touring the Chernobyl area on a motorbike

thanks for the rec, tracked it down. (lemme know if you want a ysi)

cheers for the offer LBI, already got this one on the kindle on my next to read list.

np!

voices from chernobyl which won a nobel prize a few years ago is very good. extremely sad book.

well Midnight In Chernobyl is definitely no voices from chernobyl. i'm surprised at what a shit writer he is - if he just stuck to what he knew it would be interesting but all the badly written scene-setting fan-fic about the chernobyl project manager's sniffing the flowers in his garden or the courtship of one of the young scientists and how his partner's eyes seemed to change colour with her mood. I've abandoned after 60 pages for now. ffs!

:(

Photographer Robyn Von Swank has a great account @vonswankcuriosities of interesting places she’s toured -in early March she started putting up highlights of her two trips to the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The photos are so, so good.

Starts here with Baba Ganya
https://www.instagram.com/vonswankcuriosities/p/Bu8GG8TgX2C/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=1kx4rf4r39s7f

I fell asleep watching ep 1 of the HBO series (and was having nightmares), and what I saw was pretty gritty and horrifying. The radiation horror and bit where one of the workers looks right into the burning core was something. It's got the reliably good Jared Harris and the cast speak in their normal accents rather stupid cod-ukranian accents thankfully. Going to try this one again later

I've been waiting for an evening or weekend when I'm in a really solid mood to start. I hadn't heard Jared Harris is in it, which sounds great.

all the resident Geiger counters only measure up to 360: "360... that is reasonable reading and it could be much worse!"

can't remember the units of radiation, but you get the horrific picture.

Like mh I'm waiting to be in a mood for this, but it's high up on my list. Very glad to hear they're not doing that awful Ukranian accent thing!

might need some xanax and a g'n't to face this

the incident happened very close to my birthday so the yearly remembrances seem somehow more relevant when they pop up

some of the horror in this is seeing the dickhead boss from the control room looking at glowing lumps of graphite from the exploded reactor in the grounds of the station and being too deep in the soviet denial/scapegoat game to even mention it to his minions.

I'll hold back more comment until I watch the new HBO thing, but I sometimes ponder how incredibly fucked we would have been if all those people hadn't done the work to contain what they could once the situation became clear.

the good news is in Ararat Valley, Armenia, they still have the antiquated Metsamor nuclear plant, which is a similar model to Chernobyl but somehow still operational despite being old and fucked and in a seismic zone!

2nd ep of Chernobyl builds on the good work of the first. I think that claustrophobic radiation horror at the end of the ep will give me nightmares tonight. Emily Watson/Stellan Skarsgard/Jared Harris all bringing it. There is brilliant scene with Skarsgard bluffing the lower level apparatchiks with his new-found knowledge (5mins ago in the chopper) of the make-up of RBMK reactors. Best series these useless fuckers have done in years imo.

yeah i love this show after two episodes. the horror is realised very vividly.

"a yearly stipend of 400 roubles" for whichever fool walks into the jaws of death. Nightmare day at work today!

"come on lads this is for russia"

"fuck it so, i could use a few extra roubles, where do i sign?"

"For the rest of my life, you say?..."

first episode was great, this last one was brilliant

my only problem is that i keep forgetting the names of the characters and it's difficult to refer to them by description (the apparatchik who doesn't actually know what's going on? er...
the scientist guy with glasses? er...), but that's on me

it was quite amusing when apparatchik with fey croaky voice tries to bullshit Skarsgard character that it's the concrete that is burning. But yeah, fuck knows the names of any of this lot!

I've started the Serhii Plokhii Chernobyl book, it's much better than that Higginbotham travesty and he grew up in the Soviet Union + has a better feel for how the dysfunctional + belligerent interactions between different departments (+ add idiot bosses/unrealistic quotas/budgetary pressures to the mix) conspired towards the 2nd rateness of the reactors (bad design without safety containment to start with) and absolute inevitability of a catastrophe at some point.

Yeah I only know the characters by how they look, I guess a lot has happened in two episodes, but it seems masterfully written and acted so far. The dynamic between Harris and the minister type bloke was instantly great, like the way he seems actually quite effective within the confines of what's possible in such a system.

It's interesting seeing Gorbachev portrayed at the centre of such a system, I guess I feel all I remember about him was this heroic treatment of him in western media and even when I was at primary school, which I suppose was some bizarre lionising bullshit due to the fall of communism.

