[OSSR]Eurosource

[Ancient History]

EUROSOURCE
The EuroTheatre Sourcebook for Cyberpunk

FrankT:

Cyberpunk 2020 was always a bit on the golly-gosh-wow end of Cyberpunk games. You could get a cybernetically implanted tape deck for fuck's sake. This book, complete with its terrible art is the Cyberpunk sourcebook to try to put over the R Talsorian vision of what Europe was supposed to be. Keep in mind that Cyberpunk's main playground was the fictional city of “Night City”, which is Moss Landing California, but with more urbanness (which admittedly, is not particularly difficult since Moss Landing is basically a road side vegetable stand and the county's main power plant).

Now for this project they went a bit farther afield with their author pool and decided to tap one Mark Galeotti. He's an academic who spent most of the nineties writing alarming pieces for Jane's about the military capabilities of Russia and the social impacts of the collapse of the Soviet Union. But apparently he also likes writing RPG stuff in his free time. I personally can relate.

AncientH:

He also did Mythic Russia, which isn’t so bad. Europe was always a strange place by Americentric cyberpunk standards. When your idea of “exotic” locales for cyberpunk settings includes Seattle and Denver, it’s a bit hard to imagine what life is like in, say, France or the Hungary. Most of these books emphasize the continued existence of Russian socialism for longer than you might think.

The amazing thing about Eurosource, unlike say, the Germany sourcebook for Shadowrun, is that it was actually updated several years later and re-released as Eurosource Plus.

FrankT:

Production values on this book are not high by modern standards. Heck, by modern standards this wouldn't even be publishable. RPG art has come a long way, and the ubiquitousness of desktop publishing programs has caused text quantities and layout quality to skyrocket. This book on the other hand, is an 80 page screed written in 1991 and I am going to have to drink more Vaječny Sen to get through this. That's a Czech liquor made out of eggs somehow that is sweet and kind of gross. The art looks like it is taken from the early 60s line drawings that today get copypastaed into webcomics like Married to the Sea. According to the credits, this book had five artists and an art director, but it seems like the art director was charged with sorting through the stuff the artists scribbled on placemats at Denny's for things that were “kinda useable”.

AncientH:

It is the 80s, and the cover is very multicultural indeed. We’ve got a black guy with a flat top, two vaguely Asian-looking people, and three Aryans with 80s hair. For reasons not immediately apparent, each is prominently displaying the flag of their country, and the background is filled with flying cars.

The art is pretty bad indeed, but about commensurate with other books like GURPS Cyberpunk…and while Frank likes to rant about how poor and unacceptable this all is, keep in mind that this was a professional product compared with some of the other products of the era. And indeed, the styles then are no sillier than some of the styles now.



Introduction

There’s a new Edge in towen; a new style. It’s smoother, more subtle, with the sheen of expensive metal and silk. It moves throught he cabarets and clubs like a cyberteched shark, seeking the action, defining the fashion, choosing its targets with precision. When it goes for the kill, a momentary fog of blood hits the water, then, once again, the smooth, remorseless waves close over the body.

What is it? It’s Eurostyle. And there’s only one place you can get it.

FrankT:

The “introduction” is just most of a page's worth of ranting. It's basically a “foreword.” It's trying to tell you that “Europe” is a distant and mysterious place. Also it's pimping the idea of “Eurostyle”, which looking back at from 2013 I cannot even read without hearing it in Psy's voice followed by ridiculous horse dance antics. But this was 1991 when they thought that Europe was a mysterious unknown, so asking them to predict Korean pop sensations is perhaps unfair.

AncientH:

Eurostyle has all the hallmarks of an STD, and even in an 80s when big sweaters were in seems more than a bit of a stretch. The thing is, Europe was a mysterious place to a lot of cyberpunk afficiandos; most of the writers were, to put it mildly, rather young and broke and wrote mainly about a broken American dystopia or far-away places like Japan or outer space. That’s not to say that there weren’t stories set in Europe, but it was predominantly an American movement with American/Canadian authors like in North America, and so Europe was less the focus of things. I hold that you could write a really cool and interesting book on cyberpunk in Europe. Eurostyle probably would not be in it.

