Chernobyl's 'stalker' subculture | Hacker News Reader

Chernobyl's 'stalker' subculture

calvertjournal.com

187 pointsgalfarragem101 comments

Website seems to be down: https://archive.is/vGC6C

Anecdotally, I've visited Chernobyl and I remember seeing somewhere a few empty cans and an empty vodka bottle. Both looked pretty recent. I've also seen the bus that's photographed. There was something inside, the thing with a cardboard cover and metal rings where you can put pages inside (It's called a "classeur" in French, but I can't find how it's called in English). Edit: as some comments pointed out, it's called a "3 ring binder" or just "binder". Thanks. It was filled with text, with different handwriting. Most of it was Eastern European, though I can't tell which languages precisely. I have a few pictures. The bus itself is near an abandonned farm with lots of farming machines left outside to rust.

I also had the chance of being here a few months before they put the second sacrophagus on the central, so I have pictures of the first.

I think the place that marked me the most was the "Monument to Those Who Saved the World" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_Those_Who_Saved_th....

One thing that I felt during my time here (two days) was how uncanny everything is. The buildings are still here, sometimes with furniture, but anything that you can easily carry has disappeared. All in all it was a great experience, I'm really glad I took the time to visit this place.

Edit: small "fun" anecdote that I like to tell: I was more irradiated during my plane trip from France to Ukraine and back than during the two days here.

It’s a “3 ring binder” or just “binder”

While I agree that the item is ordinarily called a "three-ring binder", and that it always has three rings, I would not call one with a strange number of rings a "three-ring binder". The name hasn't become that opaque.

And a "ring binder" sounds like something else.

"Three ring binder" maybe? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_binder

Curious that there are two replies here calling it a three ring binder explicitly, while if I think about it I have only seen them with two or four rings.

According to the wiki article: "A few years later three-ring binders became the standard in the United States"

It's just a ring binder in Britain, which like most of the world has ISO paper sizes and either 2 or 4 rings on binders.

(4 rings for durability, 2 for convenience.)

In US school, we were generally required to have a three ring binder every year for class. Like with #2 pencils, we're vaguely aware other types exist but virtually never encounter them.

And I'd assume they're called "X ring" binders, as opposed to just binders, because "binder" is a fairly generic term.

As for the number of rings: first mover advantage and network effects.

Paper is produced with three rings. Teachers buy three ring hole punches. Soon binder manufacturers target the most common standard. All other standards die off.

I have seen and used four ring binders in America. But three ring was the phrase that jumped out in my head.

The highest form of the art is found in Japan with 20 and 26 ring binders.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41sow2N%2Bi...

The mind boggles.

3 rings: provides redundancy over 2 ring

4 ring: additional stability and redundancy

... 26 ring? At that point, you almost have more hole than paper. Is there a reason?

You have to try it. It is such a joy. The pages turn like butter and never tear out. You can lift the entire binder by a single page. The paper size feels much more human-scale. I exclusively use J-Binders for my notes.

I'd love to try one of those. Three-ring binders are a chore because the holes are so easy to tear with daily use. Sure, they sell stickers that you put over the teared holes to repair them, but why not redesign the binders in the first place?

Exactly. The fact that “reinforcements” exist proves that the manufacturers know that the product design is bogus.

I think rings are kept to a minimum as evenly punching twenty holes in twenty sheets of paper at once would be difficult.

In The Netherlands, in schools 23-ring-binders are quite heavily used. In office environments it is mostly 2- or 4. The nice thing is that they are compatible: if you have 23-ring-paper or 4-ring it will fit in 2 or 4 ring binders. This does not work the other way around for obvious reasons.

Where I grew up, there were two-ring binders, three-ring binders, and four-ring binders.

Two-ring binders clamped at the top of the sheet.

Three-ring binders clamped at the left side of the sheet.

Four-ring binders were plastic instead of metal, and were a geared mechanical slider. One brand was the Trapper Keeper. ("Trappers" being the folders that matched them.)

At some point, the plastic four-ring binders switched to three rings to match the holes pre-punched in the loose leaf paper. But you could still get paper with 2+4 and 3+4 holes pre-punched in the left side that would fit multiple binder configurations.

On a rather unrelated note, those binders are called "fardes à anneaux" in my dialect of French. Translating directly to "ring binders". Languages are fun

That's the first time I hear the word "farde". Thanks for sharing.

Pripyat is mostly safe to visit, unless if you happen upon one of the unmarked spots where they dumped irradiated equipment or spent fuel. The area is just littered with extremely dangerous bulldozers that they just kind of buried in unmarked spots.

So it’s safe … until it isn’t.

We had geiger counters at all time on us. The most radioactive areas were a buried village, the sand under the douga that was used to wash it, and a can filled with garbage in Pripyat (which was by far the most radioactive things). Probably some kind of trap? Or a form of sculpture?

