Ilya, I thought you might be interested in this short film posted today on FB by Ven. Topper Pannyaavudho
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Thanks a lot Michael! I know Ven. Pannnyaavudho of course, although we have never met personally. Thanks for sharing the movie!
On a side note, I definitely have to tell Ven. @sujato the SC team has to change the Cyrillic font used in the topic titles. It is awful 
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пожалуйста, Ilya. That might be the coldest pindabaht I have ever seen.
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Thank you for you concern about fonts! You are obviously someone of wisdom and compassion.
For Discourse, we only serve a font set for the characters we normally use here, i.e. a regular font set extended for Pali/Sanskrit. We don’t have the complex setup that we have on the main site.
I have Skolar installed locally, with the full character set, so the Cyrillic titles look great to me! The fallback font is simply “serif”, so if you change the default serif font in your browser that might help.
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Yeah, I agree, it looks pretty impressive.
Can’t wait till the Buddhist temple in Moscow in finished. There is one in St. Petersburg, opened in 1913, but belongs to the Gelug-Pa tradition only, if I am not mistaken, while the Moscow temple will be open for all schools.
@sujato Nah, it is just my degree in Linguistics that makes me a bit snobbish when it comes to things like this. I mean, even when there were Olympic Games in Sochi and many major Western newspapers had headlines in Cyrillic letters, their fonts looked just awful, which really drove me up the wall back then 
I am not really wise - just a little bit, and I am unfortunately not nearly as compassionate as I would like to be. I agree, right now the Cyrillic fonts are not a big concern, but it could be more significant later if you ever make separate versions of the SC forums for languages other than English, as you mentioned in some other thread.
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Yes, we would love to do that. We have been focused on making the main site internationalized first. When this is done, we will look more seriously at international forums.
Meanwhile, check out the site for Rosetta, who make our main font. They have a special focus on international typesetting.
It’s not just Cyrillic that’s ill-served. Any non-Latin writing system suffers the same indignity. In an international context like the web, it signals that certain languages are second class citizens, that words spoken in that language are not worth the same degree of care and attention.
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Does Ven. Pannnyaavudho practice a Tibetan flavor of Buddhism? Some of the aspects seen in that video I recognize from Theravada (and in my limited exposure to different varieties of Buddhism in such visual detail). Other aspects I’ve not seen before.
Oh no, Ven. Pannnyaavudho is almost as hardcore Theravadin as it gets, with studying the Abhidhamma and all that. I am not really sure what aspects you regarded as similar to the Tibetan tradition, but if you referred to external attributes, then well, he is living in Russia where monastic requisites are not really that easy to come by and one has to use what one finds. Besides, the ethnical Buddhists in Russia (the Kalmyks, Buryats and Tuvans; Elista, the Kalmyk capital, actually has one of the largest Buddhist temples in Europe, and the Kalmyks are the only indgenious Buddhist ethnicity in Europe) all belong to the Gelug-Pa school and they could possibly generously share some requisites with the Venerable. As for the teachings and practices Venerable Pannnyaavudho regards as authoritative, I can assure you he doesn’t follow the Tibetan tradition in any way, shape, or form, even though he maintains a friendly relationship with it.
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