#classical cryptography

A few years ago, I came up with a way of encoding letters by using different combinations of sprinkles, and today I made that cipher concept into a terrible font!

Here’s what it looks like (character set and an example message, respectively):

font features:

it is illegible

sprinkles

Code and cipher tables of Mary, Queen of Scots, circa 1596. A prime example of a classic nomenclator, this system lists names, words, and common letter combinations alongside their equivalent code symbol(s), in addition to a supplementary cipher alphabet to cover any words or names not listed in the code section. Nomenclators were employed by European royalty to conceal diplomatic as well as personal correspondences during the 15th century onward. They saw widespread use until the 1850s when they were superseded by the invention of the telegraph and Morse code.

The box in the upper left corner of the table contains a cipher alphabet where each plaintext letter has four symbol equivalents. The top half of the upper right box contains substitution symbols for common digraphs (including the letter W, which was historically a digraph), each of which has two equivalent symbols; the lower half lists signs to represent common English word endings.

Below this is a list of 31 null characters — these are meaningless signs intended to confuse decryption attempts — followed by a list of 16 symbols, 12 of which represent the months of the year, and four more representing the words “Ponds,” “Angels,” “Crownes [sic],” and “Ducats.”

The next line details the use of four specialized signs:

The first sign (resembling a cursive digit 1 or lowercase /) is used to represent a doubling of any preceding character (used to double a letter, for example)

The second sign (a small square) is used as a full stop or period

The third sign (resembling a cursive capital V) is used as parentheses

The fourth sign (resembling a lowercase j without the dot) makes any preceding character null

After a couple years of searching, I finally managed to get my hands on a Barbie toy electric typewriter! 

For the unfamiliar, a neat aspect of Barbie typewriters is that some models have built-in cipher encoding and decoding modes, which, due to some quirks in how the typewriters were developed and marketed, were not advertised as features, so the cipher functionality was basically secret!

These days, the old school Barbie typewriters are relatively rare and usually pretty expensive, although the one I got was actually fairly cheap, due to being in somewhat rough condition. It unfortunately had quite a bit of battery corrosion, so it was untested and sold to be a “display piece”:

It even came with the original box (although it is certainly a little worse for wear lol)

A while back I found out that there was a Barbie typewriter that had some basic encryption functionality to it, and, being a Very Normal lady, I thought it would be neat to have a Barbie-themed encryption device that offered a bit better cryptographic security. So, I got a polyalphabetic cipher wheel off Etsy and finished it in Barbie colors. I was initially planning to add decals to it as well, but I couldn’t find anything that looked decent with it.

(The pic is a screenshot from Singing Banana's video on the Barbie typewriter, which is worth a watch for anyone with an interest in old-school cryptography)

I found out about this recently (from the video linked above), and I thought it was too cool not to share: several models of the Barbie typewriter straight-up had encrypting/decrypting modes built into them, although those modes were not typically advertised. The encryption was pretty basic (a simple substitution cipher), but still--Barbie secret encryption machine!

I came up with the ‘sprinkle’ part of my username in a pretty arbitrary way, but ever since I picked out the username, I’ve thought about what a sprinkle-based cipher might actually look like. Combining different types or colors of sprinkles seemed like the most logical approach, so I came up with a simple substitution encryption scheme that can encode letters using specific combinations of five different sprinkle types.

Each sprinkle type (1-5) could theoretically be any kind of sprinkle, although it would be best for each type to be as clearly distinct from the others as possible to reduce the possibility for confusion. The best application of this cipher would be to use different combinations of sprinkles on a set of cupcakes or cookies to encode the message (so each individual cupcake/cookie would correspond to one letter, based on which combination of sprinkles it had on it), but the same principal could be applied to other things as well.

Here's a chart depicting the sprinkle-combinations that are associated with each letter using my encryption scheme.

Exactly a month ago, I started playing this game that my extended family had made. It's a daily math game, or like, a daily classical cryptography game. I have been solving the new puzzles each day, for 31 days.

I'm still taking it in, you know? I've never had such a clear idea of how long a month is, but now I have to know: It's the time between getting an email showing me this game and right now. Perhaps this should horrify me, as confronting the passage of time should come with the spectre of mortality. But as someone who has never believed herself to have a future, it has the opposite effect. It gives me a sense of just how time passes, how long things take, and how much I can do in a month.

But it's hard to believe there can be anything in my life so consistent. I flounder between projects and take opportunities when they come, my activities or mood on any given day is largely dependent on fate and happenstance. But I have somehow managed to do this one tiny thing each day for a month. It makes me think about the importance of rituals, to have something in your life that can anchor you in time.

These days, games come packed with rituals in some form or another. Plenty of games, online and offline, come with daily bonuses, daily activities, and rewards for sticking with it, every day. It's hard to know where to draw a line. These techniques are a few of many that companies can use to extract every bit of time, money, and attention out of you. But in individual cases I am okay with them. I like the daily nature of Wordle or Animal Crossing. I like it when Fire Emblem Fates or Bravely Default give me small rewards as real-world time passes. In the days of the DS or 3DS these mechanics felt more experimental and benign. I can't help but wonder if that was ever really true.

Summary is an ephemeral game. It changes every day, and a missed day cannot be taken back. Missing a day in my streak was actually what made me give up Wordle, unsurprisingly, and that'll probably be what gets me to drop this game. Back when Wordle was popular, there was a controversy over it being ephemeral like this. Some didn't like its daily slow-paced nature, which is fair enough if you don't care for game as ritual. Others made an argument that the daily format is inherently anti-preservation, as one day's experience will never be the same as the next. I balk at this framing, as someone in theatre. Yes, some art cannot be truly (or at least losslessly) preserved. It is of the moment, and that is part of the beauty of it. For art to be an event, for it to require you to be there, in that moment, is not as terrible a thing as some would tell you.