Pamiatnik klaviature; fragment of a comic strip after a BOR quotation (both from FoR site).Another season, another reason... for writing blog posts. Lots of reasons, in fact. I'll limit myself to those related to Bergen's Future of Russian project. Not only have I followed its developments from nearby, but this autumn, it has taken full flight. First of all, starting from August 1 the core research group of this project - which focuses on the impact of new media on Russian literature and language - has welcomed two new members. Postdoctoral researcher Martin Paulsen will explore 'how the increase in computer-mediated communication has challenged the position of the Cyrillic alphabet as the code for writing Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian.' Alexander Berdichevsky, PhD student and FoR's other newcomer this autumn, will 'study the linguistic and cultural features of the community formed on the website bash.org.ru' in a project enticingly titled 'BASHing the Norm.' Secondly, the Future of Russian's autumn kicked off with 'Kto-nibud' etomu verit???,' a lecture by active partner Vera Zvereva. In a sophisticated analysis, Zvereva scrutinized newsreading and -commenting practices in Russian online media, with special attention for the popular news site news.mail.ru. For a quick overview, you can suffice with reading the abstract on the project site - but for the full lecture, surf here and download the lecture podcast and pdf. Recommended.And finally, in an early Future-of-Russian post I promised to keep readers updated on online conference papers. For those of you who showed interest then: recently, this page has become the virtual home of those papers which are (or will soon become) available for download. Among the speakers who preferred not to publish their papers directly online, several have stressed that they are more than happy to provide them upon request. So if you see a contribution that interests you, but for which you have to contact the author, do not hesitate to do so.New projects, a new podcasts, papers: it's been a prolific start of the (academic) year in Bergen. More will follow soon, and we won't forget to keep you posted.ER