No excuses for me, I was just lazy. Preoccupied. Doing. Uh. Things. Yes.
But now Steam’s free weekend is over and I can get back to actually being a productive human being.
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12004094/1/Exposure
In the meantime, I wrote a fanfiction of a favorite videogame series, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., based off the Tarkvosky movie Stalker, which in turn was based off the soviet sci-fi classic A Roadside Picnic, all three of them about a Zone of Alienation.
A Roadside Picnic had mysterious and apathetic alien visitors, Stalker was about a mysterious “wish-granter” at the heart of the Zone, and the videogames featured conspiracy theory level soviet mind control experiments set in the deserted Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a plot that while not terribly engrossing, was set in the most immersively bleak and desolate backdrop of Chernobyl, from the creaking rusted hulks of the Rassorva vehicle graveyard to the hauntingly beautiful radioactive Red Forest, and the eerie emptiness of Pripyat, amid a world where the laws of science no longer apply and the Zone itself is a living entity bent on destroying not just you, but your soul as well. The ‘stalker’ name here doesn’t refer to someone who aggressively tails an imagined romantic interest, but to the peculiar brand of crazy lunatics who delve into the Zone and its dark crevices in search of mysterious ‘artifacts’ which have supernatural properties and present a new frontier in technological advancement for mankind— and which are buried deep in anomaly fields, areas of distorted reality where anything from fire spouts to blackholes could appear, and utterly annihilate someone clumsy enough to stumble into them. All three were grim, desolate, and uniquely Eastern European in character.
Or, more humorously: Drink vodka. Trust no one. Eat lots of bread.
The story I wrote takes the premise of BBC Documentary producing a live-footage documentary of the Zone, and so sends a presenter and a film crew with a satchel full of batteries, cash and flash drives to film the Zone, and pays for a team of stalkers
Anyways, I thought the story itself was good on its own merits, so I published it on Fanfiction.com. You can find the link both here and at the top of that wall of text.
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From the City on a Hill 
Very nihilistic and very good dystopia. I’ve never heard of this mythos or the games, but from what I’ve read of your fan fic I think it’s fascinating. Really like the whole idea of the stalkers. And the way the characters have to purge their bodies after the radiation
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Thank you for the feedback!
I see a certain trend of determined nihilism in Eastern European fiction, especially in the Soviet era. It’s that sort of grim optimism that life is inevitably terrible, but it’s the pain that makes it all meaningful. At least, that’s what I took from it all.
As for the purging, it’s a tongue-in-cheek reference to the extra vodka rations issued by the USSR to those living within the affected area, and the common superstition that vodka reduces radioactive isotope uptake. (A similar argument has been made for red wine, which contains non-radioactive strontium-85, but in either case, you’d have to be pretty smashed for either treatment to be reasonably effective.) Or it might just be that the prodigious quantities of alcohol make you puke, and hopefully remove the isotopes with it.
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I’ve never heard of that approach to radiation sickness. Very interesting that they once used it. And I know next to nothing about Europe or the Soviet Era, but I’ve always thought that the whole culture seemed sort of sad
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