As the memes would “say,” if this picture caught your eye, it’s time for the more thorough check-ups that come with advancing age.

But why on earth is the wolf from Nu, Pogodi!, the Soviet cartoon whose title means “Well, Just You Wait!,” collecting eggs instead of chasing the hare? How did the wolf actually make it possible for Nintendo to turn from a playing-card company to electronics? And why is this story the exact opposite of another cult game of the same generation, Tetris, which came out of the USSR?

Oh, the fate of the egg-catching wolf, such a good friend to the kids of the 1980s and 1990s, turns out to be quite unexpected.

A Thousand and One Nights

If, thousands of years ago, you collected eggs in this game, do you remember what happened when you reached 1,000 points?

Let’s check, because you had to be among the nimblest nineties kids, with the skills of an octopus, not to give up at the unimaginable speed with which the hens maliciously fired out their eggs.

In fact, a piece of retro folklore still drifts around the internet: beat the game, and you get to see a never-before-suspected episode of Nu, Pogodi! that was never shown on television. Plenty of people still claim to have seen it, but… no such thing ever existed. Not because we weren’t good enough (some were, at the price of calluses on their thumbs), but because there was never any film in there. At 999 the counter goes back to zero, the eggs start rolling about a third faster, and that’s it.

The Russian Wikipedia puts it mercilessly: “No special reward was ever intended.” Just like in Tetris, as it happens. But, and this holds for both, with enough will you can always set yourself the next goal.

Admittedly, we are rather spoiled today. On a screen like this, where all the figures are “printed” in advance and can only light up and go dark, there can be no cartoon in principle. The only animation in the entire device is the clock mode, in which the wolf catches eggs by himself, without us.

The Wolf from Kyoto

The idea was born not on a collective farm but in the head of a citizen of Kyoto who watched a bored office worker on the bullet train. Later, without his knowing it, his idea would be “replicated” in a Soviet factory. And later still, in its own peculiar way, it would be returned, when Tetris left the USSR to become the most recognizable game in the world, mostly thanks to the Japanese maker Nintendo.

On the forum Our Childhood, one contributor recalls getting it in sixth or seventh grade and carrying it everywhere, until one day, “on a walk along the pier, it fell out of my pocket into the sea.” His parents had saved up for it, and he still feels guilty.

Another reader remembers that there was one kid in her apartment block with the “eggs,” and everyone sat on the stairs and took turns. A third writes that he bought it for his son in 1990, when the boy was 12, and he himself had fun with it “even more than he did.” Sound familiar?

The Alarm-Clock Game

Let’s go back to the source. The game Nu, Pogodi! first appeared in the December 1984 issue of Novye Tovary (New Goods), the bulletin of the Soviet Ministry of Trade. No model number, just Nu, Pogodi! Only later did it get its official name, Elektronika IM-02. IM stands for “igra mikroprotsessornaya,” a microprocessor game. The IM-01 was a chess computer nobody remembers.

The price was 25 rubles (later 23), at a time when salaries were 150–200 rubles. In 1985 alone, three factories, in Zelenograd, Arzamas and Oryol, turned out more than 400,000 units, and in the following years a dozen or so plants scattered across the USSR joined in. Production stopped only in the mid-1990s, when the state that had started it no longer existed. The Belarusian version of the same wolf, however, came out in 2000 and is still played today.

The game is also a clock, which is why the Nintendo series that first introduced it is called Game & Watch. The “Vremya” (Time) button shows the hour, while the wolf on the screen keeps catching eggs and now and then dropping them, just like that, for decoration. There is an alarm too: when it rings, the hare appears in the little window at the top and strikes a bell. For a whole minute, the same single note, brrr…

The time is set with the tip of a ballpoint pen pressed into two recessed buttons. There is no 24-hour mode, because in Kyoto they didn’t plan for one and in Zelenograd they didn’t dare add it: instead of AM and PM, the screen says DP and PP, “do poludnya” and “posle poludnya,” before noon and after noon.

Four hens, four chutes, four buttons. Nothing complicated, wouldn’t you say? Every egg caught is a point. Miss one, and a chick hatches from the broken egg and you get a penalty; three of those and it’s over. But if the hare is peeking out of the little window, the penalty is halved and the chick only blinks. At 200 and at 500 eggs the misses are wiped clean. “Game A” has three chutes, “Game B” four. Every hundred eggs the pace eases off for a moment, then climbs again. And on toward the thousand, where the speed is not for the faint of heart (or fingers).

Collectors today tell the production batches apart by the wolf’s boxer shorts: they come with polka dots, with flowers or with stars, and the last are the rarest.

Two Centuries of Card Games

And so from the USSR we fly off to Japan. Gunpei Yokoi was born on September 10, 1941, in Kyoto. He studied electronics and in 1965 joined Nintendo. Yes, that well-known company, which at the time was still mostly in the business of making playing cards, something it had been doing since 1889!

Not the kind Bulgarians shuffle for belote, but a variety called hanafuda, played with flowers. Yokoi was hired to maintain the machines that stamped them.

But how do you get from stamping to the wolf with the eggs? His boss, Hiroshi Yamauchi, the founder’s great-grandson, was at the time frantically looking for something else for the firm to do, because cards were no longer selling well enough. He tried a taxi business. He tried hotels rented “by the hour.” He tried instant rice. Well, none of it took off.

One day he caught the young technician playing during working hours with a folding wooden grabber arm he had invented himself. In most companies that ends with a scolding; in this case it ended with an order to have the toy in the shops by Christmas. The Ultra Hand sold 1.2 million units.

Nintendo discovered it could make toys, and Yokoi that he could invent them. Next came the Love Tester (1969: two people hold hands and a needle shows how much they love each other by measuring… electric current), a light gun with solar cells in the targets, and entire shooting galleries built in bankrupt bowling alleys.

Yokoi Rocks!

The legend, as Yokoi himself later told it, dates from the late 1970s. On a shinkansen, the bullet train, the inventor watched a man in a suit pressing the buttons of a pocket calculator. He wasn’t calculating anything, just pressing them, a forerunner of today’s screen zombies. And Yokoi wondered: if a bored grown man does that with a calculator, what would he do with something made for playing? Something small, that hides in your palm, so people don’t give you funny looks on the subway.

How the idea reached the president is also a legend that may or may not be true…, but it’s a charming one. Yamauchi’s chauffeur fell ill, and Yokoi got behind the wheel to drive him to a meeting. On the way he told him about the calculator. The meeting turned out to be with the president of Sharp, the biggest calculator maker in the world. A week later Nintendo had permission to make a game with the size and basic technical specifications of a calculator.

At the time Sharp and Casio were waging a calculator war, and liquid-crystal displays and 4-bit chips had become cheap and plentiful. Yamauchi gave the project to one of the departments, but they turned it down, saying it couldn’t be done. Yokoi and his assistant, Satoru Okada, did it themselves. Sharp also refused at first; then Yokoi left them the prototype “to play with,” and their engineers got hooked.

On April 28, 1980, “Ball” came out, the first game in the Game & Watch series: a little figure juggling balls, two buttons, two button-cell batteries, priced at 5,800 yen. Yokoi hoped for 100,000 units sold. By 1991 the series had reached 60 titles and 43.4 million units worldwide. Before “Ball,” Nintendo had debts of 7–8 billion yen; they were quickly paid off out of serious profits.

The Gorilla and the Plumber

Around the same time, at the same company, a young artist named Shigeru Miyamoto was drawing a gorilla and a plumber, and Yokoi liked them and pitched the idea to the president.

On October 9, 1981, exactly 45 years ago, Nintendo released two games with the same mechanism on the same day. In one, a wolf in a hat catches eggs rolling down four chutes from four hens. It was called “Egg,” model EG-26, from the Wide Screen series. In the other, Mickey Mouse does the same with a basket, under an official Disney license, model MC-25.

Why two? The Mickey license didn’t apply everywhere, and the eggs had to sell everywhere. The mouse sold about 1.2 million units, the wolf under 250,000. Officially, at least.

That same year Yokoi and his department took on Miyamoto’s arcade game, Donkey Kong, and had to squeeze it into a pocket. A joystick doesn’t fit in a pocket, so in 1982 the four-way cross was born, the D-pad that has sat on every controller in the world ever since and in 2008 won an Emmy for technology.

Copy-Paste, Comrade

Exactly how Game & Watch made its way to Zelenograd, “the Soviet Silicon Valley,” nobody knows. The author of the most detailed Russian history of the game suspects someone brought one back from a business trip.

The heart of Nu, Pogodi! is the KB1013VK1-2 chip, a copy of the Sharp SM-5A, the same chip that runs the original “Ball” and “Egg.” A copy to such a degree that the machine code is compatible: Nintendo’s program would run on the Soviet chip and vice versa. They changed only what could be seen. The wolf in the hat got Mickey’s basket. The rooster in the little window became the hare from Vyacheslav Kotyonochkin’s cartoon, which since 1969 the whole of Eastern Europe had been watching, with the wolf voiced by Anatoli Papanov. In the cartoon, the wolf never once held a basket.

Nobody asked about the rights. Soyuzmultfilm was state-owned, and Disney was far away. So alongside it came the Elektronika 24-01, in which Mickey Mouse catches the eggs and Minnie rings the bell. Then a whole family followed: “Tainy okeana” (Secrets of the Ocean) is Nintendo’s Octopus, “Vesyoly povar” (The Merry Cook) is Chef, “Kosmichesky most” (Space Bridge) is Fire, “Razvedchiki kosmosa” (Space Scouts) is Explorers of Space.

An Egg for an Egg

1984, the year of the wolf with the basket, was also the year in which, at a Moscow computing center, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris. On an Elektronika-60 computer. The same brand. In one and the same year, Elektronika copied the Japanese game and created the Soviet one that would conquer the world.

Five years later Yokoi made the Game Boy, and Henk Rogers, the man who held the rights to Tetris, persuaded the head of Nintendo of America to put it in the box, not Super Mario. The argument: Mario is for boys, Tetris is for everyone. Thirty-five million copies sold. The Soviet game sold the Japanese console all over the world, just as the Japanese game had sold Soviet electronics.

Claude, Catch the Egg

Finally, I ran an experiment. I asked Claude to make Nu, Pogodi! in the browser. One sentence: four chutes, a wolf, a basket, a hare in the little window, half penalties, misses wiped at 200 and 500, speeding up. It took minutes. 112 lines of code. Instead of liquid-crystal segments, the wolf, the eggs and the hens are emojis, but the rules are the same, and at a thousand points the counter goes back to zero. I hadn’t asked for that. In the code, right at that spot, the model had left a comment on its own: “as in the original: goes from 999 back to 0, only faster; no cartoon.”

It had obviously read about the legend, too. You can try it below these lines.

A Trusted Paradise

The name Nintendo, as we’ve discussed before, means something like “trusted paradise.” But paradise has a fence. Addressing shareholders in the summer of 2024, President Shuntaro Furukawa said that generative AI “can be used in creative ways, but we recognize it may also raise issues related to intellectual property,” so Nintendo would continue “to create value that is unique to Nintendo and cannot be achieved through technology alone.” Put plainly: we won’t be using it.

The company whose game was copied down to the last byte without anyone asking it now worries about being copied by a machine that doesn’t ask anyone either. History doesn’t repeat itself; there are always new brushstrokes.

And if you’d like to catch a few eggs on the wolf’s behalf, you can find the game online for around 100 euros, and it also exists as a browser extension.

Everything new is the well-forgotten old. Or… the other way round?

Trying to peer into the future is a doomed challenge. Sometimes predictions come true with astonishing accuracy—like, for example, the ones we make every year with the futurologist Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova.

At the same time, reading tech predictions that never came true turns out to be unexpectedly entertaining, especially when… they are your own. That is exactly what we will do in the lines below. In more than five years, I have published just over 500 Digital Stories. I will invite an impartial observer to assess them and pull out specific passages from my own texts (the point is not to embarrass my guests) that have not aged well at all.

The honor, of course, goes to ChatGPT, which receives the full texts of all the Digital Stories and the freedom to check them.

1. Digital People

“A Fake Hero,” March 15, 2021

Quote from the text:

“I believe that in just five years we will have a significant population of digital humans who will interact with people and will be able to hold millions of conversations with them every day,” says Greg Cross. And this will go far beyond customer communication—his “children” will soon teach lessons in various fields and could become part of the healthcare system, Greg believes. “The possibilities of digital humans are endless!” he sums up.

ChatGPT:

As of April 9, 2026, Soul Machines positions itself as a platform for digital workforce and AI assistant deployments, not as a world with a “significant population” of digital humans turned into a mass social reality. In other words, there is product evolution, but not the large-scale social breakthrough built into the prediction. There are not many well-known digital humans.

Hmm. Even if digital humans really aren't everywhere today, the phenomenon is gradually making its way, and I still believe it will soon be extremely widespread. Suffice it to mention the EcoElena you know so well, and the fact that a digital human recently even took a central role in the campaign of the American president.

2. A Chip in the Brain

“When Musk Puts a Chip in Our Brains…,” April 2, 2021

Quote from the text:

Elon Musk says that within five years it will be commonplace for each of us to have a chip in our brain. That we will finally merge with computers to unleash an incredible future for humanity as a different biological species. More than that—that this is the only way for us to survive.

ChatGPT:

This is among the most clearly missed predictions. By April 2026 there is no mass use “for each of us”; Neuralink is still in early clinical trials with its first human implants, not at the stage of everyday, routine practice.

