explained for Smithsonian Mag:

While hundreds of species thrive in the waters surrounding the Maldives, this fairy wrasse is the first to be described by a Maldivian scientist, and it is also the first species with a scientific name derived from the local Dhivehi language, reports Ashley Strickland for CNN. Before being formally described, the fish was long mistaken as a red velvet fairy wrasse (Cirrhilabrus rubrisquamis). Scientists published details about the vivid ocean dweller earlier this month in the journal ZooKeys.

Marine biologists first collected the colorful fish in the 1990s. However, it was not scientifically described because researchers thought it was an adult version of an existing species, a California Academy of Sciences statement explains. C. rubrisquamis’s description was based on one juvenile specimen collected in the Chagos Archipelago, located 621 miles south of the Maldives, per a statement. 

via The Smithsonian

And there could be more new species to come. Finally, some good nature news!

Fish related: flying fish doing what they do best, how a clownfish earns their stripes, and the ‘vantafish’ that absorbs nearly all light that hits it

Giant castella is giant

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_tHW\u002d\u002dJLVo

Ever since I wrote about the Taiwanese castella, I’ve wanted one. And then I saw the above video, featuring a giant castella made by a specialty store in Changwon, South Korea. Besides the size difference, this mega castella has stuffed whipped cream.

In the words of Homer Simpson, “eat the pudding, eat the pudding, eat the pudding, eat the pudding, eat the pudding, eat the pudding, eat the pudding, eat the pudding”

Ivan McClellan's photography of black cowboys in America

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© Ivan McClellan

For Creative Boom, Ayla Angelos covered Ivan McClellan’s photography of black cowboys in America, from his first encounter with them at a Black rodeo to the present day:

After he visited the black rodeo with Charles, Ivan commenced his documentary practice focusing on black cowboys in America. It’s a subject and event he holds closely; when he attended, he met people who lived just blocks away from his childhood home in Kansas City.

“This knowledge of black cowboys in my hometown transformed my perception of home away from a place of poverty and violence to a place of independence and grit,” he says. “I was determined to share what I’d found and let everyone know that black cowboys exist now, today, in America.” Ivan has now attended dozens of rodeos and visited cowboys at their ranches and farms; he’ll “realistically” be shooting rodeos until he’s 70, he admits.

Black cowboy related: Room Rodeo: a Chicago student’s film about Black cowboys

Dr. Travis Langley explains every Batman movie villain

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Every Batman Movie Villain Analyzed By a Psychologist | WIRED

Shout out to Dr. Travis Langley, noted psychology professor and author, who explained the motives behind a wide range of Batman movie villains including Penguin, Catwoman, the Joker, Poison Ivy and more. But the first villain examined by the “superherologist” is Dr Daka from the 1943 serial film Batman:

The year was 1943, at the height of World War II. Dr. Tito Daka was not directly a character from the comics. He was a type. He was both the stereotype and a villain type. He fit that alien menace. It’s why xenophobia, fear of foreigners and strangers, played a role in this racist story. It is a racist depiction. It is a character who is acting very haughty, reflects mirror image perceptions. A mirror image perception during a conflict is when each side’s perception of the other mirrors the other side’s perception of them. Americans were looking at a villain such as Dr. Daka, wanting to see him as being egotistical, arrogant. Well, that was how Americans were seen as well by others. So each side’s perception mirrored the other side’s perception of them.

Langley also analyses the villains in 2022’s The Batman: The Riddler, Penguin, and Catwoman who Langley notes as being more of an anti-heroine (agreed).

Batman movie related: The making of Batman Returns, when Batman mercilessly killed that Red Triangle Gang member, and Batman’s movie lips ranked

Yesterworld's visual history of McDonaldland

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The History & Downfall of McDonaldland and the Disney-McDonalds Happy Meal

Being a kid in the 90s meant the odd Happy Meal, in or out of a McDonald’s restaurant. I don’t eat anything from there anymore but I haven’t forgotten how the place made me feel: the smell (then mouth-watering, now sickness-inducing), the plastic decor, the taste of the hamburger and fries, and that awesome toy. The characters of McDonaldland sealed the deal and made eating at McDonald’s the best treat in the world.

Yesterworld tracked the history of McDonaldland, from its inception to its heyday and downfall in the 00s via Disney mishaps and Morgan Spurlock’s infamous documentary, Super Size Me. Glad they didn’t stick with the horrible-looking Hamburglar or any of the 60s/70s character designs. Ronald was looking more like Pennywise back then.

