#sigilization

Just curious as if anyone out there has any good spells or anything similar for bringing romance back into a relationship?

I propose a new word to differentiate “sigilization”, which actually has a specific magical theory behind it, from the “technique” of people who are making wishes in the form of a symbol: Wishgil.

Since sigilization and the form of sigil-making exclusively used on tumblr (at least as far as I can tell) are very different, this makes the most sense to me. The only theory I can find behind the tumblr trend of making a pretty picture, writing what you want to happen under it, and then being like “likes charge, reblogs cast” is that “it works because I want it to” which is what a wish is. Hence, Wishgil (pronounced “wish-jull” in an American accent) instead of sigil.

If you’re considering attacking me because you just looked up “sigil” and found out it can be used as a synonym for “symbol” please stop and continue not doing that. Did you know that in different contexts, especially technical ones, words can have different meanings? Like if I said, “angle” in a conversation such as “What’s your angle on this business?” You wouldn’t say “90 degrees” unless you were the funniest dad alive.

I thought of this during a boring lecture today - I once saw an online ARG hide text by converting it into binary, converting the binary into black/white pixels, and then arranging those pixels into a square.

This resulting image encodes almost half a page of text.

It got me thinking about how it demonstrated the ability to convert letters into shapes using binary notation. It’s more or less a simplified version of how QR codes are generated, with less compression and more emphasis on the form the pixels take. So, I wanted to see what kind of shapes would result if you converted short words or phrases into visual binary in this way. For example, “OV23″ in binary is:

O - 01001111

V - 01010110

2 - 00110010

3 - 00110011

We make an 8x4 grid and fill in every slot where a 1 is present, like so:

When we strip it down, we have a final shape:

Because the shapes are most visible at the level of individual letters, this would probably be best suited to short words and phrases. Here’s an example of a slightly longer one, my OV23 signature.

You could either keep space-separated parts together as a vertical string, like so, where the blank lines are the space between words:

Or separate them horizontally, like so, which makes the image harder to decode: