Hey guys, I've had a discussion with some Raideneers this week about a possible Easter-Egg in the milestones names, Ithaca and Red Eyes, for the Raiden Network GitHub so I put on a tinfoil hat for the fun of it to try and see what I could come up with. This whole post will be with the assumption there it is an Easter-Egg, I’ll need you as a reader to put on your tin foil hat with me. Let’s begin!

The words Red Eyes are a bit too arbitrary by themselves to start off with so I’ll begin with Ithaca. Ithaca is a Greek island located in the Ionian Sea, I’m going to assume that this milestone is related to the Raiden Network dev Lefteris, since I’ve read he’s from Greece. From an Easter-Egg perspective the island is slightly interesting before even getting started on the mythology of the island. Ithaca is part of a triangle of islands named Kefalonia–Ithaca–Lefkada. Let’s assume a scenario that LEFkada is linked to LEFteris. Ithaca is between Lefkada and Kefalonia but it’s important to the Easter-Egg hunt that Lefkada is furthest from the other two islands.

Going briefly into Greek mythology, Ithaca was the home of Odysseus and he was told to have been its king. This is important since it gives us some direction for the next part where we get to Red Eyes. Since Ithaca has been related to Greek mythology in the Easter-Egg hunt we’ll assume the words Red Eyes are also Greek mythology related. This leads us to discover two possibilities. First is that Red Eyes is referring to Typhon who has a human-like head are glowing red eyes. The name Typhon is an anagram for python, the programming language that the Raiden Network is primarily written in on GitHub. So now we’re confident (whilst wearing our tinfoil hat) we know with certainty that Red Eyes means python in this scenario.

This gives us the first solution to this Easter-Egg being that since Odysseus is the king of the Ithaca milestone and Red Eyes is python, ‘Lefteris is the king of python’. BUT! Since Lefkada is the furthest island out of the triangle from the other we would have to take this to mean that ‘Lefteris is the furthest from the king of python’… Some light office banter it seems!

Although, since I haven’t taken off my tinfoil hat yet I’m going to dig a little deeper and open the possibility that Red Eyes isn’t related to Typhon and make the second connection which is more complicated. This section has a lot more headcanons so keep your hats firmly on your head! I’ll put the headcanons in brackets so we stay on the same wavelength (hopefully your tinfoil hat is blocking all other wavelengths).

As we said earlier, Ithaca has been identified as home of Odysseus (let's say this actually refers to Lefteris) and he was told have been its king. During a journey back to Ithaca after the Trojan War (the journey of finding more developers for brainbot), Odysseus and his twelve ships land on the island of Thrinacia (the twelve ships must mean there was twelve developer applicants). There, Odysseus' men ignore the warnings of Tiresias and Circe and hunt down the sacred cattle of the sun god Helios (this is Lefteris hunting suitable applicants). Helios tells Zeus what happened and demands Odysseus' men be punished or else he will take the sun and shine it in the Underworld. Zeus fulfils Helios' demands by causing a shipwreck during a thunderstorm in which all but Odysseus drown (none of the applicants were successful). He washes ashore on the island of Ogygia, where Calypso compels him to remain as her lover for seven years.

This means that the Easter Egg says 'The python code for Raiden will take 7 years to be developed if Lefteris doesn’t get more developers!'. In other words, if you're a Raiden fan and a developer you should send in an application.

There's another part to this hunt to this hunt related to Polyphemus (Zeus' son) but it got very complicated even with my thick tinfoil hat on. Due to it going much deeper into Greek mythology I haven't been able to finish it but I might if there's interest.

^{The Easter-Egg could also just mean that Lefteris will get red eyes from programming so much but that solution wasn't as fun.}