Month: March 2024

Steam: A Proper Family Library

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As the saying goes, it only took them twenty years — and Steam’s creators have finally realized what a monstrosity their Library Sharing was. Originally, it was meant as a way to let your family (or friends) play your games. But it was implemented in the most ass-backwards way imaginable. Sure, you could make your games available to your family, but the moment you started playing anything yourself, your entire library became unavailable to everyone else. So let’s say you’ve got 400 games in your personal library and you let your kids play them. Your son launches Game A and is happily playing, and then you come home from work and decide to play too — Game B. And suddenly your son gets kicked out of Game A because “the owner is back.” Even though you’re playing a different game. Why on earth can’t he just keep playing the first one?

Nobody ever understood why this feature was introduced in such a dumb way, because its value was extremely low. Mobile platforms introduced the idea of a family. Streaming services like Netflix let an entire household watch content under one family subscription. But game platforms held out until the bitter end.

And finally, on March 18, 2024, Steam launched proper Family Groups in beta. What does that mean? You can now create a family group and add up to five family members (six total: the creator plus five members). Everyone’s personal libraries are merged into a single shared family game library: no matter which family member owns a game, it becomes available to all members of the family group. Steam explained this feature in detail in an announcement and in answers to frequently asked questions. I’ll focus here on the most interesting points.

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Book: Nikolai Lyutomsky “I Was Lucky”

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My parents are both civil engineers by education, so from childhood I knew quite a bit about how construction works from the inside. My dad often took my brother and me to construction sites, and my mom, in my early years, worked as a design engineer. That’s when it stuck with me that there are architects, and there are designers. I can’t say for sure how exactly this was explained to me back then, but what settled in my mind was roughly this: architects are artists — they’re about making things beautiful — and designers are the ones who figure out how to make that “beautiful” actually happen with the resources available. Nikolai Lyutomsky’s book “I Was Lucky” is precisely a look at this industry through the eyes of an architect who was fortunate enough to work on many interesting projects. And I really wanted to hear from the other side of the fence, so to speak.

Nikolai Lyutomsky began his career as a state-employed architect in the USSR, and later founded his own architectural bureau, “Elis,” where at first he worked independently, and in recent years with strong support from his wife and son, developing landmark projects of very different kinds — from residential complexes to schools and theaters.

We rarely read books by people we don’t know. And I didn’t come across the book “I Was Lucky” by chance — I learned about it from the author’s page literally on the day it was released, because I was lucky (there’s a little pun on the title) to get to know Nikolai Vadimovich personally (even if not in person, but through correspondence). And I want to tell that story in this review, because it seems very important to me for understanding the author’s personality.

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“The Astrologer’s Song” or “The Song of the Stars”

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Alexey Rybnikov is a legendary composer who, in addition to several great rock operas, gave us unforgettable music and songs for many films we love. I adore all of his work, but as the first song set to his music, I decided to talk about “The Astrologer’s Song” (also known as “The Song of the Stars”) from the fairy-tale film Pro Krasnuyu Shapochku (About Little Red Riding Hood) by Leonid Nechayev, released by Belarusfilm in 1977. Besides the melody, the song also features wonderful lyrics written by Yuli Kim.

As usual, I’ll remind you of the song itself and also show a few of its most interesting performances. And for those who read the post to the end, there will be a small surprise waiting (I’m sure it will be a surprise for most of you).

So, the film itself is a musical fairy tale very loosely based on the well-known original. The wolves there are a whole family, led by a strong-willed she-wolf played by Galina Volchek; the wolves are not evil at all and even a bit clumsy; and there’s also a wonderful wolf cub played by Dmitry Iosifov, who two years earlier had played, for the same Nechayev, the most famous Buratino of the Soviet screen.

Besides the story of Little Red Riding Hood, the Wolf (or rather, the wolves), and the Grandmother, the film weaves in many other plotlines and colorful characters. And on top of that, it became famous for several songs set to music by that same Alexey Rybnikov. When I was a child, the song most often performed outside the film was Little Red Riding Hood’s own number — the one that goes, “Ah-ah-ah, in Africa the mountains are this high.” There was also a well-known conversational song with a spoiled child. But no less famous — and perhaps even more so — was “The Song of the Stars,” performed by the Grandmother (Rina Zelyonaya) and the Astrologer (Evgeniy Evstigneev). Both musically and lyrically, it’s far more lyrical than the film’s other songs. That’s probably why it became so beloved.

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Book: Timur Aslanov “I Know What to Tell Them”

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On the recommendation of a good acquaintance, Anton Vert, I read Timur Aslanov’s book I Know What to Tell Them. In the blurb, the author promises to explain how to deal with negative comments about you, your company, and your products online. To do this, he introduces the concepts of the “Light Knight” and the “Dark Knight.” The latter is ready to act tough, respond rudely, and wipe out comments he doesn’t like. However, the greatest benefit comes from the “Light Knight,” who constantly monitors his emotional intelligence and knows how to respond to the substance rather than the tone.

My direct work has never involved responding to user comments; more often I’ve been on the other side of the barricades — and I’ll admit that at times I can be overly emotional in voicing my criticisms. Still, I’ve always tried not to stoop to personal attacks or mudslinging just for the sake of it.

At the same time, I’m active on social media, I have my own blog, and sometimes my position or certain statements can provoke negativity — both from subscribers and from people who just happened to drop by. So I was curious what exactly Timur Aslanov might advise, especially after such a strong recommendation from someone I know.

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Book: Henry Lion Oldie “Invasion”

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About a year and a half ago, I wrote about Pavel Filatyev’s book, which was essentially an account of the first days of Russia’s war against Ukraine seen through the eyes of a Russian contract soldier. Even then, I wanted to believe that all this horror would soon be over.

But two years have already passed since Russia attacked Ukraine, and there’s still no end in sight. As a child, reading about the Great Patriotic War, I used to think that four years of that war was a whole lifetime. By that measure, Ukraine has already been at war for half a lifetime.

The initial shock has long since faded, and any hope of a quick ending is gone for good. And then a book came out by the remarkable Ukrainian authors Dmitry Gromov and Oleg Ladyzhensky, whom all fans of sci-fi know under the pen name Henry Lion Oldie.

Both authors are from Kharkiv — a city where, before the war, Russian was heard far more often than Ukrainian, even though its residents considered themselves Ukrainian. Before the war, Oldie were seen as purely Russian-language authors. They wrote in Russian, a language they command better than most Russians do.

But on February 24, 2022, war came to their home; Russian missiles and bombs began to fall on their city. And both of them, Dmitry and Oleg, started keeping a diary.

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