Cheating a robot

Published by
bartok fiend
-on April 1, 2008 in dream. 0 Comments

I had a dream that a big robot was looking for me on an urban battlefield, amongst some rubble. If it saw me I knew it would kill me so, when it managed to get most of its head inside the little hole I was in, I grabbed its antenna and eye stalks and bent them around so they were facing inward and the robot couldn’t see anything, then I shouted something like “schauen, ein panza!”, which was supposed to mean “look, a tank!” in the dream and made the robot try to look behind itself, thinking it was about to be blown to bits. Because it couldn’t see properly the robot began to panic and ran about randomly all over the place and I felt rather sorry for it.

bartok fiend

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Dreaming about saving Iceland

Published by
flyingsquirrel
-on March 31, 2008 in dream. 0 Comments

I had a dream that I took a plane to Iceland. When I got there the country was in a perpetual twilight, the sky an interesting pale red. There was a huge army surplus store right outside the airport so all the idiot tourists, who hadn’t realised that “Ice Land” would be cold, could buy warm clothes. The owners of the surplus store thought every visitor to Iceland was an idiot, including me, but were very pleased about it as they made a tidy profit from them. The dream was set in the near future and there were no children around - some kind of atomic accident had rendered all the people infertile, no new people had been born for over twenty years in Reykjavik and only a few fools, mostly old people, and fearless explorers ever visited the country. 

Anyway, back in the army surplus store, the shopkeepers became interested in me when they noticed I wasn’t looking at the woolly clothing like all the others but checking out some curious little devices they’d always assumed no one had any use for. They were nothing too special, pen torches, flares and glow sticks mostly, but I needed them as the final components for a larger device I’d made to rid Iceland of radiation poisoning. I’m not quite sure how it came about, but by the end of the dream I had hundreds of followers waving me off as I set out across the snow to plant my device somewhere on high and transmit some kind of cleansing signals that would cure everyone of their infertility. 

After walking for a while I recognized that my progress stopped; I couldn’t move anymore. However hard I tried, I couldn’t make a step. Suddenly I started to hear some strange repetative noise coming out from somewhere. I realized it was my snoring, and as soon as I realized it, I heard these words: “When you are snoring, you are not dreaming”. I tried to approach the source of the voice, but couldn’t. “You have to be able to animate ALL the bones in your foot before you can use it”, - said the voice. And suddenly I could move. I went in the voice’s direction and there was a man. I asked him: “Who are you? What are you doing here?”, and he claimed to be my teacher. I thought about that for a moment, and then realized that he wasn’t somebody I know.  So I told him: “I AM dreaming!”. He said “Congratulations” in a calm voice, fell backwards and disinegrated. Then I woke up.

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Zodiac killer code: mapping the way to Sirius

Published by
boris kislitsin
-on March 27, 2008 in memory. 0 Comments

 I have an avid interest in cyphers and codes stretching back to my childhood. I guess it started when a teacher in our school read us, 8 year old second graders, a story about how Lenin tricked intelligence agents from “okhranka” (tsarist secret service).  Yep, this was a story from Russian language textbooks for the 2 grade. I know it sounds insane and weird, but we had many stories in our books about Great patriotic war, communist revolution and Lenin: how he liked kids, or made a friend with illiterate bricklayer, who didn’t know whom he spoke to, etc.

It was in the beginning of 80’s in the Soviet Union, and school education was a part of global brainwashing program, I believe. I have no regrets though, as we had great time at school, education was free and very good and that stories in the textbooks were interesting.

Back to the cyphers. That story about Lenin and okhranka agents contained some references to the simple way of coding, by book and the way to do so. Apparently if you use milk instead of ink for writing, nobody can see what there’s something written.  To see the message you should hold the page above heat for a while, and transparent lines will become visible. So while in prison Lenin could communicate in this way: he’d shape some bread as ink-pot, pour milk in there and write with it; after he’d finish he’d eat his “inkpot” (milkpot?) and “ink” left; having a nice meal of milk and bread. Secret agents never could catch him; moreover, in such a manner he wrote a couple of books in between lines of some French novels he was allowed to read.

I loved this story. Soon I started to research and develop cyphers and ways of communication with my friends, our neighbours kids myself. To omit details, I even took a course on structural linguistics/cracking cyphers at university later. It was very exciting indeed, and I was happy to learn from one of the students of prof. Yuri Knorozov, who amongst other things decyphered Mayan script and later on his life “located” mythical place of origin of Meso-American people, known as Chichomoztoc, which is slightly out of scope of this book, though a very fascinating subject. So I’ll put a picture here, but won’t tell you why at this point:

ToltecaChichimeca_Chicomostoc

 The seven caves of Chicomoztoc, from Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca.

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Meeting my father

Published by
Lidija
-on March 21, 2008 in memory. 0 Comments

The most important day of my life was December 5, 1995, when I met my father for the first time. I was informed about his arrival and I was supposed to go and meet him at the local law court. I could not sleep the whole night and I was so nervous that I almost decided not to go, but, after a long conversation, my best friend Sivlija managed to convince me to change my mind. She went with me to the courthouse where we sat near the front door in order to see everybody entering. Suddenly Silvija showed me a grey man who was talking to the lawyer in the nearby corridor and she said: “For sure he is your father”. I did not believe her and I continued looking for a person from my dreams and from my grandmother’s stories: “He is a tall and strong man with black hair”, I was often told.
A minute later Silvija’s mother, who is employed there too, came and gave me a sign that he was the man I had been looking for - for 16 years. Then Silvija went to school and I stayed there alone. I knew that he was sitting behind the pillar, but I could not move. I stood there rooted, looking in his direction. I wanted to run away after I realised how many nights I has spend crying because of him, how many nights I had been dreaming about him, how much sorrow there still was in my heart because of him. I was so confused. All these memories threatened to destroy me. Finally I stood up and made the first step of the seven steps I will never forget.

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