Mike Driver
The Stonewall Inn
Fai_Ryy
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Not today Justin
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@whiskybravo
1. the tag for naughty posts is whisky lemon
2. my own posts are tagged as whisky originals (in the process of mass adding this tag); everything else is tagged with reblog
3. I have a sideblog @whisky-reblogs solely for reblogging arts so the good stuff doesn’t get lost in the sea of shitpost that my main blog is. I will still occasionally reblog art stuff here too tho
She's not interested in participating in the day
[ID: Picture of a cat's paws barely sticking out from underneath a pillow. /end ID]
I wonder where Bazinga went
you just teleported to the last game you played how is it going? {you're plot involved}
good
bad
great
awful
dead
I don't play games/results
Soma 😔
A NUUUU
I'm probably gonna walk headfirst into the Glass Shards anomaly because my autistic ass is gonna space out but I'm still gonna have fun
She caught mouse.
“A kiss may be grand, but it won’t pay the rental, on your humble flat, or help you at the automat.”
Like literally the most famous song about how much girls love jewellry is just explaining the importance of getting jewellry for when your partner leaves you penniless and alone.
The founder of Girl Scouting in the US, Juliette Gordon Low, funded her first troop by selling her pearl necklace, which was her only belonging after her husband died and left everything to his mistress.
She founded Girl Scouts to teach girls self-sufficiency so they wouldn’t have to go through what she went through when her husband died and she didn’t know how to take care of herself.
While we’re on the subject, let’s please also remember that historically disenfranchised communities who had to worry about frequently being run out of town often bought expensive jewelry with their limited funds not because they were greedy or tacky or classless, but rather because you can’t sew a real estate investment into the lining of your coat, and the powers that be can’t freeze a diamond necklace the way that they can freeze a bank account.
i'll always make fun of how stupid the "born evil baby" trope is but truly it is such a wretched trope i hope it dies forever
it's like the perfect package of "child you are allowed to harm" and "easy way to not interrogate how commonplace child abuse is". thank goodness this child was simply born wrong, we never have to examine the conditions they grew up in.
I just learned that a lot of vintage perfumes and fragrances were intentionally created to blend well with the ever-present smell of cigarettes, and in specific a lot of iconic ones that are super musky and floral and civet-heavy were intended to compliment the smell of fur coats or even "refresh" that new fur coat smell, which is one of the reasons (besides just shifting preferences and trends) that a lot of them smell really, really bad to modern noses.
I bet there's some stunning genius diva out there right now who meticulously coordinates her Victoria's Secret body mists with her vape flavors.
@slavicafire fun little perfume and fragrance trivia that you might enjoy?
Languages tend to peak at their word for butterfly. Never seen 2 that are the same, either. Papillon. Mariposa. Borboleta. Fluture. Vlinder. Schmetterling. Pillangó. Babochka. Farfalla. Sommerfugl. Perhonen. Farasha. Titali. Chōchō. Nabi. Húdié. Buom buom. Great job guys, i really mean it.
Reblog and put in the tags the book that is physically nearest to you at this moment.
A tonk.
Actually I have a question for all S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fans:
Do you know how the Strugatsky brothers came up with the term 'stalker' for the 'Roadside Picnic'?
Yes
No
I'll reblog this with an answer to those who do not know when the poll ends
OK so the poll is over, but the explanation I've made got so long that I've decided to give it a chance to reach more people and make it into its own post rather than a reblog, so uhh enjoy
OK so this post is gonna be my answer to a poll I posted last week:
Why exactly Arkady and Boris Strugatsky decided to name the heroes of their 1972 book Roadside Picnic - stalkers?
From our perspective, this sounds like a controversial choice: a stalker is one of the most despicable accusations one can get those days. You're basically being named a creep, a harasser and a potential danger in one neat seven-letter package.
But if you didn't know already, within the 'Roadside Universe', it has nothing to do with what the word stalker conveys today. If fact, it's not even the same word - kinda.