Visit the Seinfeld diner in New York

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A man sitting in a diner, wearing a red coat

You may know it as the Seinfeld diner or by its real name (Tom’s Restaurant). Either way, you can visit the famous eatery in Manhattan, New York.

Although the walls are now covered with Seinfeld memorabilia, when the images of the exterior were first taken for the show (including the “Tom’s” part of the name, which was later cropped out), the owner’s sons asked what they were for. The response: “It’s just for some pilot.” 

Since the 1940s, like many diners in New York, Tom’s has been in the hands of the same Greek-American family. It’s a diner-style eatery, with classic menu items like burgers, fries, BLTs, and milkshakes. It’s a frequent stop for Columbia students and their parents, even hosting Senator John McCain and his daughter Meghan when she was attending the university.

Seinfeld related: An animated version of the ‘what the hell: I’ll just eat some trash’ scene from Seinfeld

American restaurant related: Portillo’s famous cake shake

New York related: Sucklord, The NYC Artist Who Makes Bootleg Action Figures

(via Gastro Obscura)

Remember #StopKony?

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Shout out to the folks who did and didn’t get caught up in the Invisible Children campaign to “stop” Joseph Kony. It got a lot of big celebrities and social media users (including me, in my pre-woke 22 years on this earth) and, as Sunnie Fraser explained in their piece for gal-dem, it unravelled quickly but not before it served as a progenitor of modern liberal digital activism:

It’s Thursday 15 March 2012, a sunny morning in San Diego, California. Suddenly, a flurry of calls light up the San Diego Police Department switchboard. A white man has been spotted, naked and distressed, running through the streets of the city.

It’s a harrowing scene. He’s pounding the pavement and ranting incoherently about “the Devil”. Some onlookers stop to film, as he intercepts ongoing traffic whilst shouting at passers-by. Eventually, the cops arrive. The man is detained for allegedly masturbating and being drunk in public, then hospitalised.

The young man was Jason Russell, co-founder of NGO Invisible Children. His meltdown was the climax of 10 days of virality. On 5 March of that year, Russell and his team had uploaded a 30-minute documentary titled ‘Stop Kony’ to YouTube. Its subject was Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony and the impact of his war crimes on Uganda – a country fraught by decades of socio-political turmoil. With Hollywood polish, Invisible Children pleaded for people to join their campaign to ‘Make Kony famous’ and spread the word of his use of child soldiers. 

There’s still a lot of it happening now (even during the current Ukrainian conflict) and while some people may be helped through the various donations and offers of refuge, there’s still a lot of virtue signalling and people being left behind after the dust settles and just before it.

Jason Okundaye on the 'narcissism of queer influencer activists'

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One of my favourite pieces of this year so far is Jason Okundaye’s examination of queer influencer activists [archived] and how their brand of infographic-based activism tries to distill a lot of complex historical information but often comes across as misleading and without nuance.

Beyond simply being annoying, the bigger problem is that the content and claims these influencers post are so often specious. Many of their posts, endlessly reshared, fall into a category of folk knowledge I call “things that sound true, and so must be true.” The verification system many followers use to vet the accuracy of these posts seems to be pure vibes. A sense that, because what is written feasibly aligns with a vague understanding of structural oppression, then it is undeniably true, and unquestionable.

One particularly irksome example of this recently came from the influencer activist and author Adam Eli, who has over 100,000 Instagram followers. In a tweet, which was copied to Instagram, Eli wrote in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, “In times of war, marginalized people are always hit first. This includes queer people, especially trans people. Below is a list of organizations that are helping queer people in the Ukraine.” This is incoherent, of course. The Russian invasion has launched an indiscriminate bombing campaign which endangers all Ukrainians, regardless of identity. But I nevertheless saw this claim shared across Instagram stories countless times.

I’d like to think that those who shared the idea that queer people suffer first in war feel a genuine despair for LGBTQ+ Ukrainians and wish to spotlight their suffering. My more cynical instincts tell me that this is another form of shallow digital queer politics that can only empathize through the lens of queerness — or views queerness as a satisfactory, singular prism for assessing oppression and struggle. The graphic Eli used to accompany their post about Ukraine was one of friendly looking queer protestors, beautifully adorned with pride hearts and flags. I wonder if you could ever elicit the same empathy, or a call for asylum, using the imagery of a burly, menacing-looking, straight Ukrainian man.

It’s a read in all senses of the word and I highly recommend you take a look as I know many people I follow on Instagram have shared content from the referenced activists.