24-X-1987.

Putting it here because it's a saturday, and it's a wedding. Though I somehow remember that it was a thursday - and yet couldn't even remember the year, could be anything between spring 1985 and now. Had to ask (... 3 words...) and this is what she remembered:

- they got married about a year before Silvija was born.

- we visited once when it was her first birthday (so there's another date)

- and once more, or maybe twice - once when they moved into the apartment near the cargo railway station (when Go said in the elevator „look there's a mirror on each floor here“), once when they baptized the kids.

The wedding itself I remember, in a couple of flashes (half of which may belong to his first wedding). First, the ceremony at the matricular was shortest I ever saw - there were six of us: the couple, the kum, the female kuma, and we two. And so we just walked over the square to the hotel to have a dinner and a few drinks. Nothing big, nothing solemn, just a snug little party. However, there was a serious mismatch - kum was Arpi's pal from work, perhaps otherwise a good guy, but he had nothing to say. On the other hand, the kuma was looking twice better and sexier than the bride, and had three small rings in the edge of each ear, well they'd be called earrings, right.

I was seriously asking myself who made the wrong moves here. But we left it at that and over the next eighteen years had very little contact with them. Perhaps Arpi would drop by for a moba here and there, but then we were mostly finished with those, there weren't any big ones left, so we left him alone with his new family.

She made a sweater with horizontal stripes. Because we got the idea that the knots in a sweater are a space isomorphous with pixels, which we actually did before, by freehand drawing on the millimeter [grid] paper, or projecting an image on it and drawing the lines separating colors. This time it blew into our minds to get something out of a computer.

So she embroidered Horatio's spiders on those stripes. From that zx spectrum game, which we acquired few years ago (october 1983.) and knew by heart to the extent that we had acquired reflexes for it.

So I read the game into, I guess, disassembler, and somehow found the adress where the bitmaps were, then wrote down the sixteen bytes, eight left and eight right, on the squared paper. Next to each number I drew its binary representation - blank squares for zeros, black for aces. I did this before, when I wrote solitaire, just in the opposite direction, I drew diamond, heart, club, spade and tenner in such squares, then turned those into numbers.

And the spiders appeared (16 bytes for a standing, 16 for crouching spider, the third one which chews to the floor and lowers a thread I didn't). That became the embroidery pattern, and there it was, video game on a sweater :).

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Mentions: october 1983., Arpad Gunaroši (Arpi), Gorana Sredljević (Go), kum, moba, Silvija Umljanić, solitaire, ZX Spectrum, in serbian

22-V-2023 - 24-IX-2026