I wonder what word our Leo Tolstoy had in mind in “War and Peace,” “lost the wolf” or something harsher? I take the English translation off the shelf, there it’s b——ed, apparently buggered, so it’s definitely “lost the wolf.”
Category: books
The Rise and Fall of the Pet Rock Craze | August 05 2026, 00:55
Today I learned that the most successful Christmas product of 1975 was a rock. Just a regular rock. Gary Dahl, an advertiser from California, was sitting in a bar listening to his friends complain about their pets — feeding them, walking them, cleaning up after them — and jokingly said that he had the perfect pet: a rock. It doesn’t need to be fed, doesn’t poop, doesn’t die. What began as a joke that evening turned into a business plan. Dahl bought smooth pebbles from Rosarito Beach in Mexico for about a cent apiece and sold them for $3.95 each. Each rock came in a cardboard carrying case — with “breathing” holes and straw bedding inside. And here’s the main point: the product wasn’t the rock. The product was the accompanying 32-page care and training manual, written with a stone-faced (pardon the pun) seriousness: the commands “sit” and “stay” are learned instantaneously by the pet, “come here” and “fetch” not so much, and it performs the command “die” brilliantly.
In a few months, more than a million units were sold, Dahl became a millionaire, and he was written about in magazines and invited on television shows. By the beginning of 1976, it was all over, warehouses remained with unsold rocks, and attempts to repeat success with other novelty products failed. Dahl died in 2015, but the Pet Rock brand lives on: you can still buy a rock in its branded box today.
(How I found this out. I’m currently reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and came across the phrase “They were the Pet Rock of parenting.” – about Amy’s parents. I didn’t understand it and went to Google what this Pet Rock was.)
Navigating Translation Traps: A Dual-Language Reading of “Gone Girl” | August 04 2026, 03:14
Bought Gone Girl in English in Spain, very interesting, reading it. But I keep a Russian translation on my phone, so if anything difficult comes up, I don’t have to go to a dictionary, but to the translation. And after a third of the book read – blood from my eyes. I don’t know who can like the Russian translation – only those who haven’t seen the original.
Eng: I’m using this journal to get better: to hone my skills, to collect details and observations
Rus: Работа в журнале — временная, она нужна, чтобы оттачивать навыки, копить наблюдения…
Darn, journal – it’s a diary! If they meant “journal”, they use magazine.
Eng: Nick prides himself on his packing skills: He is (was) the loader of the dishwasher, the packer of the holiday bags.
Rus: Ник гордится своим умением укладывать вещи. Ведь он работал (как-то!) загрузчиком посудомоечной машины, собирал сумки для пикника.
Darn, worked as a dishwasher loader… Nick is Amy’s husband, he just helped around the kitchen at home.
Eng: Amy’s cell was being monitored
Rus: Банковская ячейка Эми под наблюдением
Darn, translator, cell [phone] – it’s a phone!
Eng: dropped out of college and moved to Manhattan
Rus: в конце девяностых закончила колледж и перебралась в Манхэттен
Translator, dropped out means she left college halfway through. Not graduated from college.
Eng: I have a dash of ADD, and I’ve always found my wife a bit dazzling
Rus: Хотя у меня есть такой грешок — все преувеличивать
The translator clearly didn’t catch what ADD is 😉 It’s Attention Deficit Disorder
Eng: We have a cold-cut tray if you want, sweetheart
Rus: Там есть лоток с колотым льдом. Если хочешь, бери, дорогой
Cold cuts – that’s sliced meat. The curiosity is intensified by the fact that a page later Nick himself says: “we mainly live on cold cuts” – the translator translated the same word correctly, failing to notice the connection.
Eng: The awakening was mechanical. A spooky ventriloquist-dummy click of the lids: The world is black and then, showtime!
Rus: Обыденный механический процесс. Как будто фокусник распахнул черный ящик. Только что мир окутывала тьма, и вдруг — бац! — свет
Actually, spooky ventriloquist-dummy translates as creepy ventriloquist, and lids – it’s the doll’s eyelids. What’s with the magician darn.
Eng: My life was alarmless
Rus: У меня вообще беспорядочная жизнь
Actually, the author plays with the word alarm (alarm/clock, alarm). Nick means a life without alarm clocks and alarms (alarmless). The translator, however, delivered an abstract “disordered life,” completely losing the author’s irony.
Eng: Greedy journalists with knowing smirks and hollow legs, getting the free buzz before they go somewhere better.
Rus: Жадные журналисты усмехаются и
переминаются с ноги на ногу в ожидании халявного хавчика и бухла — напьются-нажрутся и свалят куда-нибудь еще.
