Chicken ovulation. It's what's for dinner.

Evening. Usilova Street. Matvey, Tishka, and myself are in the early stages of primitive video game addiction. The subject of our gadget-lust – an electronic doodad called “Nu Pogodi”, in tribute to the children’s cartoon of the same name, about a perpetually hungry and unsatisfied wolf pursuing a perpetually over-cute and fuzzy bunny wabbit. Think Wile E. Coyote, Tom & Jerry, and their ill-fated ilk. You always bet on cuter critter. Except this handheld game-slash-alarm-clock had nothing to do with scoring some delicious medium-rare rabbit in wine sauce.

Having grown tired of the futile, and often – painful – hunt, Mr. Wolf has settled on quieter pursuits. The name of the game today was… chickens. Or rather, chicken eggs. Chicken eggs, rolling down the sides of four chicken coops. The chickens were, disturbingly, in a perpetual state of rapid-fire ovulation. Such were the demands of the Communist economy on even the most bird-brained of citizens – the eggs would blast out of the chicken coops, and if not caught in time with your wicker basket, would fall to the ground, and break – releasing a fully hatched chick, who would run off into the sunset. Lose three chicks, and you lose the game. You will probably lose your house, your wallet, and your virginity too, if the three escaped chicks tattle on you to the KGB. But fortunately for us, the worst they could do was go and report us to the communal farm overseer, who would then simply have us deported to Siberia, as was the style at the time. Stay tuned for “Nu Pogodi 2: Frost-Bitten, Twice Shy”.

There were several glaring problems with the egg-catching scenario. Firstly, the coops were clearly not designed with these mutant hyper-menstruating chickens in mind. Secondly, the wicker basket for catching eggs must surely contain an inter-dimensional pocket, for all the mass-produced omelet-to-be’s are not making a dent in neither its weight nor its volume. Though it is true that someone else’s flagrant disregard for the laws of physics is our infinite replayability, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps we were looking too deeply into the meaning behind this game. But that’s as far as our immature mental processes could take us.

Enter, Dima’s step-brother. I’ll just call him Big Dima, because I don’t remember his name. He was older than all of our 8-year-old bunch – a whole 13 or 14 years old, Big Dima was a veritable guru, whose wisdom was unquestionable by our posse. And so we listened, mouths agape, as Big Dima regaled us anklebiters with tales of what awaited contestants in the Sysyphian labor which was “Nu Pogodi”, upon reaching 100,000 points. You see, according to Big Dima, these inexpensive gaming devices that every kid on the block seemed to have access to were in fact harboring a truly high tech secret – when you reached the requisite number of points, the rabbit would come out, and would dance a little jig with the wolf! Right there on the LCD screen!

OLED eat your heart out. What awaited the truly dedicated gamer was loads better than whatever meager possibilities ‘reality’ offered – these amazing graphics were in our MINDS, and we spared no expense in speculating and discussing them – yes, we believed every world of Big Dima’s tales, poking and prodding the screens, holding them up to the light this way and that, to catch a glimpse of the underlying cartoonery – naturally we believed that we did see something. Right there, if you hold it at this angle, you can see the bunny wabbit, as he would be walking onto the screen. You don’t see it? Sucks for you. You’re not good enough to get 100,000 points, so just forget it. Go play with your My Little Bolshevik dolls and forget about this secret. It’s not designed with losers in mind.

So in the midst of this obsession-within-an-obsession, we ended up playing “engineer” more than playing Nu Pogodi (unless we were aiming to score that nigh impossible 100,000 point goal). This meant putting a drain on the two little hearing-aid batteries that powered the unit. Batteries that were not easy to come by – there were maybe 2 or 3 packets per newsstand, and the competition for Nu Pogodi gaming juice was at a peak. And for Little Dima – this meant proving once again to the world that he was a grumpy 80-year-old man trapped in an 8-year-old body.

Mess with physics - and physics will mess with you.

