Talk:3054: Scream Cipher

What's the American alphabet? 172.68.64.213 01:16, 22 February 2025 (UTC)AnAussie Anyone know a good free all-language OCR tool to help with the transcript? 172.69.67.156 17:30, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

Found one here: https://www.lexilogos.com/keyboard/diacritics.htm --mezimm 172.68.2.70 17:52, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

The written cipher is very interesting, but where can I hear recordings of the spoken form? Rockymountain 17:31, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

Here ya go. --mezimm 172.68.35.117 17:54, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

Are Cueball and Megan millenials? Who else would text greetings when they're standing right next to each other? Barmar (talk) 17:38, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

They could be texting other people. B for brain (talk) (youtube channel wobsite (supposed to be a blag)) 19:37, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

Engineers and cyberfolk were text messaging their neighbors rather than talking long before it was cool encouraged for social distancing or quarantine! It's always helpful to get a reminder not to do this. 162.158.159.101 20:37, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

They might not be diegetically in the same room. Comics can get weird with physical space. GreatWyrmGold (talk) 20:34, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

Likely a pun on "stream cipher"

- Related reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scream_(cipher) 172.68.26.229 17:46, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

A̦ÅÄ ẠÂÅȀ, A̓A̅ ȀÅÄĂA̱ ȦÁ ÂÁAĂĂA̦ A̮ÄÂÂA̦ A̓A̮ ȀÁ A̱A̓A̱ A ÀÁÂÃA̓ÅÂ ÅA̮ A̅A̰A̓Ã A̭AA̋Á A̓Â A̅A̰A̓Ã ÃA̅A̦ĂÁ! --mezimm 172.68.3.112 17:50, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

The Wikifunction from Scream returns "YOU KNOW, JA̅ WOULD BE NEALLY FUNNY JF WE DJD A VENSJON OF A̅HJS A̭AGE JN A̅HJS SA̅YLE!". Hmmm... Mwarren (talk) 19:04, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

The page you link to came into existence 7 minutes after I had posted this comment ;) I was doing it all manually, using this page and best-guess attempts to interpret what Randall's handwritten diacritics were meant to correspond to. --mezimm 172.68.1.158 19:55, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

updated version: "A̦ÅÄ ẠÂÅȀ, ẢĀ ȀÅÄĂA̱ ȦÁ ȂÁAĂĂA̦ A̮ÄÂÂA̦ ẢA̮ ȀÁ A̱ẢA̱ A ÀÁȂÃẢÅÂ ÅA̮ ĀA̰ẢÃ A̯AA̋Á ẢÂ ĀA̰ẢÃ ÃĀA̦ĂÁ!" --mezimm 172.68.3.67 20:01, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

On Wikifunctions, we implemented the two functions to Scream Cipher and from Scream Cipher --172.70.38.235 18:09, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

It looks like the wikifunctions are using a different character for "D" than the github project linked in the explanation. Seems as though one's using U+0331 and the other's using 0332. Schiffy (Speak to me|What I've done) 20:32, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

Is there a logic behind the choices of the letter? I guess A̧ is for C because of the French ç and Å is pronounced like O in some Nordic languages. Also, is it A̱, A̲ or A̲ ? (or something else). 172.71.126.50 18:10, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

Seems to be mostly visual similarity. Å has an actual O shape added to it. 172.70.110.171 20:19, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

I give it a week for people to make a translator to and from this cipher. Caliban (talk) 18:20, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

- The Wikifunctions translations above were complete at least 11 minutes before your comment and well within the goal of one week :-) . Mwarren (talk) 19:04, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

Numbers should be variations of h and/or g. Andyd273 (talk) 18:32, 21 February 2025 (UTC)#

H > g SqueakSquawk4 (talk) 18:59, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