Let’s put aside hollow legs – it’s actually an idiom, meaning the ability to drink a ton of alcohol without showing signs of intoxication, but darn where does shifting from foot to foot come from?
Eng: I was a writer who wrote about TV and movies and books
Rus: Я привык зарабатывать писательским трудом, сочинять романы, сценарии для кинофильмов и телевизионных программ
AAA! Nick wrote about movies and books — he’s a journalist, a pop culture critic. In translation, he became a novelist and screenwriter, which directly contradicts all further text (he himself tells the police: “journalism, pop culture”).
Eng: So there it came, out of nowhere, as Rand begged for his daughter’s return: a killer smile
Rus: Вот она, откуда ни возьмись, улыбка, о которой просил Ранд. Улыбка, так необходимая для его дочери. Улыбка убийцы
Rand didn’t ask for any smile 🙂 he was pleading for his daughter’s return, and at that very moment Nick flashed a smile. The translator invented “Rand’s request,” ruining a key scene of the first part. Plus, the wordplay is lost: a killer smile — primarily “a knockout smile” (see urban dictionary), and the ambiguity here is Flynn’s entire trick.
Eng: …people whose brains don’t work quick enough to blog or link or tweet…
Rus: …недостаточно гибкие, чтобы уйти в блогеры и городить всякую чепуху…
Is this because Twitter got blocked? 🙂
Eng: You guys not close?’ she asked. ‘We are the definition of not close.
Rus: — Ну, парни, не пора ли закругляться? — спросила детектив. — По-моему, пора
It seems the translator got carried away with creativity 🙂
Eng: A number of women – friends of my mom’s, friends of Go’s – had invited Amy to book clubs and Amway parties and girls’ nights at Chili’s.
Rus: Кое-кто — подруги моей мамы, друзья Го — приглашали Эми то в книжный клуб, то на заседание общества «Американский путь», то на вечерний девичник в «Чилиз гриль-бар».
For the translator’s information, Amway is a cosmetics company, which nobody translates into Russian as “American Way” 🙂 And Chili’s is indeed formally known as Chili’s Grill & Bar, although it seems no one knows it by its full name. It’s just a roadside restaurant chain.
And so – the whole book. This is just what I’m listing next to where I decided to make notes with a pencil, and only then, when I looked at “how interesting this was translated.” When I realized that such good stuff comprised half the book, I stopped marking it.
Exploring the Missing Trojans: Homer’s Illusive Episodes | July 21 2026, 18:14
Tomorrow I will go to the Odyssey. Remember the Trojan Horse, the snakes, Laocoön, and “beware of Greeks bearing gifts”? So, it turns out that the most famous episode of the Trojan War isn’t in the “Iliad”—the main poem about this very war, and things with the Odyssey are also tricky. In the Iliad, Homer ends the story earlier: the “Iliad” covers only fifty days of the last year of the siege and ends with the funeral of Hector—there’s no horse, no death of Achilles, nor fall of the city in it. In the “Odyssey,” the horse appears a couple of times but only in passing: the bard Demodocus sings about it at a feast, Menelaus recalls how Helen walked around the horse and mocked the voices of the Greeks hidden inside. That’s it. There is no elaborate scene of assault and fire in Homer’s works at all. And that canonical story—with the spy Sinon, Laocoön strangled by the snakes, and burning Troy—is from the Roman Virgil, the second book of the “Aeneid,” written in the 20s of the 1st century BC, almost seven hundred years after Homer. It is precisely from there that the plot leaked into pop culture.
But Virgil did not invent the horse out of nowhere. Between him and Homer, there was an entire “epic cycle”—a series of poems that covered the entire war from beginning to end: “Cypria” (prehistory: the judgment of Paris, the abduction of Helen), then “Iliad”, then “Aethiopis” (the death of Achilles), then “Little Iliad”—here’s where they finally build the horse,—then “The Sack of Ilium”, where they roll it into the city and the massacre begins, and then “The Returns”, “Odyssey”, and a somewhat odd “Telegony” for dessert. Out of the eight poems of the cycle, only two Homeric ones fully survived. The other six—including both with all the salt about the horse—have disappeared and are known only from a later synopsis-summary and scattered quotations, totaling about a hundred lines. That means we have the middle and epilogue of the story at hand, while the beginning and the climax in the original are lost.
Turns out, we’ve been retelling a scene for centuries, the authentic text of which we don’t have.
P.S. A separate story about whether Homer was blind. And whether there was a Homer. It’s all very complicated 🙂 But that’s a story for another time.
