Seems like there’s not a lot of good news coming out of Russia these days, but Dawn recently reminded me of this little gem from a couple years ago distributed by Youtube user “birchpunk” that depicted farm life in a futuristic setting that for all its new technology has a lot of the same ol’ problems.

In fact, Birchpunk has a whole series of short films on their Youtube channel that may not have zombies but otherwise feel very much in the spirit of Zombie Ranch‘s tongue-in-cheek depictions of “everyday” life, from cops on the beat trying to deal with their glitchy K-9 robot to surgeons getting their van-like transport injected into a patient’s bloodstream a la Fantastic Voyage (and honking impatiently at a slow white blood cell in their way). The farm one embedded above is of course particularly close to our hearts and it feels like Nikolai and Uncle Chuck are cut from the same cloth, just worlds apart.

Which is cool since their latest video (alas, as yet untranslated) has a brief note that it’s being turned into a streaming series! Hopefully this won’t mean the content disappears from access by us Westerners, as the shorts so far have combined witty writing and surprisingly good production values to show a setting at once very familiar and very strange, and almost always hilarious.