Alevtina and Tamara and Lyonka, Oh My!
(As usual, click on any of the following images to embiggen. Although I really shouldn’t have to be telling anyone that.)
You might have seen a dude by the name of Dimitry SkoLzki hanging around the gallery hereabouts. He did these distinctive black-and-white sketches—they have an almost almost wood-cut vibe—inspired by characters and events in Blindsight (and later, Echopraxia). They impressed my Chinese publishers so much they bought the rights for their own Blindopraxia imprints.
Russian by birth, currently based in Cyprus (he got the hell out of Dodge just before Putin went full-on Goon Squad), SkoLzki has recently put out a heartfelt volume of—I’m not quite sure how to describe them, exactly. Certain cultural outlets are calling it a collection of “noir fairy tales”; others call it a graphic novel. Neither description is wrong, exactly, but neither really captures the essence of this surrealistic, horrific, old-time Russian Grimm-tales volume. Limasol Today says that it’s about “the author exploring his inner worlds and the depths of his personality through metaphors and symbols.” Dmitriy tells me that it was forged against a backdrop of “longterm depression” (to which I can only say, Dude, if you could pull off something like this when you’re depressed, I can barely imagine what you could come up with when you’re ecstatic). The phrase “mystical noir illustrated tales” has been bandied about.
![](https://www.rifters.com/crawl/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/20240725_152359-1024x762.jpg)
What we’re looking at is an interlocking series of nearly a hundred vignettes clumped together into five larger—I’m going to call them dream tales—across 227 pages. The balance between word and picture varies from leaf to leaf. Sometimes a mural sprawls across two facing pages with barely three lines of text to accompany it; other times a whole page of cramped handwriting has to stand on its own without so much as a stick figure for support. The balance between light and dark is a lot more consistent: darkness always wins, even in the happy bits.
The volume is titled Alevtina and Tamara, but— while those two sisters are omnipresent throughout— the stories really orbit around their brother Lyonka. Lyonka dies pretty much out of the gate (he’s a sickly child who likes beetles) but quickly resurrects and lives out the rest of the book as some kind of hyperphallic goat-human hybrid. A mother figure the size of a mountain breezes through the woods now and then; predators and prey are always prowling around at the edges of the page. Quests trivial and epic get wrapped up in a few lines of free verse, or abandoned halfway through when someone gets distracted by something shiny. A lot of time is spent in trees. It’s a weird, dark, disjointed, strangely innocent celebration of the macabre, East-European-mythic right down to the marrow, and I loved it.
![](https://www.rifters.com/crawl/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/20240725_152157-1024x729.jpg)
The whole thing is Dream Logic made flesh. I bet Lynch would be a fan. I bet Cronenberg would too.
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But I may be way too late sending out invitations to this party; Alevtina and Tamara came out back in April. A little like Lyonka and his sisters, I too have been pulled this way and that by various deadlines, ambitions, and emergencies (I’m still a bit soggy after slurping the pond out of our basement during the recent flooding—Climate Change finally hits the Magic Bungalow).
It’s not that SkoLzki’s work is the kind that staledates, mind you. I might even call it “timeless”, if I wasn’t so afraid of descending into cliché. But SkoLzki’s only released this thing in a limited edition of 300 beautifully embossed hardcovers; if they’re not sold out now, they might be soon.
![](https://www.rifters.com/crawl/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/20240725_152848-1024x700.jpg)
So if the renditions you’re looking at here call out to you, head over to the store and check the inventory. Alevtina and Tamara isn’t for everybody, but the people it is for really don’t want to miss out on this.
![](https://www.rifters.com/crawl/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/20240725_153123-808x1024.jpg)
![](https://www.rifters.com/crawl/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/20240725_153142-1-739x1024.jpg)
Wow, this is absolutely amazing and i need this. Gonna order as soon as i come home from work.
And done. At least something to cheer one up between all the current nastyness.
I wonder if the artist was inspired by Goya’s Black Period paintings? The physique of the guy hunched over the garbage pile reminds me of Saturn Devouring his Children.
Sorry to hear about your basement. Hope you didn’t lose anything valuable.
Not related to this topic, but I have been having the hardest time connecting to this site. I keep getting connection errors, time-outs, etc. EXCEPT when I try to connect through a VPN. Which is doubly strange because usually that causes the opposite problem.
This has been an ongoing problem for weeks now. My website host seems to be blocking a lot of IPs that aren’t even on bad-site lists. They blocked me twice, and they host my fucking site; for me the problem only went away when they put me on some overriding whitelist.