You see, Dima, being the wisest of our bunch (at least in his mind, and even there, inferior to Big Dima’s mental gianthood), had the brilliant idea of conserving battery power… by reversing their polarity. Yes, tossing the laws of physics out of the back of a moving snowmobile in the harsh Russian tundra, and leaving them at the mercy of hungry bears, he flipped the batteries upside down to keep them charged longer. Now, I am not the brightest hex-coded crayon in the box today, and back in those naive days I must have been a web-friendly #333333 at best – but even my 8-year-old self saw a problem with this approach. And the Ghostbusters have certainly taught us all an important lesson about not crossing the streams. But despite our passionate arguments for the sake of saving the unit from inevitable nuclear meltdown, Dima dug in his heels and resisted the winds of progress, much like a certain type of geriatric motorist resists approaching anywhere close to the speed limit on highways.

(Un?)Fortunately no spectacular meltdown occurred. In fact, I really can’t even recall his Nu Pogodi game suffering any sort of damage or fault from the experiment. This was likely because all of our poking and prodding of the screens in search of the illusive bunny dance caused us to require a regular supply of replacement units. That, and the fact that the marketing geniuses over at Электроника were busy at work on many new, updated models of Nu Pogodi. Though the new models were technically 100% the same as the old models, the overworked wolf was replaced by an energetic rabbit catching those very same plentiful eggs, then by a tank shooting down approaching UFOs, then by a submarine shooting down undersea mines, and so on – anything that featured 4 distinct places to be at the right time apparently fit the bill.

With each revision of the game, our prodding and poking of the screen grew less desperate, our bending the unit to the light and working day and night to hit that magical 100,000 score became more of a passing thought. Even Dima, in his wise-before-his-years approach to energy conservation, grew tired of arguing with us about the dangers of testing the electrical system by reversing battery polarity – and simply started inserting bits of paper between the battery and the contacts. The boy did not know the meaning of taking it easy.

And then, something radical happened – they changed the formula. The latest release of the Nu Pogodi gaming system… was a RACING GAME! Yes, now there were only TWO buttons instead of four. Financial downsizing, or marketing genius? The world may never know. The new racing game involved changing lanes with your race car – there were THREE exciting lanes to choose from! – as it sped down a racetrack in a perpetual state of construction, requiring merging from one lane to another, before hitting the barrier and crashing in a painful-looking black-and-white fireball. Faster and faster your car would go with every passing moment – and despite the monotonous theme, it really was not a bad game. But the magic was simply not there. There was nothing to look forward to. The game would progress until it weeded out all but the super-human midichlorian-fueled drivers by its breakneck speed alone. What happened then, at 100,000 points? Nobody knows… it has been whispered in some circles, that even Big Dima never got that far. That, to me, was a surefire sign of a lost cause.

Game over, man! Game over.

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Meet Dima. Preserved like an acutely hypochondriac mosquito in a block of amber, he sits here in my memories in his perpetually sniveling 8-year-old self.

Somewhere out there in the world lurks Dima, definitely older, hopefully wiser – and a complete stranger to this grown up Eugene. But I’m not talking about that Dima… THIS story is about the Dima I remember, and how he forever shaped my perception of my fellow human beings.

I'm surprized we never found one of these...

Winter. Usilova Street. Snowbanks everywhere. We’re not talking inches here – we’re talking FEET. Or, in this rather European case, METERS. Take that, you lousy Imperial System! Three shuba-clad whippersnappers – Matvey, Tishka, and myself – are out building snowmen, snow-women, snow-children, snow-dogs, and various other frosty bitches. We were pioneers, taking snow architecture to new heights – digging tunnels through snowbanks without a single thought of the possibility of being buried alive under a collapse, and making tall snow slides. Let me say again – SNOW SLIDES. How many of you ever got to play with those, huh? 2, 3, 4 meter inclines, a set of snow-stairs on the back, poured over with water to create a slippery layer of ice down which to slide – it was the shiznit, kids, believe you me.

What we had in creativity and effort, we lacked in resources – a single rusty wood-and-iron sled cobbled together between the three of us. No problem – our ingenuity did us well that year. Hooray for cardboard! If there was one natural resource we had plenty of on Usilova Street (besides the massive military-grade deposits of solid-state dihydrogen monoxide) it had to be cardboard. Oh, cardboard, whatever are you NOT good for? Making sleds out of cardboard is trivial, quick, effective. The end-result moves fast, has no handling to speak of, is easily replaceable (for those times you collide with a sleeping hobo and have to make a quick getaway) and is barrels of fun.

