Nyctography: A substituton cypher by Lewis Carroll | Hacker News Reader

Nyctography: A substituton cypher by Lewis Carroll

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82 pointsnanna15 comments

This reminds me that as a child I taught myself Tolkien's runes from The Hobbit, which is mostly another substitution of the modern English alphabet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirth#Runes_from_The_Hobbit

I got to the point I could read and write without a reference. Not as fast as English but not slow either.

Many years later I found a notebook with many pages of things I'd written but had since lost the ability to read again.

I don't speak Korean, but I'm a language nerd. Sometimes for fun I write Finnish in the Hangul alphabet in my journal (requires some approximation/adaptation).

I learned very similar runes for the Ultima games.

Those are the ones that I learned, from the magic system in Ultima Underworld. I think that H and W are swapped, and that Tolkien's alphabet includes a few more letters. They're both similar to the Elder Futhark runes, if I'm remembering correctly.

Ultima Underworld runes also had a word associated with them, and the words had meaning, which was both amusing when you used them for spells, and iirc could result in experimentation to find new or undocumented spells.

https://www.wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Runic_magic/Ultima_Und...

https://www.wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Rune_stones#Meanings

I remember an undocumented spell "Vas Kal Corp" which meant "Great Summon Death" and indeed it does. It ends the entire world and results in a game over.

I have a very similar story, except I taught myself and a friend to write using "daedric" from Morrowind. I don't know if it was the actual daedric letters from the game, I think I just found a font that claimed to be daedric from a website and thought it was really cool. My friend and I would write notes to each other in this little secret chicken scratch-looking alphabet, it was fun.

I sometimes try to remember how to write it or how to read it (I still have some notebooks from when I was a kid as well), but it's been 20+ years and I only recognize a few characters at this point. The rest is practically Greek to me now.

I learned the Daedric letters from the physical map that came with the game, which had the place names in both Daedric script and English.

I remember writing to friends using a Pigpen Cipher [0], which I probably first encountered in some sort of Super-Mario themed workbook or magazine page.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigpen_cipher

I learned the pig pen cipher from a library book in maybe 4th grade. My friends had fun with if off and on through high school.

I'm not understanding how this makes it easier to write in the dark. I'd think handwriting in cursive or even printing would work OK. In fact I just tried it and it was perfectly legible.

An excellent excuse to pull out the 3-D printer.

Or just cut a piece of cardboard. That's what I did for my kid who loves secret codes and languages.

As a child I made several crypto disks out of cardboard, draw a 3 inch circle, give it enough segments to fit your alphabet, 32 is easy and gives you room for the capitals and some punctuation, draw the letters twice on each segment inside and outside of the circle, then cut out the circle, glue the outer part to a backing sheet and glue a tab/handle to the inner part to make it easy to spin.

Used statically it works as a simple ceaser cipher, but the real advanced ciphers became available if you rotated it by a specific amount after each letter.

Many plans and conspiracies about what we were going to do with our new "unbreakable" encryption system, but in retrospect, never used and more fun to build and think about than operate.

This was used in a L05tboy mystery challenge at defcon something like a decade ago. It has made for great trivia ever since.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitaire_(cipher)

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