The Future of Fiction: Satire and Automation in “The Silver Eggheads” | July 20 2026, 16:48
I came across the book “The Silver Eggheads” (1961) by Fritz Leiber—a satirical novel about the future of literature, featuring “wordmills” and, darn it, so many parallels with what is being done now.
In the novel, wordmills are enormous machines that have completely replaced writers in the production of fiction. They mechanically “grind” words, producing an endless stream of novels—a so-called “wordwooze”, a product perfectly tailored to the tastes of the mass reader. It causes almost narcotic pleasure: the reader swallows the book and immediately forgets its content, remaining hungry for the next one.
Human writers in the novel still exist, but purely decoratively. They don’t write a single line—they only “service” the wordmills (by pressing buttons) and maintain a public image: they wear bohemian outfits, live in attics, stir up scandals, start affairs—all that the public expects from a “real writer.” Writing has turned into show business and cosplay, while creativity itself is left to machines.
Writers, imagining that they truly can write, rise up and destroy the wordmills. And then a catastrophe is revealed: none of them can compose anything readable—the skill has been lost for generations. The publishing industry panics, searching for a solution.
That’s when the titular Silver Eggheads come into play—preserved human brains in egg-shaped metal containers, brains of writers and thinkers of the past, stored for decades in the “Wisdom of Ages.” The publishers hope that these brains will be able to write books again. The Eggheads, however, having become rather snide and peculiar entities over years of pure contemplation, don’t rush to cooperate.
The plot then turns into a whirlpool of intrigues around these thirty brains—they suddenly become the only “productive asset” in the entire publishing industry.
Meanwhile, the main trouble becomes clear: the Eggheads do not want to write. Two hundred years of pure thought have turned them into haughty contemplators—to them, human novels are trivial and petty. The first attempts to make them write yield either mockeries or texts so strange that they are unsellable. The characters eventually realize that the Eggheads need not orders but motivation: experiences, sensations, participation in life.
Funny book, I should read it sometime.
Exploring Ambivalence: A Review of Andy Weir’s “Project Hail Mary” | June 19 2026, 14:11
I finished reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. My feelings are mixed.
On one hand, Weir is an absolute genius of hard science fiction. It’s evident that the universe is developed down to the smallest details. The author doesn’t just make up facts; the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, space navigation — everything is based on real modern scientific concepts. The problems the main character solves are logical, and following the plot development is insanely interesting. Pure delight for the inner geek.
But on the other hand… throughout the novel, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was reading young adult or even children’s literature.
For instance… Ryland Grace, the main character, behaves not like a leading scientist stranded alone in deep space on a mission to save humanity, but like a hyperactive school teacher (which he actually was). His inner monologue is filled with childlike wonder, and instead of normal adult swearing in stressful situations, he uses amusing euphemisms. And generally, the idea that a single scientist should be able to quickly retrofit a spacecraft on the fly with a “sticks and stones” approach just to make it work is – well.. that’s something.
Too tame and kind space. All conflicts on Earth before the launch are resolved suspiciously easily thanks to the “absolute power” of project leader Eva Stratt. Her actions often look caricatured, not realistic. And when the alien Rocky appears… Their friendship develops by the canons of a classic Disney fairy tale. They instantly find a common language, they have perfect mutual understanding, zero cultural barriers, or dangerous misunderstandings. Everything is very cute, conflict-free, and “on friendship.” Adding some conflict for sharpness would have been nice. Everything always goes smoothly for the main character.
Writing style. Short, chopped sentences, very simple language, chewing over every thought, constant exclamations. The text seems specifically adapted so that a twelve-year-old could easily read it. The plot moves in circles: a problem arises => Grace in panic => Grace calculates something on paper / Rocky helps with an alloy => problem solved. And so every 30 pages. Because of this, towards the end, the sense of real danger is lost: the reader knows in advance that the author has another scientific trump card up his sleeve.
As a result, it turned out to be a cool, very scientifically accurate… comic book. A kind, optimistic fairy tale, wrapped in relatively impeccable physics and mathematics. There’s definitely a lot to praise the book for, but if you’re expecting a deep psychological drama or existential horror from fiction — this is clearly not for you.
Who read it, what did you think? Did you also catch this feeling of a “kindergarten” on a spaceship, or am I being picky?
Rediscovering Pyotr Boborykin: The Prolific 19th Century Wordsmith | June 13 2026, 16:47
I find it astonishing that an unknown to me Pyotr Boborykin wrote heaps in the 19th century, introduced words like “intelligentsia” and “nonsense-maker” into the language. Considered the most prolific writer of the 19th century. Almost no one knows him besides a few philologists. And yet, the guy was a star in his time.