Yeah, you can definitely do it safely with the right gear and some planning. It’s both less risky on average and more tricky than most people think. Wouldn’t recommend drinking the water if you can avoid it though.

As far as the garbage. Hell if I know.

I was with an organized tour so it was relatively safe. I wouldn't go alone without proper training and equipment though. For the water, we drunk some "local" water at the inn. I think/hope that it's treated properly. Most of the food we ate was also bought by us before the trip.

I'm surprised nowhere in the article does it mention the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game series (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.T.A.L.K.E.R.)

They are loosely based on the novel, however perhaps more well known (in the US at least) than the book or movie.

I wonder still if much of the popularity of said stalking above is directly related to this game.

As a US resident, both the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games and the Metro 2033 game series have fascinated me in their different style of storytelling than most "traditional" FPS games. I have to put them in the same group as the Half Life series in terms of replay enjoy-ability for the story and engagement.

I think it's a reflection of the culture from the general area. Russian sci-fi, for example, tends to be heavily introspective (Roadside Picnic, Solaris, etc). While most other western/American sci fi is more about extraordinary world building/future scenarios.

To a lesser or different degree, you see the same approach in videogames, software development, etc.

Nitpick: Solaris (the story) is by a Polish author (S. Lem).

I think most everyone associates Solaris in this context with Tarkovsky.

Funny thing is that the Metro games are based on books by the same name. I tried reading the first one expecting horror and survivalism and action. Instead I got mysticism and philosophy.

Half the book reads like Dante's Inferno. Like its not supposed to be taken literally, but I'm not the right audience to get the references.

They led me to go read the books, the metro series of books is great if you like post-apoc. And if you enjoy them, try the Night Watch/World of Watches series. It's supernatural, focused on a quasi-governmental department that keeps the peace between the light and the dark magic communities, very gritty. The Nightwatch/Daywatch films are really good too, such a shame they never made the third.

There's a certain mind set in all of the Russian literature I've read that I find extremely appealing. I haven't read that much, but found that same mindset even in the older stuff like War and Peace, or Master and Margarita.

The game has an interesting "meta" aspect because it incorporates the Chernobyl disaster into its storyline, twenty years after after the Chernobyl workers incorporated the novel and movie into their mythology. Real "art imitates life imitates art" stuff.

I don't understand why people associate Roadside Picnic with Chernobyl and what happenned there..

Is it only because of the game and its similarities to both novel and movie?

No. The cleanup workers after the Chernobyl accident noted the similarities between their "Exclusion zone" and the zone in the book and movie, and some started calling themselves stalkers. A dangerous zone, controlled by the government where only certain people are allowed to go, filled with invisible dangers.

The game just expanded that connection, mashing up Chernobyl history and Stalker/Picinic details, and brought it to the western gamer audience.

If part of Australia was overrun by biker gangs I'm sure people would start calling it the Max Max zone. Same thing.

The article talks about Roadside Picnic, the Russian sci-fi novel where the Stalker term was coined. I learned about this book on HN and highly recommend it.

Thanks for the recommendation!

Agree. Tarkovski's movie is great also.

I watched Tarkovski's movie for the first time the other night. It was a lot more "artsy" than I expected (in a good way).

I'm curious what you expected...all Tarkovski is like maximum artsy.

It was my first Tarkovski film and I wasn't aware of the directors style.

Try “Andrei Rublev” it’s (watched all his work) one of his more balanced films, as in its full of symbolism but it’s intertwined with the narration, so one may go through it without noticing then subtext, while it’s probably one of the best (if not the best) films about medieval ages.

If you liked it, watch the Russian Solaris. It's interesting to compare and contrast with 2001.

From the synopsis, looks like it's based on the Asimov novel.

It’s a Stanisław Lem novel.

This is an amazing film. It was a real pleasure comparing it to the Hollywood version and also the book. The Hollywood version is also quite good, but focuses on different things (Kelvins relationship with his ex wife, as I recall) than the Soviet version.

Glad to see this comment. I like them both for different reasons, and feel the Clooney one gets trashed on unfairly for not being as art house smart. I thought the score and how it sets a mood was particularly well done.

Note if anyone is curious and goes looking for the trailer, be warned this is one of those movies where the studio edited the trailer to make it look like something totally different than what it is hoping to boost sales.

helps to be in an 'artistic' state of mind. ;-)

I like the movie but it’s also the ultimate nap movie.

Tarkowski with 30 minutes nap still beats most other movies by a large margin. I used to hate myself for the nap, but I wonder if I should stop doing that: the sequences work just so well in the nearly dreaming state.

Thank you for alleviating my guilt about also napping during my recent watch of Stalker. It certainly didn't hurt, and I'd agree it helped in an odd way.