FrankT:

The biggest anachronism here isn't the fact that it describes the Russian security agency as “KGB”, it's that they describe the EEC as “the most powerful entity on Earth”. Yes, really. It was 1991, and people were predicting that the EU would get their shit together and command the largest economy the world had ever seen, wielding power to match. That the entire EEC experiment would basically turn out to be a failure on the grounds that it isn't actually a functioning fiscal or monetary union and is actually just a toothless treaty organization seemed to completely miss them. It's odd, because this book is supposed to be Cyberpunk, where the failure of governmental agencies is supposed to be pretty much assumed, and we already had ample examples of this sort of high minded international feeble posturing with the UN and the League of Nations before that. No individual group wants to cede power to the Federal body, so without an army of its own there really isn't a tendency for centralization.

AncientH:

The idea that any particular part of the world would get its shit together is always the stuff of science fiction; it’s just amazing that so many people seemed to think the EEC would actually turn into something more significant.


One of the things you immediately notice in this book is the British spelling. I guess that was to give it a more European feel?

FrankT:

Attempts to predict the course of slang rarely work out, and Cyberpunk is not an unusual case. They helpfully inform you that this book will contain three new adventures, which we are assured will be “slammin”. And they end on this note:

So here's your ticket, ripperboy. Grab your seat; the party's just starting. Here's Eurostyle– in your face.

Now you can't unsee that image whenever you hear “Eurostyle” either.

AncientH:

I love the old RPG copyright disclaimers:

Copyright © 1991 by R. Talsorian Games, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Cyberpunk ® is R. Talsorian’s Trademark name for its adventure game of the dark future. The terms Netrunner, Chromebook, Night City and Eurosource are trademarks of R. Talsorian Games, Inc. All Rights Reserved under Universal Copyright Convention. All incidents, situations, and persons portrayed within are fictional any similarity, without satric intent, of characters living or dead is strictly coincidental.

Asses covered, we don our mirrorshades and delve into…the New Europe.

[Lago PARANOIA]

God, I love the early 90s.

[Koumei]

This is looking awesome.

or the Hungary.

Sidetrack: is there a rule on which Central-European countries are the (country name) and which are not? I've generally heard people refer to the Ukraine, and this is the first time I recall seeing the Hungary, so is there some list of which countries are supposed to be prefixed with "the"?

One of the things you immediately notice in this book is the British spelling. I guess that was to give it a more European feel?

It's either that or accents and umlauts. Which would make for an awesome parody game or rock band name, come to think of it. But putting dots and apostrophes over every vowel in the book would get annoying very quickly.

[Sir Neil]

Accents and Umlauts, a sourcebook for Shadowrun $th edition.

[Voss]

Good job on protecting those trademarks by the way. If they tried to contest them now, they might not be slapped down hard for Night City. And maybe Eurosource, but I doubt it.

[nockermensch]

Copyright © 1991 by R. Talsorian Games, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Cyberpunk ® is R. Talsorian’s Trademark name for its adventure game of the dark future. The terms Netrunner, Chromebook, Night City and Eurosource are trademarks of R. Talsorian Games, Inc. All Rights Reserved under Universal Copyright Convention. All incidents, situations, and persons portrayed within are fictional any similarity, without satric intent, of characters living or dead is strictly coincidental.

Man, just think on all the dough they got as settlement for that.

[norms29]

This is looking awesome.

or the Hungary.

Sidetrack: is there a rule on which Central-European countries are the (country name) and which are not? I've generally heard people refer to the Ukraine, and this is the first time I recall seeing the Hungary, so is there some list of which countries are supposed to be prefixed with "the"?

I'm pretty sure the Ukraine is the only country that normally gets that treatment. and I'm given to understand that it's a nationalist hot-button over there, as the "the" is taken to imply that they're a geographic region rather than a real country.