The Gaidar is going off!

Dima, lucky bastard, was not down with the cardboard program. Oh no, he had one-upped the entire kid population of Usilova Street. Dima’s parents, you see, were fortunate enough to procure a SNOWMOBILE. Well, it was not really a snowmobile – it had no engine, no treads, no roof-mounted miniguns or rocket launches (yes, we had some very specific requirements for our parents, had they decided to ask us what we wanted for Christmas – and so they wisely did not). What it had were three skis. And a seat. And a steering wheel. And some kind of rudimentary braking system. Imagine a tricycle for the Siberian prisoner set. That’s what it would look like. It was called “Chuk i Gek” – tribute to the book of the same name, by Arkady Gaidar, about two unfortunately named kids – Chuk and Gek – having a naive and optimistic adventure through the tundra. It was truly inspirational to the Siberian prisoner set. To our 8-year-old selves, it was a friggin’ snowmobile. And we were jealous.

Dima sneers. Looking down his nose at the three philistines  before him – Matvey, Tishka, and myself – still grounded by earthly laws of nature, bound to a mundane existance by our low-tech cardboard-based snow racing gear. It was clear who the winner was in this contest – Dima’s snowmobile was the monster truck crushing our cardboard dreams like a… monster truck… of dream-crushing.

“There’s no way I’m gonna let you ride on it, Zhenka” he tells me. “You go play with your cardboard. Leave the road to the professionals and the well-equipped.”

He sits down atop his mobile throne. Gazes down the hill before him. And kicks off into the sunset. Like an geriatric shopper on one of those motorized shopping carts, he whizzes along the isles of the snowbank, as we look at him go, sighing. Man, if only we could look like such an ass… er I mean ‘ace’! What we wouldn’t give such a vehicle – if we had known about kidneys back then, we’d probably offer one. Or two.

A slow motion trainwreck, true to its name!

But our jealousy was misplaced, as we (and Dima) soon learned. Did I mention the subject of our avarice had a steering wheel? Yes, indeed! It made the front ski rotate. Unfortunately the creators of the Chuk i Gek (no, as far as I know, Arkady Gaidar is blameless here) failed to take into account the center of gravity – you see, despite being a ‘snowmobile’ in our minds, this was basically a stool on skis. With a steering wheel. There was only so much it could do, it terms of turning, before Dima’s respectable girth got the better of it. And so it did – leaning over like the Tower of Dima, it began it’s tragic decline into the nearest snowbank, taking its greedy rider along with it.

Not to say that Dima was hurt – he was going rather slowly when he took a sideways nosedive. Our shamefully inferior cardboard sleds (much less our somewhat less inferior wooden sled) would pick up way more speed down that hill, and let us bring home much more spectacular injuries (yes, the dumpster and the sleeping hobo are another story for another day). But Dima, sensitive soul that he was, started crying – oh how he wailed. And despite being shunned by him, relegated to drooling after his toy from afar, we rallied to his rescue, and checked to see if he was ok, whether anything was broken, and whether we could have a go on his Chuk i Gek now? Please? Pretty please? The answer, as were most things about Dima, was a negative.

I don’t think I ever got to properly ride a Chuk i Gek on that day, or any day since. But it left an imprint on all of us. There were more examples of Dima’s character to follow – his fancy double-bladed ice skates, his riveting theatrical performance as a suicidal celestial object, his rice-rocket bicycle… each a story, and each a critical view into the life of this influential person.

I do not know where Dima is today or what kind of person he became, but Dima, if you are reading this – I just have one question. Can I ride the Chuk i Gek now? Seriously? Please?

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I, for one, welcome our Space Kitten overlords.