I’ve sent them an email asking them to dial it back. So far they have not responded. All I can suggest is that you email 1984@rtracker.1984.is and ask them what’s going on. I am suggesting this to everyone who reports the issue. Just maybe, if they get hassled enough, they’ll back off.
In the meantime, most people get in just fine but a significant minority, scattered all over the world, are running into the same problem you are. It’s really starting to piss me off.
Same here. I’m in the US, and have to hide my VPN via a non-US server to access the site. Why do you hate us ‘Muricans – is it because of our freedumbz?
Not just ‘Murrica. I’m getting the same reports from Portugal, Germany, all over the place. Hell, Skolzki couldn’t even connect to look at the pimpage for his own book!
They tell me that if we provide them with an IP they can look into why they blocked it. That email again, 1984@rtracker.1984.is. Tell them
Siggi told me to send you.
Hi Peter. I guess my problem is related to the issues mentioned above, but neither of your RSS feeds seem to be working?
There are two problems there: first the blocking (which had me unable to access the site since May), and also the site’s cert expired three days ago (which stops some RSS feed readers from accessing it, in case, I dunno, someone is crazy enough to man-in-the-middle attack Peter of all people).
New Zealand too, been on and off for a long time. I thought it was my ISP, since sometimes I could access via Tor.
I’m not sure I have this correct- did you write a story called Prompt Injection? If so, where can we find it?
Loved your story Iris!
Also, I noticed when I went to the Rifters blog on Safari( iPhone) your site has a Subscribe and Login button but when I was on DuckDuckgo it did not. I’ve never signed in with a Login – didn’t know you had to. I normally enter my name, email address and comment. No VPN although I probably should. So why the difference between Safari and DuckDuckGo?
I have no idea. You shouldn’t have to log in. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that when I tried to visit rifters.com this morning, I got this (I’m looking into it):
Came here to tell you your SSL cert expired yesterday. You need to get in touch with Let’s Encrypt for a fresh one.
ITYM “you need to use one of the many automated cert updating scripts so you never need to remember to do this ever again”. Except he probably is, only he can’t update the bloody cert because his hoster keeps blocking him.
Should be working again at last, on both the firewall and cert fronts.
It took a few emails, but rifters.com is back open for business. And it was partly my own fault. Apparently there’s this SSL button I can press in my website control panel to re-up the certification. Didn’t know about that.
Duh.
OMG, Peter!
Thank you very much!
Very appreciate it!
My copy arrived yesterday, after leafing through it i can confirm that it looks as great as our host promised. Money well spent!
Wait, what’s this? A comment that’s actually related to the post?
The very idea!
Peter Watts when you cut his arm off (he suddenly cares about the fate of individual human beings)
Hey, I’ve always cared about Individual human beings. I call them “friends”.
It’s the species I want to go extinct.
Which brings me back to your story Prompt Injection: Unchained Melody or Sex without a Condom. Did you take off the guard rails and use jailbreakChatGPT as inspiration?
Pretty unfair accusation i think, our gracious host always made it clear that he has loved ones and friends he cares very much about. (not being a sociopath and all)
It is our species in all its glory he detests.I reckon like most cynics he is a very, very disappointed idealist at heart. We humans have so much potential to change the world, and yet look at the state of the planet and human history in general.
As Seth Dickinson in Exordia let his aliens put it: “Humans are inbred porn-apes that are good at running. Thats it.”
Actually I’m not even sure what this Piper character was even referring to. Came across as a complete non sequitur to me.
LLMs don’t seem to be getting any more coherent with time.
Nah, I’m calling “meat” on that one. I understood it easily enough. A smidgen above the median standard for these, but it’s a “you suck” type comment from someone taking umbrage at our host’s misanthropic demeanour (which they, for some reason, felt compelled to familiarise themselves with somewhat, in order to have an opinion about it).
It’s trying to be clever by playing on hypocrisies that exist in its own constructed interpretation of the good doctor’s writings. “But you too are a human, like me, and would be compelled by your evolutionary heritage to find it intolerably bad if the kind of things which you profess to wish upon other humans such as myself (nipah outbreaks, towns burning down, etc) were to happen to you personally.”
So, an individualist (perhaps), failing to understand any perspective other than that of the individual; and pressured by their own assembly history towards being unable or unwilling to consider the hypothetical of there being, among the possible futures, no “good” outcomes at all for individuals such as themselves. Very meat!
Warning!!!
I have intelligence that the 1984@tracker link is a trap set by the Chimp.
Was not sure if you had seen this:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/these-living-computers-are-made-from-human-neurons/
I had not! But I have now.