[Ikeren]

Whoa, I've only just noticed that we say The Ukraine and not The Poland or The Slovenia...

[vagrant]

Speaking as a Ukrainian, we don't really understand why 'The' is added in English. It's really just a bit incoherent. It does annoy me a bit when people call it 'The Ukraine', but we've so many more nationalist topics to focus on! (Kick the Russians out! No, the Russians are awesome! Nationalist partisans who fought with the Nazis! Etc.)

[Ancient History]

Honestly, "The Hungary" was just a whoopsie on my part.

[Username17]

Speaking as a Ukrainian, we don't really understand why 'The' is added in English. It's really just a bit incoherent. It does annoy me a bit when people call it 'The Ukraine', but we've so many more nationalist topics to focus on! (Kick the Russians out! No, the Russians are awesome! Nationalist partisans who fought with the Nazis! Etc.)

There are several countries which begin with a definite article. It's "The Congo", "The Sudan", "The Netherlands", "The Bahamas", and "The Philippines". Also "The United States" of course.

Countries get a "the" in English if they are a geographical region like "The Sudan", if they are plural noun like "The Netherlands", or if they are in long form and have an adjective-noun structure like "The Slovak Republic". They are also given a "the" if they conform to all three of those, like "The United States". So it's "The Netherlands" or "Holland" (no "the").

Ukraine is a word meaning "borderland" and thus refers to the actual region that the country is on rather than to the corporate entity of the country itself. So properly speaking, in English it has a "the". Ukrainian nationalists get their panties in a knot because they think we put a "the" on it because we still think the name of the country is "The Ukrainian Social Republic" and assume that we don't know we aren't shortening an adjective noun structure. That is wrong, and the people who flip their shit about putting a definite article on The Ukraine are blowing smoke. It fits the English usage pattern of a country that gets a definite article, so it gets a definite article.

There is no shame attached to countries getting a definite article in English, or The United States and The United Kingdom probably would have done something about it long ago. Remember, it's "The United Kingdom", but there is no "the" in "Great Britain". And there's always going to be a "the" in "The Ukraine".



-Username17

[vagrant]

Ukraine means, roughly translated, 'The Country'. Granted, the base word, krai, means both country and border, but in usage of the actual name, it's the former.

I'd argue 'the Sudan' or 'the Congo' is just as incoherent as calling Ukraine 'the Ukraine'. When I'm talking to Sudanese or Congolese coworkers, I cannot remember them even once adding the article 'the' before their country's name.

[Username17]

Ukraine means, roughly translated, 'The Country'. Granted, the base word, krai, means both country and border, but in usage of the actual name, it's the former.

Well, in usage, "The Ukraine" means a specific country that happens to have a border with Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Hungary, Moldova, Poland, and the Black Sea. However, the name's etymology dates back to referring to "the borderlands" hundreds of years ago. Frankly, if you wanted to have the country be named something that didn't get an article in English, you should have settled on "Galicia" or "Ruthenia".

I'd argue 'the Sudan' or 'the Congo' is just as incoherent as calling Ukraine 'the Ukraine'. When I'm talking to Sudanese or Congolese coworkers, I cannot remember them even once adding the article 'the' before their country's name.

The Sudan and The Congo both get an article, and there is nothing incoherent about that. What's incoherent is Slavs getting upset one way or another about whether their country gets a fucking article in English considering that Slavic languages don't have articles and it doesn't make any fucking difference.

If someone wanted to get offended about how countries are transliterated in other languages, the people who really have standing to complain are Germans. Because in Ukrainian, their country is called "Nimechchyna", which basically means "place where people can't talk properly". The definite article in front of Ukraine is not a pejorative. It's just a completely arbitrary linguistic rule in English, which people fucking follow. And getting upset about it makes no sense on any level.

-Username17

[vagrant]

Except Ukraine doesn't mean fucking borderlands, Frank. That's the point. It means Country. Seriously. And yeah, I've always lol'd that Germany's name in Ukrainian means 'barbarians', but fuck 'em.

