XD: The Writing Shop

Person?

+1	100.0%	[ 11 ]
Total Votes:			[ 11 ]

[AphroditesChild]

Teehee. Bumps.

[Par Exemple]

AphroditesChild

Teehee. Bumps.

Is it time for your daily nommings?

[AphroditesChild]

Par Exemple

AphroditesChild

Teehee. Bumps.

Is it time for your daily nommings?

Aaaaaaalmost forgot about that. *noms a little on thread*

How are you doing today?

[Par Exemple]

AphroditesChild

Par Exemple

AphroditesChild

Teehee. Bumps.

Is it time for your daily nommings?

Aaaaaaalmost forgot about that. *noms a little on thread*

How are you doing today?

I'm good. After I finish respondign to a few things I'm going to try Monster Galaxy, how about you?

[AphroditesChild]

Par Exemple

AphroditesChild

Par Exemple

AphroditesChild

Teehee. Bumps.

Is it time for your daily nommings?

Aaaaaaalmost forgot about that. *noms a little on thread*

How are you doing today?

I'm good. After I finish respondign to a few things I'm going to try Monster Galaxy, how about you?

Quiet an entertaining game, isn't it?

Doing good. Finishing some homework and such.

[Par Exemple]

AphroditesChild

Par Exemple

AphroditesChild

Par Exemple

AphroditesChild

Teehee. Bumps.

Is it time for your daily nommings?

Aaaaaaalmost forgot about that. *noms a little on thread*

How are you doing today?

I'm good. After I finish respondign to a few things I'm going to try Monster Galaxy, how about you?

Quiet an entertaining game, isn't it?

Doing good. Finishing some homework and such.

I haven't gotten to play yet, I thought the announcement yesterday was saying they had an off facebook version, and I don't have a facebook and seriously don't want one. They said the off-facebook version won't be out till probably 2012... *cries*

[AphroditesChild]

Par Exemple

AphroditesChild

Par Exemple

AphroditesChild

Par Exemple

AphroditesChild

Teehee. Bumps.

Is it time for your daily nommings?

Aaaaaaalmost forgot about that. *noms a little on thread*

How are you doing today?

I'm good. After I finish respondign to a few things I'm going to try Monster Galaxy, how about you?

Quiet an entertaining game, isn't it?

Doing good. Finishing some homework and such.

I haven't gotten to play yet, I thought the announcement yesterday was saying they had an off facebook version, and I don't have a facebook and seriously don't want one. They said the off-facebook version won't be out till probably 2012... *cries*

Ugh... that sucks... qAq;;;

Totally understandable that you don't want an facebook account. The only reason I have one, was because my mother forced me to. I only use it to play games.

[Shafik-cso]

Very nice shop you've got. ~~~ヾ(＾∇＾)
-throws block of text at you via pm-
(/-_・)/D・・・・・------ → ('-'*) <(...♪)

[Par Exemple]

Shafik-cso

Very nice shop you've got. ~~~ヾ(＾∇＾)
-throws block of text at you via pm-
(/-_・)/D・・・・・------ → ('-'*) <(...♪)

I did get your application. At the moment I am neither accepting, nor rejecting your app. It actually really shocked me this morning because I opened the e-mail and suddenly there was a picture of a really handsome man, and I had no idea what was going on (I check my e-mail on my phone almost as soon as I wake up). In anycase I have glanced over it. I actually have a fairly serious love of Russian History. I actually have a gigantic book on Russian History for Christmas. It's still staring at me, waiting to be read, but I'm working on it. My area of expertise is acctually about the time of Pushkin and the Decembrist revolts, right before the freeing of the serfs, but I have a pretty good understanding of history and Russian history in the time period you're looking at.

What I'm saying is that from glancing over it, it looks like a good chance of a yes, but I want to actually read everything before I just accept.

[Shafik-cso]

Par Exemple

Russia is a rather fascinating country to study, I have to admit it was always my favorite subject in school. The only problem I had with it was that the subject was always heavily biased on what the author wanted the reader to base their political views upon. Why bother addressing the real issues with the country when you portray certain views as the typical beliefs of a group rather than those of a tiny subset of it?
-sigh-
Anyway, thanks for considering, and sorry for causing the confusion (yep, Alex will do that to ya, jk). o(^^o)(o^^)o

Edit: Lol, almost forgot the patronymics, are you familiar with Russian naming conventions?

Anna(russian diminutives being 'Anya' or 'Nyura') Ivanovna(daughter of Ivan) Zakharova

Regular forms: Anya; Nyura.
Tender forms: Anechka, Annushka; Nyurochka, Nyusha.
Somewhere between regular and tender: Anyuta.
Rude forms: An'ka; Nyurka.

Alexander Pinkerton

Regular: Alik.
Tender and rude simultaneously: Al'ka.

In Russia, when you're referring to someone in a formal setting, you don't just use their first name, but their first name and patronymic, i.e. "Anna Ivanovna" or their diminutive. Note that unlike in the West, dimunitive names are never used in formal situations — only full ones. Oddly, even though addressing a person by the first name and patronymic is very formal, addressing them with the patronymic alone is seen as highly informal, even less formal than addressing others by just their first name.

