asciilifeform: there was a great soviet cartoon about a kid who hates history class and then gets a time machine

asciilifeform: it's mostly a product of my diseased imagination, but has some grounding in soviet history

asciilifeform: soviet tale - one drunken idiot tells another, 'i was at this party, and this guy must've been a serious contraband hero, he's loaded - i stumbled around, looking for the throne, and found a little bathroom with golden toilet!' - other: 'fucktard, so it was you who took a shit in the saxophone!'

asciilifeform: like a soviet satellite in 'graveyard orbit'

asciilifeform: funny how my father actually spent a good deal of life doing the same (reversing western consumer junk for the soviet market)

asciilifeform: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/060105_soviet_lessons.shtml

asciilifeform: TestingUnoDosTre: 'post-soviet lessons for post-american century'

asciilifeform: orlov had a neat piece on soviet 50yo middle manager suicides

asciilifeform: msdos was in some very real sense 'soviet' - as in, all the known joys, but a kid can build explosive xxxx at his parents' dacha without being harassed

asciilifeform: (rezun's classic 'soviet military intelligence')

asciilifeform: Officially, all Soviet representatives regard these parasites with touching feelings of friendship, but privately they call them 'shit-eaters' ('govnoed'). It is difficult to say where this expression originated, but it is truly the only name they deserve. The use of this word has become so firmly entrenched in Soviet embassies that it is impossible to imagine any other name for these people. A conversation mi ☟︎☟︎

asciilifeform: 'In examining different kinds of agents, people from the free world who have sold themselves to the GRU, one cannot avoid touching on yet another category, perhaps the least appealing of all. Officially one is not allowed to call them agents, and they are not agents in the full sense of being recruited agents. We are talking about the numerous members of overseas societies of friendship with the Soviet Union.

asciilifeform: 1987: 'Eventually, Rust saw Moscow. At first, he wanted to land in the Kremlin. But then he decided to try to land in Red Square, which was full of people... Rust was soon arrested, and convicted of illegally crossing the Soviet Border, and "hooliganism." He was sentenced to four years in prison. The case caused quite a stir in Russia. For a while, Red Square was jokingly referred to as Moscow's "third airport

asciilifeform: it/sp/ro, etc. 'singable' languages are very amenable to the soviet linguist (hard head, wall, dictionary) treatment

asciilifeform: they'd like to dominate the historically rus. west, and own the soviet-built factories which they had no part in creating

asciilifeform: x86 reminds me of certain old soviet apartments, with toilet in the kitchen behind a curtain.

asciilifeform: - orlov's 'post-soviet lessons for post-american century'

asciilifeform: there is a related soviet joke. abramowitch (generic jew, not the oligarch) calls a friend who was over for dinner last night: ☟︎

asciilifeform: more like a soviet nomenklatura's grocery store

asciilifeform: (post-soviet kid's tv is an odd place)

asciilifeform: in soviet army, losing your weapon was (theoretically) a capital offense.

asciilifeform: supply of soviet z80 clones is a non-renewable resource after all.

asciilifeform: just as soviet pdp-11s would've been, if anyone had wanted them.

asciilifeform: incidentally, if you apply the principle described above, the u.s. economy is far more 'sovietized' than the soviet one ever was

asciilifeform: re: heat sinks: this is how the americans spotted the radiothermally-powered (Pu core) soviet satellites - enormous fins.

asciilifeform: phun phact - in soviet prison camps, notes ('scribbles', roughly translated from the argot) went around freely from one end of the archipelago to another. (how? bribe a guard)

asciilifeform: from btce russian trollbox: '[gox] will end up like soviet gensec: after prolonged illness, perished unexpectedly...'

asciilifeform: soviet nuke subs, it is said, have manually-cranked reactor controls.

asciilifeform: (from the 'weird soviet crap' dept. of my brain)

asciilifeform: what soviet arms, with the possible exception of trench-diggers at tbilisi, quelled the rebellions?

asciilifeform: perhaps in soviet-era military delphinarium?

asciilifeform: 'when we clean out his starfish, quickly he'll remember how he undermined soviet power and the party in his research institute with his cybernetics, this scoundrel...'

asciilifeform: question should've been more specific: 'what if' a 'soviet clone' of mpex, that is, one which bows in agreement to all of the technical decisions.

asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: some ex-soviet badlands still use exchanges with mechanical Strowger switches. and in-band. bluebox there.

asciilifeform: one day some bored kid will dig through old soviet crap, find a footnote that leads to a working rpg-7 under a mailbox.

asciilifeform: ke this: a man of between fifty-five and sixty-five years of age who has never served in the army, never had access to secret documents, does not carry or own a weapon, knows nothing about hand-to-hand fighting, does not possess any secret equipment and doesn't support the Comunists, does not read the newspapers, was never in the Soviet Union and has never met any Soviet citizens, leads a lonely, introspective

asciilifeform: "If the reader had access to real dossiers on the secret agents of spetsnaz he would be disappointed and probably shocked, because the agents of spetsnaz bear no resemblance to the fine, upstanding, young and handsome heroes of spy films. Soviet military intelligence is looking for an entirely different type of person as a candidate for recruitment. A portrait of an ideal agent for spetsnaz emerges something li

asciilifeform: 'article 58' of the soviet penal code was also 'law,' used in this exact way.

asciilifeform: confession: at one point when i was younger, i did succumb to the temptation to replicate various soviet experiments and put current through my brain. ☟︎

asciilifeform: soviet version of the joke: 'man buys a ticket, rips it up and walks - to spite the trolley conductor.'

asciilifeform: (at least, soviet 1st grade.)

asciilifeform: the inevitable boojum of conventional computing is that a boobytrap, no matter how clever, could eventually be stumbled upon by some clever soviet kid with a copy of 'ida'

asciilifeform: afaik every man who came of age in the post-soviet lands has eaten dog (army)

asciilifeform: this is how soviet clones of DEC chips ended up exact duplicates, complete with the (poorly translated, with a dictionary, by DEC) profanities

asciilifeform: just like soviet pdp clones often ran unmodified pirated os

asciilifeform: curious thing. looks and weighs like a soviet tv set, but with supervga res.

asciilifeform: btw the chinese have scholars, of 'soviet collapse studies,' and some of their output is rather interesting and educational ☟︎☟︎