Also the whole thing looks incredible.

yeah the design is so very impressive and convincing on every scale, from the reactor to the civilian scenes, everything is so real looking. I can't still can't get that image out of my head when the worker looks right into the burning core of the reactor in ep 1, incredible scene.

I'm just getting to the bit in the book that deals with the firemen attempting to extinguish the fire on the huge shared turbine hall roof. It is actually even more horrific and chaotic than the version presented in the series. Some of the firemen are kicking lumps of radioactive graphite out of the way, not realising these little glowing lumps have already condemned lots of them to a very painful death within hours/days. Molten bitumen is practically gluing some of them to the spot. One of them describing it as worse than anything the pen of Dante could have imagined. They don't even understand the implications of the reactor core blowing open and are only trained in dealing ordinary fires, and are more concerned with the broken oil pump threatening to release 200 tonnes of machine oil onto the floor turning it into a total inferno. It is a hellish clusterfuck even before you factor in the off the scale radiation bombardment and the threat of half of Europe getting sterilised.

Just started this series, and fucking hell

I mean, having read Svetlana Alexievich's book I'm not sure why I'm doing this to myself, but here we are

Now looking at the writewr/creator's IMDB credits, and having some serious cognitive dissonance.

The Huntsman: Winter's War (written by)
2013 The Hangover Part III (written by)
2013 Identity Thief (screenplay) / (story)
2011 The Hangover Part II (written by)
2008 Superhero Movie (written by)
2006 Scary Movie 4 (screenplay) / (story)
2003 Scary Movie 3 (written by)
1998 Senseless (written by)
1997 RocketMan (screenplay) / (story)

This is like finding out Threads was a Benny Hill project

That Darn Cat 2 next?

“We were doing our research, we came across this description of coal miners in the Soviet Union as being a particularly irascible, difficult group that operated outside of the normal fear bubble that everybody was in because they knew that they were necessary. In fact, they’d gone on strike a few times and Gorbachev said that he was more scared of the coal miners than anyone else,”

even though the miners were played for straight grim-faced lols, it's interesting what the writer said about them.

lol I've just realised the miners spokesman is ex-Eastenders Scottish character, who was so dull and unmemorable I can't even remember his name.

Very grim lols, but believable, too, I thought.

Watching this, am simultaneously appalled at a political system that could basically force so many people to sacrifice themselves so horribly, and astonishingly grateful that they did.

some grim lols needed after so much radiation horror, but it was cut with much sadness as well. I mean most of the grim lols were the overt machismo of these lads, but it's quite touching at the end - even though lol naked miners.

Another good touch was him (J Harris character) realising (or maybe he knew at the time) that the couple at the bar asking him innocuously nosy questions were KGB agents, making sure he wasn't spreading fear and blabbing to people.

Is that what that was? I didn't pick up on that. In that same scene, why did he ask for the other glass?

in the next ep they are being tailed by them. My take was that he was aware that the even some distance from the reactor the radiation levels were something like at least 4 times the amount legally allowed for nuclear workers, let alone civilians and much worse in some places. So an upright cup catches irradiated dust particles?

a quite chilling witness account from Pripyat from one bloke was he was blithely going about his business, supping a few beers on the roof and sunbathing. But he could sense something different in the atmosphere, and feel his skin burning much faster than it usually does on a sunny day.

Yeah, I assumed he wanted a cup that had been rim-down so the innards were clean.

Jared Harris really is a gem.

Yeah, he's a fine actor and then some.

He has so much integrity in every character I've seen him play. I hope he continues to get more work. He was brilliant in The Terror as well which didn't seem to get any traction in the UK but was very enjoyable.

All of this feels so well studied and just so real, albeit with scenes like the one with the chief of the KGB that are sort of classic spy fiction but absolutely note perfect.

The casting seems fairly meticulous, I noticed even the hospital receptionist is the Irish actress Caolfhinn Dunne, I don't even know if she will appear again but I found that interesting given how most of the roles seem perfectly cast.

Horrific scenes with the victims in the hospital.

he will definitely get plenty of work, he seems to be the go-to fellow to bring integrity and quality to all sorts of rubbish - but he is always a massive pleasure to watch.

Must have been a hard slog in relative obscurity until the last few years when you're Richard Harris's son.

I mean as far as sense of self goes rather than it being as hard as broke and unemployed actors.

i totally forgot he plays Andy Warhol in a pretty forgettable 90's movie, maybe he is one of those actors that was solid but dull in his youth, but has matured into a top notch performer?

lol, I'd also forgotten he was in Fringe, he was excellent in that deranged but very watchable nonsense as well.