Category: Everything else

About everything and nothing in particular

Book: Vayner brothers “The Age of Mercy”

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Ever since childhood, I’ve loved watching detective stories on TV. Later that hobby spilled over into books too (I wore my Sherlock Holmes volumes out back in that same childhood). And among detective stories, I always singled out films and series about the Soviet police fighting the criminal underworld. You can’t not mention epic staples like The Experts Are Investigating and Born by the Revolution.

But one particular favorite for viewers was the four-part 1979 TV film The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed, directed by Stanislav Govorukhin and featuring a wonderful cast. Vladimir Vysotskiy brilliantly portrayed the tough Moscow Criminal Investigation Department detective Zheglov, while Vladimir Konkin played the very young Volodya Sharapov, who joined the force right after the war, where he had commanded a reconnaissance unit. For Konkin, this role was probably the most significant in his entire career—he never played anything else quite as memorable. And the characters outgrew the film itself long ago—making their way into jokes, songs (like Lyube’s “Atas”), and everyday culture.

At the heart of the story is the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department’s fight against a brutal, elusive gang known as the Black Cat, which terrorized postwar Moscow.

I loved this film too. I’ve rewatched it countless times since, and every year I noticed something I hadn’t caught before, simply because I was too young back then. What’s more, as I got older, even my attitude toward the characters began to change (but more on that later).

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Book: German Shenderov, Sergey Tarasov “The Knówer: Bonds of Hell”

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The big discovery of last year for me was Ivan Belov’s Zastupa series; the third book came out just recently, and I’m going to read it as soon as it starts being sold in an ebook version. In my review I praised the first two books a lot, and someone wrote to me that in that case I absolutely had to read another one that came out in the same The Scariest Book series.

That was The Knówer: Bonds of Hell, co-authored by German Shenderov and Sergey Tarasov. Originally, German Shenderov had written only a short story, “Khryashchekhmyl,” which appeared in his short story collection back in 2022. But later he wrote two more stories about the same character, after which Sergey Tarasov joined the series, and together with Shenderov he finished the book—what has now become a novel in stories. And the original “Khryashchekhmyl” became only the first chapter of this book, changing its title to “Atonement.” And already as a novel, the book came out in 2025.

The recommendation—and then the blurb—won me over. The story is set mostly in 1965, in a small Belarusian village, where a local knówer lives and fights evil spirits. Folklore, and on Belarusian soil that’s native to me… I just couldn’t pass it by.

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Solomon Plyar’s Letkajenkka

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Not long ago, my wife and I watched another episode of Leonid Parfyonov’s brilliant show Namedni—this time dedicated to one of the years from the 1960s. One of the topics covered was the dance “Letkajenkka,” which gained massive popularity in the USSR during that era. Interestingly enough, as a dance it was incredibly simple—so simple, in fact, that it felt more suited for kindergarteners than adults, at least in my view.

The melody was originally created in Finland and very quickly evolved into a dance. From there, it swept across the globe, even slipping past the Iron Curtain. Variations with locally adapted lyrics were performed in 92 countries. In the USSR, the dance likely spread so freely because it was completely innocent in nature—simple, cheerful, and definitely lacking any hint of bourgeois undertone. (Though, to be fair, neither rock’n’roll nor the twist had such undertones either—but that didn’t make them welcome in Soviet leadership’s eyes.)

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Book: Boris Akunin “My Calendar”

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At one time, I really enjoyed Boris Akunin’s collections of short essays on various fascinating facts—“The Life of Remarkable People and Animals“ and “The Un-Chekhovian Intelligentsia.” Both were “compiled” from different short posts the author had originally published on his LiveJournal. In a similar fashion, he occasionally shared notes about specific days of the year—highlighting interesting events that had happened on that particular date.

Of course, almost any day you pick from the calendar has seen at least something noteworthy happen somewhere in the world throughout human history. So, in the end, it would be possible to gather an entire calendar of such notes. And that’s exactly what Boris Akunin did when he released his book “My Calendar.”

However, he set a rule for himself: for almost every day, he tries to choose just one event—the one he finds most interesting—and tells its story, whenever possible, backing it up with photos or illustrations. He then wraps up almost every “day” with an optimistic message. He does this so that the book can be used like a tear-off calendar—you wake up, read about the day in the morning, get some encouraging words, and ideally, the day should go well for you.

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It’s not so straightforward: an Olympiad

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Smart people say that in today’s world, it’s crucial to verify all facts (there are even special fact-checking projects for this). The ongoing Olympics in Paris has already shown how important this advice is, as a huge number of stories have spread across social networks, leading to both condemnation and praise. But if you dig deeper, things are not quite as they seem. To illustrate this, I decided to break down three well-known “fakes,” as we’ll call them.

The first of these was so convincing that even I, succumbing to the general hysteria, immediately jumped to condemnation without checking whether what was being said was true. For that, I apologize—I was wrong.

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My Kids in Music Videos

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A former colleague of mine quoted a song by the band “Lyapis Trubetskoy” yesterday, which suddenly reminded me that my daughters had a tiny involvement in the band’s next album.

Back in 2006, when my wife’s younger sister, Olya, was studying to become a TV director, she had to shoot a music video for a coursework project. She decided to create a video for the song “New Time” by the band/artist “Mara.” For the lead role, she chose her niece—my eldest daughter Sasha, who was 5 years old at the time.

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Belarus Everyone Knows From the Movies. Part 1

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Belarus is a small country: a population of around 10 million people, an area of a little over 200 thousand square kilometers. For many years I understood that not everyone abroad even knows such a country; I used to have to explain that it’s between Ukraine, Poland, and Russia. (Surprisingly, Cypriots for some reason often do know the country — which genuinely caught me off guard.)

And yet our country sometimes pops up here and there in movies. Okay, Russia — it’s been a longtime supplier of villains with terrifying English accents, since it’s the old enemy. But Belarus? Still, quite well-known creators have slipped this country into their films. And that’s what we’ll talk about today — the examples I know.

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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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Varlamov and Cyprus: A Bad Match

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I know that not everyone likes Ilya Varlamov. Ukrainians, at the time, were very offended by his video about Ukraine (and honestly, for good reason—the video is very ambiguous). Still, sometimes he talks in a pretty interesting way about the countries he visits.

But experience shows that this “interestingness” can be very uneven—and sometimes not very accurate, if you have an analytical mind. And if you also know the country he’s talking about… For example, in his series 30 Years After the USSR—which included that infamous Ukraine episode—not every installment gives a full picture of what’s going on. His video about Belarus was also very superficial, basically about nothing. And the ones about the former “-stan” republics are more about refugees than about the countries themselves.

But I’ve been living in Cyprus for almost ten years now, so I’m always interested in reading and watching what people think when they visit this island—an island I already consider my second home. (You can only really call your homeland the country you were born in, but that doesn’t make it better than the others.) A few years ago Ilya Varlamov released a video about Cyprus as well, and even then it struck me as choppy and not very useful.

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TV Show “The History of Russian Computer Games”

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Recently, the streaming service Okko released a documentary series titled The History of Russian Computer Games, about how the video game industry developed across the post-Soviet space—starting with the USSR era.

Anton Vert recommended it to me, immediately pointing out a few downsides. But it’s one thing to listen to smart people, and another to watch it yourself and then share your own opinion that nobody asked for.

In 30–40 minute episodes, the series talks about different milestones in the industry’s formation—first in the USSR, and then across the entire territory of this former Soviet empire. At least, that’s how the series is sometimes positioned (I’ll come back to this in more detail later).

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