Ukrainians don't get upset over the fact that people add 'The' in front of the name, we just get confused because it doesn't make sense. You don't translate names. Not to mention that the general trend is to drop 'The' from the name already, so yeah, if you wanna apply arbitrary linguistic rules from a language that's horribly incoherent already, you may as well not apply that one. Because it's arbitrary, but also because it doesn't fucking make sense. If you're referring to the geographical region, then it's the Ukrainian region.

Both Galicia and Ruthenia refer to completely separate ethnic groups, by the way. Of course, I can't expect you to have the historical sense of an actual Slav, Frank, so I'll forgive you. You are, however, wrong.

[Whipstitch]

The whole The Sudan thing is also kind of a weird situation because we're not exactly talking about a bastion of stability here. Basically, you have two countries with Sudan in their names that are in The Sudan.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Besides, everyone knows that attaching an indefinite article in front of proper nouns makes them that much cooler.

For example, would you rather go to Manitoba... or... THE MANITOBA? Exactly.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 1.0: The New Europe

FrankT:

First off, yes the chapters are numbered “1.0”, “2.0”, etc. This is mostly because it's 1991 and people thought that calling things “point Oh made it sound cool and high tech. It wasn't for several years that people realized that the point zero version number is actually given to stable betas and thus presumably still full of deferred and non-crash bugs. Less than a decade later, people would have graduated to naming sequels “two thousand” and shit. The nominal point of all of this is that chapter five is divided into sections named things like 5.1 and 5.2 and so on. The first chapter is also divided into sections, but apparently the author or layout guy hadn't decided on the version numbering yet, and the sections are just given titles and aren't referenced in the index. At sixteen pages, this chapter is literally exactly average for this book. There really isn't enough material for even the eighty pages this book comprises, a fact that they make up for by having really wide margins. Some of this space is used to fit boxed text, but a considerable amount is just left colored gray. Or “grey” I suppose, because British spellings.

AncientH:

As with many cyberpunk books, this section starts out with a so-fast-it-is-a-blur slice of history, vaguely mentioning important events in passing like everybody knows what those things are and no-one actually needs a history lesson…which begs the question of why the section is written like that to begin with. I mean, you wouldn’t write a modern history of Europe mentioning the Mad Cow outbreak or anything, unless maybe it was a history of beef consumption in Europe. Still, it can be effective. Remember, that off-mention of “the Clone Wars” by Ben Kenobi in Star Wars is what eventually spawned the three sequels!

…ghost, that’s a depressing thought.

FrankT:

Each section in the first chapter is about a region, and I suppose we may as well go through them one by one. The first region is United Germany. The future history has various stumbling blocks, but the core idea is one that was commonplace in 1991: the idea of manifest destiny of Germany to economically control Europe. This has actually played out fairly exactly, as anyone who has read Angela Merkel's fake twitter account could tell you. The bit where this goes completely off the rails from real history is the general assumption by the author that Germans would actually be any good at running an empire.

In the real world of course, Germans use the same word for “debt” as for “guilt”, and are basically pathologically incapable of even making a sensible banking policy – let alone setting a functional set of monetary, fiscal, and trade policies for an entire continent. But here we are regaled with tales of Germany using a guiding hand to steer the EC to prominence and dominance in world affairs. Frankly, it comes off as much stranger science fiction than the explicitly fictional events like deadly plagues, food riots, and civil wars.

AncientH:

The problem with ze Germanz chapter is that the author reaches back to fucking Bismark for a dream of what Germany should be. Oh, and there’s this little tidbit:

Austria is now in all but in name part of Germany, so closely tied into its neighbour’s social and economic system that it is often called ‘the Seventeenth Lander’. Calm and sedate, it is increasingly one big ‘commuter village’ for German suits who want a second home ‘abroad’, but can’t bear the thought of living near all those foreigners.

Gah. It sounds like Canada if Americans were as xenophobic as the Japanese. In fact, a lot of stuff about ze Germanz resembles the kind of cyberpunk thinking about the Japanese during the 80s. Like this little note tacked onto the sidebar:

Most Germans can’t imagine life outside their corps, let alone live it.