Boborykin was deeply concerned that he would remain in the history of literature as a “secondary” author, so he wrote furiously. He authored about 20 large novels and countless smaller works. 12 volumes, 350 pages each. Essentially, he was the Darya Dontsova of his era. He has a novel “Vasiliy Terkin” which you might have heard of, but not his; you’re likely thinking of the poem by Tvardovsky by the same name, who knew nothing about the novel at all, these were different Terkins.
For instance, finding the novel “Doctor Tsybulka” online is very challenging; there’s only one PDF in the form of a reprint with pre-revolutionary orthography.
Vodka and Revelations: Notes from “Project Hail Mary” Unseen in Film | May 25 2026, 04:15
I’m almost finished with Project Hail Mary. I’ll write separately about my impressions. Today – some notes along the way that somehow didn’t make it into the movie.
Russian engineer Olesya Ilyukhina drinks vodka from a frighteningly large glass at a meeting, and during the rocket launch, she joyfully screams and downs one shot after another. In her personal baggage for the space flight, 5 liters of vodka in bags are found. Grace directly asks the Russian scientist Dmitry: “Are all Russians crazy?”, to which he smiles and replies: “Yes. It’s the only way to be Russian and happy at the same time.” Ilyukhina, planning her own death, asks to be provided with heroin. She wants to die from an overdose to experience “maximum pleasure” before death (while the Chinese Yao pragmatically chooses a gun). During the launch of the ship’s modules (cabin, laboratory, and sleeping compartment), broadcasted from the Flight Control Center in Moscow, Russian cosmonaut Olesya Ilyukhina drinks vodka and yells at the TV: “Don’t screw up my home, bastards from Roscosmos!” But overall, Russian space technologies are occasionally even praised – for instance, it is claimed that experts from around the world have recognized the Russian “Orlan” spacesuit as the safest and most reliable, so it is used in the mission.
When the main character (Grace) sees the Black American scientist Martin Dubois, he turns to the project director Stratton: “Dubois turns out to be Black! Surprising that you allowed that! Aren’t you afraid he’ll ruin the mission with talk about rap music and basketball?”
When they decide to send Grace to space forcibly, they lock him in a special room at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. This room resembles a college dormitory but has a steel door and bars on the windows. The hero quips about this: “Why is there a prison cell at the Baikonur launch complex? I don’t know. Ask the Russians.”
Grace complains about how the work with malfunction reports is organized during the spaceship’s preparation. Instead of sending an email, they bring him stacks of paper documents. Grace: “Because Russians do things a certain way, and it’s easier to work with them than to complain about it.”
Out of scientific curiosity, Grace decides to observe how his alien friend Rocky eats. It turns out, Rocky is a “monostome”, meaning he both eats and excretes through the same opening in his body. Grace watches as a gray lump falls out of the alien’s stomach with a moist sound, after which Rocky tosses pieces of fresh meat into the same opening. Grace concludes: “The subject defecates from the mouth… Yep, that was pretty disgusting.”
The caricature nature of the characters, stereotypes, fantastic coincidences, and “plot contrivances” like deus ex machina are somewhat annoying.
Mastering Cross-Posting: From Facebook Frustrations to Dual Blogging Excellence | May 23 2026, 14:28
I have perfected the cross-posting from Facebook to my two blog sites [which almost no one visits] – beinginamerica.com and raufaliev.com. When a new post is published on Facebook, a mechanism is triggered to translate the post into English, process attached images, generate descriptions for them, create a title based on the text of the post and descriptions of the images, generate tags from the same basis, record the post in turso db – this is a cloud database, free up to certain limits, create embeddings via openai, record in qdrant cloud – this is also a cloud database, but vector-based, and finally, upload images to wordpress via API, and publish the post in English and Russian via API.
All would be well, but of all the APIs, the silliest one is Facebook’s. Firstly, for pages like mine, transitioned to New Experience, it’s almost impossible to use most of this API. Well, it’s possible, but you have to spend a long time proving to Facebook that you really need it, by showing startup documents, demonstrating the application, etc. Obviously, they are reluctant to deal with something that takes content out of their system. In addition, the token that gives access to the latest messages is relatively short-lived (possibly a few weeks), and it needs to be obtained anew through a browser only. So, any automation requires regular attention, otherwise it breaks.
If you mess up and don’t offload the latest posts through this Facebook Graph API in time, they just disappear from the list of recent ones and that’s it, no more API access to them. The only way is to request an archive download from Facebook. This download is also rather silly – it requires a lot of transformations and removing unnecessary stuff. For example, in the file containing posts, which I process, for some reason there are links that I sent in comments without accompanying text. And the comments are in a separate file!
