Ask Me Anything

Being a special unicorn myself, as I do answer you on the fediverse of all places and in English, I want to say I am not representative of our bunch. But from what I can gather, there is no outright remorse to the war I could've welcomed, but an overall tiredness, and even distancing. As Prigo guy and others cried, not many people really care about the war around me, unless they are directly affected. I see ads for service everywhere, I hear drunk persons coming from the trenches, but the 'unilateral' support is artificial and comes from public institutions like schools, colleges, controlled social media, while average people just try to make their living in slowly hardening material conditions. Unlike frequently bombed regions, mine is adapting to whatever comes, and unlike visible support for the cause of war, everyone's just working their hours, walking kids and animals and don't care at all unless asked.

My VPN is okay. It breaks sometimes, but the team behind it are all tops, I'm now not even detected as a VPN user on reddit like I was previously. I want to go for my own private server solution in the coming year for the sake of learning the server side of things.

I'd initially put like 4/10 Kims there because I'm so uninteresting and unimportant person no one would care to jail me, but I'd put two additional Kims for my zoomer friends sometimes make me afraid about talking my mind with them in private, since they, like, kinda agree it's offensive to play anti-government song on the street, the thing I thought we put to earth long ago. They supported sentencing some teen for that, and I'm feeling it's 6 Kims outside my tight little circle of comrades since I'm afraid to be snitched on.

I'm not a pissy boy to steal frags from ukrainians.

Yup, very much so, but this time I wore them in a company of friends. Other times, yeah, people went nitpicking about my clothes to call me an f-word over nothing and some fights ensued. Regular locals are so thin-skinned lol

OwO

I'm half grateful, half scared :b

That statue killed its creator and has veiny balls, it’s got it all

I bought them in a second-hand store, so idk where you can find another pair, sorry.

Oh, well.

I've started to answer your question a couple of times, but the vastness of it and my feeling like I lack the expertise needed made me erase these tries. I wasn't that far into the Far East, mostly meddling around northern and eastern borders in the western half of the country, so I can't tell much about two exact cases you are interested in. Only paint one big and generalized picture.

In very broad strokes, I can tell that big cities that I was in, the 300k+ populated capitals of the region, felt more like a twist on a theme: up to 50% of it's own character but 50% or more of the same soviet heritage (e.g. architecture, behavior) plus contemporary russian stuff e.g. same store chains, street names, people consuming same social media content etc. Due to geographical and political unequality, some regions do show more of local spirit, either by being more isolated or by having a strong influence of e.g. Islam. But nevertheless, if you are traveling by train and have just an hour or two in each of them, you are unlikely to tell them apart after seeing four of them one after another in a close succession.

The salt of the earth predictably lays in smaller towns, villages, and the national culture of my non-russian half is better represented in these, with it's own dialect, folk tales, customs and local paegan-alike festivals. These places are still there, and there are small and caustious steps towards conserving some of these at least as modern reenactments and museums (god forbid someone would cry separatist national self-consciousness or whatever), but small places are dying as people migrate to cities with working infrastructure, jobs and access to basic material goods. I hope they'd outlive the modern turmoil if only for the sake of counter-acting the unhealthy unifying trope of contemporary propaganda, and for people visiting this land in the future to enrich themselves with the same oddities locals were inspired by there many centuries ago.

Good question. Although, I had a lot time sitting with it alone, especially in the 2022, I still have no idea. Not about what I'd want to do if I had no exit plan, but what I'd be dare to do then, and I'm thankful I'm yet to know it.

A lot of them were inspired by the Fediverse directly, as is my Linux usage lol, but to be less of an echo from the threads we both saw, I had a great time with the latest Age of Empires II remaster. Haven't picked the original in a while, like a decade or more, or any other strategy for more than twenty hours, and getting back into that memory lane was a blast. There is some neat balance in how managing your workforces, troops and progression works there, and after watching some modern AoE youtubers I tried some of their tricks I've not discovered myself.

The gameplay, especially online one, is the downer there since I wasn't good back than and ain't getting any better, but the sounds, the gfx of growing buildings and walking armies, the ease of access are what made me both nostalgic and enthusiastic to nosedive into it for more hours than I thought possible.

Good pick!

Late-soviet Oka car is my fav due to being a pretty little town car with conservative fuel consumption and affordable price at the time. I'd have liked a modern take on it with electric engine and some modern bells and whistles as a subsidised consumer-first vehicle* instead of all these fake suvs filling the streets. It isn't built for longer road trips (although me and my friends, relatives did some), but for casual needs of a small family it's almost sufficient.

* IIRC it was one of the most frequent cars that was given to citizens with disabilities at the time of it's production, at least from what I've seen.

I don't find his thought a sculptured and ready-to-discuss point, but the end of his vid did sound familiar.