Month: August 2020

Book: Susan Cain “Quiet”

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I remember, during my childhood, there was a period when I became very interested in various tests, even collecting them in a separate notebook. It all started with Eysenck’s temperament test, where people were categorized as choleric, sanguine, melancholic, or phlegmatic. But Eysenck had another test, which, by the way, overlapped significantly with his temperament test—the introversion-extroversion test.

Who are introverts and extroverts? There are actually a huge number of scientific interpretations, and they sometimes differ in the details. But I’ll try to explain in simple terms.

Introverts are generally rather reserved people; they tend to focus on their inner world. They are usually not very sociable, feel uncomfortable in public or in large groups, and would prefer an evening with a book to a party.

Extroverts are the opposite of introverts 😉 They enjoy being in the spotlight, often becoming the life of the party, have a large number of friends and acquaintances, and are very sociable.

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Song: Lyapis Trubetskoy “Do Not Be Cattle!”

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The band Lyapis Trubetskoy started as a “backyard thug” group, but over the years, they became more professional, powerful, and intense. The song Warriors of Light became something of an anthem for Ukraine’s Maidan (and, by the way, Viktor Tsoi appears in the music video).

In 2012, the band released a powerful interpretation of the poem Who Are You? by the great Belarusian poet Yanka Kupala, written in 1908, as part of the album Rabkor. The song Do Not Be Cattle feels like an anthem of the 1917 Revolution, and the video is filmed in a matching style.

A brilliant performance. Unfortunately, at the height of their success, the band suddenly fizzled out and fell apart. The successor bands Brutto and Trubetskoy have yet to reach the peaks of the original Lyapis.

Yanka Kupala Who Are You?

(literal, non-poetic translation into English):

Who are you?
— One of us, a local.
What do you want?
— A better fate.
What kind of fate?
— Bread, salt.
And what more?
— Land, freedom.
Where were you born?
— In my village.
Where were you baptized?
— By the roadside.
What are you consecrated with?
— Blood, sweat.
What do you want to be?
— Not to be cattle.

Book: Oleg Divov “Tech Support: Dead Zone”

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tehpodderzhka-mertvaya-zona

Last year, I wrote about Oleg Divov’s book Tech Support, and this year its sequel, Tech Support: Dead Zone, was released.

A brief summary of the events in the first book: In the not-too-distant future, the Russians decided to sell a prototype walker in Africa as a highly valuable piece of military equipment. But during the pre-sale demonstration, things didn’t go as planned, a small revolution broke out, and an ordinary marketer, Lyokha Filimonov, unexpectedly found himself in the middle of combat operations that supposedly weren’t even happening—no one actually knew what was going on. That’s why this ambiguous conflict was dubbed a “Schrödinger’s war.”

The ending of the first book was left open, clearly suggesting a sequel, so I wasn’t at all surprised when the second book came out. However, it doesn’t continue the events of the first book but presents a new story. The main character, Alexey Filimonov, remains the same, but now he’s no longer a marketer; he’s an employee of the not-so-secret Schrödinger Institute, whose headquarters are located on the alluring island of Cyprus (it’s nice to learn that the place where you live is depicted as almost a paradise in the future, attracting people even from the USA).

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Literary Games: Me in Books

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In the early 2000s, I was deeply involved in the Russian sci-fi community, writing my own stories and reviewing all the latest sci-fi releases in Russian. They say my resource on this topic was among the most popular at the time and later even inspired the name of this blog—The Notes of Glitch the Hamster.

Back then, there was a kind of game among sci-fi writers: they would insert their colleagues into their works in various ways. Maybe this tradition continues today, though I no longer follow it. Or perhaps everyone has grown up and stopped playing the game.

The most notable character was Yuri Semetsky, who became a kind of Sean Bean—not in movies, but in Russian fandom. He was “killed off” in one way or another in nearly every book, and it even became a trend. He would joke that this would ensure his long life.

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