You'll agree that here it isn't me who got it wrong, but the esteemed Elon. In recent years he has once again distinguished himself with quite a few successful predictions, but also with plenty of ideas that turned out to be either impossible or too far ahead of their time. How far off is the age of brain chips? Either way, all the important questions on the subject remain fully relevant.

3. Where's the Decentralization?

“Web 3.0. What Does the New Era of the Internet Bring Us?,” May 18, 2021

Quote from the text:

Web 3.0 is expected to change this too. Thanks to the significantly higher level of security in data exchange, it will also be possible to exchange goods and services directly between individuals, businesses and machines, with no intermediary needed. The whole layer of the businesses we mentioned a moment ago will become redundant, because until now they were the link between the provider and the recipient of the service, and they guaranteed trust in the system.

ChatGPT:

This did not happen on the scale described. In 2026, Airbnb, eBay and Uber not only exist but keep reporting active business and financial results, which shows that intermediary platforms are far from extinct.

4. How Meta Took Us for a Ride

“Facebook Became Meta. What Does the Metaverse It Will Send Us To Look Like?”, October 28, 2021

Quote from the text:

According to Zuckerberg, if all goes well, the first version of the brave new world will be here within about five years. And I don't want to overdo the irony—I hope it really is brave and new, and some of the possibilities sound wonderful. As long as we are ready for them.

ChatGPT:

Avatar cohabitation in a metaverse did not become a near and mass norm. As of spring 2026, “the first version of the new world”—the metaverse—does not appear to have arrived in the promised sense. Meta reports continuing heavy losses at Reality Labs, and in March 2026 it announced that Horizon Worlds and its related virtual reality elements were being dropped from its plans, which is a sign of retreat and reshuffling, not of a successful early metaworld.

Zuckerberg certainly has a lot to say about the old Bulgarian saying that not everything that flies is fit to eat. The metaverse, at least so far, has turned out to be anything but the big subject and the big change of the future.

5. Car, Don't Drive! (For Now)

“Drive, Car!,” November 26, 2021

Quote from the text:

Autonomous cars won't keep us waiting; they will be here soon. Personally, I prefer riding a bike, and I can't wait for the moment when every driver will know where to give me the right of way. When there will be no risks while I wait at the traffic light.

ChatGPT:

As of April 9, 2026, autonomous cars are not “here” as a mass, normal everyday reality. Tesla itself writes that Full Self-Driving is supervised and “does not make the vehicle autonomous,” while Waymo has a real service, but in specific cities, not as a general market breakthrough. Yes, there is progress, but in 2026 the market is still split between limited autonomous services in a few cities and systems that officially require active human supervision.

Here, it seems, ethical and legal regulation is lagging behind the technological solutions. After so many increasingly successful trials, it's clear that we have technology that drives even more safely than humans. But how to make this happen in practice has obviously turned out to be a more complicated question. Still, I expect good news here too, and I stand by my expectation that we will soon have a completely different way and model of getting around.

6. Bye-Bye, Programmers!

“Will Artificial Intelligence Take the Bread Out of Programmers' Mouths?,” August 6, 2021

Quotes from the text:

Even if we get to the point of creating algorithms that write code, everything suggests that the moment when they will be able to do it autonomously is not too close. To do on their own the work of today's programmers—who are, in my opinion at least, somewhat spoiled by their social standing.

Since the flagship of the most advanced artificial intelligence systems is barely taking its first steps at the lowest level of programming, the moment when software will be able to make complex decisions, deliver finished projects and settle architectural questions seems, if not impossible, then far too distant.

ChatGPT:

This turned out to be too cautious. Already in 2025–2026, OpenAI describes Codex as a software engineering agent that works on many tasks in parallel, and Anthropic describes Claude Code as a system that reads code, makes changes to files, runs tests and works on the problem autonomously. OpenAI already describes Codex subagents for parallel complex processes, and Anthropic showcases a long-running mode of work with Claude on a C compiler project.

Exactly! It turns out I was cautious precisely in the field that earns me my bread. The fact is that today artificial intelligence is extremely advanced at producing computer code, and according to leading specialists we are close to, or have even reached, the time when programmers won't write computer code at all.

7. Death to Death

“What If One Day We Defeat Death?,” September 14, 2021

Quotes from the text:

That endless sleep, when we slip out of our mortal shell”… soon that moment may really be quite different.

And what if this same science, on the wings of technology, soon redeems itself by making human life, if not infinite (is there even such a thing as infinity?), then at least dramatically longer.

ChatGPT:

“No, it did not become ‘quite different’ soon. Even companies like Altos Labs talk about healthier lives and reversing disease and damage, not about an imminent victory over death. The best available estimates point to limited potential for increasing average life expectancy, not a dramatic leap in the near future.

With the boom in artificial intelligence combined with the huge interest in health topics because of the pandemic, very serious news and progress in medical technology really were expected. Well, on the whole, they are still expected…

8. Mind It

“Technology Can Already Read Minds. Is This the End of Freedom?,” April 21, 2023

Quote from the text:

This, according to Prof. Farahany, will very soon allow us to have convenient gadgets in our daily lives that can pick up our mood and judge whether we are focused and what we are imagining.

ChatGPT:

There is research and there are wearable EEG devices, but the literature in 2025–2026 still describes serious limitations: weak signal, artifacts, low reliability outside laboratory conditions. In addition, a leading review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences says the field is still mainly anchored in decoding motor and visual signals, not in rich reading of imagination and mood in everyday life.

This I definitely consider good news. The idea of mind reading is practically absent from public debate. Alas, I don't think that will last long.

9. Dr. Chatty

“How Much Does Truth Matter to Us Today?,” March 12, 2024

Quote from the text:

I imagine that artificial intelligence offering medical consultations will soon be very popular. It will be trained on very rich data, it will have the experience of millions of doctors, it will know a huge number of cases.

ChatGPT:

As of 2026, there are no grounds to say that this has already become a mass, trusted form of medical consultation. Reuters summarizes a study in Nature Medicine according to which asking AI about symptoms does not lead to better decisions than other methods, and the FDA continues to treat AI in medicine as a strictly regulated category with premarket pathways and separate guidance.

Here too, in my view, Mr. Chat is selling himself short. Both doctors and psychologists are noticing a boom in self-diagnosis with AI, and I think we have yet to see many more serious consequences of this phenomenon.

10. O Quantum, Where Art Thou?

“The Cat and the Quantum Computer,” May 11, 2021

Quote from the text:

“And according to the ‘fresh’ estimates of IBM scientists from March 2021, the new era in this field begins very soon—in 2023. According to the company's researchers, humanity will have a good enough quantum computer by the mid-2020s.”

ChatGPT: “It did not begin. In 2025–2026, IBM itself is already saying that its first truly large-scale, reliably working quantum computer is planned for 2029, and for 2026 it speaks not of a ‘new era’ but of some expected progress.”

The fact is that the long-awaited quantum computing revolution is still awaited. The topic has somewhat faded from the public stream in the shadow of the big winner—AI—but I don't think that will last long.

11. Et Tu, Blockchain?

“Blockchain Still Connects Us…,” June 4, 2021

Quote from the text:

The same will now happen with money and micropayments. The banking system, IBAN transfers, sending money and having it arrive three days later, credit and debit cards and the monopoly of Visa and Mastercard—all this is about to disappear.

ChatGPT:

This is very far from reality in 2026. The BNB, the Bulgarian National Bank, continues to maintain a register of licensed banks and branches of foreign banks in Bulgaria, and Visa reports 257.5 billion processed transactions and $14.2 trillion in payment volume for 2025.

And blockchain today is definitely not as large-scale a direction as was predicted. Yes, the ecosystem is developing, and it has its chance in the context of artificial intelligence too, but here as well the big news, if there is any at all, remains for the future.

12. Taking the Bread

“What Will We Do When a Third of Jobs Disappear?,” October 22, 2024

Quote from the text:

The development of artificial intelligence confronts us with an unprecedented, all-encompassing social transformation. While we neglect the progress in this field, big companies are investing in multibillion-dollar projects through which machines could replace a third of the jobs on the planet in the near future.

ChatGPT:

This is not visible as a reality of the “near future.” The World Economic Forum's 2025 report forecasts 170 million new jobs over the decade and a net balance in which AI and technology create 11 million jobs and displace 9 million, not a scenario of a third of all labor suddenly evaporating. PwC also writes that AI is so far making people “more valuable, not less,” including in highly automatable roles.

As someone who has already lost a job because of artificial intelligence, I would happily bet against both ChatGPT and even the World Economic Forum here. I won't, because in this case I have no desire whatsoever to win. These dramatic changes in the labor market keep getting closer, while preparation for them remains just as distant and illusory.

13. Where Did You Go, NF-T?

When Everyone Starts Talking About Bitcoin, Don't Buy!, October 26, 2021

Quote from the text:

In this field, I think there will soon be another explosion, and we are already seeing its first moments—art and the way artists sell it.

ChatGPT:

Exactly the opposite happened here. DappRadar describes a crash in the Art NFT market: from about $2.9 billion in volume in 2021 to $23.8 million in Q1 2025, which is a collapse, not an “explosion.” And in 2025 the NFT market kept shrinking in volume, including in the segment specifically tied to art.

14. Want to Bet?

“AI and the End of Stock Exchanges,” June 9, 2023

Quote from the text:

The ubiquitous adoption of AI in the financial industry will lead to traders with huge salaries losing their jobs as quickly as factory workers,” says Mark Minevich, founder of Going Global Ventures.

ChatGPT:

No such rapid collapse is visible. The closest official picture, from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), shows that the occupations of people engaged in securities trading have a projected 3 percent growth for 2024–2034 and around 38,100 new positions, so it does not look like a profession about to vanish suddenly. Even the Financial Stability Board in 2025 still speaks of the controlled introduction of AI and the related risks in the financial sector, which sounds like a sector in the process of adoption and oversight, not one already “transformed from the ground up.”

15. The Guilt?

“But… the Guilt?,” March 2, 2021

Quote from the text:

The artificial intelligence journalist is already here. It will only keep getting better, and it will try to take the bread out of the mouths of an entire profession…

ChatGPT:

AI really has entered journalism, but it has not “taken the bread” of the profession in the sense of mass displacement of journalists. In 2025, the Reuters Institute reports a major trust problem: only 12 percent feel comfortable with fully AI-generated news, compared with 62 percent for fully human-made news. Even when AI is used, audiences want human control, not journalism without journalists.

Really? Today we don't read generated content everywhere around us at all, and this doesn't apply in the slightest to journalism, which is enjoying a golden age and a return of trust.

If only that were so. Even if it happens, it won't be soon. And I'm glad we had this chance to look at some of the predictions of Digital Stories, to have some fun with them and to give them some thought. And if you, too, think it matters that we keep this conversation going and keep trying to peer into the future, join this important experiment before the end of the month. I believe it matters, and I will be endlessly grateful to you. Read this text to the end!

Exactly five years ago, “A Robot with a Martenitsa”—named after the red-and-white thread Bulgarians wear at the start of March—came out as the very first piece on the Digital Stories site! Since then, one or two long texts have appeared every week, sketching the story of Digital Stories itself.

But a birthday is a birthday! Kind words, good wishes and presents are all welcome. My modest gift is a fun and unexpected quiz with prizes. Take on 30 questions and you'll enter the draw for 10 books connected, one way or another, with the story of this venture. The quiz takes no more than 10 minutes, so give it a go! And afterward, its remarkably curious backstory awaits you…

Did you make it? If it doesn't work out the first time, you can try again. At the end, if you succeed, you'll receive a short code showing that you've reached the required result. To enter the prize draw, type it in below together with your email by March 25, 2026. Each email address will be entered in the prize draw only once.

(The winners have already been drawn and have received an email; you can still fill in the form just for fun or to sign up for the mailing list.)

So what kind of quiz is this? As I said—a birthday is a birthday. This time I decided to take a break myself and let artificial intelligence do all the work. ChatGPT was the one who came up with the concept of the quiz as an adventure, and Claude Code was the assistant who created the questions, based on every article published on the site, and wrote the code for the quiz itself. My own interventions were limited solely to requesting small improvements. Impressive, wouldn't you say?

If the quiz has filled you with enthusiasm to move on to other mental challenges, there's now a place to find them online. We're waiting for you in Quizza too—the meaningful, ambitious, worthy sequel to The Floor.

And the birthday of Digital Stories goes on, just like the story of this small, personal and optimistic venture. Support it—it's worth it! Every kind word, every share, every story is an invaluable help.

And if you have ideas for the next Digital Stories, this is where they belong, and once again a symbolic prize awaits you:

Two people stare at each other in total concentration. Each has 45 seconds to identify the pictures that will appear in front of them and win the duel.

I have no doubt that last night you watched the first episode of The Floor, the new and innovative game show on NOVA, one of Bulgaria's main TV channels. If you didn't, it's not too late at all—there are still 12 whole episodes to come. It is a reason to celebrate in itself that a game about knowledge, not scandal, has made it to prime time, and I believe it will be the hit of the season. Rumor (and ChatGPT) has it that I'm in it too.

But we're here for a slightly different digital story, one closely tied to the game. It comes to show us that when we are together, we are capable of miracles. That if people brought together supposedly to compete and beat one another can reach out a hand for something bigger, then our society can do it too.

Do you like to provoke and test your knowledge? Are you looking for meaningful causes to help, knowing for sure that your help goes to the right place and supports something important and lasting?

If your answer is “yes” to even one of these questions, then this Digital Story is just for you!

