Post by Aric Toler / Redsky

In sum: the church/school were chosen because of an obsession with hurting and killing children (this was extremely disturbing to read in the diary), and it being a soft target compared to a Trump rally or a political assassination (Trump/Musk/Nazis/"execs of greedy megacorps" are mentioned).

aug 30, 2025, 2:18 pm • 145 18 • view

Strangely, it's kinda like people who get bullied constantly asking "Why don't they pick on someone their own size!?" Because they specifically chose you, knowing most likely you won't be able to fight back. Bullies (and here specifically mass shooters) often go after the most vulnerable targets.

aug 30, 2025, 3:46 pm • 3 0 • view

Thank you for reporting out on that. I will never read it. A grab bag of hate. Do you think he may have been trying to write in Nadsat, the slang Burgess invented for the violent, bored teens in A Clockwork Orange

aug 30, 2025, 2:25 pm • 2 0 • view

No. The shooter was learning (very basic/elementary) Russian. When I taught first-year Russian, a lot of students did the same thing to practice Cyrillic, and feel cool in writing in a sorta secret language. That part didn't really feel odd to me, it was just obnoxious to read.

aug 30, 2025, 2:28 pm • 14 0 • view

Ha, okay yes; me too 😬 I did that LOL

aug 30, 2025, 2:31 pm • 1 0 • view

High school

aug 30, 2025, 2:31 pm • 0 0 • view

Another point that didn't make it into the article, but is fairly obvious, is that the shooter was suicidal, and frequently mentioned wanting to die and while taking out as many people as possible in the process.

aug 30, 2025, 2:34 pm • 109 8 • view

On a more boring, technical note, as I like to describe research/reporting methodologies whenever I do a story: I read a big chunk of the diaries just old-school style of taking notes while watching the video with the pages being flipped through. Eventually, I used Google Pinpoint.

aug 30, 2025, 2:51 pm • 65 2 • view

I screenshotted every page (this only took like 10-15 minutes with SnagIt), uploaded them to Pinpoint, and it did a good job of OCR-ing the handwritten faux-Russian. I could then do keyword searches in Russian (predicting how it was written) to make sure I didn't miss big topics.

aug 30, 2025, 2:51 pm • 67 1 • view

Better approach might be to generate a dictionary from the whole OCRed text. With a word list it will be easier to spot OCR errors, and then you can transliterate the text back to proper English.

aug 30, 2025, 3:09 pm • 3 0 • view

Here's what it looks like in Pinpoint with OCR-ed text. You have to read a *lot* of the diary to pick up how vowels in particular are transliterated. For example, highlighted word below is "continuing" I've seen a major outlet mis-"translate" a key word or two in their coverage.

aug 30, 2025, 2:51 pm • 73 4 • view

'transliterated'. You are so awesome

aug 31, 2025, 10:44 pm • 0 0 • view

@unroll.skywriter.blue

aug 30, 2025, 3:36 pm • 1 0 • view

Thank you for your reporting & for sharing your methods. I hope you get a cleanser of some sort this weekend. I think it’s time for the rest of us to face how vulnerable we are and that many (most?) of these events are not preventable unless everyone gets effective therapy, which isn’t happening.

aug 30, 2025, 3:02 pm • 3 0 • view

Very weird to see someone writing Cyrillic letters without using any cursive. I guess the shooter thus probably didn't have any real knowledge of Russian?

aug 31, 2025, 10:55 am • 9 0 • view

📌

sep 1, 2025, 8:05 am • 0 0 • view

(An outlet translated "Бэионэта" as "Beyonce". Maybe they don't play enough video games to know the reference.)

aug 30, 2025, 2:53 pm • 107 4 • view

it's the New York Post, in case anyone was wondering.

aug 31, 2025, 5:10 pm • 1 0 • view

How is that transliteration supposed to make sense? The letter "э" represents a sound similar to the e at the beginning of "end"

aug 31, 2025, 11:00 am • 3 0 • view

Tbh not a lot of it does.

aug 31, 2025, 11:23 am • 1 0 • view

You're giving it more thought that the shooter did

aug 31, 2025, 5:09 pm • 3 0 • view

If the shooter is using эи for long ā, that's reasonable (although эй would be better in my opinion). But the other outlet seems to have transcribed ‘beyon’ (intending a short ĕ) and then given up.

aug 31, 2025, 6:34 pm • 3 0 • view