I imagine a great deal of Europeans would get very angry, drunken, and sullen just with this opening section, which includes WTF-ness like Germany peacefully annexing a chunk of Poland (Gdansk/Danzig).

FrankT:

France gets their own section as well, though it is mostly there to tell you that French people like to whine about how powerful Germany is. That part actually rings fairly true. Where it sort of goes off the rails is with this idea about “dreampainting”. It's a somewhat interesting idea of people following their dreams and investing deeply in style and individuality. It's very cyberpunk, but it's hard to take that seriously as a national identity – even for France. Basically it seems like the author had a kind of neat (if not well flushed out) idea about striving for stylistic identity in the future, and then proceeded to rant about it in the France section because he didn't have enough to say about France. It kind of comes off like someone telling you “Did you know avant garde is French?” for two pages.

AncientH:

Dreampainting is a bizarre, shitty variation on something that William Gibson came up with in “The Winter Market.” Which is a brilliant short story, and you should put the book down at this point and go re-read it, as I did. Of course, this makes coming back to cyberFrance all the harder.

Some of the hopes and dreams for France under the Seventh Republic are strange. Case in point:

With a population now only minority pureblood Caucasian French, the country has an extraordinary level of racial harmony.

It’s hard to describe any racial/ethnic group in Europe as “pure”—the Basques, maybe—because quite honestly, everybody has been fucking each other’s grandmothers since at least the Romans, and probably since the first Cro-Magnons copulated with Neanderthals in the forests of Gaul. I mean, the sentiment is nice, and it must be said that in general France has done better with racial harmony than, say, Germany, but even today there’s a shitload of racial tension in the country. The fact that white people are the minority is not going to automatically make the country open and accepting.

FrankT:

Britain also gets their own section, and as you may be able to tell, there is basically no rhyme or reason to what order these sections come in. You get about 3 pages, and its mostly Thatcher commentary. It was 1991, that's what you get. Britain is under martial law because Thatcher, Britain has crumbling industry because Thatcher, Britain has a confused and overly aggressive foreign policy because Thatcher, there are riots protesting the falling standards of living because Thatcher. The head of the government is a minor noble with bad hair because Thatcher. Thatcher Thatcher Thatcher. I understand the author lived under Thatcher for much of his life at that point, and that sucked, but still: Thatcher Thatcher Thatcher.


If you were British in the late eighties, most of your nightmares would start like this.

AncientH:

Britain under a military coup, the monarchy quietly dissolved, the IRA still pissing fire in Northern Ireland, and a new aristocracy is taking place—one part V from Vendetta, one part French Terror romance. It’s nicely dystopian, but then the bizarre punkish element comes in with motorcycle gangs like the Viking GoBoys and the aggressively sexual neutral AndroGoths. These are The Warriors meets the Mods and Rockers.

FrankT:

Having done the “big three”, we now get to sections dedicated to bigger regions. Our first such foray is Southern Europe. It is weird how this piece veers wildly in and out of being a good set of predictions. Southern Europe is depicted as being the poorer, second class Europe that is almost as shat upon as the East. That part is true (indeed, they may be even more shat upon than the Poles and Czechs), but I remind you that it's true because in reality Germans can't manage their way out of a paper bag, let alone a banking crisis. So the image of First Tier Europe being a brilliant puppet master that exploits Southern Europe by forcing them to do all their filthy heavy industries is... sort of weird actually. Also we get told that because things are so chaotic and poor, that Greece is a great place to get a job. So there's that.

One of the weirder parts of this book is how it seems to think that economics is a zero sum game or something. Spain is depicted as doing well until the economy of France takes off, causing them to stagnate. I don't really know what theory of money and trade the author had read, but you can plainly see his interest is in military history rather than economics. He seems to think that your trading partners having money to buy things is bad for your economy.