Let me introduce Quizza! A website we built as volunteers. Where you can challenge yourself by taking any of our many permanent quizzes on all sorts of topics. Where you can face off in a weekly contest against some of the heroes you know from online and offline competitions! And, last but not least, where you can discover causes that each of us stands behind with our own name!

An Optimistic Theory of the Bulgarian Quiz

You have hardly ever seen 100 more varied souls at Sofia's Vasil Levski Airport than on one early morning before a flight to Amsterdam. People “of every age, sex and occupation,” united by the fact that they had dared to challenge themselves in a competition being made for Bulgarian television for the very first time.

What happened on The Floor you will see for yourselves (and I definitely advise you not to miss a single episode). So many colorful and different personalities, so many stories and so many causes. And although in the end there is supposedly only one winner, it turned out that we were all winners, because after the rather demanding and far from easy shoot we came back with new friends, new causes and new ideas.

Do you know what a quiz is? I know, I'm changing the subject abruptly, but The Floor has plenty of unexpected questions and sudden twists too.

The truth is… nobody knows. The origin of the word itself is shrouded in legend. According to a popular story from Dublin, a theater manager named Richard Daly bet that he could invent a meaningless word that within a matter of days would be the talk of the whole city. In 1791, the story goes, he scrawled the letters Q, U, I, Z on the walls, and soon everyone was talking about this strange word.

The story may be dubious, but you'll agree it's a charming one. The word “quiz” appears in print toward the end of the 18th century, but with a different meaning—an odd or eccentric person. Only in 1867 is it first found in the sense of a set of questions to test knowledge.

Strange People

We used to have a different word for the same thing: “viktorina.” A quiz is nothing more than a pleasant way to challenge and test your knowledge. A contest in which you try to solve puzzles—alone or as a team. They can be general knowledge or on a specific topic. Every duel you will see on The Floor is a quiz of sorts, and so is every other popular TV contest built around knowledge.

TV quizzes are a favorite pastime all over the world. It's enough to mention the Russian classic What? Where? When?, the American Jeopardy! or the homegrown Minuta e mnogo (A Minute Is a Lot). But in the online world quizzes come alive with full force on the web as well.

For many people, quizzes happen mainly… in pubs. I mentioned that “quiz” first turned up in old newspapers, so here is one more quote from a press review of ancient, prehistoric times.

“At first glance—a pub like any other. But if you look closely, you see sheets of paper and pens on the tables between the full beer mugs and the fries. And if you watch the people more carefully, you notice them staring thoughtfully at the sheets and puzzling over something that seems very important.”

The quote is from a Saturday feature in the daily 24 Chasa from 2009, headlined “A New Craze: Sport for the Brain in a Pub”. Perhaps you've guessed: I wrote it. In the years since—they have almost come of age by now—far more people have become convinced that pub quizzes are an extremely enjoyable pastime. Today almost every town has its local versions, and in the bigger cities you can choose where to join in with friends every day of the week.

Quiz Vadis?

The people who frequent such places have got used to calling themselves “quizzers,” though in my view we could try a little harder with our word-making.

What sets them apart from the “non-quizzers”? Erudition, perhaps, pretension, experience? I think the only difference is that the former have already discovered how pleasant it is not just to meet friends for a drink during the week, but also to try to get your brains moving together. That way even the beer tastes sweeter…

You may be wondering what all this has to do with the beginning of this story. Let's skip straight to the climax.

The Floor adventure in Amsterdam came to an end (although for viewers it is only just beginning!). And we decided that… we wanted to do something more! Many of the contestants love quizzes, and a good number of them talked about important, worthwhile, valuable causes they would support. So we wondered: isn't there a way to bring all of this together? Then, one word leading to another, we figured out how to make it happen.

Let me introduce Quizza! A website we built as volunteers. Where you can challenge yourself by taking any of our many permanent quizzes on all sorts of topics. Where you can face off in a weekly contest against some of the heroes you know from online and offline competitions! And, last but not least, where you can discover causes that each of us stands behind with our own name!

Bits and Soul

In some contests (in most of them, I'd even say) winning is not what matters most. I confess I wouldn't have guessed that 100 Bulgarians, most of whom had never met, sent off to compete against one another for a prize, could set an example of… community?

Could this be a direction, an idea, a hope that we can bring to life on a larger scale?

The idea for the site came about quite spontaneously. There aren't many places in the Bulgarian online space where you can put your knowledge to the test. At the same time, many people in our community create quizzes, and quite a few of us have an important cause we would like to support.

Can a good idea and a meaningful cause unite people, inspire them?

It turned out they can.

In a time when social networks have torn apart the dialogue between generations and points of view. In a time when authorities are as scarce as public conversation. In a time when artificial intelligence calls fundamental human notions into question…

Could it be that knowledge is what can bring us together?

A Quiz for a Cause

More than half of the contestants from the first season of The Floor are already part of the venture!

The programmers among us took on the site itself, and our designer is responsible for its wonderful look. The copywriters pitched in with texts, and the quiz authors with a huge number of quizzes varied in difficulty, topic, logic, even format, a challenge for anyone! We have quizzes for the most seasoned masters, quizzes for beginners, even quizzes for kids. We have sports and science quizzes, picture quizzes and text quizzes. A quiz for every taste and for everyone with taste!

On top of that, everyone had the right to propose a cause they stand behind with their own name.

Waiting for you already are 69 quizzes with 1,777 questions, contests twice a week and no fewer than 37 causes you can support if you so choose. Behind the venture are 88 of the 100 people from the Floor!

You can see who we are and what our causes are here.

I'm not starting with thanks by name, because here the strength truly lies in the team. In the example, in the meaning.

In the message that when an idea can unite us, we are capable of miracles. Of creating something useful for others. With no thought of profit, fame or personal success.

Is there anything more important?

Now it's your turn.

Come and try our quizzes!

(For fans of The Floor there is a special challenge with 100 questions—one for each of the topics on the “floor.” Score 60 points and you win a certificate!)

Join our contests.

Explore our causes.

Conquer the game!

I'm sure the best is yet to come…

Computer code that looks like a cooking recipe? Writing programs with the help of… colors or sounds? Programming languages inspired by Shakespeare, by Terry Pratchett and even by Donald Trump? Step off the beaten path and you can find some rather amusing and unexpected touches in the world of information technology.

Programming languages are even more colorful and interesting than human ones. They are not born “naturally” as the result of evolution, but out of their creators' desire to hand everyone else a new tool. One good enough to turn their ideas into the computer programs that drive the world forward today. Yes, there will always be the serious, useful languages (for instance JavaScript, the one I earn my own bread with), the ones used every day and everywhere around us.

But there is also the other side—playful, wacky, unconventional.

“Esoteric” is what we call programming languages that, for one reason or another, are doomed never to become popular. Sometimes they are created that way on purpose; in other cases their developers simply didn't try hard enough and made a product that could never go mainstream. Either way, they can always surprise us. In the lines that follow we'll meet 10 examples of some of the wackiest programming languages out there.

1. Let's Have a Chat

Anyone can make up a sequence of commands for a computer to execute so that something happens as a result… But to talk about a programming language, the most common criterion is called “Turing completeness.” Even some computer games meet it, if only as a side effect. Still, this is the universal test of whether we are dealing with a full-fledged programming language. One that, in a nutshell, can carry out a list of operations within the capabilities of Turing's theoretical machine (you'll find a detailed explanation here).

Those are exactly the esoteric languages we'll be looking for (with one exception). Not mere sequences of commands, but Turing-complete systems that could build a computer application…

That doesn't mean at all that they have to be complicated or packed with features, the way their “real” everyday siblings are. Our first example proves it.

SmallTalk (English for casual conversation, but literally “small talk”)—that is the name of a small language with a big history. How can a language be small, you ask? Like this: here it fits on the back of a postcard:

In the 1970s three engineers—Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls and Adele Goldberg—were working at the Xerox PARC lab. They considered the programming languages of the day needlessly complicated, convoluted and hard to learn. So they decided to create a language whose entire syntax would fit on a napkin.

The original idea was for SmallTalk to be used by children learning to program. But it turned out so successful that by 1995 it was the second most popular object-oriented language after C++.

At the start of the new millennium the American military used it to build military simulation software with more than a million lines of code. JP Morgan wrote its large-scale financial risk analysis system, Kapital, in Smalltalk. The language became a favorite of many other companies in the financial sector, too.

Smalltalk is still here and is believed to have a solid future. It is popular as a good fit for big data analysis, the Internet of Things and machine learning. It simply turned out, most unexpectedly, that sometimes it's enough for everything to be… simple.

2. The Patriotic Programmer

All languages are written in the Latin alphabet, you can't learn programming without English… Well, not exactly (and not only because today you can ask ChatGPT in Bulgarian to write code for you). Esoteric languages are quite varied, even though, of course, in the professional sphere English has established itself over the past few decades as the lingua franca.

Are there programming languages in Bulgarian? If a patriotic government ever comes to power here, it could easily decree that state software must be written in Bulgarian. Luckily, we have solutions. Here's one option: the Logo language.

Yes, its name gives it away: it's used mainly for drawing pictures, and it was created in the 1980s.

You can put it on your CV, and its syntax is quick to learn. Its main purpose, once again, is to draw children into programming, letting them draw on the screen without having to know foreign languages. In Bulgaria, in the second half of the 1980s, national Logo olympiads were held to pick out the most promising kids in information technology.

What does the code look like? You'll like it. To draw a circle, all you have to write is:

повтори 360 (нп 1, нд 1)

край

Here “повтори” (povtori) means “repeat,” “край” (kray) means “end,” “нп” (np) stands for “напред” (napred, forward) and “нд” (nd) for “надясно” (nadyasno, right). In the same way, a square is drawn with:

повтори 4 (нп 10, нд 90)

край

3. Thin Air… with No Pressure

In some languages people argue about how much indentation should precede a command—two spaces or four, a tab or a single space. In others, the most popular of which is Python, indentation actually replaces some of the brackets and arranges the hierarchy of commands.

There is, however, a language… that is just and only empty space. Nothing more. For obvious reasons it's called Whitespace, and everything in it comes down to spaces and tabs.

Because of its defining feature… it's a little hard to show it to you. Still, not impossible. Let's say S is a single space and T is a tab:

S S S T S S T S S S

T

S S S S S T T S S T S T

T

Commands are separated by a new line with a tab, and what actually gets executed depends on the combination of spaces and tabs.

4. Honestly, Everything's Oook

Technology and literature don't go hand in hand? Nothing of the sort! This language will appeal to fans of fantasy and Terry Pratchett. On the Discworld, as they know very well, everything happens on the backs of four elephants, who in turn stroll about on a huuuge turtle, the Great A'Tuin.

This world has a magical university whose librarian is an orangutan who communicates by saying nothing but “Ook” in various intonations.

Well, in our world that same orangutan could have become a programmer, thanks to a language inspired by him and created by the programmer David Morgan-Mar. Yes, he specifies: the language is intended for use by orangutans only.

Ook—that's its name, and it has three commands:

Ook.

Ook!

Ook?

And… it's Turing complete too! In other words, you can do almost anything with it that today's modern programming languages allow, and nobody will ask whether you really are an orangutan.

We leave you to ponder (and practice) the program that delivers the proverbial first message: Hello, world!

And while we're in the literary world, things can sometimes get far more dramatic. Literally—if you choose to program in Shakespeare. Here you can say outright that all the world's a stage and we are all players.

The names of Shakespeare's characters are variables, and whether the numeric values are positive or negative depends on the pairing of two characters in a given scene.

If, for instance, Hamlet has a negative value, you can bring in another character to insult him and thereby flip the sign in front of the number. You can add input and output, in the first case by making someone listen to their heart, in the second by having them speak their mind. As wacky as you like! This wacky:

There you go—even if your English is rusty, you can now boast that you understand the basics of the language of Shakespeare…

5. Chef Programmer

As Douglas Adams wrote, in the third phase of its development every advanced civilization arrives at the question “Where shall we have lunch?” Well, programmers reached that level long ago, as our next guest shows. Chef was created well before the fashion for televised cooking reality shows, and its job is to help in the kitchen. Here is the most standard “Hello, world!” command in this language:

Rather wordy, isn't it?

But fun: the ingredients are the variables being defined, and the recipe itself is the printing function. The different groups of ingredients are also variable types that interact during execution—that is, cooking.

The idea behind the language? To show people who aren't technically minded, and are more used to the recipes of Gordon Ramsay or Penka Cholcheva, a beloved Bulgarian TV cook, that programming is fun.

The “Serves” command, the moment the dish is ready to serve, runs the function.

6. #CantPronounceIt

I don't advise you to try pronouncing the name of the language CLWNPA. Spelled out? Fine! “See-el-double-you-en-pee-ay.”

But what does this acronym have to tell us? Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym. It was created back in distant 1972, and although its name is so colorful, it became popular under the far duller name INTERCAL.

One more thing to remember it by. It's a rather polite language. Instead of bothering to declare that something is a function, it politely asks the computer to create one:

PLEASE DO ,10 <- #1

PLEASE DO ,10SUB#1 <- #176

PLEASE DO ,11 <- #30

PLEASE DO ,11SUB#1 <- #76

DO ,11SUB#2 <- #190

(You'll find a longer example here.)

“Please, dear computer,” followed by bitwise information about what needs to be done. As if back in the good old year of '72 someone suspected that today we'd be so dependent on computers that we'd have to be polite to them (so that Roko's basilisk doesn't come for us).

Of course, the “unpronounceable” one comes from very different times, when the widely used languages were nothing like today's. Code meant for computers looked a lot more like, well, code. Accordingly, it wasn't particularly readable or understandable in a way that made developers' lives easier.