You see, I had the dubious fortune of being born left-handed. This means that, had I not been ‘fixed’, my right hand would have been free to perform the requisite finger-wiggles for summoning the Ancient Über-Wyrm of Planetary Destruction (and Kittens), causing the sudden and painful cessation of all life as we know it (except for kittens). The kittens, who would rise to be a dominant form of life on this barren shell of a planet, would soon achieve sentience and engender a brutal culture of slavery and warfare. Traveling through the solar system and the Milky Way, the bloodthirsty Space Kittens would conquer other sentient races and lay claim to their bounties, eventually becoming a dominant force in the galaxy, to be worshiped and feared by all. However, their claim to power would be short-lived. Not a millennium has passed by when somewhere deep inside the Betelgeuse system, a charismatic leader of a fledgling sentient race of wind-up chimpanzees – or, Wimpanzees, as they prefer to be called – heads a rebellion against the Space Kittens, winning decisive victories in system after system, with their “gorilla combat” techniques, which the Kittens were not adequately prepared for. Sensing the balance of power tipping, the ruling tribunal controlling the Kitten space empire, the Meowmix, decides to employ the one weapon which they know the Wimpanzees cannot resist – the BANANATOR. An appealing choice, but not one without risk – as the weapon has never been tested during its thousands-year existence for this very purpose. When the fateful day arrives, the eldest of the Meowmix, Her Cutest Preciousness Princess Snowpuff the Improper Urinator, is charged with triggering the device to end the war once and for all. With a reluctant press of the dainty paw, the BANANATOR is activated… and as the time-space continuum tears open with a whimper, the last thing Snowpuff sees before turning into atomized cat food is the Chiquita Banana(tm) logo, above an expiration date of some time in 1992.

So you can see why my 1st grade teacher, Mrs. Nina Zaharovna, felt threatened – it was not a matter of if, but when, before my demonic potential becomes a reality. So as any reasonable human being looking out for the continued existence of her race and that of other non-kitten species on Earth, she had to squash my problem before it became the universe’s problem. A great proven way to deal with left-handed mutants like myself was to discriminate in grading, citing ‘neatness’ of my handwriting as the reason I could never get above a C for the same correct answers as my fellow A students. Not that my handwriting was a beautiful work of art – people still think I’m a doctor when they read my handwritten notes. But it is clear that once my self-esteem and confidence were sapped, I would simply not realize the potential of my lefty powers, and instead join some Emo mope-fest band. Or start a blog. Or become a doctor.

But I was made of stronger stuff (still am – see, not a single Doctorate to my name!). I plodded on, submitting all my assignments, doing my best to keep up with Nina Zaharovna’s increasing demands for neatness – meanwhile, my parents were constantly trying to re-train me, to convert me back to the ‘right side’ of handedness. Because they too were under pressure – their son was practically a menace to South Central, as declared by his schoolteacher at the parent-teacher meetings. One thing about those Soviet parent-teacher meetings – they were all about openness and transparency. That means all comments about your kids were being said via loudspeaker, in an auditorium filled with other kids and parents. Yes, the teacher (in this case, Nina-Z) would lambaste the student (in this case, myself), his parents, and their child-rearing skills – in front of the whole damn school – while being as condescending and snooty as possible. Other kids and parents would snicker at particularly biting remarks. “Heh heh.. yea, you take that.. you.. you lefty-enablers!”

You're not paranoid if they really ARE out to get you!

The peak of my schoolteacher’s campaign to save me from a life of left-handed planetary terrorism was to order my parents to take me for a psychiatric evaluation. That’s no joke, kids – my teacher basically told my parents that I need to be checked out by a psychiatrist. Because my right-handed attempts at handwriting were not sufficiently improving in appearance, and my habit of daydreaming in class was causing her to go through wooden hand-slapping rulers like a ho on 18th street goes through herpes meds – I suppose she thought a lobotomy would help me writer neater script AND focus on being a drooling vegetable. Perhaps she was right. Either way, after a short conversation with the receptionist at the local nut house, me and my parents turned our backs on that proud institution and instead started focusing on how to get the hell out of the USSR.

Now, the things that really pop out at me in this (cautionary? kitten-themed?) tale is that a) my parents actually agreed to take an 8-year-old kid who liked to daydream and had bad handwriting to the nut house – perhaps there was room for two more in the loony bin, and b) despite all these idiotic and misguided methods, my handwriting still sucks monkey balls, and I still like to daydream when I should be more productive… but at least we’re not in the USSR anymore. So at they certainly did something right. Go parents!

REMINDER: The date of the Kitten Apocalypse has been moved forward to 2012. Enjoy your Summer Olympics, humans!