I once ran across an inner city neighborhood with 4 friends to see Solaris, due to being a bit late. We got in just in time - I watched it raptly, and at the end of the movie, looked to my left to see all 4 of my friends angelically asleep in the front row of the theater. So Tarkovsky movies are at least 80% in this fashion.

I really liked this movie, had a great build up and cool idea/atmosphere.

Second this recommendation. And if you’re used to sci-fi by Western authors, books by Cold War, Iron Curtain authors like Strugatsky, Lem (Polish) and others are fascinating.

Thanks for that, anything in particular by Lem that you recommend getting started with?

I find we get very little exposure to Russian / slavic authors in North America, and when I do occasionally get to read one (including the classics but also some paperbacks) I suspect how much we must be missing by not having more of them readily available and marketed.

Lem is pretty accessible, a good place to start might be the Cyberiad collection of short stories. The futurological congress is also a fun read. You can't really go wrong with him, he had a great sense of humour.

I mean… Solaris is amazing and was made into a film at least twice. The book is about the difficulties communicating with an alien in the vein of Arrival, but it predates Arrival by many years and is a better book, in my humble opinion.

The book is much more detailed than the films. For example, in the book they go down to the “surface” of the alien and visit it… more than once as I recall. That’s not in the films.

The great thing about this book is that it's as much about the difficulty of trying to contact an alien as it is about the problems with the scientific process and academia.

Really a fantastic read with so many angles to interpret it from.

I would say Solaris is as much about dealing with regrets, a dull pain from deep wounds that follows us through our lives as it is about the things you mentioned.

I read it more than ten years ago, but still remember the emotional experience it brought.

"Memoirs Found in a Bathtub" punches above its weight for Lem. Solaris is good too. I find Lem interesting but only sporadically enjoyable.

The Strugatskys have gone from being "Roadside Picnic" + a largely unobtainable back catalogue - I expensively amused myself by putting together a collection of pretty much everything they published in English a few years back. They have been celebrated (arguably, over-celebrated) by SF Masterworks and other recent publications so almost everything is back in print.

I enjoyed the new mix-up of "Lame Fate / Ugly Swans" (Ugly Swans was previously published as a standalone book, but is now intertwined with a book about the hassles of dealing with an AI-based evaluator of book quality, the book in question being Ugly Swans). The Doomed City was the original candidate for that, but was too long to fit - that's also available on SF Masterworks.

If you want to see where Iain M Banks extracted a good quarter of his ideas for the Culture, "Hard to be a God" is a decent read.

Solaris is worth a read for sure.

couple notes.The movie, the book and several original scripts by Strugatskies all have partially different stories and endings (with the endings every time telling different thing).

One of the brothers - Arkady - worked as a translator in the Far East in the beginning of 195x. The large areas on the border there were deeply and strongly fortified areas of Japan Kwantung army which USSR defeated in 1945. The motif of the dangerous zone full of hazards can be traced in the Strugatskies' works from the earlier short stories where the events directly happen at those Kwantung army fortifications to the abstracted Zone in the "Roadside Picnic" and the forest booby-trapped with automated weapons in the "The Inhabited Island".

Concur. My all-time favorite sci-fi novel. And that's reading it in the English translation. It must be sublime in Russian.

Did you read Metro 2033? It’s been compared to Roadside Picnic and has spawned a sub-culture, too (exploring abandoned Soviet subways lines and stations)

Metro 2033 is a solid SF B-grade actioner. Not great, not terrible. It's not even vaguely in the same league as Roadside Picnic.

Metro is to roadside picnick what mcdonalds is to your local high end steakhouse. You can enjoy both, but in different ways. Besides, the st. petersburg trilogy set in the same universe as metro but written by Andrey Dyakov is, in my opinion, far superior to the original series in almost any way (the second book is way too slow). You should give it a shot if you enjoyed the original novels.

Related: "Kontroll" (2003) is the first feature film by Nimrod Antal, born of Hungarian parents, raised in Los Angeles, returning to Budapest for this haunting film shot entirely in the Budapest subway during the five hours every night when it shuts down.

"Kontroll" trailer: https://youtu.be/LMkkJbRJdiA

Also related: Ghost Stations of the Paris Metro:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_stations_of_the_Paris_M%...

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x418gva

It is absolutely mad how Roadside Picnic and derived works basically created a fictional setting and subculture that, decades later, was brought wholesale into reality.

Never seen anything like it, and I doubt anything like it will ever happen again.

“Life imitates art.” — Oscar Wilde

book is amazing, movie is amazing, but much different than the book - really awesome all around.

I can only believe that people who enter highly radioactive areas illegally just have no idea what radioactivity is really like. It's invisible, so it's easy to imagine that nothing is really happening.

