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.
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.
Bury Me Behind the Baseboard by Pavel Sanaev was, for many years, a bit like Pasternak was for Soviet citizens. Meaning: I hadn’t read it, but I’d heard so much about it from all sides that, deep down, I didn’t even want to read it—I “disapproved” along with everyone else.
But the years went by. The book kept coming up, stage adaptations were made, and it even got a screen version with fantastic actors. So at some point I decided you can’t judge a book based on third-hand retellings.
Pavel Sanaev is the son of the actress Yelena Sanaeva, whom most people know as Alice the Fox from the film The Adventures of Buratino. He’s also the stepson of actor and director Rolan Bykov (a name that really needs no introduction). And he’s the grandson of the famous actor Vsevolod Sanaev (he appeared in all sorts of films, but Belarusians probably know him best as Fedos in White Dew).
And Bury Me Behind the Baseboard is a slightly fictionalized set of the author’s memories of his childhood. The names have been changed, but overall he’s simply telling the story of how he lived—separated from his mother—under the care of his grandmother, and to some extent his grandfather too.
