to better convey the gloomy dystopian nature of this city to the western reader

There are plenty of gloomy and dystopian cities that are not Russian, let's not get weird about this

Just trying to discourage people from making lazy stereotypes. Not sure what you're doing. It's cool that you clicked my profile to find where I live, though. Or weird? I dunno.

Let's be more specific than "weird": you're being belligerent and using the personally identifying information you can gather about someone to accost them on a tech forum.

>In general, looking up where someone lives to attach a threat of violence (ie - Russian tanks in $your_city) would be considered a threat.

No, it wouldn't.

Similarly, when someone says "What if it were your child?" , that isn't a threat -- it's a request for a change in perspective.

The idea is to impress upon the reader that they're not any safer than the victim; rather that they got lucky to be unaffected and should consider the positions and perspectives of the victims when coming to a judgement of the situation.

> In general, looking up where someone lives to attach a threat of violence (ie - Russian tanks in $your_city) would be considered a threat.

I don't think Don was trying to imply that he's in command of a Russian tank battalion.

(there is a thing to contemplate)

no, that wasnt the point. I'm not even sure if your typical _western reader_ could distinguish russian from ukrainian looking at the screenshot

What's weird about those screen shots is that they must have been photoshopped, because all the graphics except for the text are identical to the English version, yet I highly doubt the lazy translator actually had access to the save files at the exact point in time when the screenshots were made to load them into the Russian version of the game.

So it's much more likely that the screenshots were meticulously edited to remove the English text and replace it with Russian.

English original:

https://archive.ph/GokfI/5fff3abf855b5851484418965bf747d1d8a...

Russian fake:

https://habrastorage.org/getpro/habr/post_images/249/838/546...

English original:

https://archive.ph/GokfI/33461173f8f068f29ae392ddde9833c1000...

Russian fake:

https://habrastorage.org/getpro/habr/post_images/c73/e8f/088...

If you zoom in you can see that the Russian fakes have some but not all of the jpeg artifacts from the English originals smoothed out (look around the letters, then around the lines on the graph), and the large numbers are missing commas, so they are definitely fakes based on the original jpegs of English screen snapshots.

I don't even know if there was a Russian version of SimCity 2000.

There's certainly a Russian version of The Sims 4, but Russia is so existentially terrified of a computer game turning their delicate children gay that they banned it.

https://www.cbr.com/sims-4-wedding-stories-russia-banned-pro...

Edit: I explained above why I am sure they are fakes. Look at the jpeg artifacts closely, which give it away, especially around the letters and lines: some are missing (around all the letters and in some background areas), others are perfectly identical (around the lines of the graph). That proves the Russian versions are fakes beyond a shadow of a doubt, based on the original jpegs of English screen snapshots. Open each of the above four links in consecutive tabs, zoom in on each several steps, and flip back and forth between them to compare them yourself. Some but not all of the background was smoothed (gaussian blur, median filter, unsharp mask, etc), which removed the jpeg artifacts, and the old text was background-cloned away and the new text composed on top of the smooth background, without any jpeg artifacts. They definitely did not make new screen snapshots of the Russian version of the game on the original save files at the exact same time (how would they have even obtained that save file at that exact time?), because then none of the jpeg artifacts would match. It's as terrible a fake screen snapshot forgery as it's a terrible round trip translation from English to Russian back to English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_artifact

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringing_artifacts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_blur

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_filter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking

Why would you assume that these are fakes? There are fan translations for the game (a quick google search would bring this up) and you can download savefiles for Magnasanti. Maybe the person simply recreated the Screenshots with their russian client? Seems a lot easier to me.

> There's certainly a Russian version of The Sims 4, but Russia is so existentially terrified of a computer game turning their delicate children gay that they banned it.

Sims 4 is not banned in Russia. It does have a 18+ age restriction, which, I assume, is more or less USA's NC17.

Because 156 million people in the world speak Russian. Why would that be odd?

It's odd because the original version was written in English. Then somebody (Alconost) translated to Russian, without giving credit to the original source, but putting in a bunch of advertisements for their own site, then somebody poorly translated it back to English.

How many people in the world speak Russian is irrelevant and has nothing to do with the fact that it's odd that whoever translated it to Russian didn't bother crediting the original, and just credited themselves a lot.

Then because of that omission, somebody wasted their time making such a terrible redundant translation back to English, with bizarre phrases like "Transferred to Alconost" and "The article is translated in Alconost", which make one question the skills of the translator so bent on claiming credit for themselves without giving proper credit to others.

https://archive.ph/GokfI

The original author of the city was indeed an architecture student from the Philippines, Vincent Oscala. At least Alconost left Vincent's name in when he misappropriated somebody else's article to advertise his low quality translation and advertising services.

The odd and terrible Russian translation also omits important links, including this interview with Vincent:

Viceland Games: The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat SimCity

https://archive.ph/eA7CX

Mammoth:

http://m.ammoth.us/blog/2010/10/magnasanti/

The original author of the post is theoretically an architect student from the Philliphines, according to some articles. I agree, however, who knows... just screenshots.