In my mind, the first image I get at the thought of radioactivity is how a cloud chamber is affected by it [1]. Imagine that, except everything around you, all the time, much more violently.

Yeah, no thanks.

1: https://youtu.be/ZiscokCGOhs?t=109

I would say the same feeling is had with global warming and climate change. You can't really see it, you can't really connect rainfall + sunlight directly to anything to do with the climate because it really is all just invisible.

Some people remained living in the zone after disaster. Not really legal and very lonely life. Remember reading account of old woman who was like that.

I'm wondering where did she get groceries and water from and how she dealt with the loneliness.

Water was from well, just like before. She lived kind of traditionally lifestyle, so eggs were from chickens, there was garden (potatoes) etc. I think there might have been cow. For the other stuff, she said a cop went on route around once a week and typically brought her bread. She has son who comes once in months with some stuff.

So basically, very simply lifestyle with weak loose network of people who come rarely but can bring stuff.

She said that it is lonely. She talked to cats etc, animals who stayed. The way she talked, an animal passing around last week was something worth talking about - so it is also routine boring life. (With serious risks, imo, because if she breaks leg or whatever randomly, there is no one to help her for the next week minimum.)

Wow that video made radioactivity 100 times scarier for me.

I see in the photo that the guy wears a tshirt, but only long sleeves and trousers are allowed. In fact I visited Chornohbyl in a heatwave and I would give my life to the gods of radiation to be allowed a tshirt.

Jokes aside went near the red forrest and all geiger meters freaked out at a wind change. So I guess being on foot, away from the north side should be ok for a hiking.

The forrests where are very "unclean" to walk through them. Suppposedly no one picked dropped branches for firewood and hiking in the open steppe looking area not that interesting.

Also you are not allowed anymore inside the buildings but the guides cannot really control that.

Bald and bankrupt went there a few times or on the edge and befriended an old man. The videos were very interesting to me and I highly recommend them.

So I stumbled across this multipart video series a while back. It's an urban explorer that gets a couple locals to guide him into the exclusion zone so they can climb the giant Duga radar. It's a bit on the long side, but I found it fascinating. They ended up getting spotted by some guards and had to do a cat and mouse game through the forest to get out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhuhnXvSCOE

Shiey is one of my favorite channel. Cudos to him.

You meant kudos? Also another channel that has some videos from the zone: https://www.youtube.com/c/kreosann/

The piece about possibly coming across killers as they buried a body feels like quite the buried lede…

It might be poor opsec to elaborate too heavily about a time you witnessed organized criminals concealing a murder.

At some point we're going to have to re-introduce the word dangerous to mean poor opsec in a non-CIA context.

It’s tragic to think that journalism has turned into a field where ‘opsec’ is actually an appropriate term.

Yeah that's a good point, especially if he wants to keep his guide or local contacts safe.

There's an equally interesting virtual subculture built around the videogame series set in a more actively dangerous version of the Zone.

Blowout soon, stalker.

"Stalker" is my favorite film of all time and I highly recommend it.

I’ve also seen it many times and love it but I wouldn’t recommend it to just anyone. Here’s a list with the top 1000 films of all time as voted by MUBI (a community of movie geeks that like arthouse films). Stalker is at sitting at no 5. https://mubi.com/lists/the-top-1000

Message to young people... https://youtu.be/_Vvdtaaprzw

Intersting article! I always like this kind of story though I'd never do it myself.

"Roadside Picnic" IRL

This is now just another tourist trap. If you’d gone in 20 years ago or more, things were different.

How so? I imagine it's difficulty of access in a country not particularly popular with western or Asian tourists would mean only those with a genuine interest would be making the trip.

You can go anywhere on this planet and you will find someone who will say to you "Pah... nowadays this is just for tourists, if you had visited $place 20 years ago than you would have seen it in its authentic form!"

$place = Hanoi, New York, Munich, Chernobyl, Mare Tranquillitatis...

See, some people think our current culture/civilization/capitalism will not survive climate change, but clearly there is no wasteland too blasted and dangerous for it to eventually become a money-making tourist attraction. Our culture will live on in its perversity. I fully expect people to be huffing recreational Covid in 30 years’ time.

I'm curious, why do you see this as a money-making tourist attraction and not as another way of visiting a museum?

What's the line you're drawing? Most museums are tourist attractions to at least some extent.

The line would be "considered good/considered bad" I think. It's fuzzy, but saying something is "a money-making tourist attraction" is usually passing a different value judgement compared to "a museum".

> I fully expect people to be huffing recreational Covid in 30 years’ time.

How much are you willing to bet on this? (Normally I'd try to argue, but…)

Much like bug chasers I imagine there will be _someone_ out there trying to purposefully catch Covid for some (inexplicable) reason. There's always a few loose screws wandering around at any point in time.

Alexa, remind me in 30 years

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