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dedalvs · 5 months

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Hey! I'm David Peterson, and a few years ago, I wrote a book called Create Your Own Secret Language. It's a book that introduces middle grade readers to codes, ciphers, and elementary language creation. The age range is like 10-14, but skews a little bit older, as the work gets pretty complicated pretty quick. I think 12-13 is the best age range.

Anyway, I decided to look at the Amazon page for it a bit ago, and it's rated fairly well (4.5 at the moment), but there are some 1 star reviews, and I'm always curious about those. Usually they're way off, or thought the book was going to be something different (e.g. "This book doesn't teach you a thing about computer coding!"), but every so often there's some truth in there. (Oh, one not 1 star but lower rated review said they gave it to their 2nd grader, but they found it too complicated. I appreciate a review like that, because I am not at all surprised—I think it is too complicated for a 2nd grader—and I think a review like that is much more effective than a simple 10+ age range on the book.) The first 1 star rating I came to, though, was this:

Now calling a completely mild description of a teenage girl who has a crush on another girl controversial is something I take exception to, but I don't want to pile on this person. Instead I wanted to share how this section came to be in the book.

The book is essentially divided into four parts. The first three parts deal with different ciphers or codes that become more complicated, while the last part describes elementary language creation. The first three sections are each built around a message that the reader can decode, but with language creation, the possibilities are too numerous and too complicated, so there isn't an example to decode, or anything. It would've been too difficult.

For what the messages to decode are about, though, I could do, potentially, anything, so at first I thought to tie them into a world of anthropomorphic animals (an ongoing series of battles between cats and mice), with messages that are being intercepted and decoded. My editor rejected that. Then I redid it so that each section had an individual story that had to do with some famous work of literature. My editor rejected that as well. He explained that it needed to be something that was relevant to kids of the target age range. I was kind of at a loss, for a bit, but then I thought of a story of kids sending secret messages about their uncle who eats too many onions. I shared that, my editor loved it, and I was like, all right. I can do this.

The tough part for me in coming up with mini-stories to plan these coded messages around was coming up with a reason for them to be secret. That's the whole point of a code/cipher: A message you want to be sure no one else but the intended recipient can read in case the message is intercepted. With the first one, two kids are poking gentle fun at a family member, so they want to be sure no one else can read what they're writing. For the last one, a boy is confessing to a diary, because he feels bad that he allowed his cat to escape, but no one knows he did it (he does find the cat again). For the other, I was trying to think of plausible message-sending scenarios for a preteen/teen, and I thought of how we used to write notes in, honestly, 4th and 5th grade, but I aged it up a bit, and decided to have a story about a girl writing a note to her friend because she has a crush on another girl, and wants her friend's opinion/help.

Here's where the point of sharing this comes in. As I had originally written it, the girl's note to her friend was not just telling her friend about her crush, it was also a coming out note, and she was concerned what her parents would react poorly.

Anyway, I sent that off with the rest of my draft, and I got a bunch of comments back on the whole draft (as expected), but my editor also commented on that story, in particular. Specifically, he noted that not every LGBTQ+ story has to be a coming out story, the part about potential friction between her and her parents because of it was a little heavy for the book, and, in general, not every coming out story has to be traumatic.

That was all he said, but I immediately recognized the, in hindsight, obvious truth of all three points, and I was completely embarrassed. I changed it immediately, so that the story beats are that it's a crush, she's not sure if it'll be reciprocated, and she's also very busy with school and band and feels like this will be adding even more busy-ness to her daily life as a student/teen. Then I apologized for making such a blunder. My editor was very good about it—after all, that's what drafts and editors are for—and that was a relief, but I'm still embarrassed that I didn't think of it first.

But, of course, this is not my lived experience, not being a member of the LGBTQ+ community. This is the very reason why you have sensitivity readers—to provide a vantage point you're blind to. In this case, I was very fortunate to have an editor who was thinking ahead, and I'm very grateful that he was there to catch it. That editor, by the way, is Justin Krasner.

One reason I wanted to share this, though, is that while it always is a bit of a difficult thing to speak up, because there might be a negative reaction, sometimes there is no pushback at all. Indeed, sometimes the one being called out is grateful, because we all have blindspots due to our own lived experiences. You can't live every life. For that reason, your own experience will end up being valuable to someone at some point in time for no other reason than that you lived it and they didn't. And, by the by, this is also true for the present, because the lives we've lived cause us to see what's going on right before our eyes in different lights.