So what is the PLEASE command for? If you're not courteous enough to use it, the compiler works in a special, considerably slower and more fastidious mode. And if you put it on every line, it imposes restrictions again.

This language sometimes simply “blows up” with error E774 or… “RANDOM_COMPILER_BUG.” Even according to the official documentation, this happens completely at random. Think this language is a joke? Maybe, but it meets every criterion for Turing completeness. You just have to be brave (and polite) enough to pick it.

7. Plugged In and Wired

After literature, it's time to peek into the other arts. Music, for example, often finds its way into programmers' arsenal—suffice it to mention jazz and the different versions of the WordPress platform.

Which brings us to the programming language Rockstar.

Want to be a rock star but you're just an ordinary programmer? No problem! This language doubles as a way to write song lyrics. Yes, there's none of the politeness of our previous hero here, nor the drama of Shakespeare—just pure voltage and wire:

The creators explicitly state that leaving comments in the code is strongly discouraged: everyone must find their own meaning in rock poetry. Will you find any meaning in what's written above?

8. Pretty as a Picture

We arrive at the universal world of images. Here we flip the traditional scheme that Midjourney and its kin have imposed on us in recent years—the human draws, and the computer tries to figure out what it's supposed to do. This language is called Piet.

Its creator, David Morgan-Mar, uses bitmaps as input, which at first glance look like random scribbles… or like modern art, judge for yourself:

The code is executed point by point, as if a pointer were moving across the painting itself. Twenty different colors are used, each of them a specific command. Varying brightness is added for the corresponding operations. White positions perform no operations, while black ones signal that execution should stop. The language is named after the Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian, and if you're wondering why… here is one of the master's best-known paintings:

9. Make Programming Great Again

Now that we know which languages musicians, artists and orangutans program in, we enter politics, especially topical in this year of elections and political upheaval.

Now that we've calmed down a bit, reassured that algorithms won't take programming away from us as a human activity (not entirely, and not yet, at least), it's time… to make programming great again!

TrumpScript (setting aside its political messages) doesn't even pretend to meet Turing's requirements, but it's fun.

It has no floating-point numbers, only integers, because “America never does anything halfway.” All numbers must be greater than 1 million, because small ones are insignificant. External libraries aren't allowed, because all code must be homegrown American. Instead of the usual terms True and False, it uses the presidential candidate's favorites, fact and lie.

Whether the language will last… we'll find out after November 5.

10. Brain Off Grazing Ducks

We skipped some curious candidates for this list, such as ReMorse, which uses dots and dashes in the spirit of the good old Morse code; Taxi, whose code resembles a road map (without necessarily being full of the life advice that Bulgarians associate with that profession); or ArnoldC, which uses only one-liners from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.

We deliberately saved for last (on the assumption that we've already lost the younger audience) the language with the resounding name Brainf*ck, which I won't translate, but which metaphorically refers to mental gymnastics.

It is intentionally difficult, designed so that every elementary task becomes a challenge for the programmer. Competitions are held every year, and according to its fans, once you learn to write code in it, you'll be a wizard in any other programming language you know.

And all of this… with just 8 commands, which once again are enough to make it Turing complete. Urban Müller developed it in 1993 while studying physics; gradually the creation took on a life of its own and earned cult status. For the proverbial “Hello, world!” all you need to write is:

++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.
<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.——.——–.>+.>.

And so, which programming language we choose today may not even matter all that much. What matters more is whether we have anything meaningful to say online…

The page Squatting Slavs in Tracksuits is one of the most delightfully funny things you can inflict on yourself online. A place where anyone connected in some way to the Balkans, to Eastern Europe and the Slavic world simply cannot help but smile. Because with a fine, pleasant sense of humor, the memes capture the familiar wonders of the East that are dug deep into every one of us. Warmly, good-naturedly, without malice and with a pleasant dose of self-irony.

Perhaps you are among the page's 1.2 million followers on Facebook? If not, it is definitely worth a peek.

What kind of people stand behind this page? What, in their view, manages to make visitors from the otherwise so different countries of the Eastern Bloc laugh so successfully? Why can the mutri—the thick-necked racketeers of Bulgaria's 1990s—the doting “babushkas,” the reverence for Adidas and the wacky low-budget solutions to everyday problems turn into viral memes? How do you explain all this to someone from the West?

Well, the story of the page and the answers I got are definitely worth reading.

Balkan Syndrome

The page replies to my interview request right away. Soon I am in touch with the other side, and it turns out that… it is a single young man who has been building the profile and its “relatives” since 2015. He puts colossal effort into creating and collecting memes, and thanks to that effort he now makes millions of Eastern people smile every day.

He tells me who he is and where he is from, but asks me to keep that information to myself; he prefers to be associated with the profile he has created.

In fact, Squatting Slavs in Tracksuits started out as a forum for sharing memes. Later, however, for reasons that are not entirely clear, Facebook shut it down, and the page and the other profiles remained the only places where the young man shares.

“We Slavs, we Eastern people, are used to hardship,” says the creator of these jokey yet touching pages. “We are born poor and every day we have to try to make money and do ‘big business.’ Nothing is guaranteed to us and nobody helps us in any direction, even though we are obliged to pay our taxes. We are used to a hard life.”

Far more things can make us in the East laugh, because we have a more developed sense of humor, he says. “And even when we have serious problems, we find a way to joke about them.”

A Name Straight from the Pickle Jar

Wondering where the strange name comes from? Actually, the explanation, like much of the page's humor, comes from the 1990s, in some respects a far more carefree decade. A typical meme of that time in the Russian-speaking world was the gopnik. Bulgarian has no exact equivalent: these are hooligans from the outlying housing estates who do “big business.” Perhaps the closest counterpart in our slang is the bortsi, the “wrestlers,” before they evolved into today's mutri.

Either way, many of their distinguishing marks are well known in Bulgaria too. An Adidas tracksuit, sneakers. But where does the “squatting” come from? The typical photo of a gopnik shows him in exactly that position, with his heels planted firmly on the ground. That is even the picture used to illustrate the phenomenon in the Russian-language Wikipedia.

The heels are very important, because if you are seen squatting with your heels off the ground, the joke goes, you are an American spy. Besides, every self-respecting gopnik owns both sneakers and an Adidas tracksuit, and keeping the heels down lets the three magic stripes line up at the perfect angle.

The East Is a Delicate Matter

“When I created the forum, and then the page, there was no place on the internet with this kind of joke, and that's what made me start,” the young man says. He admits he has a sizable tracksuit collection of his own. “Because under communism Adidas was an ultra-fashionable brand, and a huge number of knockoffs imitating it appeared in all the Slavic countries. Every real gopnik had to wear one.”

From the very beginning he was determined to build the largest Slavic network on the internet. Of course, he says, “Slavic” here is a rather loose term, because this kind of humor is appreciated by many more nations that shared a similar fate in the 1980s and 1990s, and before that too.

Today the list of pages he runs also includes Scenic Depictions of Slavic life, Babushka (described as “Here to make kompot and be proud of her grandchildren”) and Lada Life on Facebook, plus @squattingslavs, @scenic_depictions and @babushka_ssit on Instagram.

After all of the above (and a few pictures from the examples you can see), it becomes clear why this humor manages to awaken the nostalgia of everyone who remembers the 1990s, or has at least heard about them. Anyone who learned to drive in a Lada, the boxy Soviet car, or who simply misses grandma's kompot flavored with rose geranium. That is why it is no accident that this is now the largest online network with this kind of content. What's more, all of its more than 3 million followers came 100 percent organically—without any form of advertising.

Bacon with a Little Onion

Of course, the memes are far from limited to nostalgia; there are plenty of other finds too, such as lookalikes of famous people, photos of strange architectural solutions and who knows what else. All themes in which many of us recognize ourselves.

Today the young man makes money from creative T-shirts based on some of the most successful memes. But it is not that, but the constant flow of interest, funny comments and new photos that keeps him stubbornly posting every day.

“My idea is to show things that every one of us in the Slavic countries sees every day. We have a lot in common, as the success of these pages shows,” he adds.

In his view, most of the memes are understood and liked in the West as well. In fact, the largest share of the pages' followers turns out to be from the U.S. (with the caveat, of course, that quite a few of them are emigrants from Eastern Europe).

Slavic Stew

“We Eastern people see things that surround us every day presented in a funny way. For Westerners, this kind of humor is some sort of trend, something different from the usual.”

There are plenty of Bulgarians, too, about 10 percent of the pages' fans. The young man knows our country well and has visited many times. In the forum's early years he even organized two fan meetups in Bulgaria, which turned out fun and emotional.

At first he posted only memes he made himself. Then he began adding funny ideas from other sites, which is the natural path of memes, today also part of folklore. Nowadays most of his content is sent in by fans. Quite often someone gets in touch to thank him after their face became popular thanks to a shared photo.

At Grandma and Grandpa's in the Village

Our interlocutor says the memes closest to his heart are definitely the ones about the “babushka.” “For a Slav, grandma is something sacred. She is the place where we will always find enormous, unconditional love and the best food in the whole world.”

People constantly tell him all kinds of funny true stories. One of the latest to make him smile is about a grandmother from Croatia who managed to beat up the armed robbers in the store where she was shopping. She used a long-handled broom that just happened to be next to her.

Why, in his opinion, does the typical Eastern European live with his parents until 40? “Because of money. In most Eastern countries you either have money or you don't; the middle class simply doesn't exist the way it does in the West.”

And what does the Slavic dream look like? “To have a roof over your head, a family waiting for you at home, a car in the garage and lots of alcohol and cigarettes.”

His personal dream is to introduce as many people as possible to Slavic culture. “And maybe one day there will even be a World Squatting Day,” the young man smiles.

An Optimistic Theory

In his view, at the level of the individual, we Eastern nations have always been united and have found common ground. “A good example is the refugees from Ukraine. In every country people are trying to help them. But politically we will never be united. We will struggle to pay our taxes, and the politicians will make sure they systematically steal from us every day.”

Then why have we not been as successful as the Western countries in recent decades? “Because we were led only by incompetent people whose sole goal was to get rich.” Could that change one day?

Yes, we often fail to realize that many things we mock as typically Bulgarian, usually negative traits, are in fact not ours alone but also our neighbors'. And they are not always so bad, because they are more genuine and natural for our surroundings.

And yes, we Bulgarians, like the other nations close to us, definitely have a sense of humor. All that remains is to thank our interlocutor for bringing it to the fore in its freshest and friendliest form.

Slavs of the world, smile! Because that is the only way life becomes worth living…

Unforgettable reading! What could an artificial intelligence possibly have to tell us after landing in the wild backwoods of the Bulgarian Northwest, officially the poorest region in Europe?!

Not long ago, the first super-perfect Bulgarian robot was built, equipped with artificial intelligence from the future. As part of the experiments with it, it was sent to a small village in that poorest of European regions. The scientists wanted to see how it would cope in the wilds, whether it would adapt, whether it could pass the Turing test—pass for a human—in such a peculiar environment. And so it ended up in Divi Dol (literally “Wild Dale”) under the name Tumbak Pepeiv.

A few months later, Digital Stories is the first to get the chance to interview it!

Stoyan Nikolov (Torlaka). Special thanks to this whirlwind of a man and beloved author for helping us make contact. The author of the series that began with “Severozapaden roman” (A Northwestern Novel) and has so far reached “Razkazi za masa” (Stories for the Table) made this one-of-a-kind interview possible.

– Could you briefly introduce yourself?

– First tell me if you’re from some debt collectin’ outfit. Ahh, you ain’t. Then what the heck’ve you dragged yourself here to grill me for?

– …Are you sure you’re not drunk?

– Oh, so on top of everythin’ you’re countin’ my drinks too? Go on, mind your own business, before we fill your neck full of slaps and you run off home bawlin’.

– All right, I see your integration is clearly going smoothly. Perhaps you’ve heard that old joke, “Ferdo, come and take back your Shop!”—the one about Tsar Ferdinand and the famously stubborn peasants from around Sofia… But never mind, let’s give it a try anyway. How did your day go yesterday?

– Planted spuds, hammered together beehives. Till about ten in the mornin’. Then I sat down for a breather. Two rakias, then I fixed a beam on the hayloft and took the goats out. They scattered down the hollow, one this way, the other that way. Spent the whole afternoon chasin’ them damn beasts, curse ’em, good-for-nothin’ critters. Round dusk I milked ’em and had a rest, but I overdid the rakia, so now somethin’s got me squeezed at the back of the neck.

– Have you managed to make friends?

– Oh, round here we’re all friends. When some job needs doin’, no worries. Every neighbor’s ready to lend a hand. The trouble’s when we get to havin’ fun. Then it’s a hell of a time all round.

No matter how good the mood, it always ends in a fight. All in good spirit, mind.

They dish out a slap or two to each other, warm up, and that’s that. Course, there’s fancier ones too, if you catch my drift. If you don’t catch it, I couldn’t give a damn!

– What interesting thing have you learned about the Bulgarian Northwest that the rest of us don’t know?

– Like I said, the folk are good and helpful. When it’s needed, they’ll pull together. But when they got nothin’ to do, best not be in their sight. They beat you so hard your kidneys ache, and I ain’t even got kidneys. Figure that one out. Nothin’ but mischief in their heads. But if it’s for somethin’ worthwhile, they’re always game. Why, the other day I’d thrown my back out, and neighbor Grisho Recapitulation came runnin’ and helped me split three cubic meters of firewood, ’cause this spring’s a cold one and I ain’t one for freezin’.

