MIDA

MIDA use antonymy in their writings.

Antonymy is a pair of words that have opposite meanings. It is also known as 'opposition'. The term antonymy derives from the Greek words anti and onym, which mean opposite and name.

One of the best examples of antonymy can be found in 'A Tale of Two Cities' by Charles Dickens, published in 1859. ref

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way...

It uses seven pairs of antonyms to describe the chaotic and dangerous time of the French Revolution.

The difference is that only the PDF version has certain letters in bold type. This is the same for page 3 and page 4 (see below).

Yon can see a short video here showing how these three pages were displayed live in the web version of the ezine.

To complicate matters the original PDF version of the ezine only came with 35 of the 37 available pages. All 37 pages (PNGs and animated GIFs) could be downloaded individually from the website if you went looking.

A later version of the PDF with the same file name (hearoursilence_4673c.pdf) became available with the full 37 pages restored in the right order but this more complete version has no bold text on pages 2, 3 and 4.

We'll get to the missing pages later.

For now let's look at the letters in bold. They are listed as follows:

This reads:

Note the required 'e' for the word 'the' is not in bold in the above image.

The first part is the same as page 2 but with additional text added, see below:

The required 'e' in the word 'the' is still unbolded on this page.

This completes the last word from page 3 (minute) and then repeats the message.

What the later part means is currently unclear

Thus the complete phrase (pages 2-4) with corrections is:

This is a reference to the Martian moon Deimos being converted into a colony ship (UESC Marathon) between the years 2408 - 2472 before setting off on a 300 year journey to Tau Ceti. MIDA were particularly aggrieved by this conversion and the subsequent loss of their moon. The Unified Earth Space Council (UESC) were responsible for this. Even after 400+ years this loss is still felt by new MIDA and is a common theme in their writings and graffiti.

The author of this particular piece of text is _glyph. Other author names will appear as we progress thought the ezine.

Interesting to note that GLYPH is an aka for Jon Goff (Narrative Lead on Marathon).

Based on the capitals in the word REVolution we might conclude that the title of the ezine ANTI:REV+ means ANTI REVOLUTION.

Anti-revolution is another name for counter-revolution. This may be an allusion to old MIDA and that new MIDA are the counter revolutionaries in this situation. MIDA alluded to this in a YouTube comment during the stream to unlock the Marathon ViDoc.

The lioness has Xs for eyes. These are often used in drawings to denote that a character is dead, or if not dead, then knocked out (at least that they have been hit hard on the head, even if they may still be conscious).

Each cipher key is different in that the range of substitution characters varies slightly between the three keys.

The lioness appears again along with a bird with the same crossed out eyes.

These images are used in other MIDA works. It may be a representation of the Martian people or Mars itself and the bird is Deimos. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

The reference to we/us/you/i was also made by MIDA in a YouTube comment during the stream to unlock the Marathon ViDoc, though it is slightly different.

A seasoned cryptanalyst will quickly zone in to the 3 characters  GSA  between the other two cipherwords and guess that the most likely plaintext word for this is "AND".

Testing this theory will get you  AN?  from the middle cipher key since there is no cipher letter A  in the cipher key list. The left cipher key has an  A  but only gives you  ??Y  and the right cipher key gives you  R?L .

No problem. Maybe you need to use a combination of cipher keys?

The word could be...  ANY .

err... problem.

Only the middle cipher key will successfully decode the first and third cipherwords to something meaningful...

4GSOLK▯↥T▯
MANIFESTOS

and...

XG4∞↕OSMΔ
RAMBLINGS

Should the  GSA  have been a  GSΔ  giving you  MANIFESTOS AND RAMBLINGS ?

YAM by Bungie!