Using sed you can encode with sed 's/C/A̧/g;s/D/A̱/g;s/F/A̮/g;s/G/A̋/g;s/H/A̰/g;s/J/A̓/g;s/P/A̯/g;s/Q/A̤/g;s/X/A̽/g;s/Y/A̦/g;y/BEIKLMNORSTUVWZ/ȦÁẢẠĂǍÂÅȂÃĀÄÀȀȺ/' and decode with sed 's/A̧/C/g;s/A̱/D/g;s/A̮/F/g;s/A̋/G/g;s/A̰/H/g;s/A̓/J/g;s/A̯/P/g;s/A̤/Q/g;s/A̽/X/g;s/A̦/Y/g;y/ȦÁẢẠĂǍÂÅȂÃĀÄÀȀȺ/BEIKLMNORSTUVWZ/'. 162.158.159.102 18:41, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

It would be really funny if someone added an image of Bill Cipher screaming, with the tag "A screaming cipher". It wouldn't reall fit but it'd be funny SqueakSquawk4 (talk) 18:59, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

I did. B for brain (talk) (youtube channel wobsite (supposed to be a blag)) 19:57, 21 February 2025 (UTC) (EDIT: WOW, that thing is MASSIVE! Can someone please downscale it because I have no idea how. You have permission to edit my comment only for that.) (DOUBLE EDIT: Nevermind, I did it.)

Someone started a GitHub repo with a web-based encoded/decoder already: https://github.com/Reginald-Gillespie/StreamCipher Dlech (talk) 19:35, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

I'd almost want to edit in my repo instead of the current one because mine is objectively better, but I'm new to this and not sure if that's appropriate or not =P (I don't even know if I am commenting correctly) WKoA (talk) 00:17, 22 February 2025 (UTC)

Look to the likes of the 1190: Time comic, where several different fanbase compilations may have been given. I would anticipate that you could do a decent job of editing "This thing here does..." into "Ways of experiencing it include this [existing one] and that [yours] [with room to add more, if they add up]. Or just mention your link here, let others decide if your claims of (better?) functionality stand up enough to prompt it to be put up alongside/ahead/instead of the other. I am at least intrigued as to how you did it differently.

And you certainly had a bit of trouble with the signing. Just add ~~~~ to the end of Talk comments and it autoreplaces. No need to go back in and edit (I added the original timestamp back in, for you, just for future reference). Unless of course you forgot to do it the first time... ;) 172.71.178.161 02:41, 22 February 2025 (UTC)

I know you can decode a substitution cipher by counting letters and replacing common ones like 'E' and then filling in the rest by inspection, but what kinds of automated approaches are there? 162.158.159.105 20:14, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

HEADS UP: I just changed A̲ (0332 COMBINING LOW LINE) to A̱ (0331 COMBINING MACRON BELOW) as encoding for "D" in the table and the transcript. Rationale: "T" is written with macron, so it's only logical to encode "D" likewise. A "low line" is longer than a macron, and looking at Randall's comic, the line below the "D" is definitely not longer than the one above "T". It would also make no sense to encode "T" with a "combining low line" as well when a single, uncombined character exists. 172.70.114.123 20:29, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

I expect to win a Turing Award for my proof this cypher is computationally equivalent to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language) 172.71.158.19 02:57, 22 February 2025 (UTC)

The page technically uses the incorrect characters for (at least) E, M, N, O, R, S, and T based on the title text shown on xkcd.com. The original title text uses two separate characters (ex. A + 0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT for E), whereas the table uses the combined character (ex. 00C1 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH ACUTE for E). Alternatively, my browser is just doing something weird. Not necessarily worth updating, but something I noticed when implementing the cipher. Abus (talk) 06:22, 22 February 2025 (UTC)

I think it's the browser. Firefox->Page Source gives me A+COMBINING WHATEVER, but w3m -dump_source https://xkcd.com/3054/ | zcat | grep 'img.*title=' returns combined characters. The title text here on explainxkcd was copied by TheusafBOT. I trust TheusafBOT and w3m to be so basic and simple that they wouldn't try to do something 'clever' with the characters, whereas I tend to suspect the multi-MB-monster Firefox messed things up. I'm just guessing, though... could maybe someone test with yet another browser - e.g. Edge or Opera? 162.158.159.107 11:52, 22 February 2025 (UTC)