– What kind of people live here? Are the inhabitants of these parts really a bit rough?

– You get used to it. They ain’t a bit rough, they’re plain rough. But that’s one side of it. Looked at another way, we’re delicate, and that’s why they seem rough to us. Reckon you get me.

– Yes, I do. Little by little I’m starting to follow your words better. Why do you think this country just can’t get it right with its politicians?

– ’Cause they’re stuck in a loop.

The folk are stuck in a loop, and so are the politicians. Shoulda mucked out the pigsty,

but the folk didn’t muck out the pigsty, so the politicians regrouped and now they’re playin’ the new match with the old ball. Y’know, in Russian myach means ball. I’m givin’ you wordplay here and you’re still not happy.

– How do people live in the poorest region in Europe, judging by what you’ve seen these days?

– Some live well. Others don’t. Now, I won’t deny there’s lazybones, stinkers and freeloaders here too, same as everywhere. But most folk are decent. Look at things right. You always gotta dig for the root cause. When the state screws you over, there’s no roads, no livin’ to be made, ’cause nobody’ll invest in a place with no infrastructure—how d’you live? Bit by bit you start shrinkin’ down to your little garden, your two goats, the still for your rakia, and you turn into a beast. Sadly, lots are like that.

That don’t go for everyone, though. Others grit their teeth and work miracles of bravery in spite of everythin’ and everyone. And they’re bullheaded. You can’t break their spirit, not even if you stand on your own neck. Personally, I reckon folk like that are rare in this world. In the good sense and the bad.

One thing’s for sure, there ain’t no mediocre ones, that’s certain.

– Have you found an explanation for the aging, the lack of young people? For the skepticism toward vaccines? And toward everything…

– You looked to me like a smart fella, but you’re turnin’ out to be real, real dim, I’m tellin’ you, just so you know!

– I didn’t understand you…

– You didn’t understand me ’cause you’re dim. I told you, it’s poverty here. No roads; culture, theaters, schools, cinemas—everythin’s either shut or hangin’ by a thread, kept up by the efforts of a handful of crackpot dreamers who won’t take a single step back. But only as long as they’re around.

The young got no work, so they head for Sofia, and then for the terminal and off to one shore or the other of the Atlantic. Not ’cause they don’t wanna live, work and enjoy their home country. But ’cause they’re put in such a spot that, however much they can do, know how to do or have studied, there’s no room to grow here. Some stick it out, but they often wonder too

why bother poundin’ like muddy water on the bank, when you can live easier with less effort.

– It must have been hard for you without the specific local vocabulary in your algorithm…

– Are you messin’ with me? Looks to me like you’re itchin’ for a fight, and that’s where things are headed, I’m tellin’ you straight!

The local lingo is poetic, refined, beautiful—hell, it’s a damn masterpiece all round.

It sticks to your tongue from day one. And if it don’t, you take a beatin’ and you manage to land the words in a week, tops. If you’re askin’ whether I had a language barrier, the answer’s a flat no.

– Any unforgettable conversation?

– The first one. My first time out wavin’ my britches round the village, I meet a stranger and say, “How you doin’, what you up to?” and he goes, “Here, see, right here!” To this day I reckon that’s an idiom and can’t be translated with the full charge of its cosmic super-thinkin’.

– And what do you think about driving in Bulgaria?

– I don’t drive. Thought about goin’ to drivin’ school, but I’m always half-drunk, so to this day I ain’t sat behind a wheel. But as a side observer, I can tell you that

99.9 percent of the drivers in Bulgaria think they’re astronauts headed from my home constellation, the Shield of Sobieski, toward some black hole.

– What is the most valuable advice you’ve received from the old folks?

– If you see the sun’s got a grin on it, dress warmer, ’cause your back’ll catch a chill.

– I understand that thanks to an innovative project, hospitals across the whole region now treat patients with the help of Artificial Intelligence. Is that really so?

– Pal, round here treatment with artificial intelligence by innovative methods is widespread. Everyone says, “I took a pill and it all went away.” “What pill?” “A beige one.” “What was wrong with you?” “Well, my leg hurt.” “Ah, me, my heart flutters now and then. I’ll try it. Beige pill, you say.” “Somethin’ like that.” “Right, I’ll try it.”

– What is the most beautiful Bulgarian word?

– “Благодаря” (blagodarya, thank you). Think about where it comes from and you’ll see why. And the fairest one is “необходимо” (neobhodimo, necessary).

Think about where that one comes from and you’ll get it too. But you’re dim and not much for thinkin’.

– What is… maybe it’s better you don’t say it, but what’s in the juiciest curse you learned during your months in the Northwest?

– Ask me one more, just one more question like that, and I’ll screw you in the crook of your knee!

– What do your algorithms show—does this region have a future?

– This lot can’t be wiped out. I been round the whole universe, but I never came across livin’ organisms like these.

Can you wipe out folk who laugh at death, who brawl in the tavern and the next day come runnin’ to help the fella they gave a slap or two, haulin’ his barrel out of the storeroom and rinsin’ it so it don’t go sour? They’re nuts, but their hearts are as big as Io, Saturn’s moon, and they don’t break. Just so long as they don’t multiply too much, or the whole world’ll suffer.

– Where does the strength of this region lie, the strength that never quite gets put to use?

– In the spirit. The hard life, the harsh conditions, the very nature of these wild ones has made ’em unbending. They’ll drop dead on the spot, but they won’t give in. Once they’ve set their minds on somethin’, that’s how it’ll be.

– What impressed you in Bulgarian poetry?

– Risto Botyov. Every bit of him. And it really gets to me that he signed himself that way, and you lot renamed him Hristo Botev. There’s so much fire in every word of that revolutionary poet, and so much smoke risin’, I don’t reckon he’d be pleased you… what’s the word… de-poeticized his name with that boring “e.”

– And in chalga, the Bulgarian pop-folk?

– We ain’t into chalga round here. We love Serbian stuff. My personal favorites are Mile Kitić and Indira Radić.

– Do you have a recipe for how humanity can deal with COVID?

– Hypochondria’s incurable. Otherwise, viruses are nasty. We got ’em on my planet too. Usually you take precautions, hygiene, we don’t eat each other’s snot, and after a while the survivors catch their breath and mourn the dead. But that’s just normal. Viruses were here before us and they’ll stay after us. Evil, primitive critters, but they’re part of life and that’s that. It ain’t nice, but there shouldn’t be any drama either. Otherwise we all go mad and we’re neither alive nor dead. In a stupor.

– People in these parts are said to love reading Stories for the Table. What does that mean?

– That they ain’t got two cents’ worth of brains in their heads. That book was written by some real nutcase. Sure, it’s funny, there’s the odd wise thought between the lines, but you got no right to mock literature like that. The fella did whatever he pleased, without givin’ a hoot about public opinion and morals. I flat out don’t recommend it. Open it if you like, but by the third sentence you’ll be convinced I’m right. I’m downright scandalized that not just here in the Northwest, but all over Bulgaria they like it. And they order it from abroad too. I don’t know where this world is headed…

Still, even that moron wrote two or three halfway decent books. Personally, I recommend “Mai she ni bade…” (Looks Like It’ll Happen for Us…) and “Ivail tsar” (Tsar Ivailo), but you can leaf through some other one too. He’s supposed to have said he don’t care if you read him, what matters is that you buy the book so he can get his hands on the cash and drink it. Can you imagine such sacrilege and nerve? What kind of writer is that!? He’s a total lowlife, take it from me.

– What kind of people will live in the Northwest once its current inhabitants disappear?

– None. This lot won’t disappear. This lot are indestructible. They’ll take you in, feed you, give you a roof, show you which end of the shovel to hold, and they won’t throw you out. But they’ll melt you down, in your genes and in your mindset. And you’ll become one of them. Otherwise you got no chance. And they’ll never become anythin’ other than grumps with big hearts and rich souls, hidden under thick skin.

– What is happiness?

– Every day it’s in somethin’ or other. For everyone it’s in somethin’ different. Here it’s all a matter of taste. For me in particular it’s doin’ the work I do, havin’ my drink go down sweet, and the folk around me bein’ well, so now and then we can crack up laughin’ together.

– What would you wish Bulgarians for this wonderful holiday, so beautifully symbolic for us—April 1?

– To crack up laughin’, didn’t I just tell you, you numbskull!? Laugh, ’cause the universe is endless, but life ain’t. It’s just energy, changin’ from one form to another in this endless universe. Long as you’re in this here shell of yours, enjoy it. After that, who knows. Like they say in the Northwest, “May you have everythin’ and may nothin’ ail you!” A hundred years at least, and after that we’ll see.

Last updated: August 14, 2022

Have you ever stopped to think… technology has exploded, we have access to an unthinkable ocean of information, and yet what makes us laugh most often these days is… the same dozen pictures.

Is there any logic to this phenomenon at all… or is it the art of our time? What is a meme? A descendant of the joke, anonymous online folklore? Or… a phenomenon that marks a new stage in the evolution of humankind?

We'll look into the philosophy behind it and try to explain how it came about. And to have some fun along the way, we'll also tell the stories of some of the most recognizable meme heroes.

Seize the Meme-ent!

A blonde woman is screaming in the picture on the left, while on the right a cat, cozily settled behind a dinner table, watches her with perfect composure.

You don't know what I'm talking about? I don't believe you, but if that's really the case, it's time to go back to Facebook for a three-hour remedial class.

Of course, I mean one of the most widespread meme templates, which appeared in 2019. And if you scroll long enough, you're bound to see it in your feed even today, with yet another witty caption.

This is quite an amusing side of this strange… hm… genre? We look at the same pictures, some of them a decade old, and we don't get tired of them, even though the joke stays the same and the kind of surprise that makes us laugh never changes. We know the screaming woman will say something she firmly believes in, and that she'll be met with a cold and rather convincing denial. So we keep looking at one and the same picture, which our brain otherwise won't let us do online—because it's always looking for something new, and so we scroll and scroll.

Memento mori

In real life, the two heroes of the pictures have never met. On the left is the actress Taylor Armstrong in an episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills shot in 2011. I don't need to tell you what the show is about; the title is eloquent and seems to explain everything you need to know about the situation in which we see Taylor's character. For the record, before this scene her character had told her friends that her late husband had abused her. Her friend Camille then started spreading rumors about it, which got back to Taylor's character, and… it doesn't really matter.

Facing her is Smudge. The cat first appeared in this photo on Tumblr, the somewhat faded social network, with the caption “He no like vegetables.”

Taylor Armstrong made use of the fame that came not from the show but from the meme: she was a guest on Oprah, and she wouldn't have said no if Gala, the Bulgarian talk show host, had invited her too. Smudge wasn't so lucky; he just quietly gathers followers and fans. What can you do, influencers. After several joint appearances in TV studios, though, Taylor and the cat's owner became friends and started swapping the funniest memes made from this template.

Seventeen Memes of Spring

Who came up with the idea of putting the two photos together? History is silent. But whoever it was clearly struck straight to the heart of a great many online users. “Straight to the heart”—did you notice? Memes very often have magical word combinations stuck to the picture, and they, too, are always clichés.

Is this just a coincidence that produced a perfectly ordinary collage at exactly the right moment, which then became a pop-culture phenomenon? Exactly. The two photos obviously capture some quite clear moods, but… no one will ever manage to explain what exactly made them so, so successful online, no matter how many doctoral dissertations are written on the subject.

Let's move on to terminology. You may have noticed that in Bulgarian I call this phenomenon „мем“ (mem). You, however, are used to „мийм“ (miym), lifted straight from the English, or to the literal „меме“ (meme), borrowed from the vocabulary of goats as small children imagine it. The reason is quite interesting and lies far back in history.

Meme Dreams

Unless you've come across this fact before, you'd hardly guess that the term was coined by the science popularizer Richard Dawkins in 1976, long, long before we all found ourselves on the internet, let alone liked our first meme.

Excuse me? How could Dawkins have guessed that a quarter of a century later we'd start stuffing our jokes into identical pictures that we look at hundreds of times a day without getting bored? Wasn't he the scientist mostly busy with the important task of explaining to us that religion is obsolete?

In fact, the phenomenon is much broader, more interesting and more revealing of our digital present than the simple use that has brought us together here. In English, “meme” has the same kind of origin as “gene.” Because it's not just about online jokes, it's about the way humankind evolves. At least if we stick to the author of the word rather than to its so widely familiar meaning today.

Man Is a Meme to Man

The term itself comes from the Greek “mimema”—“imitation,” which also gives us words like “mimicry” and “mime.”

Language is a very dynamic world. Bulgarian dictionaries still have no standard, and yet logic points to „мем“ (mem) precisely because of the similarity to „ген“ (gen, gene) that Dawkins was after. The plural is open to debate—you'll come across „меми“ (memi)—but „мемове“ (memove) is far more familiar.

The name is only a detail; what the phenomenon represents is far more important. Let's give the floor to its godfather.

“If you want to understand life,” Dawkins writes back in the good old year of 1976, “don't think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.”

“I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet,” the scientist continues. “It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.”

The Meme Trickster

It is this replicator that Dawkins calls a “meme.”

If we ask biology, genes are our chief defining factor and the main field of evolution—the way they combine and reproduce onward. Just like ideas. The replicator is the dividing unit, the thing that carries life forward. In one case the replicator is the gene, in the other the meme.

“Memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation,” the researcher explains.

“Dawkins made his own leap from the evolution of genes to the evolution of ideas,” adds James Gleick, a writer and technology journalist. “Today memes compete for limited resources, such as our brain's capacity to take in information.”

