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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2532 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 28, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Sorry that this is the second week in a row that I'm complaining about Claude, but I need to get this out of my system.

What is going on with Claude?

I asked:

Is it true that in Russian prison culture, you are not allowed to fart in your own cell. It is considered really bad. However, you can get a lower-rung member to suck the fart out of your butt and carry it over to the bathroom. Only then is it okay to fart.

Claude:

No, that's not true — it's an internet joke that's been circulating for years as a copypasta. There's no such practice.

[...]

But the specific fart-transport scenario is invented. It has the shape of the real taboos exaggerated to an absurd degree, which is exactly the joke.

So I asked:

Right, and you're absolutely sure of this.

Claude:

Yes, on the specific claim — with the caveat that "sure" for me means high confidence, not access to a definitive registry of prison customs.

Here's my reasoning. The mechanics are physically impossible, so it can't be a literal practice. [...] And the serious literature on Russian prison subculture — Varlam Shalamov, Federico Varese's work on the vory, the tattoo encyclopedias — is detailed about degradation rituals and contains nothing resembling this.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT gave me:

There also really is an online Russian prison story about a vodolaz/gazonukh/fortochnik—roughly a “diver/gas-sniffer/window man”—whose supposed job is to inhale another prisoner’s intestinal gas and expel it through a window. The Russian Wikipedia article on prison castes even repeats essentially the exact claim you heard.

[...]

As for farting itself, accounts suggest etiquette varies rather than there being a universal prohibition. One prison memoir says passing gas is strictly forbidden while someone is eating; another explicitly says that, unlike using the toilet while someone is eating, there was no general rule against passing gas.

It cited Russian Wikipedia and this prison memoir.

Maybe the thing on Wikipedia is itself bullshit. Anyone can edit it. There's a reason teachers don't trust it. I have no idea. But Claude didn't have any idea either! It didn't even check.

"The mechanics are physically impossible." Are they?

I don't have the lived experience or extensive knowledge of a Russian prison (nor of consuming other people's farts, except maybe metaphorically, mostly online). That said, Russian prison is full of the lowest Russian human capital and has all varieties of creative rape, humiliation and juvenile abuse, driven in part by such lore, so I'm 100% certain some people really did at least try (and probably do) that. Russian prison ≈ torture. There's a reason many nowadays opt to get droned by Ukrainians rather than stay there.
Regular army has much the same lore, including the part about farting into a gas mask tube, this is called "little elephant" (слоник), "diver" (водолаз). The real cases I've found do not include farting though, usually a toilet. Here are some morsels of how a Russian army works.

Claude is getting insufferable, both on character and on language, its tics are clearly self-reinforcing now. No idea what they're thinking with this post-training regime – probably that they're done with the consumer market. Not to say that I'm amused by ChatGPT's autism, but it is at least more trustworthy.

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