I sorta knew the answer for this question before, but it was only when I attended a lecture by Michał Gołkowski last June on this topic that I've remembered the full story, and then I've actuall done some of my own research to put everything together, because back then I was too invested in listening to make notes lol
So strap your belts, hold onto your artifacts, and let's get this show into the Zone:
***
To fully understand the origin of the term 'stalker' in the context of the Roadside Picnic and its 'expanded universe', we need to leave the 70s Soviet Union for a bit, go back in time to the end of 19th century, and make a short stop in Great Britain. Enter Rudyard Kipling, best known as the author of the Jungle Book; as a twelve year old kid, he was sent to the United Services College, a boarding school in a rather creatively named Westward Ho! in North Devon. There, he became friends with a boy named Lionel Dunsterville.
Both Kipling (left) and Dunsterville were being prepared to serve as officers in British armed forces, but it was the latter who had shown greater predisposition for this role. Later, having graduated from the College, Dunsterville went on to serve in the Royal Sussex Regiment, and then in the colonial British Indian Army. His service would lead him into the North-West Frontier - a region of British Indian Empire that now forms the western Pakistan, - and also China, during the Yihetuan Uprising (Boxer Rebellion). But I digress, as that would happen later.
In 1899, Kipling released his novel Stalky and Co., which was a collection of stories of a group of adolescent boys - Stalky, Beetle and M'Turk, - at a boarding school. They spend their days sneaking out into their hideout, smoking, debating life, and pulling pranks on the authoritarian staff. The book would be re-released in 1929 as The Complete Stalky and Co., including several new stories.
It doesn't take much to realize that the entire book is a self-insert fanfic of Kipling's years at the USC. The titular character is based on Dunsterville, whose wit and cunning made a great impression on Kipling, whereas the timid, literature-loving Beetle is a stand-in for the author himself. (The third of the company, M'Turk, was based on Kipling and Dunsterville's mutual friend, George Charles Beresford).
In the final chapter, the boys, now adults, meet to exchange the stories of their exploits during their service in India. Two of them, Dick IV and Tertius, tell the story of how Stalky, now an army captain, and his men were besieged by numerically superior foes - united tribes of Malots and Khye-Kheens, - and how he outwitted them by sneaking out, finding his way behind their lines, and, using his knowledge of ancient grievances between the tribes, killing one of the Khye-Kheens and planting evidence suggesting that Malots were to blame, thus triggering a gunfight between them and allowing the besieged force to break out. This mirrors some of Stalky's adventures at the boarding school, such as the one when he lured three of the school's staff (Foxy, Prout and King) into following them to the adjacent grounds of a sympathetic colonel, thus losing their pursuit while they received their beratement for trespassing.
At one point Tertius, who started the whole story by trying to cram it into two sentences, summarises the whole adventure:
"Stalky stalked. That's all there is to it."
***
Fast forward to Leningrad, 60 plus years.
In the 1960s, Arkady Strugatsky - a fan of Kipling's book, - was attempting to translate Stalky & Co. into his native tongue, and this exact line is where he ran into a major problem: Russian language does not have a corresponding word for the verb 'to stalk'. Because Tertius' joke was based on Stalky's nickname, which was used throughout the entire book at this point, it created a dillema: should Arkady want to keep the line as is but in Russian, he would have to go back to the beginning, translate the nickname itself into his language (also leading to the change of title), and make sure that other dialogues still make sense. Otherwise, he would have to skip the pun altogether, or rely on footnotes to explain it to the reader. (I've seen it done this way in a Polish edition of Stalky & Co. - like Russian, Polish also does not have an equivalent of to stalk)
Eventually, the translation remained unpublished; it was considered a lost media until 2012, when, following Boris' death, it was rediscovered in Strugatskys archive by a group of enthusiasts of their work.
But the pun that gave him so much trouble etched itself in Arkady's mind.
So Stalky stalked. What does that make him? Well, the author concluded, it makes him a stalker.
***
Now we move to 1971, when the brothers began writing their new book, and immediately, they started drawing inspiration from Stalky and his company - who would sneak out through a hole in their school's fence, and into the forbidden world beyond, - and combined it with the theme of Man facing something new and incomprehensible, into what would eventually become a new archetype of hero: someone who silently crosses forbidden frontiers; not a scientist in a clean white spacesuit making a peaceful contact with a member of an alien civilization, but someone more down to Earth, with dirty face and equally dirty mouth (another feature borrowed from Stalky & Co.); a rebel, a smuggler, a troublemaker, a survivalist. The chief difference was directional, so to speak, in that Stalky & Co. would sneak out of their boarding school, whereas Red Schuhart and his comrades would sneak into the Zone of Visitation.