Greece is a military dictatorship with heavy industry and a good place to get a job if you're from outside Europe. This is a very 70s view of Greece, and it seems like the Author possibly hadn't read anything particularly recent about the place. The description of Turkey is perhaps even more anachronistic, talking about acid rain and repeated military coups – that part could have been written in nineteen-eighty-one as easily as 1991.

AncientH:

It’s difficult to sum up an entire country in a few paragraphs, and I should know, because I’ve had to do it. Poor, indifferent treatment is what drove the Shadows of Europe book for Shadowrun after all. I think my biggest criticism of this chapter is that there’s no big picture about how all these countries—which are almost uniformly restless, corrupt, or in financial straits—really add together to a coherent Europe. Where’s the EuroStyle in the Neuvo Mafia or having to be the early mercenary to the table to get the precious work permits that allow you to escape Greece?

FrankT:

Poland and points south and East are referred to interchangeably as “New Central Europe” and “Eastern Europe” throughout the text. Like the author just couldn't be fucked to decide how exactly they wanted to divide up the continent and ended up with a very confused narrative. We're talking about “Czechoslovakia” and “Central Europe” in one sentence, and then we're off to the races talking about Bulgaria and Romania. I hold that if your country has a border to the Black Fucking Sea, you are not in “Central” Europe. You might be in Central Asia. Still, I can accept their prediction that Czechoslovakia would attack Poland and get their asses handed to them. Wouldn't be the first time.

Bonus points for talking about an expansionary Yugoslavia that keeps adding bits to itself. Ironic because the author apparently forgot what “Balkanization” was named after.


Even in 1991, predicting this thing would expand was probably a pretty weird choice.

AncientH:

In the latter years of the last century the renaissance of former Eastern Europe seemed just over the horizon. Post-Stalinist permafrost melted in the face of people power and Western liberalism, and investment was set to recreate a new, all-European democratic order. Gorbachev and then Gorborev pulled out all the political controls to concentrate on internal reforms.

And then it all exploded. Nowadays the Czech Republic is probably best known for their export of porn stars, but there’s no way the author could have predicted that. Perhaps more than anything he did underestimate the sheer level of corruption at play in the Eastern Europe…and he thought Greece and Italy had it bad!

Another problem with these write-ups is that they’re in the traditional top-down structure, focusing on big national issues and whatnot. Which isn’t to say that nobody gives a crap about that, but it’s like trying to understand life in America by watching cable news. You might possibly be informed on some of the issues, but you’re never going to get a glimpse of a real human being just not being an asshole and getting on with life. So you just hear about the difficulties and disasters and not about the actual people that live in those places, or what makes their life interesting.

FrankT:

The final section is the “extra stuff” section, officially called “The Troublesome Margins”. There's a bit about Scandinavia, a bit about the Soviet Union, and little bits about relations with non-European areas of North Africa, the Middle East, and the United States (fuck you, Canada!).

The Scandinavia section is really short, but extremely confusing. The big problem for Scandinavia is apparently that they don't have any oil and cannot afford their European lifestyle unless they supplement their incomes with unethical medical tourism. I don't even know what to say about that, because North Sea Oil is totally a thing, and virtually any other shortage you cared to name – from food to electronics to clothing to medical supplies would make more sense than claiming that Scandinavia was starved for petrochem.

Notably absent from this chapter is the entirety of Western Europe other than Germany and France. For a book about the EU, it's really very weird that they do not mention the capital of the EU. Belgium and Holland are just lost in the memory hole. It's very strange.

AncientH:

I think this is a chapter where the author could have severely benefited from a map, because there are large gaping chunks of Europe that just are not mentioned. Belgium, the Netherlands, Iceland (presumably mixed in with the rest of the Nordic countries), Estonia, Monaco, fucking Switzerland (!), Armenia, I guess Romania and Ukraine doesn’t really exist in this timeline…but somehow at the end, because Russia is in there, we get little snippets of information on the ‘stans (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc.) and North Africa. Bizarre.

