#decoder

[samreich]

from my conversation with Hank Green for Decoder Podcast

[foldingfittedsheets]

My paternal grandmother was a librarian. I only got to see that set of grandparents once a year as they lived out of state. I fondly remember summers spent at their house watching That Darn Cat and The King and I on loop, hunting for water skippers in the back creek, and reading the entirety of the Peanuts comics.

Because my grandma was a librarian she was delighted to foster my love of reading. We made trips to the library every week. One summer when I was seven or so I got really into this kids series about princesses all named after gemstones, each had a unique magic power.

At the end of each book was a puzzle or some extra bit of lore to decode. All of them were easily copied down in some way. Until I got to Sapphire’s book. At the end of the story Princess Sapphire was in peril! She needed a hero to come save her from a terrible fate. And there, on the last page, was a decoder device. It needed to be cut out and assembled.

I had to help save the Princess!!! In the iron grip of a fever of imagination I immediately found scissors and started carefully cutting the page. The page warned only to use scissors with an adult present and I scoffed to think I needed supervision just for scissors! I was a hero!Her plight called to me from the pages, imaginings of how I would daringly rescue the beautiful sweet Princess Sapphire ran through my little brain-

And about halfway up the page toward my goal I froze. This was a library book. I couldn’t cut a library book! What was I doing?! Even now in my memory it stands as a glaring example of the first time I mastered impulse control. Tragically, too late.

I was distraught. My grandma had a sacred duty to books and I, villain that I was, had defiled a precious tome! I wallowed for some time in abject misery, experiencing the greatest amount of guilt my tiny body had ever previously held. I’d probably go to jail. For a crime as monumental as wielding scissors against a book I wouldn’t even get dessert in jail.

Gradually, I processed my way through the grief of my vile deeds. I couldn’t have the decoder, I slowly accepted. That might be punishment enough. And I had only cut the page halfway. So it was only half a crime... It wasn’t illegal to lie when you’d aborted an evil act, right?

I didn’t know but I didn’t want to face my grandma’s potential wrath. I have no memory of my grandma ever yelling at me. I waited until the next day to approach her.

“Grandma? I finished my book and when I got to the end I saw someone had cut the page! They probably wanted the decoder because I also want that but it was very bad to cut a book, wasn’t it?”

My grandma regarded me benignly. She carefully took the book to observe it and nodded. “It’s good to see that they stopped before they cut it all the way out. Let’s go tape this together, and then I can photocopy the page and we can make you a decoder.”

I was ecstatic. Rewarded for my honesty! I created and cracked codes for the rest of summer with the flimsy paper creation we’d made. I genuinely doubt my grandma believed that I wasn’t the perpetrator, but I loved that she acknowledged that the person responsible stopped.

[slayerbuffy]

Decoder 1984 | dir. Muscha

[orchidblack]

Hard to believe I'd never seen DECODER (1984) until now. West German proto-cyberpunk with an incredible list of credits, including cameos and soundtrack work by William S. Burroughs and Genesis P-Orridge, Christiane F. as a dreamy goth girlfriend, and Sleazy as second unit director. Abrasive, art-damaged nonsense with atmosphere to burn.

[svartmalt]

F.M. Einheit and Christiane F

found this photo in a random magazine

[tsunamiholmes]

Here it is, my decoder for all of the new ciphers in The Book of Bill.

Huge thanks to Jim and trickenGF for help with the color cipher!

Happy solving, everyone!

I plan on creating fonts for most of these soon, but in the meantime, feel free to extract parts of the png for your own use from the transparent version below the cut.

I'll also explain how I got each cipher down there.

Theraprism: Brute-forced* using the first 4 ciphers in the book, then filled out via the decoder ring that appears in the dream sequence of The Last Mabelcorn.

Rune: Brute-forced* using the posts from OregonParksDept, then filled out via the stone that appears on page 111, "Cipherstitions".

Cipheric/Alchemic: Brute-forced* with lots of effort, and then filled out with the actual font its from (1651 Alchemy), where we discovered it's just the capital letters of that font. Womp womp.

Color: Brute-forced* by Jim and filled out via help from around the world! Some of the letters were only found via copies in different languages, since we have so little to go off of.

Bros. Secret Code: Solved using the key in the photo on page 161.

*Brute-forced means taking the symbols given, with no other information except the cipher itself, and using frequency analysis and word probability to break the cipher logically. Things like unique word structure (things with double letters, for example) help to speed up this process.

[a-boy-too-weird]

I'm not good with codes so I search a little around and everybody is like "Yeah, I did this or that, then asked an IA and this is the poem, I swear" and is something completely different from one another

Example:

By Electrical-Budget577 on Reddit (Link)

"ALONG THE SHORE, THE KING IS LOST. NEXT CLUE IS UNDER THE OLD TREE NEAR THE ROCK. FOLLOW THE PATH AND SEEK THE SONG THAT WILL REVEAL THE KEY TO OPEN THE NEXT PASSAGE."

By MrSidplayz on Reddit (Link)

And people giving zero context on how they did it but publishing something that doesn't makes much sense like:

(I'm not able to share direct link to a youtube comment but is on the original video (Link))

BUT

There is actually a translation, or something really close

In reddit (Link) Quiet_Valuable691 created a post on r/codes that gets really close and actually gives a path way to follow.

The text that it showed on the screen in white apparently have a possible few mistakes, taking the text directly from the wall is better, then we need to use a Caesar Cipher with a rotation of 22 and a Vigenere Cipher with the key "YELLOW"

The result text isn't perfect so the theory of some mistakes makes more sense.

I won't copy the possible result so y'all can go to reddit and upvote the post of the people actually doing the work.

LINK TO THE POST ON REDDIT

LINK TO THE VIDEO I'M TALKING ABOUT