Anyway, this is a story that wouldn't have come out otherwise, so I wanted to be sure to let everyone know that Justin Krasner ensured that my book was a better book. An editor's job is often silent and thankless, so on Thanksgiving, I wanted to say thank you, Justin. <3

#conlang #language #code #codes #cipher #ciphers #thanksgiving #thank you

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ashwithapen · 3 months

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hello guys i have been bored, tell me if this is comprehensible (cipher using normal latin letters and symbols)

(translation/decoding below the cut)

hōllo, my nómō ôč óčh. ô'vō bōōn ōxpōrômōntông wôę čôphōrč for yōórč now, čôncō ô wóč óboøt ęôrtōōn yōórč old (ô tørn ōôghtōōn nōxt wōōć).

ćørrōntly, ô óm ôn my fônól yōór of hôghčćhool. ôn dōčōmbōr ô ópplôōd for ćrōótôvō wrôtông ćoørčōč ót ønôvōrčôtôōč ôn ęō øć, æ čo fór ô'vō rōčôōvōd offōrč bócć from ęrōō of ęōm.

čo fór, ęôč čôphōr doōčn't hóvō ó nómō, čo ôf yoø wónt, fōōl frōō to čøgōčt poččôblō nómōč lol

translation

hello, my name is ash. i've been experimenting with ciphers for years now, since i was about thirteen years old (i turn eighteen next week).

currently, i am in my final year of highschool. in December i applied for creative writing courses at universities in the UK, and so far i've received offers back from three of them.

so far, this cipher doesn't have a name, so if you want, feel free to suggest possible names lol

rules

a = ó e = ō i = ô o = o u = ø

th = ę wh = ŵ and = æ

sounds made by "k" (kuh sounds) = ć sounds made by "s" (ssss sounds) = č (there is no letter c as c either makes "k" or "s' sounds)

#ash.txt #writeblr #writers on tumblr #writing #writers #writers and poets #writerscommunity #poetsandwriters #cypher #ciphers #ciphertext

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vampirejuno · 5 months

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Kind of a weird question but is anyone here into like codes and ciphers and shit cos I'm trying to solve one and it's stupid hard and I need help :(

#cryptography #ciphers

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illegalsquid · 4 months

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CAN SOMEONE PLEASE FIGURE OUT WHAT THIS SAYS

#gravity falls #book of bill #bill cipher #alex hirsch #ciphers

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oneeyedcatlover · 5 months

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hello, i am a strange resident of northern california. some things that interest me are ciphers, ghost hunting, the woods, mysteries, and women. some things i love are my one eyed cat dinah, my haunted house home, cigarettes, the crashing ocean on the cliffside, and my friends.

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thethinkingaurora · 5 months

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Hey you, the one with the 'cool thing you think about but don't get to talk about as much as you'd like to.' What is one thing you want to talk about, in as much detail as you'd like (I will read all of it).

Ok one thing that I really think is cool, hmmmmm

This happens every time I’m asked “what do you like” my brain just instantly vacates everything I do, it’s just like “Error 404: Life Experiences not found”

Hmmmmmm, I’d probably say ciphers/encryption

Ok so encryption and ciphers, simple in concept but holy hell does this shit get complex and fun fast

I first found out about them from the Secret Breakers book series (I love it, would definitely recommend), and then I went to a CTYI (Centre for Talented Youth Ireland) course and learned more about them and how they work, in between these two events I also did a load of research and got really hyper fixated on them, I then proceeded to learn more and begin creating my own and making my own little puzzles and stuff

Ok so encipherment and encryption both do a similar job, obfuscate a message to hide it, they were used in the World Wars to send messages to people in enemy lines on both sides (most notably the Enigma Machine), encryption often uses mathematics and numbers linked in certain ways to hide things, ciphers are a little different in the way they operate, ciphers are obfuscations but it’s easier to hide that they are obfuscations as they can often look like normal text

For example, the Baconian cipher uses something similar to binary and highlighted text to hide a message, so 00000 is A, 00001 is B, 00010 is C, so on, so where there is a one you highlight the letter

So to hide the word “hi” you need at least 10 letters, but less that 15, so “hello there” is our ten letters and hi translates to 00111 01000, so we highlight the letters specified, which gives us “hello there” (the baconian cipher was made by Sir Francis Bacon and he has many written letters with hidden messages in them, that’s all I can remember off the top of my head)

But using encryption (for example Base64) “hi” would become “aGk=“ which is much more obvious that it is a hidden message

