25 Comments
Aug 22Liked by Terry Freedman

Certainly looks like a word puzzle when you see it. Was it a deliberate decision to make each chunk of text 5 characters long, or did the ROT13 encoder you used do this automatically?

Congrats on the 75, btw. Big milestone!

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Automatically? Pffft! Of course it was deliberate, old bean. Details of how I did it will be revealed soon. Thanks for congrats!

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You know what that made me think of? Remember back in the eighties on shortwave you could hear east German voices barking out number sequences that were code? Oh, just me listening to shortwave as a teen then... Anyway, they were coded messages to agents across Europe and also, oddly enough, a mainstay of Avant Garde ensemble X using tapes and found sounds. Yes, I had a thrilling teenage life. But what I really want to know is are you, or have you ever been, a member of the communist party?

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Aug 19·edited Aug 20Liked by Terry Freedman

I sent Terry an email with the noodling that follows. I was a hesitant to post it in the comments section ... part out of a desire to avoid cementing my reputation as nerd even more snuggly than ever and partly because it doesn't fit the "style" of comments sections. But Terry encouraged me to post, so here it is:

Your experiment today made me think of boundaries that I haven't really considered, but that are actually made quite visible with you various experiments. Basically today's experiment made me wonder about writing styles and "codes." I bet this is a boring bit of info in the oulipo world, but it was new to me.

What is the boundary between code and style?

It made me think of the notion of "code-switching," which has kinda ridden the wake of identity politics and the like. I guess that is a bigger thing in the US than in the UK, since it seems everything is about "identity" in the US. (And I do think that it isn't a positive thing that we're obsessed with on this side of the pond.) For a definition: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching

The ROT-13 try violated the human intelligibility standard that I bet applies in oulipo, but it made me wonder how oulipo audiences draw the line, so to speak.

Just a note and speculation.

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Aug 18Liked by Terry Freedman

Looks like gobbly-gook. 🤣

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😂

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No voiceover?! 😉😂

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Lol

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???

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😄

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I'm stumped and don't have the brain power this morning to go 13 letters away from what's there. Does that make me lazy? I searched for a ROT13 translator but don't have Java installed on my Mac, so that's a dead end. I'm impressed with other's brain power that I lack . . . 🧐

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Mary, it's the original story. Mark de long, in the comments here, gave a website decoder, so can just copy and paste the text into that.

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Must be a code of ethics.

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🤣

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I will look at it later. I haven't had my coffee yet

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😅

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Congrats on 75. Where is Alan Turing when you need him?

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Thanks! 😂

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Aug 18Liked by Terry Freedman

TBBQ BAR GREEL!

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Cheers, Jim!

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Aug 18Liked by Terry Freedman

Challenging to decipher in one's head, but there's an app for that: https://cryptii.com/pipes/rot13-decoder. A perfect transformation for middle school secret societies.

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Excellent. Just tried it, and it works! Cheers, Mark 😁

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Hmmmmm….. 🤨

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Ps but as Nathan Slake said, these are experiments 😁

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I agree, Beth

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