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This blog seeks to inform the masses about the Agonothetai and the Lost Ring and it is the companion blog to the Agonothetai696 podcast.
It's been hard to find time to help Ariadne when I just moved twice and finished finals week :P Hopefully now I can contribute again. I had a really busy and stressful finals week and moved from college to home and then from home to the beach where I am working for the summer. And now I am working full time as part of the waitstaff here at CBCC.
Expect the first episode of the Agonothetai696 podcast soon-ish. I don't know how much time it will take to get it up but Dav's first recording went well and so I just have to get it ready for the web (maybe converting it from wav to mp3) and posted online.
I don't know if you've seen it yet, but over at http://www.thelostsport.co.nz/ the Wellington team videotaped their most recent run... and of course their resident runner, Atalanta, has beaten me by a good 1.35 seconds, setting the record at somewhere around 14.09 seconds. I now officially challenge the Wellington runner Atalanta to a friendly competition that will last until the closing ceremony of the Olympics. May the best... runner win. (can't say man on account that Atalanta is a woman.) I will be training in my backyard, because I see that I am not the only one who knows the turns by heart.
It makes me sad that I can't go to the San Francisco practice tomorrow, but I will help run the Omphalabyrinth and I'll be around for as many of the others as possible. This competition is going to be truly epic. Wellington, THE GAUNTLET HAS BEEN PUT DOWN.
If you're wondering what this is, see the post below first. Otherwise this won't make any sense.
A few brief explanations: The 646 reference that Shad0 makes at one point is his attempt to figure out where James called before we ambushed him. We had taken his phone and Shad0 had found the number. We were trying to figure out where the number was to pinpoint James's TheO allies. Unfortunately, it was only a voicedrop... and we did learn that it was New York.
I did not subtitle the final video because it is 100% James telling his story and that would get tiresome (as well as delay the release of the highly-anticipated videos). So instead I posted my transcript on the wiki here.
As many of you may already know, I was in San Francisco assisting Kai and my fellow Agonothetai friends in our capture, interrogation, and conversion of James Mutters, well-known TheO activist and Kai's best friend. I've been busy all week compiling videos of the event, since it's best to see what happened firsthand, through footage gathered the day of the event. Sometimes it's wonderful being a Mythopoeia. Anyway, I'll post each video here as I get them, and I'll also give some brief explanations of the video.
I created the beginning of this video because I knew people would want to know who each person in the video and the photos was, and I figured that knowing their ancient strengths would be helpful. I also used it as a time to make it known what color each person was for their text, since I knew I would be color-coding the subtitles.
I had to use subtitles because the wind was horrendous, and even I, who remembered most of what was said, couldn't understand half of what was being said. So I added subtitles--that's what's taking the videos so long.
We were so nervous before that, and I was grinning like a maniac because I was so nervous. I'm glad it didn't get that for the most part--I look like a complete fool XD
At the end, the papers that were blowing away were the pages from my Kodekso--I brought along my copy of la Kodekso de la Perdita Ringo in case we'd need it. I guess a clew isn't good enough to keep papers weighted down. An unfortunate side-affect of that was that in the blowing-away papers my scroll tube vanished. It had my scroll for James and a spare in case we needed it, and the tube itself was really awesome. But it vanished, and we had to use a backup scroll. Oh well. Work on #2 is underway, but it's 3 times as long as #1. So I'm uploading it in 3 segments roughly 7 minutes each. I expect #2 part 1 will be up at about noon tomorrow.
I did my personal labyrinth today. I wanted to talk about what I learned about my parallel selves on the video, but I also wanted my video to be accessible to Esperanto speakers, and I'm simply not good enough at speaking Esperanto to do an Esperanto voiceover (I actually tried, but I wasn't very good and I wanted English subtitles, and I couldn't make them work). In any case, writing's my best medium anyway.
I know my labyrinth is lopsided... that's what I get for freehanding it! I did my labyrinth in the back of Parking Lot J, which is very empty on the weekends. (WOU dies every weekend because everyone leaves town for the weekend!) I wanted sidewalk chalk, but WOU's bookstore only had regular chalk. It took more than one whole stick of that chalk to draw that labyrinth!
I did three runs, actually, of my labyrinth. It was actually kind of annoying because after the first and second runs, I realized something was wrong when I was back in my room so I had to scrap the run and do another, walking back to the parking lot where I set up my labyrinth. The first time went fine but my head was cut out of the shot for the entire video. The second run was seemingly good, but when I was editing the video I realized I forgot my scroll! (No wonder I got nothing on that run from the parallel selves!) The third and final run is the one I published the video of.
The first and third runs I got differing impressions of my parallel selves, so I've concluded that I was seeing two different parallel selves. My world-creating moment was March 30th, 2008, when I committed to going to college at WOU instead of Pacific University.
The first run, I got the impression that my parallel self (the one that went to Pacific U) was a lot more lonely than me. I didn't know anyone who was going to Pacific, but I knew several who were coming to WOU, and I hang out with them all the time here. Even though one of my best friends from elementary school went to Pacific, my parallel self wasn't really friends with her. However, my parallel self was working for the student newspaper at Pacific, something I haven't really had time for here.
The third run, I got impressions of a similar, but different parallel self. This parallel self was on the newspaper staff, yes, but this me was a dikaiosune, not a sofia, and he was organizing synchronizing labyrinths and was a runner for his labyrinth... not something sofia-me would do! I guess this means that WOU has stimulated my intellect while Pacific would have stimulated my leadership skills. I didn't get the impression that this me was lonely like the first one at all. It's good to know that I'm not the only me that is helping Ariadne!
Overall, I think it was a good run. I completed a mythopoeia mission by writing "Findthelostring.com" below my labyrinth so that anyone who happens to pass by the labyrinth might get curious and join our cause!