And the Strugatskys called them stalkers. Because Stalky stalked.
In a way, this is an interesting example of a linguistic divergent evolution: the word stalker existed in English before, but Arkady 'invented' it anew (by adding suffix -er to the verb stalk to form a noun) and gave it a completely new meaning. The word itself wasn't as commonly used as it is now, since stalker in the sense of 'obsessive harasser' wasn't popularised until 1990s and beyond, therefore there's a non-zero chance he didn't even know about its existance back then.
(btw the Soviet censors hated this theme of the unknown I've mentioned earlier, which ironically also mirrored some of the reactions to Stalky & Co. when it was first published. But that's a topic for a different post that I'll make, to use the title of Arkady and Boris' other book, definitely maybe)
***
OK, so that's how we got the stalkers in Roadside Picnic. Now how did the term breach its paper containment and, once again, acquired a new meaning?
Fast forward again to April 1986. Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant has just fulfilled a five year energy production plan in 2.137 microseconds, and the entire USSR is pooling its people and resources to contain this collossal clusterfuck.
Among those crossing into the Zone of Alienation were students from the Obninsk Institute of Nuclear Energy, who volunteered to go to Chernobyl to monitor its condition after the disaster, when the Sarcophagus was already erected and the power plant resumed operations, but the cleanup effort was far from over. Their chief task was the dosimetric work; as such, they would go out into the field, into uncharted territory, get their readings, and help establish the real image of the post-accident contamination. Highly intellectual, they were not only specialized nuclear scientists, but also fans of Strugatsky brothers and their writing.
Soon, they started drawing parallels between themselves and the stalkers from the Roadside Picnic (and Tarkovsky's film): like them, they were not a bunch of 'eggheads' in pristine lab coats sticking labels on their exhibits, but those who ventured out there to get their hands dirty and get the job done; a team of young, daring adventurers facing an unknown, dangerous reality in a highly restricted area, where every step had to be taken with utmost caution. Their dosimetric duty even somewhat resembled Red Schuhart's mapping of anomalies with his trusty bolts.
Eventually, they borrowed the term as the name for themselves - Студенческий спецотряд Сталкер, or "Students' Special Team Stalker", - and their periodical magazine.
At first they were publishing scientific data, but eventually they also started to include their feuilletons and poems (middle-right and rightmost columns, respectively).
Fifteen years after the disaster, in 2001, employees of a Ukrainian gaming studio GSC World, began work on a new project titled Oblivion Lost. At first, it was meant to be a futuristic, first-person shooter taking place in a high-tech environment, with occasional exploration of Mayan-like structures and temples. Then, after four team members - studio founder Sergiy Grygorovych, lead designer Alexey Sytyanov, Andriy Prokhorov, and Sergiy Karmalsky, - took a trip to the Chernobyl Zone in 2002, GSC World completely reworked their concept, replacing the initial setup with a combination of a real-life Zone of Alienation with Strugatskys' Zone of Visitation. The game also recieved a new codename: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. After years of protracted development, it was finally released to the world in 2007.
The rest is history.
***
So there you have it folks. The main reason we have the term stalker in the context of Roadside Picnic and subsequent works, is because one day in the 60s, a Russian writer ran into a translation problem while working on Kipling's fanfic about himself and his classmates.
Because Stalky stalked. That's all there is to it.
O, to ja
Walter Molino
this man really woke up every morning and committed to painting the absolute dopest fucking pictures anyone could ever have imagined god bless
The second one is based on a real story from 19th November 1958 when a Douglas F4D-1 Skyray of the US Marine Corps attempted to land at MCAD El Toro, but overshot the runway, crashed through the perimeter fence, and ended up on a railway track adjacent to the airbase, damaging the tracks as well. It was then hit by a passenger train, which subsequently derailed, however, fortunately, the accident resulted in no fatalities (the pilot managed to leave the aircraft before the train hit)
The painting is highly dramatised, as it shows the plane hitting the train, not the other way around as it happened.
Ah lads it's that time again
hey if you have a pet or pets you need to reblog this rn and tell me in the tags what their names are. bonus points for including what kind of animal.
Reblog and finish this sentence in the tags: “A true friend wouldn’t _____”