I’ll explain how encryption is used in real life somewhat in a reblog later, I just want to get back to where I was as uI just accidentally deleted a huge chunk of what I had typed (as in I opened Google to check my spelling and tumblr decided it would be the perfect time to restart, I’m typing this on my phone)

Ok so onto the ciphers, the one that I really really like

So ciphers have been in use for millennia, I’ll start with a common enough one, The Polybius Square

The Polybius Square was created by an Ancient Greek scholar called Polybius(yeah he tried really hard when naming his cipher), the cipher is a simple enough substitution cipher (a substitution cipher is where certain letters or symbols are replaced by others things), where letters are replaced using 2 digits which mark there position on the square

Which looks like this, it goes like this 11=A, 12=B, 13=C, 14=D, 15=E, 21=F, and so on, you’ll notice that in 24, instead of a single letter is both “i” and “j” simply for the reason that you can’t make a square out of 26 boxes

Early ciphers were often only used by themselves but later they were used together to make more complex ciphers whether this be where it was encoded once and then encoded again or that the two were used at the same time to do some funny shenanigans

A great example of this is the ADGFX cipher which uses a modified Polybius Square along with Columnar Transpostion

Ok I’ll explain the ADGFX cipher in just a second ima explain columnar transposition first, so with columnar transposition you need a key, we’ll use “cargo” (the general standard) so first take your message and split it into groups with the amount of characters in the group corresponding to the length of the key (So “we need to attack soon”, would be grouped into groups of 5 when using a key like cargo, the groups would look like this “wenee dtoat tacks oon”)

Next you align the groups under the key

Here is one using the example message of “we need to attack soon”

Ok next you need to take the letters in your key and arrange them alphabetically, so cargo become acgor, now take the columns you made and shift them along with the key letters

Like this

So now that we have our letters it’s easy, we take them from left to right, top to bottom and write them out, leaving us with, “eweentdatoatkscoon” with the key of cargo, now if most people were given that they wouldn’t have the slightest clue what to do

So now imagine if we added more layers, like in the ADGFX cipher

Long story short, you take a custom alphabet and replace the letters in a Polybius square with them, then replace the numbers in the square with ADGFX

There is one that I stole from Google

So you encode your message using the square and then with the result you use the columnar transposition that we discussed earlier and then you have your final encoded message, unless you want to add more bullshit to it, like idk a A1Z26 cipher, changing the letters to numbers, or maybe a binary converter, or maybe a morse encoder, actually why not all of them

And that’s where shit starts getting fun (for me anyway, where you stack the jenga tower of encoding hoping that one of the ciphers in it doesn’t need numbers or spaces which other ciphers can’t use

Oh another fun thing, a number and text where you have to convert the number to binary and use that to highlight letters which are the encoded message, or are they

And that’s why I absolutely love encoding and ciphers so much because you can create such interesting little things that can become games, or just brand new ciphers where you have to spot little patterns or grab little ideas and run with them hoping that that was the way it works

Actually one last thing before I go, my own encipherment method which I couldn’t find anywhere online, and thus gave it a name

The Eclipsed Polybius Square (EPS)

Ok so the name comes from a name I used to go by (Which was Eclispe) and then the Polybius Square

Ok so I’ve written documentation of it countless times, but I can never explain it off the top of my head, I know how it works, it’s just stored in the depths of the blob of synapses that is in my skull

Ok so first step, take your message and use a Polybius square to turn it into the numbers,

I am struggling to figure out how to write this

Here is an example which I used in an sort of puzzle hunt that I made for some friends (If you notice the name Lily there, it’s a character within the story of the puzzle hunt, game, thing)

Ok so see how some of the words are highlighted, they indicate numbers for the Polybius square

So “the” is in bold and it’s 3 letters long so we get the number 3, then “to” is in bold so we get 2, these two give us 32 which is our first letter “M”, then we have “get” which is 3, then “time” which is 4, now we have our next letter 34 which is “O”, and this continues to give us a whole word

You’re welcome to solve the rest if you want(send it to me if you do, whether that be in DMs or reblog)

Also just a note, when making the text which will hold the code, I’d recommend making the code first and then writing the text working around the code to get it in using as little words as possible, or you might end up like I did with all of the text there only giving 1 word

Actually actually, I have one last thing, thank you @rookieroc for asking, I have been dying to talk about this and so much more but I just haven’t found anyone to say it about

P.S. I will most likely add to this over time with reblogs with more information on different ciphers

#ciphers #puzzles #encryption #cryptography #god I love ciphers #again thank you @rookieroc for giving me the opportunity to share this knowledge #whadda ya mean it’s half past 2 in the morning #where tf did my time go

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cupidford · 7 months

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Accidental Magic by Calais_Reno

Johnlock Love Letters #2326

After his return Sherlock takes the case of a woman seeking stolen books hidden in her late husband’s library.Working together after so much time apart, John and Sherlock begin to discover more than stolen books.

