Birbla

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  • Hacker News
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitaire_(cipher)
    by sublinear
  • This was used in a L05tboy mystery challenge at defcon something like a decade ago. It has made for great trivia ever since.
    by client4
  • An excellent excuse to pull out the 3-D printer.
    by dickiedyce
  • Or just cut a piece of cardboard. That's what I did for my kid who loves secret codes and languages.
    by Loughla
  • 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.
    by SoftTalker
  • 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.

    by suprjami
  • I learned very similar runes for the Ultima games.
    by Carrok
  • 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).
    by ronjakoi
  • 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

    by Terr_
  • 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.

    by nozzlegear