Category: Everything else

About everything and nothing in particular

Affiliate Programs of Bookstores: Description and Review of Popular Ones

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There is a concept known as affiliate (referral) programs. In short: you promote a store’s products, and in return, the store gives you a percentage of each sale. It’s generally beneficial for everyone: the store gains new customers thanks to advertising on external platforms, and the authors of popular resources get a small cut from the stores if their readers decide to make a purchase. Moreover, this is highly advantageous for stores (from my non-professional point of view). In most cases, when you pay for advertising, you spend money without any guarantee of getting it back. But here, you essentially receive free advertising and only pay a small percentage of the actual revenue generated by the user. Furthermore, as a store, you typically pay for a single purchase, but the buyer might stay and become a long-term customer. For subsequent purchases, you almost never pay anyone. Additionally, there’s the well-known factor of the first purchase—it’s much harder to convince someone to make their first purchase, but if they’re satisfied, the likelihood of a second purchase increases significantly.

As a devoted bookworm, I’ve always kept an eye on the development of online book sales. I witnessed the rise and growth of ozon.ru, and I even had a small hand in the creation of the Belarusian oz.by when it launched. From then on, I simply followed the market’s evolution.

As soon as such stores started offering affiliate programs, I signed up to test them out. This was especially advantageous when I was regularly writing the ” The Notes of Glitch the Hamster” series (the namesake of this blog), which reviewed all the latest sci-fi releases on the Russian-speaking market. Back then, I included links to books directly in my reviews, using my affiliate ID. I wouldn’t say I earned a lot, but I did manage to buy a few books (considering that getting books from Russian ozon to Belarus at the time wasn’t exactly easy).

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Cyprus: The IT Mecca of the Mediterranean (Not Really)

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I decided to write about Cyprus and IT. Perhaps this post will upset some people, but I’m sharing my perspective as I see it.

I’ve been meaning to write about IT on our island for a while, but recently I found an additional reason to do so. Over the past few months, I’ve noticed an odd wave of posts in various communities, like: “Looking for a job in Cyprus, currently living in Sunny Podunkville, open to opportunities,” or “Vacationing in Cyprus, skilled and talented—if anyone has work to offer, let me know.”

Alright, I’m exaggerating a little, but overall, there has indeed been a noticeable increase in queries from people who don’t live in Cyprus but have clearly read or heard somewhere that Cyprus is now a fantastic place for the IT industry. I want to explain what it’s actually like, what the advantages are, and what the downsides are.

Let’s start with the fact that IT as an industry has never really existed on the island. I moved here in 2014, and back then, the IT sector was quite uniform. Thanks to offshore regulations and British law, many Forex companies had established a strong presence here, along with a few others connected to the financial sector.

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Game: Metro Exodus

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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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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

Game: FRAMED Collection

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This week’s unexpected discovery—FRAMED. Or rather, two games, as it’s sold as the FRAMED Collection, including both parts.

The game is remarkable for its concept: it tells a story through an interactive comic. Each level is like a page from a comic where you can interact with the “frames.” As you progress, new actions become available. At first, you can only swap two frames. Then, you must create a sequence that leads to the desired outcome. Each attempt shows how the story unfolds with the current sequence, helping you understand what went wrong. Eventually, you can rotate frames or change them mid-action, even multiple times.

Add to that vividly drawn silhouette-style characters, and the game becomes nearly a masterpiece.

It’s rather short, though. Both parts together took me around two hours. But my whole family was captivated, one by one, fascinated by the idea and the mechanics.

I highly recommend it to all puzzle game lovers. It’s worth every cent, 100%. And right now, it’s on a 60% discount on Steam, making it practically a steal.

Lefkosia — The White City

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2016-09-16 14.50.54_cr

The capital of Cyprus is known to all Russian speakers as Nicosia. Similarly, it was called Nicosia in English for many years.

However, in recent years, this toponym (Nicosia) as the name of the capital of Cyprus has become less and less common. About five years ago, the name started to be replaced on all the signs on the island. According to rumors, this change was driven by some policy of the European Union, which aimed to replace the Latinized names of geographical locations in different countries with names closer in sound to their original pronunciation in the local language, rather than names imposed by colonial governments, for example.

The fact is, in Greek, the city is called Λευκωσία, which is pronounced Lefkosia, not Nicosia. Turkish Cypriots call it Lefkoşa in Turkish (pronounced Lefkosha). The name means “White City.” For example, Belarus in Greek has the same linguistic roots and is pronounced Lefkorossia, which literally means “White Russia.”

On road signs, all names are given in two languages—Greek and English. When I first moved to the island, the signs said Nicosia, but a few years ago, when the changes started being implemented, they initially showed dual names: Lefkosia (Nicosia), Lemesos (Limassol). Gradually, the older names were phased out everywhere.

Now, even many online maps show Lefkosia instead of Nicosia.

Interestingly, in official documents in English, the Greek Cypriots themselves can’t seem to decide how to write it—sometimes it’s Lefkosia, sometimes Nicosia. However, the postal service doesn’t mind how you address something—parcels and letters arrive in both “cities” just fine. 😉

What’s interesting is that there’s no such trend toward change in the Russian language. And even when Lefkosia finally becomes the standard in English, the city will most likely still be called Nicosia (Никосия) in Russian.

There are plenty of examples of this: we still call Beijing Pekin (Пекин) in Russian. And English speakers call Moscow Moscow, which is close but still sounds a bit different from Russian Moskva (Москва).

Winter in Cyprus

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Типичный конец ноября на Кипре
A Typical Late November in Cyprus

It’s been a while since we talked about Cyprus—it’s all been about books lately. Since the warm summer is coming to an end, let me tell you about winter in Cyprus.

Many people who don’t live in warm countries often think that it’s always warm here, though not necessarily hot. In part, they’re right: for instance, today is November 6th, and during the day, the temperature outside is +29°C (84°F), while at night, it drops to +16°C (61°F). That’s pretty decent August weather for places like Minsk.

Moreover, even in the winter months, the weather is much warmer than what residents of Minsk, Moscow, or Saint Petersburg are used to. Based on my observations, the average daytime temperature during winter months is between 13-20°C (55-68°F), while at night, it’s around 5-7°C (41-45°F). Sometimes it drops to 0°C (32°F) or even below, but this is quite rare.

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Sasha Galitsky “Don’t Be Afraid!”

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I can’t say I was over the moon about Sasha Galitsky‘s first book, Mama, Don’t Worry!, but it offered a very interesting perspective on aging, with unconventional thoughts and advice. It was definitely worth reading, and I even added it to my recommended list.

Almost immediately after, I found out that Sasha had written a second book on the same theme—Don’t Be Afraid! But this time, instead of talking about how to get along with the elderly, he focuses on how not to fear aging yourself, as reflected in the subtitle: How to Grow Old Without Losing Your Mind.

The first book was based on the author’s blog posts, which was quite noticeable, but the second book really disappointed me. It feels like an attempt to recycle the same theme and material for a second time.

Once again, it’s filled with brief sketches and thoughts, presented in the form of micro-chapters. It even seems like the thoughts were written first, and only later was there an attempt to come up with clever titles for them.

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