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sorrowfulwill · 7 months

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sometimes I have the urge to put unsolvable ciphers in my art about reverse falls

#reverse falls #art #struggles #ciphers #gravity falls

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philosophypotatoe · 14 days

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#philosophy potatoe #diamondbunnyart #most dangerous game #ciphers

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wbasnciphers · 5 months

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Welcome To WitherBurn

This account was created by fans to help present and future listeners to WitherBurn After School News solve the puzzles presented in the podcast. All of the hints and answers in this blog will betaken directly from the WitherBurn Discord server, which is closed to Pateron donators at the moment.

Hints will be given to each cipher, and solutions will be hidden for people who don't want spoilers or who want to solve it themselves.

All asks will be answered to the best of our abilities (since we are only fans) and anyone who has a question should not be afraid to ask.

Happy solving!

-Love, Compass of the WBASN Discord Server

#witherburn after school news #wbasn #ciphers #wasn

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toccata-i-voir · 6 months

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The secret of the marble lockbox

At last, the stage awaits the players. The game is set and I can't wait how it will unfold.

The objective is simple. Open the lockbox and reveal what it holds. There are some ciphers and puzzles in the way, but I believe they are not too big of an obstacle for anyone with basic cognitive activity given enough time (and internet connection).

Have at it. There are some instructions below the cut that you might want to review before you begin. Just to make the experience smoother.

Anyone may play the game as long as they respect the other players' right to not get spoiled the answers to the puzzles. Especially the ones who will be tagged below, but that should be obvious regardless.

Tagged individuals: @criminalisticonsultant @twireneadler

There are choices - questions in cursive with options in bullet point lists. Pick one and stick with it (some are links, other bits of information you need to keep around for later use)

Store the "hub file" links for the purposes of returning and trying a different path (files with links to different "arches".

Images are of their best quality if downloaded before editing. Screenshots might degrade important contents beyond recognition

Desktop is recommended for the game (especially due to copy/paste needs of certain ciphers and ease of the online converters in general)

The forms take either all capitals or all small letters. If not specified otherwise, use small letters primarily

Links scattered in files can be useful. Or taunting. Choose wisely.

Happy solving 😉

#cipher game #the secret of the marble lockbox #V #rp #sherlock rp #ciphers #puzzles #choose your own adventure

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disappointingcabbage · 7 months

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Is it weird that I’ve made up two completely original written ciphers (might be the wrong word, idk each “cipher” has a symbol that corresponds to each letter in the English alphabet plus numbers and some punctuation, follows the same rules as the English alphabet/language minus caps) without studying linguistics and without learning any real alphabets besides the English one because I feel like making up silly little secret codes is a new special interest of mine but also I have literally never done research into the history of written language/alphabets so idk

#positive vent #hehe codes #or ciphers #or whatever #they’re fun #I can read the first one I made up almost as well as I can read English #like it just kinda looks like a weird font to me at this point #I can also write in it fluently #I made up the second one literallt today so I will have the guide to that close at hand until I’ve memorized it #ciphers #written code #they’re like my own personal Wingdings #one of them exists in a way where you essentially write a full sentence without lifting pen from paper

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sagehuntsargs · 1 year

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youtube header

there is a link in the header of the main youtube page (cornfield sorrows), and it leads to this video (here)

the title is 1 Thessalonians 4:16-4:17 (below).

the description of the video is in binary and translates to, “the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and her ears are attentive to their cry.” This is from Psalm 34:15, but interestingly God has been characterised as a woman here!

it also has a link which when decoded links to an image (here) with another link!

the cipher text is “ahkim://zqzii.vid/e/GLOvirG” but so far I’m struggling to find out what the cipher is.

the video itself features someone running through a cornfield with dog(s) barking behind, and then a black screen at the end with,, a weird noise...

i’m not familiar with the noise or what it could be like at all, so this has me completely stumped! let me know if you have any idea what it could be.

#boozois #boozois arg #arg #horror #unreality #ciphers #unsolved

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day666666 · 1 year

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