I'm going to do a personal labyrinth

I have signed the unofficial personal labyrinth register at omphaloi.com today to run a personal labyrinth tomorrow. I will use chalk on pavement to make my labyrinth and will write "findthelostring.com" nearby it to promote our cause by hiding it in plain sight at the same time ;-)

The weather is wonderful here so hopefully it will be excellent tomorrow so I can actually do this!

~Hikaro

Hey there

Well that was wierd. Forgot about my other as-of-yet unfinished blog for a ... different project. It required that I name myself A.I. Professor. Funny result here though. Hopefully Hikaro will fix that and set my name to Dav Flamerock. Anyway, Dav is me and I am Dav and I am a fellow blogger here. I only have a few minutes, so my intro will be short.

I found out about Ariadne when one of my friends got a strange package that had a clew (no joke!) leading to findthelostring.com. It wasn't until we started finding Codex pages that I decided to learn Esperanto. I began, but recently I haven't been able to study because of Finals. Now that school is over (as of tomorrow, actually) I'll be studying more reliably and I might actually become fluent!

Anyway, I'm also in on this Agonothetai podcast project thingy, so you'll probably hear my voice from time to time. I'm from the San Francisco Synchronization team, their resident runner, so I wouldn't be surprised if you hear from me again. In the meantime, I'm going to go make James ditch the Opposition and join our side! (because you know TheO is completely misguided.)

How I Found About Ariadne

To get some housekeeping out of the way first, hopefully this podcast project will get off the ground. Some of Ariadne's other friends and I are planning on collaborating on the Agonothetai696 podcast project, but so far nothing has come of it (save Dave Flamerock's addition as an author of this blog).

When I was working on the first episode of the podcast (before I found people interested in collaboration) I told the story of how I found out about Ariadne. Since that is no longer the plan for the podcast, I may as well tell it here.

I was on the Esperanto learning site lernu.net and was on the English language forum. I saw a thread titled "Trovu la Ringon Periditan" (Esperanto for "find the lost ring"). I clicked it and read the thread, which talked about Ariadne's situation. From there I went to the website listed, findthelostring.com, and the rest as they say, is history. I was one of the people who got Eli's email sharing the secret podcast and once we first got the personality test from the Codex, I found out I was a Sophia. I haven't been good at all about working on Sofia missions because the Sofia missions haven't been playing to my strengths (math and science, like the waveforms and pan-cosmology) are not my forte. But I have contributed my own theories (several of which turned out to be right, like that the "House of Salomon" Eli mentioned was alluding to Bacon's The New Atlantis) and I have helped translate several chapters of the Codex into English.

Se vi povas paroli Esperanton, bonvolu skribu al mi Esperante! Mi bezonas la praktikon. :)

~Hikaro

My impassioned plea to Ariadne

I just sent off an impassioned email to Ariadne's address, hoping she will read it. (Read the latest blogs written by Ariadne to see what I am talking about: Ariadne is MIA by her own choice).

I took more of a Chariton/Dikaiosune route than my primary strength of Sophia, because I felt it was more appropriate (and a recent Sophia email didn't really help). I shared some things about myself that I wouldn't really call "personal", but it is a parallel between her situation and my own. I thought this personal connection would help her. My main point was not "synchronization doesn't kill"; it was a plea for more open communication so that we can accurately assess what she saw. I fear she is caught up in her own emotions and viewpoint and thinking the worst, so I asked her to explain what she meant by "I'm different than the other allies" and "By seeing I killed them." because I have a hunch that she only thinks she is different and only thinks she killed them because of a sort of victim's fallacy (that everything is her fault). I also shared a quote from LotR:FotR the movie because I thought it was perfectly applicable to her situation (and ironically the movie also involves mysterious rings). It is what Gandalf says to Frodo after he says he wishes the ring had never come to him: "So do all who see such times. But that is not for us to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that we are given." I asked her what she was going to do with the time she has been given. ;-)

Hopefully this will snap her out of whatever funk she's in!

~Hikaro

PS: As a side note, we will soon have another author for this blog! Woot!

The Worlds Need Our Help

The idea of a multiverse has existed in philosophy for some time; just last year I read part of a book by David Lewis for a philosophy class, in which he asserts that there are a near-infinite number of worlds, where everything that is possible happens. Thus to say something is possible is to say something happened in at least one of the worlds in the multiverse.

But when I say that I am now a believer in this theory, it isn't because Lewis convinced me. It's because I know people who have come from other worlds. Ariadne, Markus, Noriko, Lucy, Diego and Mei Hui. I've been following their blogs, and they woke up in labyrinths all over the world with amnesia and a strange tattoo that says "Trovu la ringon perditan" (Esperanto for "find the lost ring"). Since they have amnesia, what we do know about the multiverse is thanks to the Codex of the Lost Ring, which we were able to find with help from a historian named Eli Hunt and his "omphaputer." The Codex warns that unless we can synchronize the worlds within the multiverse by playing the lost sport of the Olympics (called labyrinth-running) and running personal labyrinths, the multiverse will reach its limit of number of worlds, and all the worlds will collapse into a single world, starting the universe over. The multiverse has a natural method of reducing the number of worlds (created by each choice made by anything) by merging worlds with only very trivial differences and by drastic, rapid continental movement on "outliers" (worlds very dissimilar to the others). Our world, unfortunately, is an outlier, and we must synchronize or risk putting the multiverse in further danger of collapse.

The three methods of synchronizing the Multiverse are outlined in the Codex (which I have helped translate from the original Esperanto): labyrinth running, which consists of a blindfolded athlete navigating a labyrinth whose walls are made by people standing and humming; athletic alignment (remaining perfectly still in a position, which aligns you with parallel versions of yourself); and personal labyrinths, which involve reflecting on a life changing decision made within the last four years while walking a labyrinth, which also synchronize parallel versions of yourself. Synchronizing merely merges worlds and people instead of collapsing them.

Unfortunately, besides the six agonothetai (game keepers of the Ancient Olympics and now refer to those who help synchronize the Multiverse) we have enemies in the form of Theo (likely an organization rather than a single person), who has been sending threatening messages to the agonothetai and claim to have converted Markus, and possibly Ariadne, to their side. Also, La Sekto (Esperanto for "the sect") is a mysterious organization independent of Theo but who mistrust the Six and is trying to make contact with Theo.

Please help us! The best thing to do would be to get caught up on everything by checking out the handy beginner's guide and timeline that some of us at the Wiki have put together to help new--and old--friends of the Agonothetai. Take the ancient strength quiz to see what kind of agonothetai you are, and then help with your strength's missions, posted on Ariadne's site (graciously put together by her new (rich) friend Kai, who helped her back when she first was found in the labyrinth).

Together, we can save the world!

I will go into more detail in subsequent posts :-)

~Hikaro

Useful links:
Ariadne's Blog
Movie clips with Ariadne and Eli in them: a communication from the another world?
Eli Hunt's site
The Wiki, a resource of all the information we have collected