Right now, AI is stirring up fierce debates — careers are being derailed, games are being banned or stripped of awards… in short, all hell seems to be breaking loose. This will eventually calm down, though, because AI really does help get many things done faster and better. No, it won’t replace a living human being — but it can be a powerful aid.
And riding this very wave, animator Oleg Kuvaev, the creator of the legendary Masyanya, has started making videos using artificial intelligence. He has even shared behind-the-scenes fragments showing that AI is just a tool — and that there’s still a tremendous amount of work involved. But what Oleg has managed to demonstrate is how this tool, in the hands of a talented creator, can help bring yet another series of wonderful works to life.
A music journalist and columnist writing about provincial Belarus suddenly decides to write a novel — and that novel is just as suddenly published and attracts a fair amount of attention. That’s Alexander Chernukho. I had never read his work before: I’ve almost never been interested in music criticism, and Belarusian online media had long since dropped out of my field of view altogether — especially after 2020, when many outlets simply ceased to exist.
As for what the state calls “official media,” it’s hard to describe that as journalism at all. In fact, according to the author himself, those very official outlets became one of the triggers that pushed him to write his satirical novel Pigs. Because how can you not laugh at what they print and broadcast? Though at its core, the book is first and foremost a response to Alexander’s own emotional experience of the events of 2020 in Belarus — just expressed in the form of a comic-satirical novel. After all, it’s well known that the best remedy for anger, bitterness, and melancholy is laughter.
I’ve watched the second season of The Last of Us. I was already very disappointed with the first one, though my wife liked it.
I watched this season with great difficulty. But by the end even Tanya said she doesn’t want to watch the next one.
My complaints are fairly straightforward. Bella Ramsey is a good actress, but she’s completely wrong for this role. And appearance isn’t even the main issue here. Although, yes, let’s briefly touch on looks too. I do want adaptations to resemble the characters we know from the games. And even Pedro Pascal, charismatic as he is, still doesn’t quite match my image of Joel. But Bella creates an entirely different perception of the character because she is fundamentally different. Dina in season two also doesn’t look like her in-game counterpart, but at least her personality fits. Anyway, after the first season I had already made peace with the visuals.
My main complaint is that the writers, together with Neil Druckmann, for some reason completely reworked the characters’ personalities and motivations. For the sake of flashy spectacle, they changed both the internal logic of the world and the characters’ actions.
The episode with a zombie army attacking Jackson may look impressive, but it’s illogical (fast zombies in such huge numbers would have wiped everyone out instantly), it doesn’t exist in the game or its logic, and it directly contradicts it — the area around Jackson is constantly cleared precisely to prevent any large horde from forming. Yet somehow they missed an entire army. And narratively, this episode is completely unnecessary, in my view. The game’s motivation works far better without any zombie armies.
From the very first episodes, Ellie is portrayed as a reckless, self-absorbed idiot who doesn’t care about rules and just does whatever she wants. And not only does no one put her in her place — everyone around her turns a blind eye to it (which, honestly, explains how they ended up with a horde right next door). And everything Ellie does afterward only reinforces this impression. She’s not a strong character with an internal code. She’s not someone who has to overcome herself to torture a person and then break down in tears afterward. All of that remained in the game and was effectively buried by the writers. In the series she’s just an extremely unpleasant fool — to the point where at some stage I actually found myself wishing she’d just get shot already and the show would end on that happy note.
All in all, I’m genuinely surprised that the creators are doing such a thorough job of undermining their own work. I won’t be watching any further — especially now that even watching it out of solidarity is no longer required.