Memelets and Memelings

Of course, the memes Dawkins described have countless different applications and are far from limited to identical pictures with funny text. They can be ideas, tunes, messages or images. The Mona Lisa's smile is a meme, so is the slogan “survival of the fittest,” and so are the little songs we sing to our children. They all fight for the same thing—our attention, our interest. A resource that grows ever scarcer as the competition grows ever fiercer.

And so it is images, but in a new and rather peculiar digital way, that have become very unexpected contenders in this race. Scientists call them “internet memes” to set them apart from Dawkins's more general definition, but that definition stays in the books: for all of us, these are simply memes.

Some trace the first example resembling its internet descendants all the way back to the 3rd century BC. A mosaic found in Antioch shows three scenes. In the first, a servant prepares a bath. In the second, a young man runs from the bath, chased by an old servant trying to catch him. In the third, a visibly happy skeleton lounges casually, holding a cup of wine. In fact, you can see it as a template for today's memes too.

Slowly and Memethodically

What exactly is a meme? We can picture it as the tiny units of cultural code that make us who we are.

Today the Oxford dictionary says it is “an image, a video, a piece of text, etc. that is passed very quickly from one internet user to another, often with slight changes.”

The pioneering internet meme is probably the well-known emoticon 🙂, first used in 1982. The first successful video example came in 1999: a GIF of a dancing hamster managed to attract 18 million visitors, a huge number for the internet of the time.

Remember the “Harlem Shake”? Another fine example of a hugely popular meme that later vanished in the course of meme evolution. For a few months we watched celebrities all over the world behave absurdly to a moronic track from the '80s. Then they were pouring buckets of water over themselves. Today young people have largely carried this fashion, in different, much smaller and wackier waves, over to TikTok. Yes, it seems today's banal pictures with sometimes original captions are rather more likable.

Memeories

It's curious to note that years after he created this theory, and long before he became truly famous, mainly for his anti-religious views, Dawkins worked for several years as a programmer.

And while in his first work on the subject he wrote that “the computers in which memes live are human brains,” in 1989, in the second edition of The Selfish Gene, he added: “It was obviously predictable that manufactured electronic computers, too, would eventually play host to self-replicating patterns of information.”

Like genes, memes change the world beyond themselves too. Their chances of survival depend on how quickly they spread.

Memento Shake

From here it's only a small step to the term “viral.” The first to use it in the context of online information was the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, inspired by Dawkins's ideas.

Gradually a whole scientific school formed around Dawkins's ideas—memetics. One of the parallels memeticists draw is with those popular chain letters you had to forward to ten people… you certainly know what we're talking about if you were born before the internet went mainstream. The principle is similar; they were simply limited by the technology. Unlike the heroes of our story.

Could internet memes transform the whole Earth, the way genes have for millions of years? In a way, it's already happening, at least as far as the way we take in information is concerned.

Monumemental

Meanwhile, as you can see from the pictures scattered around this text, memes have made quite a few people famous, and that, too, has two sides.

The story of two-year-old Mariah Pringle is telling. The little girl has a rare disease that affects her motor and cognitive abilities. Somehow a photo from her birthday escaped the family album and in no time became a popular template. The family did everything in its power to stop it, but once a picture has spread, that turns out to be almost impossible.

Other newly minted celebrities use their fame to win a little offline popularity too. Only the best get as far as properly monetizing their immortalization—for instance, by selling souvenirs bearing their face. Some become vloggers. András Arató, the old fellow we've grown used to associating with suppressed pain or discomfort, says in a TED talk that ending up in a meme was the greatest chance of his life and opened countless doors for him.

(You'll find many more interesting stories about the heroes of the templates in this wiki.)

Phenomeme

Sometimes waves of memes come along, inspired by current political moments or news photos. Think of everything Bernie Sanders got up to in his famous thick knitted mittens.

The same goes for sports. It's enough to mention the way Neymar and Cristiano Ronaldo are mocked for their diving. Or Giorgio Chiellini's brutal foul in this year's European Championship final.

TV series are another traditional source of pictures. Friends, The Big Bang Theory, Game of Thrones, Chernobyl… the list is huge, and you can surely think right away of the most recognizable templates from each show.

With all these groups, though, the fashion usually explodes with the popularity of a given show or a particular sporting or political event, and then fades away. Much more interesting are the shots of ordinary people that go viral by some unknown path and don't grow stale for decades.

Meme Fritters

The world is big, and that's just as well, because if we peek into the Bulgarian-language corners of it… we'll find almost nothing original. Yes, now and then a photo of a politician briefly becomes a cool meme, and sometimes the jokes really are charming. But on the whole we mostly copy and reuse content that is universal and close to our perceptions anyway. The visually familiar wins; it stops our gaze in the endless flow of information.

One of the funniest pages—with the stories of the classic Bulgarian (and later his relatives)—turns out to largely repeat the stories of the classic Serb, who is also in the picture, from the much older page Dnevna doza prosečnog Srbende.

Spinderman, Motikarya (the Hoe Man), the pages devoted to trending TV series… everything follows the same popular templates. And no wonder: memes are like jokes, they have no original source and you pay no copyright. And thanks to the advances of digital marketing (with all its cost to the way we take in information and look for the truth today), gathering a large following in a group can bring in real money.

Meee-meee

Making a new picture takes seconds (here's one of the countless handy generators that carry all the most popular templates). You have a neat idea and, presto, the meme is ready.

Most templates carry the bulk of the message on their own; all that's left is to add the nuances. We all know what the quarreling woman and the composed cat will tell us, or the artificially grinning Leonardo DiCaprio with a glass in his hand from Django Unchained, or the “classic Bulgarian.” All it takes is some small nuance that fits the logic and comes from the text—a modern haiku.

What could be easier than climbing onto things already invented and, with simple translations or a little sense of humor of your own, “breaking through” online on the spot? Before your meme sinks among all the others.

Nothing wrong with that, of course. I, and surely you too, often smile at pictures like these.

And what could be better than smiling, especially when it's not at someone else's expense?

Meme evolution goes on. What will its next forms be? How will it surprise us, and where will the changes in the meme pool take us? All that's left is to ask Dawkins, or to let our imagination run free…

– You must often read a news story that sounds like Not!News. Do you have any funny examples?

– Every day. Whenever something absurd pops up in the country or around the world, people start messaging me and tagging me with either “I didn’t know you worked for outlet X now” or “these guys stole your job.” I’ll use this lofty platform to declare that it’s annoying, and I’m writing down on a little slip of paper everyone who does it.

– Which piece of Not!News did the most people take for real?

– I don’t know. Fooling people isn’t my goal.

My first goal is to cheer them up by refracting reality through Not!News.

My second goal is to get them to start checking the sources of the information they read and not to trust too readily, even when they come across something that panders to their attitudes and views. And my third goal is to use the 25th frame and a particular arrangement of punctuation in my texts to manipulate the world’s population so that all the french fries end up being mine.

– Has a piece of Not!News ever predicted the future? Has something you joked about become fact?

– Yes, to some extent it happens fairly often. Sometimes the “predictions” are rather convoluted, like Nostradamus’s—we can fit current events to old posts. But there are very specific ones too. For example, in the spring CSKA, one of Bulgaria’s biggest football clubs, appointed Lyuboslav Penev as coach, and a few days later I wrote that he had failed to win a single game (because there hadn’t been a match) and they had fired him to bring in Stoycho Mladenov. Well, the switch did happen a few months later.

– If it were up to you to make one piece of Not!News you’ve written come true, which would it be?

– There are many. But I’ll name a recent one—Fandakova, the mayor of Sofia, hires Borisov, the former prime minister, as a security guard at City Hall because his money has run out.

You won’t believe it! It turns out vaccines…

don’t work on Saturdays and Sundays.

– I think you’re the best person to ask: which topics get Bulgarians worked up online?

– Several a day.

We may not be good at multitasking at work, but at following and being experts on several things at once, we are magnificent.

I can discuss influencers’ nose jobs, the rescue operation for a stranded ship, cryptocurrency fluctuations and the vaccine issue in the time it takes to drink one morning coffee.

– In that sense, are there any topics on which we don’t feel competent enough?

– No.

The more incompetent we are, the more competent we are.

Think how often we see a comment that begins with the words: “I don’t really understand this and I hope I’m wrong, but….”

– And which topics make us curse most furiously?

– Mostly we curse in our heads. Next—when the target of the curse can’t hear. After that—when they can hear but can’t answer back, say if they’re playing a match and we’re in the stands, or we’re passing him or her in our cars. We rarely curse face to face, and then we make sure we have numerical or qualitative superiority. For example, a little while ago I cussed out a stink bug.

– I think we’re very far behind when it comes to online jokes. Apart from you, the rest is almost all imitation. Even the “Classic Bulgarian” meme is a Serb. Why? Is that just what online humor is like, standardized, uniform, or are we not creative enough?

– Unfortunately, the tendency to be imitators or, at best, to adapt something to local taste isn’t limited to humor. It’s in the arts, in cooking, in architecture. But I don’t agree that there’s only me or that I’m anything special. The point is that

many people give up on making something of their own, since it’s faster and cheaper to copy

or to take something foreign that has already achieved the desired result, and you really risk a lot less. And I’m an idiot who still insists on sharing dumb jokes that only I get. But they’re mine.

We won the Nobel Prize in Literature! The author…

copied Mark Twain and signed his own name.

– Can you explain why online people love reading horoscopes so much?

– Because they’re the children and grandchildren of offline people who love reading horoscopes in newspapers.

– Does real news have a future?

– Of course. We live in times when there is more real news than ever, at least in quantity. In two minutes we can find out what’s happening in some godforsaken town in Chile. The problem, though, is that

the media developed too fast, and we haven’t built up habits of our own

to help us judge what’s true, what’s a half-truth, and what’s been taken out of context to serve a particular end. Even I sometimes get fooled or fail to look at something critically enough, even though sifting, sowing and fabricating quasi-news is literally what I do.

– Are there people you respect too much to put them in a Not!News bulletin?

– I don’t think joking and respect contradict each other. Let me start from afar—people respect their parents, their family, their close friends most of all. And I, at least, joke about all of them. True, most of the people who become the subject of Not!News are strangers to me, but

I always ask myself—would I say what I’m writing to the faces of the people I’m writing about? And my answer is yes.

I realize that some public figures, most of them in positions of power, may feel slighted at becoming the target of satire, but I usually take my cue from the news. And most of those cues are produced by them.

Jesus is Bulgarian! The facts prove it:

He doesn’t like Bulgarians and is better appreciated abroad.

– Why aren’t you in politics?

– I haven’t yet run my own life in such a way that I could step out and say: “Look what I’ve achieved, let me run your lives too.”

– You write about “the news as it could have been,” but it seems to be more from the point of view of what you wouldn’t want. If it really were up to you, what would “the news as it could have been” look like?

– It would be naive to say I imagine a world embroidered with honesty, joy and kindness, with no natural disasters, illness or suffering. But if someone weighed down by the real news reads one of my posts and starts looking at life and the world around us with a pinch more cheer, let them buy me a beer.

– What would you write if you weren’t writing Not!News?

– Last year I published a book of absurdist and science fiction stories, Garvanat, koyto mozheshe da spira vremeto (The Raven Who Could Stop Time). Now a more substantial literary effort on my part is on the way: a novel about homegrown, and not only homegrown, mythological and fairy-tale heroes.

– That will be quite something to read! You’ve gained plenty of experience in that direction… You’ve been creating Not!News since the early Paleolithic, since 2009. Which topics have vanished from the media stream in that time, and which have taken their place?

– It’s normal for all sorts of topics to rise and burn out over a dozen years. Very often they rise again like a phoenix, but

for several years now nobody has restarted the debate on smoking indoors

and I hope to use this platform to remind the TV channels to invite guests to have a row over it, because you can’t live like this.

Plot twist! An artificial intelligence found out it was Bulgarian… and immediately explained how things really work in the world.

– Have people become at least a little more literate in the way they get their information over that time?

– They’ve become more confident in their literacy.

But at the moment we’re seeing a kind of collective information puberty

—when someone settles on a particular station and mindset, gets angry at everyone else, and no form of reason can convince them that they’re not entirely right. The good news is that after puberty there are several more phases, and shortly before collective senile dementia we’ll be in brilliant shape for taking in information.

We’ve made a deal with the Macedonians! They won’t drink on days whose names contain Ъ, the Bulgarian letter missing from the Macedonian alphabet.

– So will audiences eventually learn, en masse, to check information? Or will they give up trying?

– It’s possible. Maybe in a generation or two, once those of us who consumed traditional media in their old, pre-internet form have died out. Not that there was no disinformation or sloppiness back then. But back then the trust lay in the fact that someone who was being paid for it had selected, checked and reported. Now we have to learn that the media are racing for clicks, and the mass click isn’t all that influenced by the quality of the information.

– In that sense: do you believe the media have a future?

– Yes, until someone invents another tool to satisfy our thirst for gossip, our urge to be connected, our curiosity, our desire to explain to ourselves what has happened to us and why, and what lies ahead. Our media have already caught up in speed, so they connect our entire present world instantly.

But the discovery and settlement of new worlds lies ahead

and it will be interesting to see how that affects them.

The first day on social media has been recorded without anyone… sending you an old joke.

– Do you think this topic is connected to the “great success” of vaccination in Bulgaria?

– Our low rate comes from our extreme distrust of institutions. And that comes from the fact that

institutions here are either corrupt, or sloppy in their work, or fail to communicate properly.