To assign tags, I had to solve a separate challenge. Here’s the thing: there are about 10,000 posts over all time. That’s a big chunk, and you can’t build tags from it because it doesn’t fit into the contextual window of the LLM. But you need to. So, I did this: a script takes random posts from the 10,000 in such a volume that their total size is just below the specified limit in tokens, and at the end of this block, it adds the prompt “generate the most common tags for me, 30 pieces” (I simplify the prompt used). In the end, I ran this 10 times and got 10 sets of tags with 30 pieces each, generated for different slices of the database. That made 300 tags, some of which are complete duplicates, while others are synonyms and closely related in meaning. All this is fed into the LLM, and we get a list of tags and a hierarchy of tags. Now we have a limited set of tags that reflect the 10,000 posts as closely as possible. Turns out, that in almost 20 years on Facebook, my breakdown is as follows:
Tag Posts
==================================================
#Russia 3412
#Thoughts 3146
#Tech 3105
#Culture 2765
#Hobbies 2726
#AI 1603
#Science 1367
#Software 1358
#Travel 1298
#Learning 1138
#Society 1050
#Nature 958
#Education 915
#Business 902
#Art 894
#Programming 889
#Humor 840
#History 807
#Gadgets 750
#Moscow 713
#USA 614
#Cinema 567
#Webdev 493
#Music 476
#Sports 473
#Mindset 443
#Auto 400
#Books 386
…
and so on. This list includes both tags from the limited list and tags that the LLM appointed to content simply because it didn’t find anything suitable in the limited one.
Tags from the limited list became categories on the site. The rest of the tags + these just became regular wordpress tags.
As for image search. I had two ideas on how to do it. The first – OpenCLIP. It’s pretty straightforward but requires hosting the model somewhere. Easy on my machine, but inconvenient to start it each time, plus I planned to move the migrator to a cheap server on Amazon. It’s also okay to calculate in cloud models, but you have to pay a bit, which is yet another dependency. But the main thing – it works quite well without it. I generate descriptions for images using OpenAI, which is used for translating into English anyway, and then create embeddings using a large model. So far, all search tests are a great success. Especially when there’s text on the image, and it’s a big question whether OpenCLIP would have interpreted it successfully.
In the end:
1) wordpress raufaliev.com – free
2) wordpress beinginamerica.com – free
3) turso db where all posts are stored – free
4) qdrant cloud where embeddings are stored – free
5) openai for translation and image descriptions – not free, but inexpensive (cost $30 for post processing over a year).
I attach two screenshots – how the search by images works, and by texts, as well as the migrator dashboard.
Navigating Simple English in “Project Hail Mary” | May 10 2026, 15:30
I’ve read about a quarter of Project Hail Mary so far. The English is very simple, easy to read, captivating; the movie so far follows the book closely, but still, it makes reading quite interesting. However, I generally find it hard to read fiction because I keep getting distracted to google stuff. I reached the phrase “..I used the bathroom (or “head” I guess, because I was on the ship)…” and it got me thinking, it’s interesting to learn that the toilet is called differently on a ship not just in Russian. And why “head”? Turns out that “galley” in Danish and German is “head”. Interestingly, galleys are also found on airplanes, and historically, galleys were used only by sailors; officers did not use them.
The text is very childish, and understandably so – the main character is a physics teacher at a school after all. All these motherfluffer and dang it, gosh darn it, fudge, holy moly, for cripes’ sake instead of for Christ’s sake, there’s even bull-puckey instead of bullshit. “To go wee” is how they say “to pee” in the book. I recall, the day before yesterday we entered a mattress store, and the consultant, while discussing the topic “if one of you goes to the toilet, the other won’t even notice that the first one got up” – well, because the mattresses are so soft – actively used the verb “to pee”. So what? 🙂
Update: when the physics teacher encounters an alien ship on page 120, the chapter ends with holy fucking shit! That’s what all the rest was leading to;)
Occasionally, there are quite funny expressions that can even be used in life 🙂 For instance, the main character asks, “Who pooped in your Rice Krispies?” which is the idiom “to poop in someone’s cereal” – “who messed up your meal”.
In conclusion, if you’re choosing your first book to read in English – this one is at the top of my list. Even something seemingly simple like “Harry Potter” is more sophisticated, in my opinion. Here, there’s a lot of dialogue, school level but almost slang-free vocabulary, and a pretty interesting plot. Plus, it’s real science fiction, where the author educates the reader about the scientific method, how the world works, etc., all from the viewpoint of the hero, a physics teacher, who shares various facts and thoughts on how physics works, relating it to the plot in his interactions with other characters or thoughts to himself (rather than directly to the reader). It’s middle school level so far, but maybe it’ll get more complex later on.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 