Author: knari

Book: Alexander Feduta “Lukashenko: A Political Biography”

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On August 9, 2020, my home country, the Republic of Belarus, held another presidential election, in which, according to the official results, the incumbent president, Alexander Lukashenko, once again won by a large margin. On that very day, I began reading Lukashenko: A Political Biography, written by Alexander Feduta, a former ally of the president who worked in his first campaign headquarters and in his first government. When he wrote the book, Lukashenko had already been in power for 10 years, and even then, the author noted many changes in the initial promises and direction chosen by the country’s first and, so far, only president.

Today, Lukashenko has been in power for 26 years. Many of today’s voters were born during his rule, attended kindergarten, went to school, grew up, and became parents themselves. And for the second month after the election, protests in Belarus have not subsided, as the authorities attempt to brutally suppress them.

Why did I start reading this book? In 1994, I was 17 years old, not yet eligible to vote, and probably not very interested in politics at the time. But my coming of age took place “in the Lukashenko era.” I wanted to understand how Alexander Grigoryevich came to power and what kind of person he was. I remember all the events described in the book, but I could hardly assess them back then in the way a person “over forty” can now.

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Book: “Dealing with Difficult People”

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Sometimes, I read individual articles from Harvard Business Review and even posted one on my blog (Misconceptions about Feedback). They also publish books that compile several articles on specific topics, organized into sub-series.

I decided to read one from the Emotional Intelligence series, titled Dealing with Difficult People, as this topic has interested me for several years. The book includes eight articles by seven authors. It’s not very thick (around 150 pages), and with a more modest font size, it would be even slimmer.

As the title and description suggest, the main theme of the book is dealing with difficult people, those under stress, and troublesome colleagues.

On one hand, it’s a collection of very short articles, and I wouldn’t say each one is revolutionary or highly valuable. On the other hand, it’s brief and to the point, unlike many business writers who often stretch a single idea over 300 pages.

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Game: Metro Exodus

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metro_exodus

Though belated, I want to share my thoughts on the third part of the Metro game universe—Metro Exodus. But first, let’s dive into a historical overview of its origins and the earlier games.

The Metro series, developed by the Kyiv-based company 4A Games, is based on the works of Dmitry Glukhovsky. Glukhovsky wrote the first novel, Metro 2033, back in 2002, but it was not quite the novel we know today. It originally had only 13 chapters, and Glukhovsky published it online for free. Unexpectedly, the novel gained popularity, but readers didn’t like everything about it. So, in 2005, Dmitry made significant revisions to the book, expanding it to 20 chapters and altering the main character’s fate (in the original version, he dies). It was in this revised form that the novel first appeared in print.

The story is set in the year 2033, 20 years after a nuclear war that left few survivors, and Moscow itself became an almost uninhabitable place. To make matters worse, various mutants emerged, eager to finish off the last remaining humans. Only those who were lucky enough to be in the Moscow metro system during the attack managed to survive. The metro became their new home, eventually dividing into micro-states with their own authorities, rules, and even ideologies. The entire book is essentially a quest in which the main character, Artyom, must travel from one point in the metro to another. Along the way, he encounters various stations and faces both human adversaries and mutants, as well as supernatural elements.

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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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GOG Galaxy Unites Platforms

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CD Projekt continues to develop its GOG service, which began as a store for selling classic, DRM-free games. In my observation, it hasn’t managed to win the platform war against Steam, but they recently made an excellent move. Forget the platform war; they’ve chosen to target the numerous launchers from different platforms and essentially become a single aggregator for your gaming library. Steam has long been connectable via a plugin, but official integration first came with Xbox Store and now with Steam’s growing competitor, the Epic Games Store.

I fully support this initiative because they haven’t just consolidated a game library in one place; they’ve also maximized the functionality of each platform they can integrate with—friends, statuses, achievements…

They’ve even added a rating system and filtering features. With this, they are gradually moving into a different territory, suddenly competing with game databases like rawg.io and igdb.com.

Well done!

https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-games-store-has-officially-integrated-into-gog-galaxy-20

Song: BG “Backup”

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I was taught from childhood that profanity and vulgarity are unworthy forms of language, and I don’t use them in everyday speech. However, over the years, I’ve come to understand that sometimes it’s precisely hardcore swearing that adds meanings and shades to language that sound different in literary language.

So, I’ve become a bit more relaxed about them when they’re appropriate.

And there’s the song Backup (Подмога) performed by Boris Grebenshchikov. Originally, this song was by another band, called HZ for short, and in common language… well, Russians can guess.

I’ve heard it in the original version, but in Grebenshchikov’s rendition, it sounds much more soulful, and the profane and vulgar phrases here come across in a completely different way. As Pushnoy once said in one of his songs, “a song is nothing; the performance is everything.”

The video sequence from the film Battery Number One layered over it adds a unique color.

By the way, I couldn’t find whether this song by BG is included in any of his albums.

Book: Guy Kawasaki “Art of the Start 2.0”

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Guy Kawasaki is described as “the boldest venture capitalist in Silicon Valley,” according to the cover of the Russian edition of his book The Art of the Start. In the original English version, however, no one characterizes him this way, nor did he include his own name in the book’s title—that was the work of the Russian publishers (in the Russian version, the book is titled Startup by Kawasaki.)

I can’t speak to his boldness, but Guy Kawasaki is best known for promoting the Macintosh brand at Apple in the 1980s, and he is credited with creating both the strategy and even the term “evangelism” (when a product gains passionate fans who promote and advertise it on your behalf—”evangelists”).

The book is often recommended as an excellent guide for those wanting to start their own business and for those seeking investors for such ventures. The book’s subtitle positions it as a collection of time-tested methods for launching any business.

Yes, the book consists of a series of relatively short chapters covering everything that might be needed to start a new business: from preparing a pitch and finding investors to hiring employees and working with customers.

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