One thing we both noticed about this section is that it has these big gray sidebars on every page, flanking the main text when you have the book spread open, where various segues, notes, comments, quotations, etc. are included to supplement the text – as was relatively common in RPG books of the day, in one form or another. However, by and large these sidebars are blank, which just seems a criminal waste of space.

[darkmaster]

Please spoiler that comic book panel. It's stretching my tiny, tiny screen.

[DSMatticus]

Wishful thinking aside, the correct etymology of Ukraine is in fact borderland and not country. Case and point: the Ukrainian language makes a distinction between the preposition you would use to say you are in a geographical region and the preposition you would use to say you are in a country. Historically (as in, as recently as the late 1900's), guess which preposition the Ukrainian language used to refer to the Ukraine? Guess which preposition other Slavic languages still use today? The idea that Ukraine means country is nationalist revisionist history that isn't reflected at all in the historical linguistics we have available. It's like saying El Salvador means country - sure, it refers to a country you can point to on a map, but it actually means "The Savior."

And the same nationalist revisionist trend that caused Ukrainians to stop referring to their own country as a political entity based on a geographical region and instead as though it had always been a political entity is what puts the stick up some people's butts about calling it the Ukraine - it's a clear statement that we consider the Ukraine a political state named after a geographical region (which it is) instead of a very old political state that just happened to not formally exist until recently because of a string of bad luck (which it isn't). Bonus to drive the point home:

Continuing the thousand-year tradition of state development in Ukraine,

Bahahaha. Yeah, alright.

The moral of the story is always call it "The Ukraine", because it will piss off Ukrainian nationalists and those people are assholes. If you offend sane Ukrainians in the process, then those individuals are deeply confused in some way. We call it "The Ukraine" because your country took its name from a region that has been there for considerably longer, and so standard operating procedure is it gets the article.

I have no idea what vagrant's particular reasons are for being bothered by it, but the things he's saying are a mix of wrong and stupid. He is wrong on matters of etymology and meaning and stupid on matters of language. One of his actual complaints was that the rule suggesting we call it "The Ukraine" is arbitrary, and that's bad because reasons. Um, what in the fuck? All rules in all languages are arbitrary. That's a terrible criticism. Here, let me help you out: find some countries that were at one point in situations similar to The Ukraine's, and point out that we don't refer to them with an article. Showing inconsistency is a way you could successfully point out that English is stupid about this. But the way you're trying is a colossal failure and mostly boils down to "I don't like how English works, fuck your language." Okay.

[vagrant]

Blahblahblah I know nothing of actual Ukrainian history and will quote claim its all revisionist because derpderp

There's no such thing as a true fucking history, you idiot. It's all been revised, more or less, in places. You're dismissing 'Ukrainian revisionist history' without realising you've hit the failure state of making a binary distinction. And yes, in fact, English does suck and fuck you for tying your idiotic arbitrary rules to a goddamn proper noun.

[Username17]

Blahblahblah I know nothing of actual Ukrainian history and will quote claim its all revisionist because derpderp

There's no such thing as a true fucking history, you idiot. It's all been revised, more or less, in places. You're dismissing 'Ukrainian revisionist history' without realising you've hit the failure state of making a binary distinction. And yes, in fact, English does suck and fuck you for tying your idiotic arbitrary rules to a goddamn proper noun.

Please fuck all the way off. Read some fucking history written before the Directorate period. Ukraine means "the Borderland" in actual fucking history. And if that bothers you, that's a problem with you.

-Username17

[Koumei]

I love it when a simple question leads to an intense battle.

[Starmaker]

*хрустящий картофель*

[Username17]

*хрустящий картофель*

My Cyrillic is basically nonexistent, is that "French Fries" or "Potato Chips"?

-Username17

[Starmaker]

*хрустящий картофель*

My Cyrillic is basically nonexistent, is that "French Fries" or "Potato Chips"?

-Username17

A specific kind of potato chips. There's only one "open source" brand of it, Московский картофель (Moscow potatoes). Since the Ukrainian insult for Russians happens to be "москаль" (muscovite), it is a particularly appropriate *popcorn* alternative for this thread.