When it comes to name orders, Russian does not stick to just one, unlike English or Japanese. The most formal order is family name first, followed by given name, followed by patronymic (e.g. Ivanov Ivan Ivanovich). However, this order is only used on official documents and when introducing or referring to people in a very formal setting (for instance, dinner at the Kremlin or a courtroom in session), never as a direct form of address. This does not differ too much from the equivalent Western usage; think of the situations someone might use the phrasing "Smith, John Michael," and you have a rough (but hardly complete) idea when "Zakharova Anna Ivanova" might be used in Russia. The more Western order of given name-patronymic-family name (Anna Ivanova Zakharova) is a less official, but more commonly used way of giving someone's full name. When the patronymic is left out both the Western (Anna Zakharova) and Eastern (Zakharova Anna) orders are acceptable. The media nowadays uses the Western order almost exclusively (which also means that most official anime dubs reverse the Japanese names, just like they do in the West), while in schools and colleges the Eastern order is generally preferred. The only strict rule in Russian naming orders is that the patronymic can only be placed immediately after the given name (so "Anna Zakharova Ivanova" is always unacceptable). The surname alone is used in some formal situations as surname and first letters of name and patronymic in many documents. It assumes authority of the caller, such as of teacher in a class.
The Russian equivalents to Mr. and Mrs. aren't really used save in older literature. Lack of an easy pronoun to call someone actually became a problem a few years ago. "Gospodin" or "gospozha" (equivalents to Mr. and Mrs. respectively) were only recently returned to use and are used mostly by businessmen or civil servants to address each other, very formally. (Don't call a Russian the equivalent of "citizen"; that's how cops address a perp, so it sounds offensive.) The address "comrade" is used only in the army and in the Communist Party, which works in this setting. The most common forms of address between common people are the Russian equivalents of "man", "young man", "woman" or "girl". Note that "girl" ("devushka" ) is MUCH more preferable then "woman" ("zhenshina" wink as the latter is used for middle aged women and may and frequently will be interpreted as connoting significant age and thus offensive (in this sense, it's a lot like Ma'am for people residing outside of the Southern United States). Children mostly address unfamiliar adults as "dyadya/dyadenka" and "tyotya/tyotenka". These words literally mean "uncle" and "aunt", but they do not imply family ties in this case. Similarly, in the predominately Muslim regions of Russia and the former USSR it may be customary for young and middle-aged people to address all elderly people as "father" and "mother", saying either "otets" and "mat'" in Russian, or a corresponding term in the local language.
When writing full Russian names in English, you either skip the patronymic, initial both names, or do it in full. Usually. Some people get the "Name Patronymic-initial Surname" treatment, most famously Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, frequently called "Vladimir V. Putin" in the Western press.

[Shafik-cso]

Info bump!

The Gulag


Gulag is an acronym for Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-Trudovyk Lagerey i Koloniy, which in English roughly means (now take a deep breath) "The Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies" and was the name of the NKVD wing that administered the prison labor camps.
Note that a similar labor camp system existed in Tsarist Russia, but it was only used to imprison actual revolutionaries, not merely tellers of anti-Tsar jokes. It was also much nicer—Lenin himself noted that it was one of the best times of his life, with the rich Siberian countryside doing wonders for his health and lax policing leaving plenty of time for the revolutionary prisoners to fraternize and catch up on their reading. When he and the Bolsheviks took over, they went out of their way to show those incompetent Tsarists how prison camps are supposed to be run.

Gulag was a term not used much in Russia itself at the time ("the camps" was the most commonly used term), it has expanded to cover the entire system of Soviet oppression.
The history of the Gulag system has been covered elsewhere, so a few general points:
People could be sent to the labor camps for stuff like anti-government jokes. The conditions were horrible, leading to lots and lots of deaths. The guards would summarily execute prisoners for no reason, the physical slave labor was beyond exhausting, and in the summer months the prisoners were "fed" only bowls of water so many died of starvation.

The labor camps did contain many genuine violent criminals and gangsters - which is the main reason why the Russian Mafia ended up in the US. When the US said it would take all Russian Jews who'd been imprisoned, the Soviet Union gave them their Jews, plus their gangsters (some of whom also happened to be Jewish, especially those from the Odessa gangs).

Not all the camps were up in Siberia. Some where incarcerated inside fenced-in slum villages across the Soviet countries, where many died from the terrible conditions, lack of fresh water and rampant diseases.

The Soviet Union put many peace protesters and dissidents in mental asylums when the labor camps became overpopulated. These people were mixed in with genuine mental patients—and Russia was not the only Warsaw Pact country to do this.Stalin even stated that communism is good for everyone, so anyone who disagreed must be insane.

The Special Project Prisons or Sharashkas. These were low-security prisons attached to special research institutes. Useful engineers and scientists were picked from the prison system to work at these. They had much better accomodations than at normal prisons. Cryptography, nuclear weapons and the Soviet space program all used Sharashkas.

Note be careful next time you call USSR an empire of evil. Call it a dissident-unfriendly empire of high security.