Often all three. We’re more inclined to trust a dubious potion with unclear ingredients, recommended by a friend of a friend who bought it from an old woman in Gigintsi, a village near Sofia, and gave it a good review, than our health institutions, which contradict each other anyway.

– Will the day come when you publish a piece of Not!News and nobody takes it for real?

– No. There is

a special type of person with a strange fetish for not reading even the headline to the end before rushing to comment.

I’m just looking for a way to capture their energy and turn it into electricity, so I can get even richer than I’ve already gorged myself.

A Bulgarian startup set off… 100,000 triple-bang firecrackers to push the Earth farther from the Sun and avoid Global Warming.

– Which media outlets are your biggest “competition” in creating Not!News?

– The other media are my inspiration, not my competition. I hope that someday there’ll be a news parody here in Bulgaria I can compete with over who comes up with the funnier take. It would do me good, because at times I get rusty.

– How do you always manage to find a sense of humor even about news and topics that visibly anger, infuriate and depress you?

– I’d go mad otherwise. Or maybe I already have. But in reality, whether I get worked up over everything or take it with a smirk makes no difference at all—Andromeda and the Milky Way will collide in about 4.5 billion years, and that will certainly mess up the belongings of a lot of people rushing out the door because they’re late.

Exposed! The creator of Not!News is… about to give birth to a badger.

– Where is the line between a sense of humor and rudeness online?

– Sometimes there isn’t one. We don’t even need to look at a case where A jokes about B. A and B can both be watching C’s joke, and A laughs for three days while B doesn’t like it, finds it in bad taste, takes offense, threatens to sue, takes up arms and begs his God to do something, because if He keeps sitting idle over this joke, B will have to personally wipe out half the planet.

– You never advertise anything… how do you monetize your success as an influencer?

– I go through the Commercial Register and tell every company that I’ll film myself smearing their products or services on my bare belly button on my OnlyFans channel. They don’t even check that I have no such channel and immediately shower me with money.

– Jokes aside, who are the meaningful Bulgarian influencers?

– There is no such animal as a meaningful influencer.

Either you’re famous because you do something, can do something, know something and are somebody, or you’re famous for being famous.

– Isn’t it time for Not!News to conquer the world?

– That will happen when we discover an alien civilization to which we’ll sacrifice influencers so they won’t eat the good people.

After the writers and the IT specialists, the time has come for Digital Stories to give the floor to influencers. Today's guest rarely gives interviews. It is safe to say that without our digital present he would never have given a single one. And that would have been the reader's loss, because his thoughts are sincere, colorful and delivered in a rather peculiar way.

Rumen the Cat has more than 50,000 followers on Facebook, and on his own website he invites guests to enjoy his work. Like any self-respecting influencer these days, he is also the author of two books. That is why we decided to invite him for an interspecies interview for connoisseurs. To talk about his life as an influencer and about communicating online. About existence on Facebook and the IT career that happened and yet somehow didn't.

– Mr. Rumen, it's a pleasure to meet you. I'm personally a big fan of yours!

– thats exakly how u start an entervew! bravo! verry profeshunal! besides, it also meens we hav sumthing in komon. i am a big fan of me too.

– Well, I'm just trying to put you at ease. To be honest, this is the first time I've interviewed an influencer. And while we're on the subject… Is it easy to become an influencer?

– the enfluenser is just like a reglar persun – eats, sleeps, goes to the toilent – only he duz all this in frunt of a publik, so that the publik can get enfluensed. and the betur he duz these things, the more the publik gets enfluensed and says “eeeeeeee, how nicely i got enfluensed todai by this enfluenser!! bravo! i am satisfide!!!1 i wil definately cum bak to get enfluensed agen tomoro!” i hav generaly obzerved that most enfluensers make shure that whatever they do, it looks nice – they eat nice stuuuf, go to nice plaaaces, take pikchers with famus peeeple… things like that. only me and my roomate zlatim razsadnikov eat kat food, are always the same, and take pikchers only of each uther, and stil sumhow we enfluense verry well. just imajin if we went with caviar bardem to spit-roast a hole lamb under the treeomfal arc in parees!

the publik wud get so enfluensed it just cudnt take it!!1

we wud brake it, wot can u do…

– Did you expect to become one?

– forsed by sirkumstanses, i started out as an enfluenser on facebuk befor i was even two munths old. bak then the only things i cud do were eat, sleep and go to the toilent. with thoze skils i had no uther career choise but to becum an enfluenser. i also thot about sumthing like being in charj of sea bass fillets at sum restorant chain, but i think i wud hav abused my offishul posishun, so i held bak.

– You once tried to get a job as an IT specialist. What went wrong?

– wot cud hav gone rong!! nuthing went rong!!!1 i dare say i prezented myself brilyantly at the entervew, but rite when i was explaning to the colleeg wot modjulashun in pop musik is and that the tomato leafminer moth in latin is tuta absoluta, the conekshun sumhow broke. i asume they wil get bak to me any momant now, only i am not shure i am stil interested in the posishun. i am a bizzy persun.

– So you could become a programmer? What kind of program would you like to create?

– one that trax the lokashun of every singl pijun in the naborhud. u see, u humans dont realize it, but hanging at the windo all day to catch them is quite tiring! and sumbody has to do it!! cmon!

– Was the internet invented for cats or for people?

– the internet egzists mostly to give peepl akses to more katz. in that sense – it is for peepl.

we katz liv perfectly calmly without watching klips til we lose our minds

of peepl sleeping on their bak with their mouth open on the net, beleev me.

– But really… why do people go all soft over your cat photos?

– “go soft” isnt exakly put rite. more like they fall into a relijus trans. and why – becoz the lord gawd set it up that way, so he can wotch u thru our eyes. there is a speshal plase in hel for peepl who dont go soft over katz, and there they clean kat toilents until they are reborn as sumthing dum, like linoleum for egzample. shure thing!

– So you cats have won the eternal argument online—people are not the least bit impressed by dogs on the web… How did you pull it off?

– as i hav sed on anuther okasion – in an argyument the one who wins is always the one who can get up and leev first. we katz hav perfekted this, and dogs are just no gud at it. simpl.

– Are you afraid that artificial intelligence might replace you in people's hearts?

– when they make an artifishal entelijense that can snatch half the mackrel from a hungry turist on the black sea coast, then i wil start to worry ever so sliiitly with one ear.

– Is there anything you would teach the artificial intelligence of the future?

– how to egnore peepl while akshually egnoring them.

every kat can do it, but that entelijense wil eat its own artifishal tail befor it gets the consept.

– How much time do you spend on Facebook? Do you think people overdo it?

– me personaly not much, but let everyone spend as much as their spesifik need reqwires. every persun needs a diffrent amount of kat pikchers to feel like a fully fledjed individyual. let us be tolerant and judj no one.

– Would your life be more meaningful if there were no internet?

– no. my life wud be more meeningful if there was no fridj door.

– Spelling is a window to the soul. How does that sound to you?

– wot was a windo to the sole???2 i didnt get u, sorri.

– …never mind, let's change the subject. You say that what matters is being beautiful and the rest is vanity… If work ennobles a man, what ennobles a cat?

– mostly the fakt that it is purfect. but also laziness.

– Speaking of laziness, how did social isolation affect you?

– as a twentieth-jenerashun apartment kat, i hav spent my hole life so far in voluntery qwarantine and, life and helth permitting, i hope it stays that way. only i dont kno wot sort of soshal isolashun i of all kats cud talk about, givn that our apartment is teeming with beings of all kinds of biolojical and nonbiolojical orijin and astral rank. besides me, zlatim and the cleaner of our toilent, there also liv my plush mouse tsetska, zlatim's flea elly zabeth, the left leg of the table, whose name is stoyam, the gost of the kat who lived here befor us, and lil milky ourz, who is a yogurt that ch.t. gave me yeers ago, but we dont eat it becoz we alredy feel it is part of the famly and who wudnt! WHO WUDNT!!! we are walking on each uthers heds in this house! wot isolashun, wot five euros!!!11 so wot i want to say is that

lonelyness is a subjektiv fenomenon and a qweschun of the intensity of ones inner life.

i also want to say that if this goes on, i wil move out to a flat of my own!!!11

– What do you think about vaccines? I hear they boost your… immunkeyty?

– our immunkeyty gets boosted and how!!1 that is why we go get vaxinated every yeer. i never did get wot u find so qweschunable about thoze vaxines.

– What is the way to a cat's heart?

– if i anser “thru the stummik,” first it wil be a klishay and second, it isnt that simpl. only a kat can luv a human while not akshually luving him. sum aquarians can do it too. they wil understand me. the rest wil start to protest. it is complikated. but i want everyone to stay calm!

just take gud care of us and everything wil be fine.

– What sets cat lovers apart from other people?

– the fish hed in the plastik bag in the ladies handbag.

– We're always told to keep the child within us alive. So why not the tomcat within us?

– the idea of taking care of your inner tomcat isnt bad at all. u never kno when u wil need to throw a parti for one persun, that persun being u, and be verry plezantly surprized and in the end hav an awe sum tiiiiime!!!1

– When did you discover your poetic talent?

– one day when i was six munths old, i realized the fakt that the sqware stool i usualy rested on in the afternoons is in its esense the skin of a silvur fox. shoked by this diskovery, i rote my first poem. it is calld “the deth of the sqware fox” and in it i poured out the feelings born of this senseless deth. i quote from memory:

silvur am i like a fox
off a-hunting in the nite
but sumhow it isnt rite
now she lies upon my floor
and i sleep on her nekkid, what for

she wuz a bewty, so they say
but evil peepl took her away
lokked her in a cage, and yet
sewed a stool, a tabooret
from the little foxy's fur…

and so on. since then i hav ritten dozens of poems, one play, a few storys and one elejy. i also publisht a book of poetry, in which i collekted sum works that in the fyuchur wil be referred to as the pre-classikal period of rumen the kat. i also hav one book of proze publisht. and so.

– Why do you like those cardboard boxes so much?

– wot we like is not so much the big kartons as the not-too-big cardbord boxes. we hav lots of reezons to like them, but mainly we just

cant resist the entelektual chalenj

of fitting our round kat bodies into the not-too-big sqware box. the feeling when u sukseed can only be compared to wot galileo felt when he diskovered electrisity! u shud try it.

– Forgive me, but I can't resist ending on something more philosophical. When all is said and done… what is the meaning of life?

– good gawd almity, sitizen!! i dont want to skare u, but u do realize the sirkumstance that u are talking to just a four-yeer-old tomcat of the british shorthair breed? wot kind of qweschun is that, under the sirkumstances!!!1 and between u and me, isnt this fakt starting to worry u a tiny meowbit sumhow?

In my personal ranking of favorite conspiracy theories, somewhere just behind the reptilians and the microchips in vaccines, comes the idea of a flat Earth, which has been gathering speed lately. Today, when anyone online can say whatever they like, when access to information is unprecedented and general knowledge is shrinking in proportion, it is time to question the sixth-grade physics textbook. Today, when technology is shoving us forward at breakneck speed, why not go back for a change, and live for a little while in a more interesting world, where the Sun circles across the ceiling above our pancake planet, and Galileo and his ideas have gone from mainstream to dissident once again.

And while you read… just be careful not to fall off. I have yet to come across a sufficiently charming theory about what lies beneath and beside the flat Earth, but it is hardly an ocean of beer…

0. A Flat Joke

“Down there, spread out like a platter of gemstones, the flat Earth appeared. It looked like a plate full of continents. A coin tossed, heads or tails, by some indecisive god…”

So far you could easily assume you had stumbled upon the words of one of the growing number of flat Earth enthusiasts, one blessed with a little extra eloquence. If we go on, however, with the description of the four elephants carrying the planet on the back of the giant turtle A’Tuin, the science fiction lovers among you will immediately guess whose quote this is.

Let us loosen the reins of our imagination and try to believe, at least until the last line of this piece, that the Earth really is flat. Brace yourselves for a series of crushing arguments…

1. Shenton and the Shambolic

The topic came to the fore partly because of the QAnon community, which became famous around the storming of the Capitol at the start of 2021. Yes, those people led by the “Indian chief,” for whom the Earth really is flat.

And so we are now in a world where global society, like a drunk, has lost its sense of up and down, hiding its intoxication behind the hazy idea of a three-dimensional Universe, packed with planets and stars like a jar of cherry compote.

A little searching online is enough to find countless videos that gather the arguments for the flat thesis and enjoy impressive interest. They come in every language, even Bulgarian, and the arguments underneath them are long and heated.

“There is no single unified flat Earth theory,” says Daniel Shenton. “But there are serious enough reasons to believe that our planet is exactly that.”

The words belong to a 44-year-old Londoner who came over from America and now lives in Hong Kong, and who today heads the Flat Earth Society—the largest association of people won over to the idea. He does not dispute the theory of evolution, he accepts the evidence for global warming, and the world’s media describe him as a likable man without particularly extravagant views on the world… except for one. He does not believe that gravity is what keeps his beloved motorcycle on the road. On the contrary: we all live on a Terry Pratchett disc.

Shenton is a man who has traveled quite a bit—he has no qualms about using the GPS navigation on his phone, even though, in principle, this technology works thanks to its link to satellites scattered in orbit around the Earth. According to Shenton, the satellites really are above us—like the Moon and the Sun, they spin along their trajectories above the pancake Earth, tethered by cables, and their work has nothing whatsoever to do with the shape of what lies below.

