Russian Mags and World Domination

Written by slash

Hello. I'm slash of the chaos energy group. I'm Russian and I'm incredibly proud of this. Being Russian is kind of being a terrible animal, which threatens all the peaceful world with its abnormal behavior and unpredictable lifestyle... yes, almost everyone outside Russia thinks that we have bears walking without any fear at the red square in the Kremlin in the center of our capital, Moscow. They think: "Animals drink vodka just like men, and men drink vodka like animals..." In some way it's right, but most of the time it's wrong.

Duh, I'm not here to tell you about Russia and the Russians, I'm to show you something about our diskmag scene. It's august 27th here. And... let's see... in the last half of the year no diskmags were released here! Can you imagine? We have some local mags, all of them are published in Russian. I will tell you about some "famous" mags, I mean mags the latest issues of which have a number greater than 1, i.e. the mags I'm talking about have been released at least twice. And, by the way, I'm almost sure that the next issue of each diskmag will be published some day, so I suppose these mags are undead.

Ok. The most admirable diskmag is Hacker. It has already got its 9th issue and is the oldest mag in Russia that is still alive. But... when was it issued for the 9th time? In february 1999. BTW, its 8th issue had come out in august 1998. I won't mention the update for the 9th issue of Hacker (the special technology by Street Raider), which was released in march 1999 and contained nothing except the Bytefall '99 party results - it wasn't an issue of the diskmag.

Let's go further... Armor of the Gods, one of the greatest Russian mags (due to its 4th issue), was last released in august 1998. It's been a year we haven't had any news about aog5. That's a pity, because the diskmag was supported by TEN (The E-mag Network), and Programmer (the main editor of aog) had created TEN. The 4th issue of aog was a consequence of the creation of TEN - it was full of English articles with a lack of Russian ones. But, anyway, we don't have the 5th issue and Programmer doesn't give us a hope.

Next, the new diskmag Evil. It's been created by a new group called Energy and in the course of less than one year it was published three times. They promised us the forthcoming 4th issue. Let's see what will be there... The 3rd issue of Evil was full of articles and made a good impression, it was released in april 1999, probably.

Then comes the X-Ray diskmag. It's kind of being in an intermediate phase of its evolution. Test issue zero and issue 1 were released, and the last (1st) issue came in the end of january 1999.

So what else? There are some local diskmags, like Smaf etc., but they're too local and almost no one outside those areas knows about the diskmags. Two dead diskmags, Harm (last issued in november 1998) and Rising (last time published in december 1998) will probably never arise again. Only four diskmags are left, which we can put a little hope on...

Why is our diskmag scene going through such an evil period? now we come to the meaning of the article headline - the laziness of the majority of Russians. They are too lazy. Among a hundred persons you cannot even find one that is capable to write interesting things for a diskmag constantly. That's why we have this boring lack of articles. Because of it, the diskmag (e.g. Hacker) is delayed three months, as the diskmag organizing committee is ashamed of publishing it free of texts. No one needs an empty shell.

At last when the mag has been released, people argue with the publishers if it was worth to release it, because it's again not completely filled with articles. And then a new potential writer looks at all this scramble and thinks that it's no worth to write anything for this diskmag because he himself will never do it any better, and others will never even try to go this way (he thinks). So we lose this writer. In this way we lose many writers. And the potential writer himself doesn't understand that it's his own laziness which prevents him from writing to his friend and both of them making the double number of articles, which is more than when he does it alone...

Maybe this situation is the same all over the world, and it was some kind of miracle that Hugi became the most popular diskmag. I don't know, but if no new fashioned diskmags appear in the world arena, then Hugi will be left alone and win all laurels (I mean, writers) of being the only super star. I can't judge whether that's good or not, but this situation sucks... We need more diskmags, someone might think. Why? It's much better when you download one diskmag and have the opinions of the whole world and news from the whole world. And you have no need to look for other diskmags. But maybe we should focus half of our energy on the local mags to make them more popular? I don't think that some diskmag will beat Hugi's authority, but maybe it'd be greater if we had two or three diskmags over here... Who knows?

I want to know your opinion... BTW, sorry for the long story of the Russian diskmag scene. But I think that our situation is common with yours...

slash //ceg