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To this day, I am still not sure why it felt like Igor, a friend of my parents, was in danger of doing hard time in the Gulag for exposing obedient communist drones to the wonders of computing technology – or, for that matter, why he decided to bring the computer to our place for several days. Probably to lay low from the KGB for a while. For that matter, I was sure I was complicit in his crimes – after all, wasn’t it me who learned to type my first DOS commands while impressing all my friends with the only non-Soviet-piece-of-crap computer for miles around?

Insert "World's Greatest Marching Bands" Into Drive Ж:

Speaking of Soviet crap. Have you ever heard of a Mikrosha? This legandary computing powerhouse was Russia’s answer to the PC. Let me describe it for you. Imagine an integrated processing unit stuffed into a black-and-pastel keyboard, connected to a television screen… and a cassette player. Yes, a cassette player. Ernst Blofeld had a Mikrosha too! All REAL geniuses did in those days. It is no surprise that the puny Englishman James Bond got his ass handed to him so soundly in the end. Uh uh! Yep! He sure did!

Getting the Mikrosha all hooked up is fairly easy – now the fun part begins. You see, the Soviets realized from a very early stage that any form of persistent storage – whether hard or floppy (Viagra notwithstanding) – was for Westernized pussies. This means that in order to play a rousing game of Soviet Pong (or just “Понг”), you had to insert the audio cassette containing the program’s code into the cassette player… and PLAY IT AT MAXIMUM EAR-SPLITTING VOLUME!!! Yes, it had to be at max volume or it didn’t work – the genius behind the Mikrosha was too great for mere mortals like myself to understand, so don’t ask me why. Perhaps it was necessary for me to hear and appreciate the shrill yet musical harmonies that spewed forth from the little speaker (reminiscent somewhat of that old 56kbps modem dial-in sound… ONLY MUCH, MUCH LOUDER!!!), in order to understand that I was dealing with a superior product of Soviet engineering. Each program took only about 15 minutes to load this way, as is proper and polite. No need to rush art.

So you can understandably see why I was sorely devastated when my parents decided to return my Mikrosha back to the store for a refund, just 2 days after buying it for my 7th birthday. I was a broken shell of my former self – deprived of purpose and direction, I went to school, did my homework, ate, slept, gone to the bathroom (not necessarily in that order) – but there was no more joy in the world. And now, a year later, with the wounds on my heart having yet to heal, a new love comes on the scene – and boy, was it HOT. I mean, there was STRIP POKER, in lovely 16-color EGA graphics! Not that I knew how to play Poker. Then there was a game simply called “Spy” where you had escape from the bad guys via hang-glider, automobile, and other spy-centric means. But I was not much of a gamer in those days – what’s a gamer?! – so the bad guys consistently wiped the floor with me.

No Bones About It - This Game Builds Character!

Which I guess is the reason I became fixated on the one game I could actually get ahead in. Prince of Persia. Yes, I had good taste in those days – I still love the damn thing, even today, loading it up via DOSBox now and then to relive the painful memories of spike traps, falling deaths, and those chomping metal things, the very SOUND of which, in the distance, scared the bejesus out of my 8-year-old self and my school buddies, who came over to my house to bask in the sheer awesomeness that was classic DOS gaming. Our parents even allowed us to stay home from school to enjoy the computer – yes, it was that awesome!

And so we plodded along, taking turns trying to navigate the trap-filled corridors of horror that game is famous for – I believe I got as far as level 4. And then the unthinkable happened. The Prince had to go away for a while. A LONG while. Like, forever. The PC was being taken away – Igor, my parents’ friend, was back, and he needed to take his illegal stash to another safehouse, probably another of his friends’ house. That’s just how Igor operates. Slick and discrete… never staying in one place too long. But for me, it was a blow. It was like losing a loyal 4-bit hound to the dog pound. And I cried – I really cried, for a computer. It was then when my 8-year-old self realized that he needed it – that I needed the good stuff. I needed computers in my life.

Today, after dozens of PCs built from scratch, plenty of company websites designed and re-designed, countless hours of ticking away at code, and a Computer Science degree under my belt, I am still not changing my mind – at 8 years old I was as right about this as I’ll ever be – Prince of Persia was one hell of  game.

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