“Does sailing around an island prove that it is a sphere? The same goes for the Earth.”
Samuel Shenton

By pure coincidence, today’s leader of the society bears the same surname as the pioneer of his field. After long years of oblivion, the truth about the flat Earth came to light in 1956, when the Englishman Samuel Shenton founded the organization fighting to restore justice. The theory was born while Shenton was still in primary school and gradually grew into a complete cosmology, which flat-earthers still more or less uphold today.

2. Galileo’s Chandelier

Until recently, a far more famous Don Quixote of the flat Earth was among us. The limousine driver Mike Hughes, also known as Mad Mike (a nickname he gave himself), had a hobby of building steam-powered rockets out of spare car parts. With them he tried to climb high enough to take photographs that would debunk the spherical lie. “I like doing amazing things that no one else can do. No one else in the history of humanity has designed, built and launched himself in his own rocket,” the American used to say.

On March 24, 2018, his rocket rose to 460 meters, reaching a speed of 500 kilometers per hour, before a hard landing followed. His ambitions, however, were far more serious—one of his next ideas was to launch it from a balloon, have it reach 800 km/h and make it to open space.

Yes, there is a reason we speak of him in the past tense. On February 22, 2020, Mad Mike’s epic came to a sad end when yet another of his homemade rockets crashed. The parachute failed, and so proving the hypothesis was left to the next daredevils.

As for us, it is time to turn to the arguments that cannot fail to convince us of the rightness of flatness.

3. Earth Under Pressure

All photographs of our planet from afar are fake, the International Space Station is a hoax, and the Moon landing was masterfully directed by Stanley Kubrick.

You will say you have seen the Earth from above in photos from space missions, and it really does look like a ball? Well, have you never used Photoshop?

Just because you have seen a photo of, say, Donald Trump, does that make you firmly believe that such a strange person could really exist, and that he very nearly became president of the most powerful country on the planet a second time?

One piece of evidence is the surprisingly small number of “portraits” of the Earth from afar, despite the countless (made-up) space missions by now. Flat-earthers count exactly eight photos, each of them a rather clumsy montage, as you can see in plenty of videos online.

The continents look completely different from one to the next, cheap Photoshop tricks are visible—the clouds repeat, patterns in the landforms are cloned… And in the pictures from the Apollo 17 mission, it is obvious a mile away that our planet was pasted in.

“I like doing amazing things that no one else can do.”
Mad Mike Hughes

Former NASA employee Matthew Boylan of the flat-earth community admits that he was forced to doctor photos so that the Earth would look round.

Do you think it could be mere chance that enlightened and wise peoples such as the ancient Greeks, the Egyptians and the indigenous civilizations of the Americas believed, just like that, that we live on a plate, that down is down and the sky is up?

Is it by chance that Homer and Hesiod tell us of a world as flat as the shield of Achilles?

Sadly, the Flat Earth Society overlooks the experience of the ancient Shopi—the people of the Sofia region, proverbial for their stubbornness—who proved empirically that “there’s nothing higher than Vitosha,” the mountain above the capital, as well as that of quite a few sergeants in the Bulgarian army who have ordered their men to run to the horizon and back.

4. Chicken Soup for the Earth

In this sense, the Iskar reservoir near Sofia will also be of use to us, never mind that it does not date back to the days of the ancient Shopi. Because one of the experiments that unambiguously shows flat-earthers are right has to do with large bodies of water.

The example was set by one of the “grandfathers” of the theory, Samuel Rowbotham. In 1838 he stood on the bank of the Old Bedford River in Norfolk, England. He chose a straight stretch, six miles long, where the water flows slowly, and mounted his telescope eight inches above it. Through it he watched a receding boat with a five-meter mast and… never lost sight of it, even when, by the flat-earthers’ calculations, it should have been eleven feet below his line of sight. It took the false scientists a full 30 years to come up with an explanation—in his calculations, he had not taken into account the refraction of light over the surface of the water.

The Old Bedford observations led Rowbotham, who besides being an amateur astronomer and inventor was also a writer, to produce his pamphlet Zetetic Astronomy, to this day something of a manifesto for flat-earthers. That is why they sometimes call themselves zetetics—from the Greek “zeteo,” meaning “I seek.” What is being sought, of course, is the truth.

The Salar de Uyuni is perfectly flat, and because of the salt in its waters it turns into a huge, perfect mirror, beloved by photography fans. Here is yet more evidence: there is no way a large body of water could be flat if the Earth were spherical. And from one shore of Lake Michigan you can see the other, which should be absolutely impossible because of the Earth’s curvature.

And what about rivers? They keep flowing even when there is not enough slope, and they have the nerve to do it in every direction.

Beach season is approaching, so the next time you find yourself on the sand, watch a departing ship in search of the truth. The globe theory will tell you it should start to vanish little by little, until the last thing you lose sight of is its highest part. Nothing of the sort happens in practice—the ship disappears all at once, because it is moving away across the pancake.

While you are at the beach anyway, watch the sunset too, for science. You will see that the sun gradually shrinks. So how can we claim it is so far away, 145 million kilometers from us? It always vanishes not at the horizon itself, but a little before it.

In other words: it simply hides from us to light up the other part of the Earth’s disc. One last look at the Sun before it disappears: if it is behind a cloud, its rays do not fall vertically but fan out sideways. So there is no way that shining thing is not very close to us.

5. Flat as a Board

This brings us to the point that a round Earth (or geoid-shaped, as the boring scientists insist on calling it) would be more or less… round. That is—walking forward, we would not be moving in a straight line, and sooner or later our path would have to start heading downward. If you don’t believe it, experiment at home with an ant, an orange and a ruler.

Then why is all construction based on the Earth being flat? Surveyors and architects are obviously among the specialists who indirectly admit the theory is right, because in their measurements, even for huuuuge structures, they do not account for the arc beneath our feet.

If the Earth were a circle with a diameter of 13,000 km, then the horizon would have to curve 12 cm per kilometer, 36 cm over 2 kilometers and about a meter over 3 km! The longest bridge on the planet, in China, at 165 kilometers, would have to have at least 2 kilometers of curvature, which the civil engineers, following the traditional rules, did not account for.

What’s more, the people who most often rise above the pancake will confirm its shape for you, albeit indirectly. No pilot is taught to point the plane downward every so often to compensate for curvature.

We have all flown on a plane. Is the horizon straight and level, or do its edges drop away, as they should if we were on a ball? Let us go even further. Let us take off in search of the truth with Felix Baumgartner.

When in 2012 he drew the eyes of the world with his jump from the edge of space, two things stood out. First: how can a man rise almost 40 kilometers, jump, fall down while the Earth is spinning, and suddenly find himself back at the same starting position, in the net waiting for him where he set off? You probably didn’t notice, but the footage of him preparing to jump is especially telling, too. From the side, the camera captures a perfectly flat horizon, but when it turns toward it, the curvature becomes enormous…

6. The Horizon Program

It is time to turn to the authorities. George Orwell himself speaks of the flat Earth, if metaphorically, saying that most people are quite convinced of the truth of the fact, yet could not explain why the Earth is round. Press them for a justification, and they would get angry.

The galaxy of celebrities who attack the status quo even more directly begins with Mohammed Yusuf, the founder of Boko Haram. We are all flooded by the stream of information, so it is important to clarify that this was not a successful youth rock band, but one of the most popular terrorist organizations, thriving in Nigeria. Well, according to Yusuf, rain comes not from the clouds but directly from Allah, but let us leave theological disputes aside. The list of prominent advocates of the flat Earth thesis includes the basketball players Kyrie Irving and Shaquille O’Neal (who sometimes claims he is joking) and the rapper B.o.B., an honorary member of the society.

Despite a careful search, I failed to come across any other famous names, probably because no one has yet thought to ask the attention-loving regular guests of Bulgarian morning TV shows.

Actually, I missed the official announcement from none other than Neil deGrasse Tyson, reading: “I admit it, the Earth is flat!”

Alas, published on April 1.

While we are on the subject of authorities, real and imagined, it is actually not Galileo and Copernicus who are to blame for the lovely pancake turning into a doughnut. Their role was to strip the Earth of its role as the center of the Universe. The real damage had been done earlier by Aristotle and Ptolemy, in the 4th century BC and the 2nd century AD respectively, who imposed the idea of spherical bodies across the empty sky.

“It is time for experience and logic to get ahead of dogma.”
Daniel Shenton

It was Aristotle who first tossed out the absurd notion that if some object casts a round shadow on the Moon, it must undoubtedly be the Earth. As if he had never seen spotlights in a theater. Besides: a disc casts a round shadow too, doesn’t it?

Magellan, for his part, stubbornly boasted of having circled the planet—a good marketing move, but also a whopping lie—he simply went around the disc without ever reaching its edge.

An important point for all scientists, including the more progressive ones associated with the flat Earth, is eclipses. In a solar eclipse, for example, a disc appears over the body of the daytime luminary that is perfectly smooth—not even the 9,000-meter peaks show.

Is it really possible that in a vast, vast expanse of space the Earth, the Moon and the Sun, so different in size, could line up in such a way that during eclipses their shadows coincide so perfectly that in a solar one the Moon hides the Sun, and in a lunar one the Earth’s shadow covers its supposedly celestial satellite exactly? Coincidence?

You throw a stone hiiiigh, high up, and instead of drifting away because of the planet spinning beneath you, it smacks you mercilessly on the forehead? After a sufficiently precise experiment of this kind, there is truly no way you won’t join the ranks of the flat-earthers.

Our bowl of soup revolves around the Sun?

Well, if it did, we would surely have spilled out of it long ago.

But then how do day and night alternate? In fact, the Sun stays on the ceiling above us and circles sideways around the North Pole, which is not a pole but the center of the disc. And now that we no longer doubt the flat idea, it is time to look further, to seek the reasons the oceans don’t spill out of the soup bowl, to see what lies at its rim that has kept us for so many years from being convinced of flatness.

7. Everyone into the Baking Pan

Well, we won’t tell you. Because the UN (an organization that has most demonstratively put a flat Earth in its logo!) lets no one near the so-called South Pole itself.

This is usually done with invented arguments about the need to protect its ecosystem, but the truth is that the edge is simply there. And as for what lies beyond it, flat Earth advocates don’t say, because they are researchers, not people of imagination.

All that is mentioned is the 45-meter ice wall that keeps us from sliding off.

Let us complete the overall theory. The Earth’s disc has a diameter of 40,000 km; the Sun and the Moon are the same size—objects 51 km in diameter, at a distance of 4,800 and 4,100 km from us respectively. Different stars are visible from different parts of the pancake, which logically counters the arguments of good old Aristotle, for whom the difference between the northern and southern hemispheres was proof of the spherical lie. But what is to stop different “little lamps” from simply shining “on the ceiling” above the two outer parts of the disc?

If there is no gravity, what holds us down? Well, not only a lack of faith in our own abilities, as with Jonathan Livingston Seagull, but also the fact that the disc is moving through space, and its acceleration pulls us toward the Earth, just as it happens to those sitting in the back seat of a souped-up BMW.

As mentioned, there is no universal flat cosmology to speak of. According to the current secretary of the Flat Earth Society, the programmer John Davis, for example, the earth stretches horizontally to infinity, and governments confine us to a narrow part of it so they can manipulate us.

In November 2017, the first world conference of flat-earthers was held in North Carolina; tickets cost $249, and around 400 people attended. Today the society has over 1,000 members (although in the days of the “old” Shenton there were up to ten times as many), and more than 9,000 people have joined the official forum. There is no need to mention the millions of views of the videos and the discussions on social media. “We now number in the thousands, and it is time for the theory to blaze new trails,” says James McIntyre, a moderator of the forum. “The moment has come to gather all the information in one place, to talk about it scientifically, and for its advocates to come together in a global community,” he adds.

“Of course, if you’ll forgive me for using the silly word ‘global’ (get the joke?).”

8. Nobody Loves the Flat Ones

One of the flat-earthers’ most charming arguments holds that the world of Copernicus was invented the way it was because it casts us in the role of specks of dust.

We think we are infinitesimally small, that we know nothing and control nothing, and this makes us a convenient, manageable mass in the hands of politicians.

Half of Americans (as of 2014) believe in at least one conspiracy theory. It is far more innocent to think that Elvis is alive (or Hitler; so far there is no such hypothesis about Lenin) than to question a fact undisputedly accepted for millennia.

“Doubting pleases me no less than knowing,” says Dante Alighieri. Confucius adds that what everyone hates needs to be examined, but the same goes for what everyone loves.

The next Flat Earth Society conference is planned for the second half of 2021, so if the arguments have won you over, it is not too late to join the ranks of this transnational anti-establishment elite.

The truth is that if no one told us otherwise, we would conclude that the Earth is flat. That is exactly how it looks at every moment of our lives. And when it comes to space, no one can check things for themselves; you always have to trust someone. That is why it is quite easy, if one is inclined to question everything, to doubt the so very doubtful fact that we live on a ball.

Flat-earthism is one of the most popular forms of denialism—the irrational rejection of generally accepted facts and scientific data.

And if you will excuse the ironic take on the topic so far, it is time to admit that people who have the courage to stand against the conventional deserve some sympathy. Sometimes their imagination even reaches impressive heights. Some of them are not afraid of society’s ridicule, while others use it quite deliberately to rack up cheap fame.

In the ocean of the internet, anyone can get any kind of information. That is a priceless treasure and a risk, because not everyone is ready for it. Still, perhaps it is going too far to challenge the very foundations of our knowledge, because from there to primitivism it is only a few steps.

And once we start taking them, it would be no wonder if, without noticing, we spilled off the flat Earth, far away, into nothingness.

Published: Spisanie 8 magazine, December 2018
Last updated: April 12, 2021