Imaweirdnugget - Certified Wizard

What to do if you suddenly find yourself homeless

FOOD

Find your nearest food bank or mission, for food

grocery stores with free samples, bakeries + stores with day-old bread

different fast food outlets have cheaper food and will generally let you hang out for a while.

some dollar stores carry food like cans of beans or fruit

SHELTER

Sleeping at beaches during the day is a good way to avoid suspicion and harassment

sleep with your bag strapped to you, so someone can’t steal it

Some churches offer short term residence

Find your nearest homeless shelter

Look for places that are open to the public

A large dumpster near a wall can often be moved so that flipping up the lids creates an angled shelter to stay dry

HYGIENE

A membership to the YMCA is usually only 10$, which has a shower, and sometimes laundry machines and lockers.

Public libraries have bathrooms you can use

Dollar stores carry low-end soaps and deodorant etc.

Wet wipes are all purpose and a life saver

Local beaches, go for a quick swim

Some truck stops have showers you can pay for

Staying clean is the best way to prevent disease, and potentially get a job to get back on your feet

Pack 7 pairs of socks/undies, 2 outfits, and one hooded rain jacket

OTHER

first aid kit

 sunscreen

 a travel alarm clock or watch

 mylar emergency blanket

 a backpack is a must

 downgrade your cellphone to a pay as you go with top-up cards

 sleeping bag

 travel kit of toothbrush, hair brush/comb, mirror

 swiss army knife

 can opener

I might be insane

you go harriet

just a couple of fruits. a pear of detectives if u will

Bug au phasmid (?) sighting (WIP)

Based on those lines from DE, I tried to estimate Harry's salary in USD, using prices in Ukraine as a starting-off point (pros of being Eastern European...?)

And I also estimated the price of Whirling's special borsht.

This is not a serious math solution; I took a lot of liberties to round the numbers and didn’t spend much time looking for equivalent products. I mostly settled for the cheapest items sold at big chains of supermarkets.

Methodology here is not great. This is just for fun. I'm not good at math and statistics, sorry TT

What I did:

found the UAH prices for analogues of some items sold in the game

averaged the UAH/reál ratio to estimate the price of 1 reál

then converted the final result to USD

Price of 1 reál

Starting from the game items to feature in those calculations, Frittte products are probably the easiest to find analogues for. As for pawn shop and book items from the game, it’d be hard to estimate, I think, the prices vary a lot. Especially for second-hand items that have lower prices.

FALN pants were an exception, because maybe Cuno sells you the new ones? I took the average price of sweatpants made by a local brand popular among young people.

With magnesium I’m also not sure, turns out it's rarely sold by itself without added minerals or vitamins, such as B6. Medications in Ukraine are most frequently sold in blisters, not small plastic bottles like the one in the game art, so I chose the price for a small tube of water-dissolvable tablets.

The price of Drouamine is taken from the price of Ibuprofen.

The final number was an average of all UAH prices divided by reál prices

So, with those loose calculations, the price of 1 reál is around 41,7 UAH, by today’s exchange rates it’s pretty close to 1 USD.

2. Harry's salary

This is the numbers we get.

With his monthly salary Harry can buy, uuuh, 91 bottles of Commodore Red or 152 bottles of Potent Pilsner or 19 112,50 hryvnias.

Just for comparison,

Data for salaries is taken from the biggest work searching website in the country. Couldn't find the median salaries, though.

The price of a motor carriage Harry destroyed is ~40 000 USD/1 668 000 UAH. It'd take him 7 years 4 months to repay.

3. Conclusions

For a competent detective with a high rank who spent 18 years of his life working in RCM? I thought it’d be more. For lower ranks it'd be much harder to get by, puts into perspective how he lived with Dora.

Vibe-based? Livable, especially if Harry owns an apartment and doesn’t have to pay rent. If we say he spends around half of his salary on rent+bills, he can survive on inexpensive food (if he wants to also by substances).

Genuinely scared of thinking how Jean lives with an even lower monthly pay. Judit has three children... oh god. I hope Harry bought them a lot of kebabs (the price of a very delicious big kebab a friend bought me once was 120 UAH /~3 USD).

4. Bonus: the price of Gorący's special borscht

That's right, we're so normal about borscht here that we have something called "Borscht index". It's the price of ingredients used to cook this essential dish that helps to track inflation.

Information from the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine (March, 2025).

If we say Gorący's pot is 20 L (19 L borscht + 1 L vodka), the price would be around 1394 UAH or 33 reál.

Unless he's cooking the Polish barszcz czerwony, which is pretty different from Ukrainian borscht, if I remember correctly.

So, yeah, if we use Ukraine as a stand-in Eastern European country for Revachol, it'd be like this. Thank you for reading! Sorry if the math is very bad TT

Waiting for a response

Appreciation post for all the beginner artists who work hard despite the AI ​​looming over us. You are fabulous. You are precious. Keep up the hard work, you are needed.