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Winter pleasures
1 January 2026 05:09 pmI am currently wearing a ridiculous number of layers (thermal vest, heavy brushed-cotton shirt, thin jumper, sleeveless hand-knitted tank top, heavy roll-neck Aran pure wool jumper given to me after it had shrunk in the wash from XL to S, silk scarf under the roll-neck to keep the neck of the jumper clean, fluffy novelty scarf wound many times over it -- and a similar arrangement on my lower half, ( Read more... )
Since the temperature outside my bed was 49F I didn't feel like getting up until finally forced to do so by the demands of my bodily functions, so spent a further three happy if somewhat mindless hours watching uploads on YouTube from Russian channels celebrating the New Year with archive footage, Project Zomboid playthoughs (a game I have never played and shall never be able to play, but for some reason find entertaining to watch), and, by an inevitable process of intersection, Project Zomboid videos *in Russian*... the game being popular enough to have generated its own circle of players there, and even its own Project Russia setting, which remaps everything in the game to a 1990s Russia instead of 1990s USA (the game developers are not, in any case, American, so the original setting reflects zombie movie culture rather than anything else ;-)
After which YouTube proceeded to suggest to me an hour-long interview with Mikhail Boyarsky from 2007, which turned out to be, as so often with the lively Boyarsky, highly entertaining... and also turned out to be completely without subtitles of any kind, either English, Russian, or auto-translated, as I discovered about 15 minutes in when I actually wanted to check what had just been said ;-) ( Read more... )The great thing about Boyarsky as a performer is that he has absolutely no embarrassment and no inhibitions :-D)
† "Mama"....
At any rate I am feeling unusually pleased with myself for once -- and almost ready to gird my loins and tackle the broken-spined paperback 1960s/70s Penguin "АБВ of Russian" (ABV -- the first three letters of the Cyrillic alphabet) that I have just acquired, with an eye to formal grammatical study!
(Never mind grammar, there are words that I don't know in the very first lesson: 'school-desk', 'blackboard'. This is what happens when your vocabulary acquisition consists of words like "honour", "sword" and "hand-to-hand combat"... :-P)
Edit: heating is on. Temperature in here now 54F -- am sweating a little!
Since the temperature outside my bed was 49F I didn't feel like getting up until finally forced to do so by the demands of my bodily functions, so spent a further three happy if somewhat mindless hours watching uploads on YouTube from Russian channels celebrating the New Year with archive footage, Project Zomboid playthoughs (a game I have never played and shall never be able to play, but for some reason find entertaining to watch), and, by an inevitable process of intersection, Project Zomboid videos *in Russian*... the game being popular enough to have generated its own circle of players there, and even its own Project Russia setting, which remaps everything in the game to a 1990s Russia instead of 1990s USA (the game developers are not, in any case, American, so the original setting reflects zombie movie culture rather than anything else ;-)
After which YouTube proceeded to suggest to me an hour-long interview with Mikhail Boyarsky from 2007, which turned out to be, as so often with the lively Boyarsky, highly entertaining... and also turned out to be completely without subtitles of any kind, either English, Russian, or auto-translated, as I discovered about 15 minutes in when I actually wanted to check what had just been said ;-) ( Read more... )The great thing about Boyarsky as a performer is that he has absolutely no embarrassment and no inhibitions :-D)
† "Mama"....
At any rate I am feeling unusually pleased with myself for once -- and almost ready to gird my loins and tackle the broken-spined paperback 1960s/70s Penguin "АБВ of Russian" (ABV -- the first three letters of the Cyrillic alphabet) that I have just acquired, with an eye to formal grammatical study!
(Never mind grammar, there are words that I don't know in the very first lesson: 'school-desk', 'blackboard'. This is what happens when your vocabulary acquisition consists of words like "honour", "sword" and "hand-to-hand combat"... :-P)
Edit: heating is on. Temperature in here now 54F -- am sweating a little!